The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 9780520962439

Citation preview

Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism edward dimendberg, martin jay, and anton kaes, general editors 1. Heritage of Our Times, by Ernst Bloch 2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990, by Steven E. Aschheim 3. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg 4. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, by Christoph Asendorf 5. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen 6. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany, by Thomas J. Saunders 7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, by Richard Wolin 8. The New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean 9. The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, edited by William E. Scheuerman 10. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frank furt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, by Martin Jay 11. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum 12. Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, edited by Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau 13. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, by Karl Toepfer 14. In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, by Anson Rabinbach 15. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, by Beatrice Hanssen 16. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, by Anthony Heilbut 17. Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, by Helmut Lethen, translated by Don Reneau 18. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated by Kelly Barry 19. A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism, by Elliot Y. Neaman 20. Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust, by Dan Diner 21. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle, by Scott Spector 22. Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich, by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld 23. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945, by Klaus Kreimeier, translated by Robert and Rita Kimber 24. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990, by Rudy Koshar 25. We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism, by Marsha Meskimmon 26. Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany, by Bernd Widdig 27. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, by Janet Ward 28. Graphic Design in Germany: 1890–1945, by Jeremy Aynsley 29. Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, by Timothy O. Benson, with contributions by Edward Dimendberg, David Frisby, Reinhold Heller, Anton Kaes, and Iain Boyd Whyte 30. The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler, by Laird M. Easton

32. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood, by Lutz Koepnick 33. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, by Peter Eli Gordon 34. The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, by Paul Betts 35. The Face of East European Jewry, by Arnold Zweig, with fifty-two drawings by Hermann Struck. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Noah Isenberg 36. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, by Johannes von Moltke 37. Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture, by Peter Jelavich 38. Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity, by Andreas Killen 39. A Concise History of the Third Reich, by Wolfgang Benz, translated by Thomas Dunlap 40. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, edited by Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes 41. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, by Ehrhard Bahr 42. The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, by Kay Schiller and Christopher Young 43. Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond, by Veronika Fuechtner 44. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen 45. Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture, edited by Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson 46. Metropolis Berlin, 1880–1940, edited by Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby 47. The Third Reich Sourcebook, edited by Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman 48. Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, by Noah Isenberg 49. The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, edited by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Eric Papenfuse and Catherine Lawrence Endowment Fund in Film and Media Studies of the University of California Press Foundation.

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA GERMAN FILM THEORY 1907–1933

EDITED BY ANTON KAES, NICHOLAS BAER, AND MICHAEL COWAN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California For credits, permissions, and acknowledgments, please see page 639. The editors and publisher are grateful to the copyright owners for permission to republish material in this book. Despite great efforts, it has not been possible in every case to locate all rights holders and estates. The editors and publisher apologize in advance for any unintended errors and omissions, which they will seek to correct in future printing. Please address all inquiries to: University of California Press, 155 Grand Avenue, Suite 400, Oakland, California 94612.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Kaes, Anton, editor. | Baer, Nicholas, 1985–editor. | Cowan, Michael J., 1971–editor. Title: The promise of cinema: German film theory, 1907–1933 / edited by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, Michael Cowan. Other titles: Weimar and now ; 49. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016]. | “2016 | Series: Weimar and now: German cultural criticism ; 49 | Includes bibliographical reference. Identifiers: lccn 2015049570| isbn 9780520219076 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520219083 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520962439 (ebook). Subjects: lcsh: Motion pictures—Germany—History—20th century. | Film criticism—Germany. | Motion pictures—History—20th century. | Film criticism. Classification: lcc pn1993.5.g3 p765 2016 | ddc 791. 430943—dc23 lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049570 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Acknowledgments User’s Guide Introduction

xiii xv 1

SECTION ONE. TRANSFORMATIONS OF EXPERIENCE

1. A New Sensorium

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Hanns Heinz Ewers, The Kientopp (1907) Max Brod, Cinematographic Theater (1909) Gustav Melcher, On Living Photography and the Film Drama (1909) Kurt Weisse, A New Task for the Cinema (1909) Anon., New Terrain for Cinematographic Theaters (1910) Anon., The Career of the Cinematograph (1910) Karl Hans Strobl, The Cinematograph (1911) Ph. Sommer, On the Psychology of the Cinematograph (1911) Hermann Kienzl, Theater and Cinematograph (1911) Adolf Sellmann, The Secret of the Cinema (1912) Arno Arndt, Sports on Film (1912) Carl Forch, Thrills in Film Drama and Elsewhere (1912–13) Lou Andreas-Salomé, Cinema (1912–13) Walter Hasenclever, The Kintopp as Educator: An Apology (1913) Walter Serner, Cinema and Visual Pleasure (1913) Albert Hellwig, Illusions and Hallucinations during Cinematographic Projections (1914)

13 15 17 20 22 22 25 28 30 31 33 35 38 39 41 45

2. The World in Motion

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

H. Ste., The Cinematograph in the Service of Ethnology (1907) O. Th. Stein, The Cinematograph as Modern Newspaper (1913–14) Hermann Häfker, Cinema and Geography: Introduction (1914) Yvan Goll, The Cinedram (1920) Hans Schomburgk, Africa and Film (1922) Franc Cornel, The Value of the Adventure Film (1923) Béla Balázs, Reel Consciousness (1925) Colin Ross, Exotic Journeys with a Camera (1928) Anon., Lunar Flight in Film (1929) Lotte H. Eisner, A New India Film: A Throw of Dice (1929) Erich Burger, Pictures-Pictures (1929) Alfred Polgar, The Panic of Reality (1930)

48 49 51 52 55 56 58 60 62 62 64 66

29. Béla Balázs, The Case of Dr. Fanck (1931) 30. Siegfried Kracauer, The Weekly Newsreel (1931)

68 70

3. The Time Machine

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Ludwig Brauner, Cinematographic Archives (1908) Berthold Viertel, In the Cinematographic Theater (1910) Eduard Bäumer, Cinematograph and Epistemology (1911) Franz Goerke, Proposal for the Establishment of an Archive for Cinema-Films (1912) J. Landau, Mechanized Immortality (1912) Heinrich Lautensack, Why?—This Is Why! (1913) E. W., The Film Archive of the Great General Staff (1915) Hans Lehmann, Slow Motion (1917) Friedrich Sieburg, The Transcendence of the Film Image (1920) August Wolf, Film as Historian (1921) Fritz Lang, Will to Style in Film (1924) Siegfried Kracauer, Mountains, Clouds, People (1925) Joseph Roth, The Uncovered Grave (1925) Fritz Schimmer, On the Question of a National Film Archive (1926) Albrecht Viktor Blum, Documentary and Artistic Film (1929) Béla Balázs, Where Is the German Sound Film Archive? (1931)

74 77 78 81 84 86 88 89 92 94 95 97 98 99 103 105

4. The Magic of the Body

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Walter Turszinsky, Film Dramas and Film Mimes (1910) Friedrich Freksa, Theater, Pantomime, and Cinema (1916) Carl Hauptmann, Film and Theater (1919) Oskar Diehl, Mimic Expression in Film (1922) Béla Balázs, The Eroticism of Asta Nielsen (1923) Friedrich Sieburg, The Magic of the Body (1923) Max Osborn, The Nude Body on Film (1925) Béla Balázs, The Educational Values of Film Art (1925) Leni Riefenstahl, How I Came to Film . . . (1926) H. Sp., The Charleston in One Thousand Steps (1927) Leo Witlin, On the Psychomechanics of the Spectator (1927) Lotte H. Eisner and Rudolf von Laban, Film and Dance Belong Together (1928) 59. Fritz Lang, The Art of Mimic Expression in Film (1929) 60. Emil Jannings, Miming and Speaking (1930) 61. Siegfried Kracauer, Greta Garbo: A Study (1933)

108 111 115 119 122 124 126 130 134 136 136 139 141 142 144

5. Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

62. Fred Hood, Illusion in the Cinematographic Theater (1907) 63. Alfred Döblin, Theater of the Little People (1909) 64. Arthur Mellini, The Education of Moviegoers into a Theater Public (1910)

147 149 151

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Anon., The Movie Girl (1911) Anon., Various Thoughts on the Movie Theater Interior (1912) Victor Noack, The Cinema (1913) Emilie Altenloh, On the Sociology of Cinema (1914) Resi Langer, From Berlin North and Thereabouts / In the Movie Houses of Berlin West (1919) Milena Jesenská, Cinema (1920) Kurt Tucholsky, Erotic Films (1920) Herbert Tannenbaum, Film Advertising and the Advertising Film (1920) August Wolf, The Spectator in Cinema (1921) Kurt Pinthus, Ufa Palace (1925) Karl Demeter, The Sociological Foundations of the Cinema Industry (1926) Rudolf Harms, The Movie Theater as Gathering Place (1926) Siegfried Kracauer, The Cinema on Münzstraße (1932)

153 154 155 156 161 164 166 168 169 170 172 174 175

6. An Art for the Times

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Egon Friedell, Prologue before the Film (1912–13) Anon., The Autorenfilm and Its Assessment (1913) Ulrich Rauscher, The Cinema Ballad (1913) Kurt Pinthus, Quo Vadis, Cinema? (1913) Anon., The Student of Prague (1913) Hermann Häfker, The Call for Art (1913) Herbert Tannenbaum, Problems of the Film Drama (1913–14) Will Scheller, The New Illusion (1913–14) Kurt Pinthus, The Photoplay (1914) Malwine Rennert, The Onlookers of Life in the Cinema (1914–15) Paul Wegener, On the Artistic Possibilities of the Motion Picture (1917) Ernst Lubitsch, We Lack Film Poetry (1920) Fritz Lang, Kitsch—Sensation—Culture and Film (1924)

178 182 184 186 188 190 192 196 199 203 206 208 210

SECTION TWO. FILM CULTURE AND POLITICS

7. Moral Panic and Reform

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

Georg Kleibömer, Cinematograph and Schoolchildren (1909) Franz Pfemfert, Cinema as Educator (1909) Albert Hellwig, Trash Films (1911) Robert Gaupp, The Dangers of the Cinema (1911–12) Konrad Lange, The Cinematograph from an Ethical and Aesthetic Viewpoint (1912) Ike Spier, The Sexual Danger in the Cinema (1912) P. Max Grempe, Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid (1912) Roland, Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid: A Response (1912) Naldo Felke, Cinema’s Damaging Effects on Health (1913)

215 219 222 223 226 227 230 232 234

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

Karl Brunner, Today’s Cinematograph: A Public Menace (1913) Richard Guttmann, Cinematic Mankind (1916) Walther Friedmann, Homosexuality and Jewishness (1919) Wilhelm Stapel, Homo Cinematicus (1919) Kurt Tucholsky, Cinema Censorship (1920) Albert Hellwig, The Motion Picture and the State (1924) Aurel Wolfram, Cinema (1931) Fritz Olimsky, Film Bolshevism (1932)

235 238 240 242 243 246 247 249

8. Image Wars

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

Paul Klebinder, The German Kaiser in Film (1912) Hermann Duenschmann, Cinematograph and Crowd Psychology (1912) Der Kinematograph, War and Cinema (1914) Anon., The Cinematograph as Shooting Gallery (1914) Hermann Häfker, Cinema and the Educated Class: A Foreword (1914) Hermann Häfker, The Tasks of Cinematography in This War (1914) Edgar Költsch, The Benefits of War for the Cinema (1914) Karl Kraus, Made in Germany (1916) Anon., State and Cinema (1916) Johannes Gaulke, Art and Cinema in War (1916) Gustav Stresemann, Film Propaganda for German Affairs Abroad (1917) Erich Ludendorff, The Ludendorff Letter (1917) Joseph Max Jacobi, The Triumph of Film (1917) Rudolf Genenncher, Film as a Means of Agitation (1919) Kurt Tucholsky, War Films (1927) Film-Kurier, Film in the New Germany (1928) Siegfried Kracauer, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Kurt Tucholsky, Against the Ban on the Remarque Film (1931)

254 256 258 259 260 262 266 267 269 271 273 275 277 279 281 282 284 286

9. The Specter of Hollywood

126. Claire Goll, American Cinema (1920) 127. Erich Pommer, The Significance of Conglomerates in the Film Industry (1920) 128. Valentin, The Significance of Film for International Understanding (1921) 129. Joe May, The Style of the Export Film (1922) 130. Hans Siemsen, German Cinema (1922) 131. Georg Jacoby, Film-America and Us (1922) 132. Ernst Lubitsch, Film Internationality (1924) 133. Georg Otto Stindt, Is Film National or International? (1924) 134. Axel Eggebrecht, The Twilight of Film? (1926) 135. Anon., The Restructuring of Ufa (1927) 136. Carl Laemmle, Film Germany and Film America (1928) 137. Billie Wilder, The First One Back from Hollywood (1929) 138. Alexander Jason, Film Statistics (1930)

288 290 292 294 295 297 298 300 301 304 305 306 308

139. 140. 141. 142.

A. K., Done with Hollywood (1931) Anon., Film-Europe, a Fact! (1931) Anon., Internationality through the Version System (1931) Erich Pommer, The International Talking Film (1932)

309 311 312 314

10. Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

Henny Porten, The Diva (1919) Kurt Pinthus, Henny Porten for President (1921) Robert Musil, Impressions of a Naïf (1923) Béla Balázs, Only Stars! (1926) Vicki Baum, The Automobile in Film (1926) Anon., Vienna Is Filming! (1926) Willy Haas, Why We Love Film (1926) Hugo, Film Education (1928) K. W., What Is Film Illusion? (1928) Hans Feld, Anita Berber: The Representative of a Generation (1928) Marlene Dietrich, To an Unknown Woman (1930) Max Brod and Rudolf Thomas, Love on Film (1930) Siegfried Kracauer, All about Film Stars (1931) Siegfried Kracauer, Destitution and Distraction (1931) Anon., In the Empire of Film (1931)

317 319 323 325 327 328 330 333 335 337 338 340 344 347 349

11. The Mobilization of the Masses

158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173.

Béla Balázs, The Revolutionary Film (1922) Siegfried Kracauer, The Klieg Lights Stay On (1926) Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Potemkin and Tendentious Art (1927) Walter Benjamin, Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz (1927) Lotte H. Eisner, The New Youth and Film (1928) Franz Höllering, Film und Volk: Foreword (1928) Béla Balázs, Film Works for Us! (1928) Heinrich Mann, Film and the People (1928) Ernst Toller, Who Will Create the German Revolutionary Film? (1928) Karl Ritter, Mass-Man in the Cinema (1929) Willi Münzenberg, Film and Propaganda (1929) A. A., World Film Report (1930) Lupu Pick, Individual and Montage (1930) Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Lawsuit (1931) Herbert Jhering, The Banned Kuhle Wampe (1932) Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Film and Conviction (1933)

351 353 355 356 359 361 362 364 365 366 367 368 370 372 374 375

12. Chiffres of Modernity

174. Georg Lukács, Thoughts toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema (1911) 175. Alfred A. Baeumler, The Effects of the Film Theater (1912) 176. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Substitute for Dreams (1921)

377 381 384

177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188.

Kurt Pinthus, The Ethical Potential of Film (1923) Siegfried Kracauer, A Film (1924) Siegfried Kracauer, Film Image and Prophetic Speech (1925) Adolf Behne, The Public’s Attitude toward Modern German Literature (1926) Fritz Giese, Revue and Film (1928) Walter Benjamin, Chaplin in Retrospect (1929) Siegfried Kracauer, Chaplin in Old Films (1930) Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin (1930) Walter Benjamin, Mickey Mouse (1931) Ernst Kállai, Painting and Film (1931) René Fülöp-Miller, Fantasy by the Meter (1931) Ernst Jünger, The Worker (1932)

386 389 391 392 395 398 400 401 403 404 407 408

SECTION THREE. CONFIGURATIONS OF A MEDIUM

13. The Expressionist Turn

189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200.

Bernhard Diebold, Expressionism and Cinema (1916) Gertrud David, The Expressionist Film (1919) J. B., Expressionism in Film (1920) Ernst Angel, An “Expressionist” Film (1920) Carlo Mierendorff, If I Only Had the Cinema! (1920) Robert Müller, The Future of Film (1921) Robert Wiene, Expressionism in Film (1922) Walter Reimann, An Afterword to Caligari (1925) Rudolf Kurtz, Limits of the Expressionist Film (1926) Hanns Sachs, The Interpretation of Dreams in Film (1926) Robert Breuer, The Film of Factuality (1927) Henrik Galeen, Fantastic Film (1929)

415 420 422 424 426 433 436 438 440 443 444 447

14. Avant-Garde and Industry

201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213.

Walter Ruttmann, Painting with Time (ca. 1919) Bernhard Diebold, A New Art: Film’s Music for the Eyes (1921) Hans Richter, Basic Principles of the Art of Movement (1921) Adolf Behne, Film as a Work of Art (1921) Rudolf Arnheim, The Absolute Film (1925) László Moholy-Nagy, film at the bauhaus: a rejoinder (1926) Walter Ruttmann, How I Made My Berlin Film (1927) Walter Ruttmann, The “Absolute” Fashion (1928) Siegfried Kracauer, Abstract Film (1928) László Moholy-Nagy, The Artist Belongs to the Industry! (1928) Lotte Reiniger, Living Shadows (1929) Hans Richter, New Means of Filmmaking (1929) Walter Ruttmann, The Isolated Artist (1929)

450 452 454 457 459 461 463 464 465 467 470 472 474

214. 215. 216. 217.

Hans Richter, Avant-Garde in the Realm of the Possible (1929) Anon., “Candid” Cinematography (1929) Lotte H. Eisner, Avant-Garde for the Masses (1929) Alex Strasser, The End of the Avant-Garde? (1930)

475 476 478 478

15. The Aesthetics of Silent Film

218. Ernst Bloch, Melody in the Cinema, or Immanent and Transcendental Music (1914) 482 219. Oskar Kalbus, The Muteness of the Film Image (1920) 485 220. Albin Grau, Lighting Design in Film (1922) 487 221. Hans Pander, Intertitles (1923) 489 222. Béla Balázs, The Close-Up (1924) 492 223. Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, My Ideal Screenplay (1924) 498 224. Paul Leni, Architecture in Film (1924) 499 225. Julie Elias, Film and Fashion (1924) 501 226. Guido Seeber, The Delirious Camera (1925) 503 227. Béla Balázs, Productive and Reproductive Film Art (1926) 505 228. Fritz Lang, Looking toward the Future (1926) 508 229. Karl Freund, Behind My Camera (1927) 509 230. Lotar Holland, Subjective Movement (1927) 512 231. Giuseppe Becce, Film and Music (1928) 515 232. Béla Balázs, Farewell to Silent Film (1930) 517 16. Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

233. Hans Hennes, Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry (1910) 234. Osvaldo Polimanti, The Cinematograph in Biological and Medical Science (1911) 235. Leonhard Birnbaum, The Cultural Mission of the Cinematograph (1912) 236. Anon., Cinema in the Light of Medicine (1913) 237. Julius Pinschewer, Film Advertising (1913) 238. Bruno Taut, Artistic Film Program (1920) 239. Wilhelm von Ledebur, Cinematography in the Service of the Police (1921) 240. Arthur Lassally, Film Advertising and Advertising Films (1921) 241. Edgar Beyfuss, School and Film (1924) 242. Ulrich Kayser, Industrial Films (1924) 243. Eugen R. Schlesinger, Kulturfilm and Cinema (1924) 244. Dietrich W. Dreyer, The Trick Film (1927) 245. Hans Cürlis, Film Is Promotion (1929) 246. Karl Nikolaus, Advertising Film and Its Psychological Effects (1932)

520 523 526 529 530 532 534 537 539 540 541 544 545 546

17. Sound Waves

247. Anon., How Singing Pictures (Sound Pictures) Are Made (1908) 248. Herbert Jhering, The Acoustic Film (1922)

549 551

249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261.

Heinrich Strobel, Film and Music (1928) 552 Walter Ruttmann, Principles of the Sound Film (1928) 555 Siegfried Kracauer, Sound-Image Film (1928) 556 Béla Balázs, A Conviction (1929) 559 Ernst Hugo Correll, The Nature and Value of Sound Film (1929) 562 Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Reality of Sound Film (1929) 563 Carl Hoffmann, Problems of the Camera (1929) 565 Walter Gronostay, Possibilities for the Use of Music in Sound Film (1929) 566 Erwin Piscator, Sound Film Friend and Foe (1929–30) 567 Rudolf Arnheim, A Commentary on the Crisis Facing Montage (1930) 569 Edmund Meisel, Experiences in Composing Music for Sound Films (1930) 572 Alfred Döblin, Only the Transformed Author Can Transform Film (1930) 574 Film-Kurier, Fritz Lang: Problems in Sound Film Design (1931) 575

18. Technology and the Future of the Past

262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267. 268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275. 276. 277. 278.

Max Mack, The Conquest of the Third Dimension (1914) Max Skladanowsky, The Prehistory of the Bioskop (1916) Heinz Michaelis, Art and Technology in Film (1923) Béla Balázs, The Color Film (1923) S. E. Bastian, The Telefilm (1925) Herbert Jhering, Film and Radio (1925) Kurt Weill, Possibilities for Absolute Radio Art (1925) Eugen Schüfftan, My Process (1926) Arthur Korn, Why We Still Do Not Have Television (1929) László Moholy-Nagy, The Elements Once Again (1929) Erich Grave, The Third Dimension (1929) Ernst Steffen, Telecinema in the Home (1929) Frank Warschauer, A Glance into the Future (1930) H. Baer, The Color Film (1930) Rudolf Arnheim, Radio-Film (1932) Bernhard Diebold, The Future of Mickey Mouse (1932) Siegfried Kracauer, On the Border of Yesterday (1932)

Bibliography Credits Index

578 579 581 583 584 585 586 589 590 592 593 595 598 600 602 603 607 613 639 641

Acknowledgments If it is true that all books constitute the very objects they study, collaborative work allows these objects to emerge in new and more complex ways. As we initially set out to publish a collection of early German fi lm theory in English, we found that the category of “theory”—and more specifically the question of which writings to include under its umbrella—is anything but self-evident today. Moreover, we realized that it is far from obvious what a sourcebook of early-twentieth-century writings on film should look like at a time when film history is increasingly seen as part of a nexus that includes media, technology, and visual culture; when canonical writings are understood less as autonomous, fixed texts than as parts of discursive networks that extend far beyond their field and ours; when the material and cultural histories around cinema are garnering as much attention as the films themselves; and when the idea of “theory” is being debated and historicized along fascinating lines. Looking back, we believe that the different perspectives each of us brought to the table helped to produce a richer and more dynamic approach to both film theory and the form of the sourcebook. The Promise of Cinema has been a genuinely collaborative undertaking, one made possible by the particular tradition of scholarly collaboration that has been the hallmark of German and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. While it would be impossible to thank everyone who has come into contact with the project over the years, we would like to mention several people who contributed immeasurably to the fi nal product. Our first thanks go to our translators from UC Berkeley, above all Alex H. Bush, but also Eric Ames, Erik Born, Jon Cho-Polizzi, Sara Hall, Nancy Nenno, Paul Reitter, Jeffrey Timon, as well as Tara Hottman, who also served as chief research assistant in the final phase of the project. The following individuals also contributed translations: Brenda Benthien, Janelle Blankenship, David Britt, Christopher M. Geissler, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Rodney Livingstone, John MacKay, Don Reneau, and Marc Silberman. We would like to acknowledge several colleagues who took the time to discuss the overall concept of the book with us, often more than once: Stefan Andriopoulos, Erica Carter, Ed Dimendberg, Thomas Elsaesser, Doron Galili, Sabine Hake, Thomas Levin, Stuart Liebman, Johannes von Moltke, Eric Rentschler, and Jörg Schweinitz. We are deeply grateful for their insights that helped shape the book at critical moments. The annual Silent Film Festival in Pordenone provided the perfect backdrop for extensive discussions about the project with Scott Curtis, Joseph Garncarz, Katharina Loew, Martin Loiperdinger, Charles Musser, Leonardo Quaresima, and Heide Schlüpmann. Over the years, many scholars shared their expertise on various topics and figures, helping with individual chapters, suggesting primary texts to include, or assisting with specialized terminology: Raymond Bellour, Oliver Botar, Francesco Casetti, Tobias Faßhauer, Susanne Fontaine, Kata Gellen, Deniz Göktürk, Jochen Hung, Kristina Köhler, Annette Michelson, Tobias Nagl, Dana Polan, Philipp Stiasny, Mario Wimmer, and Joshua Yumibe. Our thanks also go out to the participants of the bi-annual German Film Institute at the University of Michigan, the Film Seminar at Columbia University, the BildEvidenz Kolleg Berlin, and also to those colleagues who invited us to present our research in lectures and workshops. Echoes from all these exchanges and even from fleeting remarks are likely to be found in the final version of the book. In this way, the book xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

is not just a collaborative but also a communal product—a tribute to the good will and generosity of our colleagues. We would also like to take this opportunity to extend our sincere appreciation to the pioneers of film archaeology who have not been directly involved with this book but have made our own work possible: the late Herbert Birett, Hans-Michael Bock, Stefan Drössler, Gero Gandert, Jeanpaul Goergen, Tom Gunning, Fritz Güttinger, Frank Kessler, Enno Patalas, Hans Helmut Prinzler, and Paolo Cherchi Usai. It goes without saying that any book publication today needs institutional and material support, and a volume of this scale all the more. The project received truly generous research funding from the Arts & Humanities and the College of Letters & Science at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Moving Image Research Laboratory. The Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin offered ideal working conditions for archival research, and we would like to thank Wolfgang Jacobsen and Werner Sudendorf for their invaluable support. The staff of the Kinemathek, especially Cordula Döhrer, provided extra help, as did Erika Wottrich of Cinegraph – Hamburgisches Centrum für Filmforschung. We are grateful to the various copyright holders for giving us permission to translate texts we considered essential. Special thanks go to Petra Hardt from the Suhrkamp Verlag for her enthusiasm for our project. At the University of California Press, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Mary Francis for her encouragement and patience, to Barbara Armentrout, our extraordinary copy-editor, and to Rachel Berchten, our immensely supportive production manager, as well as to Bradley Depew, Aimee Goggins, and Zuha Khan. We also thank Alicia Roy, Cara Tovey, Jessica Ruffin, and Peter Woods of UC Berkeley for their help with proofreading in the final stages. Finally, our individual thanks: Tony Kaes would like to thank his amazing group of former and present students at Berkeley for their countless contributions to this project over so many years. In addition, he is grateful to his family for their unwavering support. Nicholas Baer would like to express his sincere gratitude to Maggie Hennefeld, Kristina Köhler, Doron Galili, Katharina Loew, Laura Horak, Samuel England, Sarah Goodrum, and many other friends from Berkeley, Berlin, and beyond. He also thanks his parents, Alan and Maria Baer, and his grandparents, Eva Baer and the late Alfred Baer, his own personal links between “Weimar and Now.” Lastly, Michael Cowan would like to thank his colleagues in film and media from Montreal and St. Andrews for their support, his graduate students for their inspiration, his research assistants at the Moving Image Research Laboratory (especially Brian Bergstrom, Sarah Robinson, and Pete Schweppe) for their painstaking work, and Hélène Sicard for so much. Berlin, June 30, 2015

User’s Guide All of the documents in this volume are primary sources first published in German between 1907 and 1933. The vast majority of the 278 texts were translated for this book and appear in English for the first time. The documents derive from different forms of public discourse, ranging from film books and trade journals to newspapers, popular magazines, pamphlets, radio addresses, and lectures; they also include a few unpublished texts, such as diary entries and letters. To the extent possible, the translations retain the texts’ heterogeneity in style, syntax, and diction. Standard historical terms for the cinema have been rendered with their English equivalents (e.g., “cinematograph” for Kinematograph). For certain key terms unique to the German context (e.g., Autorenfilm, Kientopp, Kulturfilm), we have elected to retain the German spelling but to use the English plural form. For institutions and associations (e.g., Volksverband für Filmkunst), translations are provided upon first mention. Journal titles have not been translated. Film titles are generally given in the original followed by a translation; in some cases, e.g., long lists or internationally known films, titles are in English only. Throughout, we strove for maximum clarity and readability. Following previous sourcebooks in the Weimar and Now series, this volume organizes the materials into discrete analytical chapters that are informed by contemporary questions. Within each of these chapters, texts are placed in chronological sequence, often giving emphasis to exchanges and debates at certain historical moments. Each of the eighteen thematic chapters juxtaposes texts by renowned figures with those of lesserknown and anonymous authors. The book uses the principle of montage to complicate and undermine established narratives, and the openness of the assemblage is meant to suggest alternative ways to combine the documents. Cross-references also highlight interconnections between the texts and chapters. In contrast to previous volumes in the series, this sourcebook introduces each document with editors’ comments, which emphasize the singularity of the texts while also placing them within broader conceptual frameworks, be they theoretical, historical, political, or biographical. More suggestive than comprehensive, these analytical commentaries are intended to spark the reader’s curiosity and invite further inquiry. Endnotes provide essential details on each document’s cultural-historical and linguistic context, and, more generally, recover for today’s reader the resonances and symbolic energies a text may have had in its time. In addition, all original notes have been retained and are identified as such. Whenever available, authors’ biographical dates are included in the editors’ comments upon an author’s first appearance in the volume. Several texts had to be shortened for reasons of space. Ellipses in square brackets indicate where sections have been omitted within a selection; however, they are not used at the beginning or end of excerpted texts. Ellipses without brackets are part of the original texts, as are all emphases. To encourage additional research into the rapidly growing field of early fi lm theory and history, The Promise of Cinema offers an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources in German and English. For updates and further research materials, including multimedia resources, we invite readers to visit our website: .

xv

INTRODUCTION

Even if the clattering of the film projectors disappears, there will be something—I firmly believe—“that functions like cinema.” Alexander Kluge, Cinema Stories (2007)

the rise of digital media has provoked no shortage of debates about what cinema has been and will become. To some observers, film seems to be a thing of the past, an artifact of twentieth-century visual culture, a relic of the Fordist era with its industrial rhythms and distinct division of labor and leisure. Others point to cinema’s unanticipated afterlives in film festivals and retrospectives, compilation fi lms and museum installations, online archives and virtual cinephilic communities. From the latter perspective, cinema is not so much disappearing as morphing into exciting new forms and hybrids, whose uncharted trajectories bear an uncanny resemblance to the cinema’s beginnings more than a hundred years ago. Looking back on the first decades of the twentieth century, we find a rich culture of theoretical speculation, as critics imagined the possible futures of what was then a “new medium.” In this book, we hope to give readers a sense of these diverse futures of the past by reanimating the promises once associated with cinema— both those that were realized and those, in Siegfried Kracauer’s words, that “history did not see fit to explore.”1 The Promise of Cinema thus reconceives film theory as a field of possibilities, expectations, and propositions. Whereas scholars have conventionally viewed the corpus of “classical film theory” as concerned with defining the medium’s specific, essential properties, this book highlights the multiple potentialities that cinema represented for film theorists, whose writings, as Rudolf Arnheim suggested, referred “not so much to what is as to what can be or ought to be.” 2 Theorization of film, we contend, often occurred in the subjunctive rather than the indicative mood—one oriented toward an unknown, empirically unverifiable future that might diverge from all prior historical experience. In this regard, film theory exemplifies what Reinhart Koselleck has characterized as the modern period’s expanding chasm between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.”3 Reconstructing a wide-ranging set of debates from 1907 to 1933, this sourcebook offers a glimpse into cinema’s historical horizons, which were inseparable from the broader horizons of modernity as such. 1. Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995), 6. 2. Rudolf Arnheim, “Preface to the 1957 Edition,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), n.p. Emphases added. 3. Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255–75.

1

2

Introduction

The German-speaking world was one of the leading sites for theorizing the promise of cinema in the early twentieth century, as names such as Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Lotte Eisner, Kracauer, and Hans Richter attest. Despite translations of seminal works by these figures, however, we still have no collection of early German film theory to complement existing sourcebooks in English devoted to the Chinese, Czech, French, and Russian contexts.4 Assembling 278 texts, nearly all of which appear in English for the first time, this volume not only features lesser-known essays by the aforementioned figures but also situates their works within a much wider nexus of writings on film from the period—writings by a broad range of authors, including actors and filmmakers, journalists and philosophers, activists and government officials, doctors and educators, and many other voices that have come down to us only as “anonymous.” • • •

The project of expanding “film theory” beyond established figures was both motivated and facilitated by the shifts in our media environment, where digital collections and online resources are affording us unprecedented access to a searchable, ever-growing archive of materials beyond traditional canons. But this decision to broaden the material base also underlies an implicit argument about how we should understand and approach film theory itself. Amidst recent debates across the humanities on the origins, history, and fate of theory,5 D.N. Rodowick has historicized the concept of film theory, arguing that the term’s common usage has tended to “superimpose retroactively a picture of theory on a complex range of conceptual activities that may not have characterized themselves as such.”6 For Rodowick, what is called “classical film theory”—unlike the semiotic and psychoanalytical theories of later decades—can best be understood as an open set of interrogations, which sought to comprehend a medium that was itself unsettling established aesthetic categories. While sharing Rodowick’s interest in reconceiving the history of film theory, we nonetheless diverge from his analysis in two notable ways. Whereas Rodowick seeks to replace the paradigm of “classical film theory” with what he calls an “aesthetic discourse”—one that extends from early studies by Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg to the postwar writings of André Bazin and Kracauer—the present volume understands film theory as an entire network of discourses that approached film not only as a form of art and entertainment but also as a medium of culture, science, education, training, politics, philosophy, and governmentality. Furthermore, in contrast to Rodowick, who restricts his discussion mainly to well-known figures, we suggest that the contributions of so-called classical film theorists can best be read as part of a large and contentious culture of writing about film during the medium’s first decades. Early writings on film were grappling with an acute medial transformation, one that was fundamentally challenging prior frameworks of experience and knowledge. Appearing long before film study and theory were institutionalized—that is, when commentators necessarily came from a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds— 4. See George S. Semsel, Xia Hong, and Hou Jianping, eds., Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era (New York: Praeger, 1990); Jaroslav Andeˇ l and Petr Szczepanik, eds., Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908–1939 (Prague: National Film Archive, 2008); Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939 (London/New York: Routledge, 1988). 5. See, for example, Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): 78–112. 6. D.N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 71.

Introduction

3

these writings were characterized less by systematic and exhaustive investigation than by speculative, heterogeneous, and open-ended exploration.7 Although known primarily for their book-length studies, Arnheim, Balázs, Eisner, and Kracauer all began as film critics in the 1920s, publishing hundreds of texts in newspapers and journals—texts that were passionately “in the moment,” responding to new films, emerging stars, technological and aesthetic developments, inaugural events, special screenings, censorship cases, economic crises, and political exigencies. Contributing to far-reaching and ever-shifting debates, these texts were adaptive and provisional in their approaches and styles of prose, lacking any fixed or dominant epistemological framework and engaging in a dynamic interplay with a medium that was itself in statu nascendi. • • •

Reflecting this open-ended mode of early writing about cinema, Béla Balázs advanced the following understanding of “theory” in the preface to Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Visible Man or the Culture of Film, 1924): Theory opens up the broad vistas of freedom for every art. It is the road map for those who roam among the arts, showing them pathways and opportunities, so that what appeared to be iron necessity stands unmasked as one random route among a hundred others. It is theory that gives us the courage to undertake Columbus-like voyages of exploration and turns every step into a freely chosen act.8 Setting aside the imperialist resonances of the phrase “Columbus-like voyages”—and the entanglement of cinema and colonial ideology is more than evident in Balázs’s contention that cinema will produce a “uniform type of the white race” throughout the world9 — Balázs makes a remarkable argument here: far from uncovering inherent laws, “theory” is what first enables exploration, indicating the arbitrariness of current practices and revealing alternative possibilities. Theory is thus a “road map” not in the sense of a mathematical representation of organized space but rather in the sense of a creation of concepts that both liberates art and inspires its movement into unknown territories. This temporal structure—theory before rather than after the perfection of its object, theory as a facilitator of exploration rather than as a form of retrospective mastery—is something that Balázs shares with thinkers such as Kracauer, whose essay “Photography” (1927) would likewise attribute to consciousness the task of establishing “the provisional status of all given configurations.”10 But this interrogative gestus is also evident in the writings of countless other contemporaries across a wide variety of realms, whose theorization of cinema is similarly driven by what Robert Musil, in The Man without Qualities, famously called “a sense of possibility” (Möglichkeitssinn)—that is, a concern less with cinema in its current, often-compromised forms than with what it might become.

7. On this point, see also Francesco Casetti, “Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Changes in Objects,” CiNéMAS 17, nos. 2–3 (Spring 2007): 33–45; and “Roundtable on the Return to Classical Film Theory,” October 148 (Spring 2014): 5–26. 8. Béla Balázs, Visible Man, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 3. 9. Ibid., 14. In Theory of the Film (1948), Balázs would revise this passage, instead invoking “an international human type”; Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 45. See also Erica Carter, “Introduction,” in Balázs, Early Film Theory, xxxviii. 10. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 62. Emphasis in the original.

4

Introduction

This is not to argue that we should make no distinction between dedicated film critics and writers from other professional spheres whose interest in cinema was motivated by other questions. For one thing, readers will quickly notice in the following pages how many of those other voices, particularly as they intersected with the so-called Kinoreform movement (see chapter 7), greeted film with ambivalence or even downright hostility, regarding the new medium as a symptom of the broader ills and pathologies of modern society. It bears emphasizing, however, that even as such commentators disparaged film’s actual, commercially driven uses, most of them maintained a tacit investment in the medium’s prospects, whether in the realms of art, politics, science, or education. And it is the wager of this book that every one of these overlooked texts contains insights that might be called “theoretical.” While this concept of theory is rarely addressed as explicitly as it is by Balázs, it is always present in a dormant sense—for example, in Berthold Viertel’s 1910 account (no. 32) of the German and Austrian emperors watching themselves on film, where cinema’s ability to challenge political sovereignty (“Is one allowed to copy majesty so wantonly? Is it not too much for one moment to have two, no, four kings?”) is no less palpable than it will be a quarter century later in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936). Early commentators adopted a variety of positions vis-à-vis cinema’s present and future, its actual and potential uses, its dangers and utopian promise. But nearly all of them shared a fundamental sense that film was effecting and registering a revolution in virtually every area of life: the experience of space, time, and the body; the articulation of class, gender, and race; sexuality and social mores; the partition of private and public spheres; politics and forms of mobilization; the definition and functions of art; the ways that knowledge could be generated, applied, and disseminated; and the construction of “reality” itself. The debates here address cinema’s role as both catalyst and seismograph of a host of massive and abrupt transformations that characterize German modernity: industrialization and urbanism; the emergence of a mass culture of consumption and distraction; the increasing precariousness of the cultural and intellectual elite; the multiple traumas of war, defeat, and the loss of colonies; failed revolution and new stateformation; and, finally, economic and political crisis. More than any other cultural form, cinema appeared as inextricably linked to processes of modernization, and the texts collected here view film as an indicator of the course that modernity was taking—and even as a signal of the paths that could yet be taken. • • •

The temporal parameters of modernity are often contested, and the dates of the present volume deserve more precise explanation. While the “birth” of German cinema has traditionally been dated according to the first public screening of Bioskop films by the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin’s Wintergarten on November 1, 1895, most scholars today agree that such dates are at best heuristic placeholders and at worst misrepresentations of a medium that emerged from myriad technological, performative, and intellectual contexts. Such contexts were hardly rendered obsolete overnight, and some film historians have gone so far as to argue that the very term cinema is a misnomer for what, until shortly before 1910, was understood as the latest variation of long-familiar cultural forms and practices.11 Thus, the awareness that cinema was becom-

11. André Gaudreault, “The Culture Broth and the Froth of Cultures of So-Called Early Cinema,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Malden: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 15–31.

Introduction

5

ing a major and enduring force in public life—and consequently that something like a theory of this new medium was necessary—arose gradually and unevenly across different contexts. For the purposes of this volume, 1907 offers a convenient starting date because it is the year when the first film journals were founded in both Germany and Austria. Among these journals, the earliest and most notable was Der Kinematograph (1907–35), published by Eduard Lintz in Düsseldorf. In its inaugural issue, on January 6, 1907, the editorial and publishing staff identified the publication as an “organ that reports on the latest achievements, shares information with a circle of interested parties on new technological developments, and also publishes important news from the realm of praxis.”12 The commercial success of Der Kinematograph quickly led to the founding of additional journals devoted to film, among them the Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung (Berlin, 1907–20), Kinematographische Rundschau (Vienna, 1907–21), and Lichtbild-Bühne (Berlin, 1908– 39). As such publications suggest, it was evident by this point that film mattered, and understanding what cinema could become was now firmly on the agenda of public discourse.13 In contrast, the ending date of our volume was dictated by wider political developments. The National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933 forced countless Jewish and leftist fi lm theorists to flee Germany, among them Arnheim, Benjamin, Brecht, Eisner, Kracauer, and Richter. (Balázs remained in the Soviet Union, where he had gone in 1931.) While these exiled figures would continue to write about film in new national and linguistic contexts, the German-speaking world, as Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener note, “lost its pre-eminent position” in the international debate about film.14 Following the Nazi regime’s systematic appropriation of cinema for diversion, propaganda, and warmongering, the medium’s promise also appeared to have been irrevocably betrayed. At the height of its power in the 1940s, cinema had failed to engage with the Holocaust, as Jean-Luc Godard argues in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, stifling rather than enabling forms of resistance to the atrocities occurring across Europe. Not until a few decades later could one again invoke “German film theory,” now in relation to figures such as Alexander Kluge and Hans Magnus Enzensberger and journals including Filmkritik (1957–84) and Frauen und Film (1974–). • • •

In order to offer a “road map”—to borrow Balázs’s term—through the period thus delimited, this book is divided into three sections of six chapters each. Arranged according to a loose and overlapping chronological progression, the sections all examine questions concerning cinema’s promise and possibilities. Section 1 brings together writings that sought to comprehend cinema’s imbrications with transformations of experience. Though disparate in their specific concerns, these texts all reacted to the sense that cinema was uniquely poised to register and assimilate myriad aspects of modern life. Chapter 1 examines cinema’s power to address the senses: to dazzle spectators with magical displays, jolt them with nervous thrills, or confound them with optical illusions. Recalling the

12. Redaktion und Verlag, “Geleit-Worte,” Der Kinematograph no. 1 (January 6, 1907). 13. See Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film, 1909–1929 (Munich: DTV, 1978); Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Helmut H. Diederichs, Frühgeschichte deutscher Filmtheorie: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Habilitation, University of Frankfurt, 1996). 14. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2.

6

Introduction

nineteenth-century visual culture studied by Jonathan Crary,15 all of these texts assume a thoroughly embodied spectator, one both fallible and eminently excitable. More often than not, “sense perception” meant vision, of course, and a number of texts included here attempt to work through the modes of “visual pleasure” (Serner, no. 15) offered by the new medium. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the ways in which film was linked to shifting conceptions of space and time. Contemporary observers were fascinated by cinema’s ability to transport spectators to foreign and even extraterrestrial spaces, but they also pinned divergent hopes on the medium’s status as what Alexander Kluge would later call a “time machine”16 —one able to record segments of time, fragment them through montage, and stretch or contract them through the techniques of slow motion and time lapse. These reflections on space and time are followed in chapter 4 by a set of texts examining what Friedrich Sieburg called “the magic of the body” (no. 52), that is, the heightened visibility and affective power of bodies shown on the silent screen. Chapter 5 presents a range of texts on film spectatorship and sites of exhibition, from early, working-class Kientopps (Döblin, no. 63) to erotic cinemas (Tucholsky, no. 71) to the gentrified picture palaces of the 1920s (Pinthus, no. 74). Chapter 6 concludes the section with a number of texts that consider cinema with respect to existing aesthetic norms, either by transforming the cinema into a form of art (e.g., the debates around the Autorenfilm) or by adapting the very definition of art to a modern age defined by speed, concision, and fragmentation (Friedell, no. 78). Section 2 turns to questions of film culture and politics. Beginning with the Kinoreform movement, in which psychologists, educators, and moral leaders first sought to regulate film’s influence, especially over women and youth (chapter 7), the section goes on to examine cinema’s status vis-à-vis state power (chapter 8), from the “The German Kaiser in Film” (no. 108) through the propaganda battles of World War I to the censorship cases of the late Weimar Republic. Chapter 9 focuses on the precarious position of the German film industry in the face of Hollywood’s ever-increasing hegemony, and chapter 10 considers audience investment in the institution of cinema and its star system, highlighting the entertainment industry’s massive influence in Weimar democracy. Chapter 11 follows these discussions with writings on the roles cinema could play in mass mobilization, whether by socialist revolutionaries or by members of the emerging Nazi Party. Lastly, chapter 12 steps back to examine seminal reflections on film as a medium of philosophical thought, one that could facilitate broader insights into the modern condition. Section 3 brings together essays that strove to comprehend various configurations of the medium, especially with regard to its evolving technological and aesthetic potentials. In chapter 13, we encounter discussions of expressionism, dream states, and the fantastic, all of which probe the possibilities of film as a modernist, anti-mimetic medium. Chapter 14 examines the discourse around the radical uses of cinema by the avantgarde as it made “absolute fi lms” and entered into a fraught relationship with the fi lm industry. In chapter 15, we examine aspects of silent fi lm aesthetics, including set design, lighting, and camera technique. Chapter 16’s selections approach the cinema as an instrument of knowledge and persuasion in science, culture, and

15. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 16. Alexander Kluge, “Zu einer Stein-Konstruktion,” in Foto-Assemblagen, ed. Udo Klückmann, Klaus Heinrich, et al. (Berlin: Medusa, 1979), 29.

Introduction

7

commerce. We turn in chapter 17 to the major technological shift of the late 1920s: the advent of sound. Finally, chapter 18 assembles reflections on fi lm technologies, their histories, and their possible futures. Resonating with recent studies in media archaeology, this chapter features early explorations of television, 3-D, color, and expanded cinema. • • •

Providing a heuristic analytical grid, these sections and chapters represent an initial attempt to map a vast area of writing, much of which is still unexplored.17 While they could, of course, be read in any sequence, our division seeks to convey broad, if uneven, discursive shifts. The earliest writings on cinema were overwhelmingly concerned with film’s role as a gauge of changing modes of experience. Writers from the Wilhelmine period sought to grasp the newness of cinema as a representational form, its ability to render modernity legible, and the challenge that its rapid and disjunctive aesthetics posed to the traditional arts. During the Great War, politics became an explicit and dominant concern, and commentators began to think intensely about cinema’s relation to the masses, its potential as a tool of mobilization and political propaganda, and its role in forging national communities and collective identities. Finally, the 1920s, a decade in which film attained greater cultural legitimacy, saw efforts to define film’s specific qualities and to forge a language and repertoire of aesthetic means (e.g., camera movement, montage) that would lend cinema a unique identity among the arts. At the same time, this decade of film history—one also marked by greater institutionalization and professionalization—witnessed the emergence of new forums for specialized thinking about film technologies, avant-garde experimentation, and cinema’s uses in science, industry, and advertising. This temporal division should not suggest that there was no media theorizing or political thinking before the First World War nor that the imbrications of cinema and modern experience became any less important in later years (a proposition refuted by Benjamin’s work alone). Rather, we are acknowledging that specific sets of concerns moved to the fore at particular historical junctures. The three sections of this book trace largescale shifts in fi lm discourse, but they also include numerous texts that look backward and forward in order to call attention to the impossibility of confining any single mode of interrogation to rigid temporal parameters. Organized around historical debates or theoretical issues, the chapters in this volume present a full trajectory of responses to particular issues. Following Kracauer, one might refer to the series of texts in the various chapters as “sequences,” that is, “successive ‘solutions’ of problems originating with some need and touching off the whole series.”18 By arranging the texts into these discrete temporal “sequences” (rather than according to an overall chronology), we hope not only to render the volume’s materials conceptually coherent and manageable for readers but also to acknowledge each historical moment’s heterogeneity and Ungleichzeitigkeit 17. The archive for German writings on film in the period covered by this book is immense; in a 1930 brochure on German trade publications, Erwin Ackerknecht listed 160 film periodicals, about half of which are now available on microfilm. These titles include influential trade papers that appeared daily in the late 1920s, such as Der Kinematograph (1907–35) and the Film-Kurier (1919–45), as well as fan magazines that often stopped after just a few issues. In addition to these film-related publications, most newspapers (there were sixty daily papers in Berlin alone) and lifestyle magazines featured film reviews and articles about cinema. The present book can only offer a glimpse into the overwhelming mass of archival sources; most still await discovery. 18. Kracauer, History, 144. See also George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).

8

Introduction

(nonsimultaneity)—a concept theorized in the interwar years by German thinkers such as Wilhelm Pinder, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Bloch.19 Within the volume’s eighteen chapters, all texts are introduced with editors’ comments, which highlight their contributions to the theorization of cinema’s promise and possibilities in the early twentieth century. Resisting any unifying generalizations, these comments signal some of the events, debates, and other immediate circumstances to which the authors were responding. Our interest in recovering the historical dimensions of the texts is matched, however, by a commitment to conveying their relevance today. Following Walter Benjamin’s argument in The Arcades Project that “the true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space),”20 we forego any attempt at self-transposition into the past and instead analyze early-twentieth-century documents in dialogue with contemporary issues. Our hope is that the texts throughout this sourcebook will continue to gain new, unanticipated meanings, illuminating our ever-shifting media environment and its attendant theoretical concerns. 21 • • •

With its dual temporal focus on the historicity and actuality of early-twentieth-century texts, the present volume seeks to contribute to understandings of German film theory in three major ways. First, it allows us to see the broader context in which cinema could appear to well-known theorists as a key cultural form of modernity. Alongside Benjamin’s and Kracauer’s analyses of cinema’s “shocks” and “distractions,” we encounter a vast array of writings on cinema and modernity from other commentators, such as government advisors, sociologists, or advertising theorists. In these writings, words like tempo, nervousness, thrill, astonishment, and novelty abound as efforts to understand the transformations of everyday life that modernity had wrought. If many of these texts strike us today as reactionary, others stand out for their euphoric tone. But the important point—and the one that becomes visible with sufficient historical distance and a large enough archival base—is that all the authors were observing the same phenomena. From Alfred Döblin’s description of working-class audiences “spellbound” by the cinema’s “white eye” in 1909 (no. 63) to Wilhelm Stapel’s anxious observations on the revolutionary “homo cinematicus” in 1919 (no. 103) to Ernst Jünger’s reactionary-modernist reflections on the new audience of mass types in 1932 (no. 188), the authors of nearly all the texts collected here understood film as a medium of modernity, one deeply implicated in the emergence and workings of twentieth-century mass culture. Second, this expanded range of articles allows readers to better comprehend the cultural and linguistic specificity of writings by Balázs and other well-known theorists who were well acquainted with wider debates on cinema in Germany and Austria. Such debates have transnational ramifications, and one can draw links, for example, between the emergence of cinema reform movements in Germany and America; the rise of the avant-garde in Germany, France, and Holland; or the forging of a left-wing fi lm culture

19. See Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1926); Erwin Panofsky, “Reflections on Historical Time,” trans. Johanna Bauman, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 4 (2004): 691–701; and Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 20. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 206. 21. On the goal of conveying both the historicity and actuality of film theory, see also Johannes von Moltke, “Out of the Past: Classical Film Theory,” Screen 55, no. 3 (Autumn 2014): 398–403.

Introduction

9

in Germany and the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, many of the epistemological framings of German-language debates were also informed by specific intellectual traditions such as Kultur (culture) and Bildung (education), both of which had been valorized and discussed extensively since the German Enlightenment. When Balázs titled his study Visible Man or the Culture of Film, for example, he understood the term Kultur according to a Germanic tradition linking Kultur to the idea of Bildung as the holistic cultivation of an ensemble of human faculties; it was precisely this organic notion of Kultur that the technological medium of film had seemed to threaten. Similarly, the Schillerian concept of aesthetic education arguably informed debates among German educators and psychologists about the effects of cinema on child development (see chapter 7); the efforts of the Kulturfilm, a German variant of documentary based on ideals of experiential education (chapter 16); and Balázs’s 1925 speech to an annual conference of educators on the Bildungswerte (educational values) of film art (chapter 4, no. 54). The terms Kultur and Bildung provide just two examples of the many latent “protocols” of early German film theory, which become visible only when theoretical writings are reinserted into their cultural-linguistic context. Third, the scope of this volume allows readers to see more clearly the ways in which early film theory was always already a form of media theory—one whose open, interrogative quality anticipates our efforts to assimilate “new media” today. Many of the key topics of contemporary media studies—animation, immersion and distraction, participation and interactivity, remediation and convergence, institutional and nontheatrical uses of cinema, amateur fi lmmaking and fan practices, democracy and mass media—were already part of early film-theoretical discussion and can be fruitfully teased out of the texts in this volume. Such thoughts and questions were not entirely new even in the 1910s and ‘20s; most of them can be traced back to the visual and media culture of the nineteenth century and even before. 22 But our present environment of proliferating screens and media platforms allows these aspects of early film culture to come to the fore in new ways, revealing the latent futures harbored within archives. The present volume thus embraces an understanding of the contemporary moment that Thomas Elsaesser describes as an ever-shifting “enunciative position” from which the past is constantly reorganized in constellation with present concerns. 23 Eschewing any approach that assumes we know what the cinema is, has been, and will become, this volume features historical writings that explore cinema’s manifold horizons—writings that suggest actual futures, as well as the many roads not taken. • • •

Although the three categories outlined above—film and modernity, film and cultural context, and film and media theory—loosely correspond to our section divisions, each one also cuts across the book as a whole. This means, of course, that the form of the present collection is provisional, its categorizations necessarily tentative. Much as Aby Warburg perpetually reorganized his Mnemosyne Atlas in the 1920s, we have gathered, arranged, and

22. Siegfried Zielinski has been particularly insistent on this point. See his Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7–8. See also Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 44–45; and Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 13. 23. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” CiNéMAS 14, nos. 2–3 (2004): 75–117; here 78.

10

Introduction

repeatedly repositioned the texts before settling on a working assemblage. In this regard, we have adopted the role of curators who place artifacts into creative constellations; while we suggest pathways through the book’s immense archive of materials, we also encourage readers to establish their own links cutting across the various sections and chapters. To offer one example: though many of the texts reproduced here embrace notions of artistic and medial “specificity” as part of an effort to legitimate cinema, one could also construct an entirely different genealogy of conceptualizing cinema in terms of intermediality. Such a trajectory would include all of the early efforts—palpable throughout chapter 1—to position cinema with respect to existing forms of visual culture, such as variety shows, naturalist theater, sports, the circus, amusement parks, and phantasmagoric illusions. But it would also include the myriad reflections of the avant-garde on cinema as a form of “painting with time” (Walter Ruttmann, no. 201) or “music for the eyes” (Bernhard Diebold, no. 202); experiments with fi lm and modern dance (Rudolf von Laban, no. 58); writings on mixed media (Kurt Weisse, no. 4; Heinrich Strobel, no. 249); and efforts to position cinema with respect to emerging media such as radio (Herbert Jhering, no. 267; Kurt Weill, no. 268) and television (which Rudolf Arnheim discussed under the name “Radio-Film” in 1932; no. 276). 24 An anthology informed by a narrower definition of film theory might limit itself to discussions of medium specificity and “film as art,” or to canonical theorists and texts. But in our era of expanded audiovisual media and their concomitant genealogies, we are aware that such a shared consensus can no longer—if it ever could—be taken for granted. Cinema is and was many things. It was defined and redefined by countless voices, projects, and relationalities. For any sourcebook seeking to understand what German film theory might mean for us today—what sorts of promises it still holds, “even if the clattering of the film projectors disappears”—it is imperative to take seriously the anonymous murmuring that subtended “classical film theory,” lending it the expansive relevance and vitality that it always possessed.

24. On the intermedial concerns of classical film theorists, see Doron Galili, “Intermedial Thought in Classical Film Theory: Balázs, Arnheim, and Benjamin on Film and Radio,” Germanic Review 88, no. 4 (2013): 391–99.

SECTION ONE •

•

•

TRANSFORMATIONS OF EXPERIENCE

ONE

A NEW SENSORIUM

1 HANNS HEINZ EWERS The Kientopp First published as “Der Kientopp” in Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur 1, no. 18 (October 11, 1907), 578–79. Translated by Eric Ames.

Early attempts to assess cinema’s power and potential varied widely, but perhaps no issue was more central than sense perception, particularly vision. With its kaleidoscopic presentations, often strung together pell-mell, the cinematograph seemed to offer an aesthetic counterpart to the urban experience of hyperstimulation and sensory fragmentation described by Georg Simmel and others. It could also dazzle the senses with impossible spectacles such as fast motion and backward projection. Indeed, as early psychological theories such as Karl Marbe’s Theorie der kinematographischen Projektion (1910) emphasized, the fundamental cinematographic operation of making still images appear as continuous movement presupposed the fallibility of spectators’ senses, too sluggish to the perceive the trick and hence susceptible to further illusions (Jonathan Crary). This power over the senses formed the focal point of intense debates; while reformers decried cinema’s alleged “damage to the eyes and the nerves” (see chapter 7, no. 99), as well as its suggestive power over young minds, other observers extolled its ability to generate thrills and to extend the human senses (chapter 3, no. 33). This chapter brings together several prewar writings that sought to come to grips with the new “sensorium” of cinematographic projection: to understand its pleasures, situate it with respect to previous forms of entertainment, articulate its relationship to modern life, probe its interactions with spectatorial imagination, and assess the challenge it posed to aesthetic criticism. In the first text, which is also one of the first published articles on cinema by a well-known intellectual, Hanns Heinz Ewers marvels at the medium’s “curious pleasures” for the senses in an exploratory tone that will be evident in several subsequent articles in this chapter. Ewers (1871–1943), best known as an author of horror and fantastic literature, also became one of the first literati to pen screenplays: Der Verführte (The seduced one, 1913), Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913), and other productions. This essay appeared in Morgen (1907–09), a short-lived weekly cultural journal published in Berlin.

Whenever I leaf through the newspapers in a café, and see how much is printed about all kinds of art, day after day, I can’t believe my eyes. There are articles on theater, variety shows, art exhibitions, concerts, lectures, and books, but who speaks of the Kientopp?1

13

14

Transformations of Experience

Are all of these press people blind? Don’t they know that the Kientopp is a cultural factor beyond comparison in its priority and power? Don’t they realize that it can be placed beside Gutenberg’s invention, for which we writers have our livelihoods to thank? An equal measure of vitality, please. The Kientopp! I heard this word for the first time when I returned to Berlin and instantly fell in love with it. For four years, on three continents, in the most forsaken holes, I have been going to “cinematographic theaters” (what a dreadful term!); from now on, I am only going to Kientopps. 2 I love the Berliners for inventing this word, a national word, which convincingly demonstrates their love of a good cause. There is no point of view from which we should not welcome the Kientopp with resounding applause! In terms of education, where else do you learn so easily, so playfully, thousands of things lying far, far off on the horizon? What book can offer you such a concept of foreign lands? Father, send your kids to the Kientopp! It’s better than Sunday school! And you should go in yourself! In terms of amusement, these are the circenses of the twentieth century! The Kientopp costs ten pfennig to enter. Not even bad sideshows are that cheap. And even the best are not nearly as amusing. What philistine has become so hardened that he cannot enjoy the delightful Parisian burlesque. In terms of hygiene, no one smokes or drinks in the Kientopp. And the bad air is still much better than that of the beer cellars and schnapps bars. The Kientopp is as beneficial to the lungs as it is for the purse. And so on! But what good is it if I blow my horn for the Kientopp in this paper and appeal to classes who don’t even read it? Hence I wish to trade my floppy hat for a top hat, and now preach to the intellectuals. Go to the Kientopp! It’s not as if intellectuals could not learn a lot in the Kientopp, something new every week. But they could also, as an added bonus, gather rather curious pleasures here. Quite exquisite is, for example, the pleasure of suspended causality. It is not very easy to identify with it, since our stupid rational mind always stands under the tyrannical influence of cause and effect. Then comes along Mr. Kientopp and inserts his film backwards into the projector. A little sleight of hand—and it turns the history of the world upside down; the effect becomes the cause, the cause, effect. Allow me to offer a simple example. I take a cigarette, stick it in my mouth, light it with a match, and smoke. The cigarette smolders and grows smaller, the ashes fall down, the paper burns up, and finally I throw away the butt. Now roll the film backwards. From the earth a burning cigarette butt flies up into my mouth. I smoke, the cigarette becomes longer and longer, and the ashes fly up from the ashtray and into the cigarette, turning themselves into paper, until my cigarette is whole again. Then I hold an already burned-down match, which also becomes whole again, and whose flame extinguishes at the moment when I strike it on the box. Michel eats, and the noodles come out of his mouth; his child crawls out of the midwife’s arms and back into the body of its mother! Who says that the prophets are all dead? Wasn’t the magnificent August Kopisch a great prophet when he wrote his poem about a giant crab?3 And, if you will, let us fantasize a bit. Take whatever situations, plots, or events you wish and mix them together using inductive and deductive methods. With a little practice, one would become the greatest sophist who ever turned himself on his head. At first, like all new art, the Kientopp mainly copies from nature. So far, this is the best it has had to offer. Up to now, what people have created for it has been partly dreadful, such as those silly magic scenes, and partly amusing, such as Parisian burlesque

A New Sensorium

15

scenes, but mostly unsatisfactory for a refined taste. Where are the poets and painters who will create for the Kientopp? Many have already done so unconsciously. The best among them is Shakespeare; his Richard III would receive a better and more comprehensible treatment in the Kientopp than on many a theater stage. Or take Hogarth; 4 string some of his scenes together and let them whir through the film projector, and you will see this artist coming to life. Today, however, we are familiar with the Kientopp and can consciously create for it. Here lies a new terrain for art, an unplowed field. Who will help to cultivate it? And you, dear Mr. Censor, who have done so many foolish things and continue to do them, for once do something for which one may thank you. Now that you have absolute control, hire an artistic adviser, and a good one at that—for nobody expects you to understand anything about art yourself! And if the artists then come and hand you their Kientopp plays—and they will come!—separate the chaff from the wheat; stamp out the kitsch and foster the art! If you will do that, then I will write you the first Kientopp play and make you the hero. Notes 1. Kientopp (or Kintopp) was a common colloquial term for Kinematograph (or Kinematographentheater) in Berlin in the decade before World War I. Since Kientopp has no equivalent in English, we have opted to retain it. We also maintain the variations in spelling in subsequent selections. 2. In the four years prior to this article, Ewers and his wife had spent time on the island of Capri and in Spain, Central America, and the Caribbean. 3. Ewers refers to a popular poem, “Der große Krebs im Mohriner See,” by the German poet August Kopisch (1799–1853). Alluding to the crab’s backward movement, the poem also envisions other phenomena going backwards (e.g., from bread to grain, from hen to egg). 4. A reference to the English artist William Hogarth (1697–1764), famous for his series of paintings of “modern moral subjects.”

2 MAX BROD Cinematographic Theater First published as “Kinematographentheater” in Die neue Rundschau 20 (February 1909), 319–20. Translated by Nancy Nenno.

A prolific writer and a close friend of Franz Kafka, Max Brod (1884–1968) published his first novel, Nornepygge Castle, in 1908. The following feuilleton article, with its paratactic list of attractions witnessed in a film screening, offers a good sense of the “challenges” (mentioned by Brod in the last sentence) for any writer seeking to convey the phenomenological excess of a motion picture screening. Die neue Rundschau was one of the most prestigious literary journals of the time.

I imagine the members of the Pathé Frères company in Paris roughly as follows: on the trail of new cinematographic ideas, they stroll through the famously beautiful environs of Paris and come, for instance, upon a sand pit. One of them cries out immediately: “Voilà” and so on—in French, naturally. Translated, his words mean approximately that this spot, in his view, would offer a golden opportunity for a new shoot, one that could be titled Drama in den Goldminen Kaliforniens [Drama in the California goldmines]. So they quickly procure the necessary paraphernalia: broad-brimmed hats, revolvers, ropes

16

Transformations of Experience

for the loads of gold, winches, and cartridge belts to be strapped diagonally across the chest. Then they’re off: under the supervision of the dandified director, the actors perform their best Wild West manners for the film. . . . Alternately, the flat roof of a warehouse evokes images of romantic Moorish citadels; a bog suggests horseback rides through the Gobi desert; a passing prop wagon suggests all the scenery of the Earth. . . . And I do not state this as a reproach. No, I am really enchanted by the fact that Edison’s invention, which at first aspired to nothing more than sober copies of life, has brought so much fantastic theater into the world. I sit many an evening before the white screen (subsequent to the amusement I unfailingly experience upon entering the cinematographic theater and observing a ticket window, a coat check, music programs, ushers, and rows of seats—all of this pedantically exact as though in a real theater with live actors). After this truly witty (as it seems to me) observation, the low buzzing of the machinery makes me simmer with excitement. I have studied the program. I know which offering is “instructive,” which is “outrageously funny,” “sensational,” or will present “touching scenes from real life.” Suddenly, the hall darkens for Reise nach Australien [Trip to Australia]. I see streets with people walking by, their rapid clip not disrupting their ease in the slightest. Some stand still and look down at me from under their Australian caps. God bless you, fellow, you don’t see me (perhaps you’re already dead), it’s all the same: Greetings! Next, I experience a conflagration—alarms, then the water brigade on the march, beyond the call of duty. It seems I already experienced the same fire on a trip through Chicago, but perhaps my cinematographic memory plays tricks on me. Besides, I didn’t come to Australia simply to see fires; any minute now I’ll be surprised by two tracks racing straight at me. I’m sitting, you see, in the locomotive of a speeding train. I’m delighted by mountains, rivers, and natives, by the absolute nothingness in the tunnel. Now I see types from the country’s interior; as always with exotic shots, the razor must be there, as must the lathered-up black man making faces of a distinctly central European variety. Then, suddenly, “The End” is announced. Ah, why so soon? But the next film is no worse. Science receives its due; now cheer marches into place; and then the tragic, accompanied by the adagio of a Viennese song. There are the magic tricks, a thousand patiently colored photographs, metamorphoses of blossoms into ballerinas, Brahmans with long beards, wrongdoers whose heads drop off like nothing, people floating through the air, flying to the moon, deities, the devil. It wouldn’t do to slight everyday events. Counterfeit rings are uncovered; criminals imprisoned after lengthy chases; poor children are tortured; innocent fathers of other children are condemned and saved at the last second. I already know the performing personnel well—it is that boy who can scarcely hold back his laughter whenever he is supposed to cry. Yesterday this deceived husband played a brother beyond the reach of emotion. Thus does the justice served surpass the individual deed. I admire this achievement, but even more I admire how gestures provide clear solutions for the most complicated of assignments. One sees “I hate you” or “Why did you tell my uncle that I was still home at half past five yesterday?” or “This man’s son also robbed me twenty years ago.” But one thing continues to puzzle me: since the actors already convey normal speech through such strong gestures, how would they portray cinematographically someone who makes himself understood in a foreign country through signs, or who naturally tends to gesticulate wildly? This is not, however, the time to reflect on this matter. For the second part is already showering me with pictures (you’ll “laugh yourself sick,” as the program puts it); pictures of drunken mailmen, primitive peoples, gallant lovers who hide themselves in crates in the rocking freight car to go on a long (oh-so-long, laugh-yourself-sick-long!) trip on the railroad. Mattresses come to life, glue bonds permanently, boots are too tight, plates crash noiselessly into dust, furies howl, and wisecrackers laugh. And whole collections of people who trash one another,

A New Sensorium

17

whole colonies of people who wish, no matter what it takes, to capture an escaping gnome. . . . The vitality of such a wealth of events has fi nally shaken me out of my semisomnolent state. On the way home now, I will become an inventor myself and think up a few new pictures for the Biograph, such as a chase scene in which, instead of automobiles or locomotives or trolleys, two ships run the race, a cruiser and a pirate ship. Over the broad surface of the sea, accompanied by the most furious shooting, the distance between them grows smaller . . . But that would surely be an expensive film. All the cheaper, then, is the second idea: a poet in his lonely chamber, falling into a desperate rage over the challenges of powerful yet restrained representation.

3 GUSTAV MELCHER On Living Photography and the Film Drama First published as “Von der lebenden Photographie und dem Kino-Drama” in Der Kinematograph 112 (February 17, 1909). Translated by Alex H. Bush and Jon Cho-Polizzi.

Like the article by Ewers (no. 1), this text celebrates film’s ability to surpass the laws of ordinary vision through trick photography, backward projection, time lapse, and similar processes. Gustav Melcher’s description of the cinema’s “expanded and improved eye” predates Vertov’s better-known writings on the Kino-Eye by more than a decade. The text is particularly symptomatic of early writing on film in its interest in the endless potential of such vision, allowing us to see “through the eyes of limitless possibility.” Like Brod (no. 2), Melcher refl ects on the difficulties of grasping such visual excess through traditional aesthetic criticism. Melcher was a painter, a regular contributor to Der Kinematograph, and secretary of the Düsseldorf-based Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Lichtbildkunst (Society for the Promotion of Motion Picture Art).

Not long ago, an announcement ran in the newspaper classifieds that the Prince of Fürstenberg had attended a screening at a cinematographic theater. The same was said of the German kaiser. As no retraction followed, I decided that I, too, would begin to visit these art institutions. I supplied myself with cigars, purchased a ticket at the theater box office, and let someone give me a program, which said, among other things, that my ticket was good for a journey through East India and for a ride through Chicago on the electric tram. At the same time, according to the program, I would also be deeply moved and die laughing several times over. The program cost nothing, the ticket not even one mark. The program alone was worth ten marks. I had gotten a good deal. I had them give me another program. Oh, these cinematographic theater programs! Where can you find their like! The world is rich and life multifaceted. But when it comes to richness, one single cinematographic theater program leaves world and life in the dust. It is impossible to say what such programs consist of, just as it is beyond our power to say what constitutes life. What use is it to stillborn children if I say to them, “All the objects that you can find in Brockhaus and Meyer’s Conversational Lexicon and lots of other unnamed and unnameable things exist in life”?1 And what use is it to the reader if I say to him, “Besides objects from the past and present, in a cinematographic theater program, you can find all the things that do not exist and never will”?

18

Transformations of Experience

Criticism is just as powerless against the cinematograph’s shows as the philosopher is with regard to life. They are too much. We can rightly or wrongly complain about poor ventilation, faulty “lighting,” insufficient costuming, or the moral danger of some films—all that applies to the art of photography that lives, sings, dances, murders, and races along. Any criticism that follows the rules of art as practiced in educated Germany is out of the question. Artists, who have an antipathy for criticism, need only to have their art brought to eternal life cinematographically, and they will be better protected from the dreaded incompetence of arrogant literati than if they were already in the grave. Criticism attacked Goethe, scorned Schiller, and can reduce one of Hauptmann’s dramas to a literary ruin or dramatic wreck in less than twenty-four hours, but against five hundred film premieres a week, it is totally powerless. Should critics ever wish to annihilate a film, by its second part the quill would fall from their hands as the queasy feeling overtakes them that they must thereby spare 499 other movies. The technological or artistic aspect of film dramas also poses difficulties. Whether in the film Der Mord in den Monkeymountains [Murder in Monkey Mountains], the Northern Pacifique traveled too fast or too slow to achieve the desired sensation; whether the eagle, whose job it was to devour Prometheus’s liver, ate too much or too little; whether the automobile that raced around the rings of Saturn had the proper scale in relation to the heavenly body—who can answer such questions? And when an entire city appears with streets and squares; or an entire country with mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, industries, and military and spiritual authorities; and when the desert comes onstage with its glowing sands and endless distances, with Arabs, Negroes, and camels; and when the sea sparkles and hurls its white, cresting waves over dark cliffs; and when the kaiser finally appears, the kaiser in maneuvers, surrounded by his great General Staff—! There are other ways, beyond perfect mastery, to nip every criticism in the bud. Too much is too much. There, where the Victoria lilies bloom and fade, where the queen of the night unfurls her buds, where palm leaves waft in the winds and the California sun (or the Indian sun or the Neapolitan) showers trembling kisses over the shapes of distant people, the vegetation of foreign lands, or the waters of the sea—in those holy halls, where the greatest beauties from every zone are born before your eyes from the most distant fragrant airs, silently growing closer to you with secretive movement; where the wonders of space stream ceaselessly before your eyes, as though the entire world had been swept up in the flow; where Vesuvius grows up next to you, Mount Etna spits glowing lava, the holy floods of the Nile flow by, and the waters of the Niagara writhe into fog in the depths; where Caruso sings, Duse moves her hands, 2 and His Royal Highness Prince Wilhelm rides Puck, 3 drives his team of donkeys, jumps over a wire fence, and falls; where you haven’t even paid one mark for your seat. There, any mortal who purchases a ticket acquires only one right: that of being astonished over and over again. The sea, the barefoot boys in the streets of Barcelona, the kaiser, and a thousand other things and people are not employees of the theater. They appear because they deign to appear. The race car is not obliged to flip over and bury its drivers beneath it. The crown prince does not chitchat with his wife when the hunt is at full speed in order to make a film more interesting, and the Adriatic Sea, gleaming in the sunlight, is no stage effect. The cinematograph is a new visual organ: an expanded and improved eye. If this organ can be used creatively, as indeed the cinematic slapstick has already proven it can, then its true value lies in its ability to augment our faculty of sight. The primitive visual tools given to us by nature are but the substrate for the eyes of today, and no one who relies upon our inherited eyes alone can truly see in the contemporary sense

A New Sensorium

19

of the word. We observe stars, the light of which our naked eyes are blind to see; we marvel at bacteria for which our retinal tissue alone is ill-prepared. With the aid of this international visual organ, the cinematograph, we see around the very surface of the earth—on the streets of New York, London, and Paris and even into the depths of the past. We expand our optical horizons, or perhaps abolish them entirely to gaze unhindered upon the light of the world. The fly has more than ten thousand eyes. The flounder’s eyes can wander across its body. But twentieth-century man has the cinematograph. He sees more than the visual world: he sees what he desires. He sees living elephants and their keepers in the hand of a child and battleship-devouring tadpoles. He sees a steamboat motionless against a twilit coast, which itself rolls with the motion of the waves. He sees the water flow up the mountain and the rose bloom from the refuse heap. He sees an old woman grow younger and younger, a child smaller and smaller until she lies once more nursing in the cradle before passing from her father to the midwife. He sees that no object exists which cannot be consumed by a vacuum cleaner, sees the Alps reduced in size until they fit into Little Carl’s specimen box. He sees a man go into a contemporary shop to select a new face as one would choose a hat—each head laughing and talking and posturing until the man finds one to his liking. He sees a bicyclist run over, then sees him rise to tip his hat in thanks and ride away after his scattered body parts have been reassembled in the street. He sees the timelessness and imperishability of life. He sees through the eyes of limitless possibility the growing of the grass, the blooming and the wilting of the flowers in five, three, or even two minutes. In short, he sees with no limitations all that he desires to see. The modern eye sees beyond the grave, peers into the past, stretches across the ravages of time. It looks both backwards and forwards, sees living death and deathly life. The Kingdom of Death no longer provides the imminent frontier to life. Through these eyes, Leo XIII need not have ceased to project his benevolent smile, to pray for us and bless us with his papal grace.4 The Kingdom of Death stops at the border of the cinematograph and the gramophone. Memory has ceased to be dependent upon that off-white and fickle mass we call the brain. The modern man does not remember. He collects and uses “cinegrams” [Kinogramme]. Clio, the Muse of History, has ceased to write shorthand or type events into the Book of History. Clio turns the crank of the cinematograph and operates the phonograph. [. . .] Enabled by better insight and sharp censorship, the man on the street now craves morality. According to his perspective, drama consists of the representation of a great passion, an exciting story, with manly power, gallantry, virtue, and beauty on one side, and vice on the other. The man on the street demands that heroes behave heroically, that there be as little talking and as much action as possible, so that virtue will quickly win out. He demands the classic magnitude of gestures and a story that unfolds as clear as day. He discards every attempt at psychological subtleties and details in favor of the representation of a morality grander than any that really exists, because under his flannel shirt and his hat, worn low on his forehead, he hides a dark awareness that all good and tender things are bound to moral power by a secret contract. We thus have every reason to celebrate that, in dramatic films, every murderer leaves a monogrammed handkerchief at the scene of the crime, that all the severely wounded people are sufficiently recovered by the end of the story to be able to endure a betrothal. It is absolutely in the national interest for as many citizens as possible to believe in justice and God in Heaven. And such dramas are produced not by the meter, but by the kilometer; they are truly manufactured. The actor has not only become a visual artist but he works at a factory. And what he makes there is not a manufactured good in the worst sense of the word. The sanguine, pulsating, enterprising modern life, which even before birth takes on its

20

Transformations of Experience

cheerful automobile rhythm, is put on display without prejudice in fi lm acting. The modern go-getter’s hearty idealism dares to tackle huge challenges with a courage we must admire. This brave, stalwart man who loves his fatherland, who hates sitting around and brings all his youthful enthusiasm to every sport, this “Philistine” whose misbehavior and disregard for tradition we privately smirk at, speaks his own language here, and he performs a thousand times. He considered it his obligation to modernize Schiller’s “The Hostage,”5 because he is of the opinion that the beautiful idea contained in this poem can only gain from being projected as a film drama, where Damon smokes cigarettes, and a dagger stashed in a cloak advances to a Browning hidden in a trouser pocket. Sport and travel films are also made by the kilometer, and educational films produced, sold, distributed, and spread across the planet without regard for people or nations. And just as the kaiser honors even the smallest village with his cinematographic presence, just as the actress from the Comic Opera in Paris cannot help appearing in Mettmann or Küppersteg,6 so the tide of art, education, and entertainment—once it has passed through the sieve of censorship—is unstoppable. Without even leaving their village, people can see good—indeed, the best—actors, get a glimpse of street life in London, and take pleasure in a thousand things that, until now, were available only to city dwellers. Edison, who goes so far as to claim that the cinematograph can help stop rural depopulation, is perhaps not totally incorrect, if he achieves his goal of perfecting the gramophone. Years ago, there was much talk of artistic, social, and mental upheavals. Today, we hardly remember these words. It is not fashionable to talk about real upheavals, because it is superfluous to side with something that knows no resistance, that surprises us with a thousand perfected facts and opens up perspectives in every direction. Drawing is coming to life! Sketches are moving their outlined arms! Photography sings! Movement is secured in lifeless images! The dead dance before our eyes! Caruso is singing in Mettmann! A conductor who died ten years ago will direct his orchestral composition tomorrow! A thousand singing and speaking actors are going without pay! Notes 1. Brockhaus and Meyers Konversations-Lexikon were two popular encyclopedias. 2. A reference to the Italian actress Eleonora Duse (1858–1924). 3. A reference to the horse named Puck that belonged to Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia (1887– 1949), son of Wilhelm II. 4. Leo XIII was pope from 1878 to his death in 1903 at the age of 93. 5. “Die Bürgschaft” (The Hostage, 1799) is a ballad by Schiller extolling the value of friendship and loyalty. 6. Mettmann and Küppersteg are small towns in North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany.

4 KURT WEISSE A New Task for the Cinema First published as “Eine neue Aufgabe für den Kino” in Der Kinematograph 142 (September 15, 1909). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A literary and theater critic, Kurt Weisse proposes the use of cinema for rendering dream images on the stage—an argument that would find an echo twenty years later in Béla Balázs’s The Spirit of Film (1930). Though often associated with the experimental theater directors of the 1920s such as Erwin Piscator, uses of film projection on the

A New Sensorium

21

stage can be traced back to early féerie productions such as La biche au bois (1896) and built on the use of magic lanterns (not least in productions of Wagner’s operas). The masculine definite article (der) for Kino in Weisse’s title, instead of the more common neuter das, was typical at the time and probably derived from the term der Kinematograph.

Moritz Wirth,1 a Wagner researcher from Leipzig, has set a new task for the cinematograph and the film industry in several essays that he has recently published in various trade journals on the subjects of stage direction and theatrical set design. In them, he pleads for the implementation of cinema on the theatrical stage. For example, he wishes to see it used in Faust productions, where he believes that the cinema could help to achieve a meaningful refinement of stage performances of Goethe’s work. Imagine, for example, the famous scene from the first part of Faust, where Mephistopheles tries to lull Faust to sleep through various dream images that he conjures upon the ceiling of Faust’s room, while the chorus comes in with the powerful hymn “Vanish, ye darkling / Arches above him!”2 Faust does indeed fall asleep and enables Mephistopheles to achieve his goal: he can now disappear unnoticed . . . With today’s stage technology, Faust’s “dream faces” can only be approximated imperfectly. Usually, magic lantern images are projected on the ceiling. In their inflexible rigidity, they admittedly lag far behind the demands of Goethe’s text. There, a backstage chorus describes Faust’s dream images in words, while the poet dreams away in majestic images of far-flung imagination. No further explanation is necessary to demonstrate that cinema could represent these images in their opulence and lively alternation far better than a magic lantern can. Thus, the cinematograph could in fact enable a significant improvement of our Faust productions. However, Moritz Wirth admits that in order to be used on the stage, the cinematograph still requires a few improvements; namely, it would need to work more quietly. But he hopes that the cinematographic industry, which has developed so quickly and brilliantly in just a few years, will have increasing success in its endeavor to construct the quietest possible devices. Truly, Wirth’s proposal has set a new task for the film industry, which could be as interesting as it is meaningful. This depends on realizing his challenge as soon as possible, and this is a shining opportunity for the German industry to pull ahead of other nations! What if a company tried now to invent a film for the aforementioned Faust scene? Of course, this would require a first-class creation of highly artistic style. This goal would be well served by first discussing the film’s composition with a well-known artist: with Max Klinger, for example; or the Weimar artist Ludwig von Hofmann; perhaps also with Fritz Erler, who produced the Faust décor for the Münchner Künstlertheater.3 This would guarantee a first-class production, and one could certainly expect all German theaters to take up this film. So who will try it? To contribute to the perfection of the theater is to contribute to the elevation of culture. If the cinema can make such a contribution, it will strike yet another weapon from the hands of those who love to deride it as a mere “sensational tool for riffraff.” Notes 1. Wirth appears to have been particularly concerned with the question of illusion on the stage. His three-part article from 1888 for the Musikalisches Wochenblatt entitled “Walhall und Regenbogen” (Valhalla and rainbow), for example, explored the means of creating a realistic rainbow bridge for performances of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. 2. The English translation is from Bayard Taylor’s translation of Faust: A Tragedy (London: Strahan, 1871), 70.

22

Transformations of Experience

3. Max Klinger (1857–1920) and Ludwig von Hofmann (1861–1945) were among the most celebrated German painters of the turn of the century. Fritz Erler (1868–1940) was a painter, graphic artist, and stage designer whose Faust production was staged in Munich in 1908.

5 ANONYMOUS New Terrain for Cinematographic Theaters First published as “Neuland für Kinematographentheater” in Lichtbild-Bühne 3, no. 111 (September 10, 1910), 3. Translated by Sara Hall.

For intellectuals steeped in text-based media, the cinema, along with photography and illustrated journals, seemed to herald a shift toward “visual literacy.” This author’s contention that cinema “has now taught us to see for the first time” echoes the famous words of Malte Laurids Brigge, “I am learning to see,” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel of the same year. It also looks forward to several other articles in this collection by Béla Balázs (e.g. chapter 4, no. 54), Fritz Lang (chapter 4, no. 59), and others, who would theorize the potential impact of film’s visual power on European culture.

The cinematograph is increasingly broadening its domain of living material. It is as if it wished to swallow the whole of humankind in a violent deluge. The camera lens’s eye records each and every thing, observing it long and penetratingly, preserving its interior, and conserving it visibly on a strip of film. And we can observe all of this again whenever we wish. I believe that the cinema has now taught us to see for the first time. It has awakened in us a joy in vision. We no longer wish to string sober letters together in a word (this spelling and deciphering of meaning strains the mind). We would rather enjoy the cinematograph’s quick and easy pictorial lessons. In the cinema, reality appears much more clearly before us and our interest is twice as great. We could almost let our minds fall asleep and create with our eyes whatever the soul desires. The pleasure in visual works exists everywhere; we are now more inclined toward viewing than toward reading, and for that reason everyone streams willingly, as if hypnotized, into the cinema—the newspaper of images—to bask in its lessons. The public has stored away its musty books; people rifle, fleetingly, through the pages of the newspaper. Evenings, they satisfy their hunger for the visual in the cinema.

6 ANONYMOUS The Career of the Cinematograph First published as “Die Karriere des Kinematographen” in Lichtbild-Bühne 3, no. 124 (December 10, 1910), 4–6. Translated by Eric Ames.

A New Sensorium

23

Faced with the novelty of moving pictures, early critics were at pains to define the new medium and situate it in relation to established forms of art and entertainment. Aware of cinema’s increasingly predominant function as an entertainment medium, the author of the following text proposes replacing the official term Kinematograph with the more conversational term Kinema. While identifying crime fiction and vaudeville as obvious precursors to cinema’s sensationalist presentations, the author also argues that cinema goes beyond literature in its ability to arouse affective responses, driving audiences “from hot to cold.” Like Melcher’s text (no. 3), this essay also addresses the question of whether film might become an “object of critical and aesthetic observation.” We have retained the author’s proposed term Kinema in the translation.

The term cinematograph is a neologism from Greek meaning “movement-writer.” But the word is too long; we need an abbreviation suitable for conversation. People of taste will never agree to the impertinent Berlin coinage, Kientopp. The Parisians—who have recently made great strides in assimilating Anglo-American practices (Montmartre has become a luxury suburb of London, a remote refuge for the “weekends” of pleasure-seekers from the Thames) —the Parisians help themselves to the concise and attractive expression cinéma. This is the best solution; let us borrow it and say kinema, with the stress on the first syllable. It is necessary to agree on a fitting word, since the thing itself is on the point of overcoming its youthful immaturity, stepping into the ranks of the socially recognized entertainments. In the beginning, we saw the kinema as a bad influence on the public, a teacher for aspiring apaches, and a prophet of the most vulgar sensations. To be sure, it frequently shows exceptional scenes, in which the practice of crime—minus the enchantment of art—appears in realistic and brutal detail. However, this choice of content results from the correct recognition of what modern nerves require, what they greedily desire: adventure within a homogenized humanity, extraordinary cases that deviate from the tiresome rule, the thrill of fairy tales, and heroic wonder in a world stripped of its gods and heroes—a world bereft of romantic forests and temples, a world that is now only a cold and eminently rational engine room. At first, only the authors of sensational novels understood the need to construct a new romanticism for our technical age. Then the British writer Conan Doyle appeared and created in Sherlock Holmes the figure of the elegant, extraordinary private detective, a popular daemon of skeptical humanity, with occasional tinges of decadence—just as the public desired him. This figure proved to be the skillfully cheapened version of a far more genial personality who had appeared in Edgar Allan Poe’s crime stories. The most recent psychological poisons have infiltrated the spheres of international crime and detection through the works of the Danish writer Johannes V. Jensen.1 Jensen knows how to construct multiple backdrops against one another; in his novels, the detective, although believing himself to be the observer, is actually observed by a still more powerful one, who is unmasked in his turn when his exaggeratedly acute cunning ultimately fails to withstand the cold calculations of an American intellectual. [. . .] The ideal would be a kinema whose films could be seen beside the pages of Jensen’s novels. We are already on our way to achieving it. Fashionable décor in kinema theatres is a prerequisite for pleasure. We must relegate to the past those long, smoky bars smelling of bad cigars and sour beer, where the obligatory fire breaks out during the fourth picture. We wish to enjoy the kinema, this two-dimensional vaudeville, from the philanthropic fullness of a Moroccan chair; we wish to take a train ride through all parts of the earth without having to do anything but loll about comfortably and, as Laforgue says, “roasting our dear thumb like a goose’s thigh” on the finest tobacco of some exotic

24

Transformations of Experience

cigarette. 2 In the intermissions, they could serve tea and whiskey. All of this would give off scents appropriate to the discreet and charming aesthetic of these offerings. Like vaudeville, the kinema accommodates our nervous impatience. We desire rapid developments, extracts, concentrated plots, and three-minute novels (Heinrich Mann wrote one).3 But the kinema is more spiritual and more meaningful than the (more sensual) vaudeville. It offers dramas in which the characters step into conflicts and dangers. It cannot present a person in his complexity—in his “totality,” as Goethe said—thanks to the primitive status of the medium and its temporal abruptness. Like figures in Molière’s work, characters in a film are reduced to a single trait: greed, love, or simply delirium. But the kinema’s real task is to show a stylized money-grubber, a philanderer, or a pathological type losing his equilibrium and falling into an insane and feverish frenzy, and then to show things settling back down and coming to a resolution. To be sure, for the time being, the kinema celebrates its mastery of the aesthetics of fever. Consider those hot pursuits through the many perils of city streets, those chases in which objects hound the pursued man with every form of malice4 —are these not sick dreams, visions, nightmares that even the malicious and stubborn E. T. A. Hoffmann, that Satanist from the Gendarmenmarkt,5 could not invent? The resolution in almost all kinema dramas is a moral one: the guilty man receives his punishment, or—better yet—he atones for all guilt through a martyr’s death of perfect bravura. Sometimes this moral is presented only fleetingly and economically—so that, as in Max and Moritz,6 the audience takes more aesthetic pleasure in the evil pranks of the actors than in their impending destruction. Incidentally, there is only one exception to the standard moral resolution of serious kinema conflicts: in cases of divorce, the French and Italian kinemas gallantly take the side of the guilty woman . . . In England, patrons of kinema theaters are in the habit—when moral principles intervene in the action up on the animated screen, when virtue snatches up victory, when the detective (aboard some transatlantic steamship) tears the false beard from the face of the murderer, when the loyal dog picks up the tracks of its owner who had been kidnapped and carried infinitely far away—the English are in the habit of breaking into applause at once uninhibited, fresh, and practical. They applaud the moral, the order imposed by the state, and the kinema literati who managed to pull all of this off. They applaud the literature; they recognize the literary character of these presentations. It is only a step from this recognition to the creation of kinema criticism. Indeed, wherever a kinema theater is epicurean enough for the (rightly) discriminating body of a reviewer, and where it can raise claims to literariness, why should its premiere not be the object of critical and aesthetic observation? We must realize that in these halls a new form of publicity is unabatedly winning ground. One day, this potential publication forum will become aware of its powerful effect; the kinema will begin to exert a decisive influence. Besides, who else today— today, when the kinema hardly even brushes up against the sphere of the tendentious— who else could drive us from happiness to sorrow, from hatred to enthusiasm, and from cold to hot like the kinema, this most ardent of all publicists? We watch as a rich child, robbed by bandits, must break into his own parents’ castle; tears shimmer in many a viewer’s eyes. A minute later—as a man fights his way through the pounding breakers of New York’s Broadway while holding a stack of porcelain plates—the kinema triumphs over front rows that squeal, chuckle, and slap their thighs as they rattle the chairs . . . Somewhere in a city suburb, I saw a kinema adaptation of Zola’s L’assommoir,7 and there could not have been a more vivid deterrent to alcoholism. At an exposition in Paris, however, near the Lions of Belfort, two booths stood side by side, one housing a nationalist, the other a socialist, kinema . . . How much longer until the literati of the Pathé Frères

A New Sensorium

25

Company will no longer be the only ones to declare “We publicize only in the kinema”? When will politicians also begin to publish their articles exclusively in filmic form? The kinema can be biased, but, if it wishes, it can also be the most objective reporter— namely, when it records natural events rather than arranged sequences, organic rather than artificial developments, life rather than art. Then the kinema becomes a form of journalism. That this journalism can once again tip over into polemics opens up still further prospects . . . Pleasure is beauty in motion. The kinema is photography in motion, photography on the warpath, on the paths of life. In France, where art belongs to life more than it does for us, the kinema has long reached into the public’s very being. In the evenings people go to open-air kinemas located on the rooftops of the great boulevards; in the gardens of Bullier, 8 where students dance with girls from the Left Bank; and in casinos by the beach, when the sun has dipped below the sea and a brightly dressed party soothes itself with colorful drinks and cool, westerly breezes . . . Let us make the kinema a topic worthy of discussion! It can attain power; so let us empower it! Then we might best profit from all of its sensations and magic. Notes 1. Jensen (1873–1950) was a popular writer of detective serials under the pen name Ivar Lykke. 2. Here the author invokes the concluding line (“Mon cher pouce rôti comme une cuisse d’oie”) of “La Cigarette” by French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue (1860–1887). 3. The reference is to Heinrich Mann’s Drei-Minuten-Roman, which appeared in 1905. 4. The author uses the term Tücke des Objekts [malice of objects] here. Coined by the aesthetician and novelist Friedrich Theodor Vischer in his 1879 novel Auch Einer: Eine Reisebekanntschaft (Another one: A travel acquaintance), the phrase describes a modern condition in which subjects attributed a kind of malicious agency to the objects of daily life. The phrase later found wide usage in descriptions of slapstick film and their particular staging of encounters between heroes and objects. Among others, René Fülöp-Miller used it in his book Die Phantasiemaschine (1931), from which text no. 187 is taken. 5. A reference to the novel The Devil’s Elixirs (1815) by E. T. A. Hoffmann, who lived on Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt. 6. The children’s picture book Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks was published by Wilhelm Busch in 1865. 7. Émile Zola’s 1877 novel (the seventh in his series Les Rougon-Macquart) L’assommoir (The Drunkard) addresses alcoholism in working-class Paris. A film version of the same title by French director Albert Capellani was released in 1908. 8. Bal Bullier was a Parisian ballroom created by François Bullier in the mid-nineteenth century and in operation until 1940.

7 KARL HANS STROBL The Cinematograph First published as “Der Kinematograph” in Die Hilfe 17, no. 9 (March 2, 1911), 137–38. Translated by Don Reneau.

Though the cinematograph’s jolts, thrills, and other titillations aroused suspicion in some circles, others saw filmic sensations as an ideal expression of modern urban life, characterized as it was by acceleration, nervousness, and distraction. A “vending machine of visual pleasure,” as Karl Hans Strobl describes it here, the cinematograph offered a form of entertainment suited to mass audiences’ need for rapid stimulation rather than prolonged contemplation. Strobl (1877–1946) was an Austrian author known for horror and fantasy novels.

26

Transformations of Experience

The world is growing ever more clever in its efforts to save time. Pleasant strolls occur only in the quiet streets of out-of-the-way country villages; they belong almost exclusively to the world of gabled houses and half-timber buildings. There is no place to linger comfortably on the street in the world of reinforced concrete and giant department stores. If there were statistics on the matter, they would tell us how greatly the demand for nightgowns, slippers, and long pipes—those symbols of comfort and leisure—has declined. These are items indicating that one has time and enjoys taking one’s time. But wherever the streets of world commerce run, wherever the paths of millionaires cross, wherever goods are traded for money and power—at these nodal points of human and economic relations, one must always remain on alert. Constant presence of mind has replaced the old contemplativeness with which one permitted one’s mind to go walking because one did not need to keep its services ready at hand. In the enormous cities of the twentieth century, as in any natural or artificial system, centrifugal and centripetal forces work against one another. The enormous distances created by the incredible expansion of these clusters of residential and commercial buildings find their counterpart in the acceleration of traffic. But people have also devised methods of acceleration for purposes of entertainment. There is the gramophone, that five-minute concert for the harried urbanite, and, above all else, there is the cinematograph, that theater performed in a gallop. We no longer have the time to seat ourselves in the theater and to stay there until sunrise like the Greeks. We have persuaded the dramatic muse to wait patiently until after the close of business hours. She must then make do with what remains of everyone’s mental ability and strength of nerves after the trying activity of a full day. We all know how hard it is at the end of a workday to listen to one of those endless Wagnerian operas that seem to have been created for a race of giants or utterly inexhaustible spectators. The smaller art forms are becoming more popular: for those not yet completely indifferent to the literary, there is that form of comedy known as the Lustspiel; for the larger masses, there are operettas, revues, and the dramatic trivialities of the variety shows. But the kinematograph is above all a vending machine of visual pleasure. It offers spectators the opportunity, even during the day, to satisfy their need for revitalization within a quarter of an hour. It runs almost nonstop. One never has to wait long for the beginning or fight crowds in front of the ticket window. One enters quickly and leaves twenty minutes later, and, between two errands, one has taken in numerous colorful, amazing scenes just as one might gulp down a Swedish pickled herring with a glass of beer at Aschinger.1 The cinematograph is one of the most perfect expressions of our time. Its quick, distracting tempo corresponds to the nervousness of our lives; the restless flickering of the scenes flitting by lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the confident persistence of a regular stride. Before these wild images, it becomes apparent that the present has no room for the idyllic. The cinematograph’s technical requirements tolerate no lingering; they condense all events to their most essential elements; they shorten people’s movements and make them jerky in such a strange way that a puppet-like inflexibility sometimes comes to the surface as the hidden meaning. In this way, one only receives extracts of events, sketches of life, realities trimmed and pruned. The American principle that Peter Altenberg proclaimed for the theater, “Boil down the whole cow to a pot of beef stock” is also the principle of the cinematograph. 2 And the fact that words are absent also suits the spirit of our time to a tee. By choosing stories that speak for themselves and plots that do not stand still for even a second, one ensures that there will be no need for explanations in the form of words. Of all artistic media, that of words is the least important for our time. For our culture, the

A New Sensorium

27

most noble of all forums for expression has become an unwanted child. Oh, there are still artists who work with words: stylists and fine engravers who succeed in producing endless delicate, radiant, supple creations; poets capable of withholding a good, beneficial thought until they find the perfect form for it. But their impact is limited to the four hundred highest intellects. Most audiences do not appreciate these finer points; they simply do not understand them, and when the uniqueness of a writer’s linguistic style includes strange forms, the most they can do is laugh about it. It is sometimes frightening to observe the negligence and the disregard for words in the literature consumed by the largest part of our reading public. This shortcoming even characterizes books that enjoy great success and appear to stand up to serious critique: worn-out, grimy clauses; ungroomed sentence structures; shamelessly prostituted adjectives; neglected similes; and all the stylistic monstrosities from the world of business. Only a sporadic few seem to understand the first condition for a good book: good German. The cinematograph unambiguously expresses the audience’s apathy toward the word. The only important factor is the subject matter, and in the choice of those subjects, it becomes clear what exceptional psychologists lead the large companies that supply our cinematographic theaters with films today. The lists of their latest products provide us with a perfect psychological profile of the masses. The spectator to whom they gear their programs is an avid reader of the newspaper with a strong interest in facts; in its best form, this interest amounts to a genuine admiration for the great technological and scientific achievements of our times. This spectator has a taste for splendid processions, displays of military pomp and royal encounters; he enjoys being impressed, but he equally enjoys laughing; he loves to be titillated; and in the end, he longs for a noble surge of stirred emotions. Thus cinematograph programs include, first and foremost, reports on the events of the week, the flickering presentations of the latest boat launch, the latest stunt flight, or the latest reception of royalty from abroad—grounds for patriotic enthusiasm, supplements to newspaper reports, or substitutes for all those who were not there. When a mining accident has occurred, the cinematograph covers at least the victims’ funeral procession; for a train collision, it shows the tangled, twisted locomotives and the helpless tumult at the accident site. Less common are the purely scientific topics, the travel pictures and the films explaining technological developments in industry and agriculture; as replete as such films are with inner dramatic life, they completely lack the sensation of up-to-the-minute reporting. In compensation, comic sketches are granted even more space. At present, this group is characterized by a tragic turn into silliness; it has successfully revived the style of comedy contained in barbershop joke books. Here, one sees clearly how low our sense of humor has sunk; these lame, boring jokes provoke not a joyous smile, but rather its misshapen refraction: roars of laughter. Here, audiences receive the most beneficial effects today from that American brand of slapstick, with its atrocious exaggerations and its humor dressed in war paint. In any case, the healthy brutality of this humor possesses an aesthetic and ethical value high above the loathsome forms of sentimentality that make up no small fraction of the sketches in the cinematograph. These moving stories of child abductions, lost sons and daughters, true love and burning hatred; these “ten years later . . .” and melodramatic moral sermons (usually accompanied by tinkling on the piano) are the most wretched pieces in the programs. But set between two funny sketches, between “The Farmer at the Dentist” and “The Clumsy Groom,” they satisfy a need lying deep in the people’s soul. If we add to this list a brief mention of the set pieces, the ballet-pantomimes with serpentine dancers, and the filmed Indian stories and detective novels, then we have a psychological outline of the masses before us.

28

Transformations of Experience

Throughout all of this we should not forget, however, this institution’s potential for exerting a novel and beneficial influence. The cinematograph could easily emerge from its apathy toward good and evil and rise up to become a tool for the education of the people. It is a completely democratic institution and, as such, represents a valuable counterforce to all those cultural efforts and initiatives that require one to wear a tuxedo. The cinematograph has no dress code. It has no loge sections. The work apron and street wear are absolutely acceptable. In Germany there is only one institution that is equally democratic: the Munich Hofbräuhaus. New forces reside in the flickering of the movie projector, forces that will increase the speed of reporting, broaden intellectual horizons, and open up new areas of technology. We only need to eliminate all banalities, all horror scenes, all forms of sentimentality, and all satisfaction of servile instincts. With this act of negation, we would have already accomplished a great deal. In Germany we have committees for the selection of good adolescent literature and for the promotion of good and healthy reading for the people. Why doesn’t someone take up the reform of cinematograph programs? Notes 1. Founded in 1892, Aschinger was an enormously successful culinary establishment in Berlin known for its standing beer halls and its quality fast food. 2. A Viennese poet and writer, Altenberg (1859–1919) was famous for his terse, short prose, which he referred to as “telegram style.” Strobl may be referring here to Altenberg’s short “Autobiography,” where he described his own poems as “The life of the soul and what the day may bring, reduced to two to three pages, cleansed of superfluities like a beef cow in a reduction pot!”; see Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg, trans. Peter Wortsman (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2005), 3.

8 PH. SOMMER On the Psychology of the Cinematograph First published as “Zur Psychologie des Kinematographen” in Der Kinematograph 227 (May 3, 1911), 1–3. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Typical of early film theory in its wide-ranging interests and exploratory style, this essay by a district court councilor argues that cinema epitomizes the modern age in its fast pace, heterogeneous content, internationality, and sheer ability to “hypnotize” the gazes of astonished spectators. Sommer also considers the potential uses of the medium for historians and educators, a topic that will be further addressed in subsequent chapters of this volume.

Decades ago, being a theater director was perhaps a more lucrative occupation than it is today, when fierce competition from cabaret has considerably cut into the audiences of the classic theater. Spectators would rather be amused than stirred, and often they prefer the taste of the ragout fin served up in cabarets to the heavy food of theaters devoted to high art. The cabaret’s lower ticket prices have probably also influenced this development. However, in the main, the rise of cabaret out of the artistic lowlands where it once eked out its existence occurred for psychological reasons. Every age wishes to see on the stage the reflection of those forces moving it most profoundly. The religious world of the Middle Ages had its mystery plays; the Renaissance its theater of intrigue, its cloak-and-

A New Sensorium

29

dagger dramas; and the gallant period of rococo, its pastoral plays. Similarly, what most appeals to the nervous haste and variety of our age, with its leveling, democratic tendencies, is the cabaret—although this of course does not mean that the theater is doomed to die out. But now, even the cabaret has encountered a new rival for public favor in the form of the cinema, the projection theater, which has surpassed cabaret in its hurried tempo and variety to just as great an extent as the latter had surpassed the classic theater. The cinema offers a lively, moving image of everything taking place on the world stage. Its laterna magica enchants everything on the screen, at which the eyes of spectators stare as if hypnotized—everything, from the most indifferent everyday occurrences to events of world-historical importance; if Columbus were attempting to discover America today, his memorable landing—in an airplane of course—would certainly be recorded by movie cameras. In the cinema, one can enjoy the offerings of the theater as well as the achievements of cabaret. On the same evening, one can see Ermete Novelli in the role of King Lear and watch with awe as the cabaret stars perform their dangerous feats.1 But the extent of the cinema’s achievements goes well beyond that of the other two spectacles. Scenes of streets, crowds, races, oceans, ports, people swimming, parades, festivals, and even entire trips through foreign lands—all of this flits by, so lifelike, before the audience’s astonished gaze. In addition to this, the cinema opens up a fantastical world of magic, in which the laws of nature seem to be inoperative. People suddenly appear and disappear, or transform themselves into animals. Flowers and fruit grow and unfold before one’s very eyes. In short, there seems to be no limit to what can be depicted. If the art of film corresponds to the spirit of our age in its hurried tempo and variety, it conforms to it no less on another point, where theater and cabaret once again fall short: namely, its internationality. Cinema is international in the true sense of the word. We see foreign peoples, foreign artists, and foreign lands as they genuinely appear, while theater and cabaret can only offer stylized images of foreign life, images which—frozen in traditional forms—offer us nothing new, although they do offer much that is false. The Spanish scenes we see on the stage in Don Giovanni, Carmen, or The Barber of Seville, or the Italian scenes in Fra Diavolo, La muette de Portici,2 and other operas, have nothing in common with the real life of those countries; they are the same theater sets that have decorated stages for a hundred years. [. . .] The cinema could undoubtedly be developed into an artistic medium, although in this domain, it will of course never be able to compete seriously with the cabaret, let alone with the classic theater. However, it seems to have been granted a greater future in the domain of education and history than in that of pure art. Many people are convinced that the cinema’s pedagogical potentialities, although offering no lucrative financial prospects to entrepreneurs, deserve greater recognition and development. On the other hand, they are also convinced that we must keep the cinema under close surveillance on account of its seductive influence, especially where young people are concerned. It is all the more surprising that they leave this surveillance to our well-intentioned police, and that private citizens and organizations for the protection of youth intervene relatively rarely in matters of the cinema. This is not without reason. A morally questionable book or image will easily fall into the hands of an educated man. But the educated only rarely stray into the cinema, so that here, many images slip by whose artistic value and moral effect would be judged differently by educators than by police officers. Above all, however, it is the field of history, and especially of cultural history, that should take an interest in the cinematograph. Films are quickly worn out; and because of the costly nature of their production, they cannot be replaced. In the vast majority of cases, this is no great loss. But many films contain significant contemporary historical events, memorable moments from the history of peoples, which appear with a vibrant and lifelike vividness and which certainly merit being passed on to posterity. Even images of

30

Transformations of Experience

our own daily life will be objects of great interest to future historians. What transformations would our image of the ancient Egyptians or Babylonians undergo if, rather than the stone tables of our museums, we had films from the time of the Pharaohs! We have often pointed to newspapers as sources for future historians, even founding newspaper museums. Of no less importance would be a museum of historical films, films normally destined to perish even more quickly than the pages of newspapers. Notes 1. Ermete Novelli (1851–1919) was a prominent Italian stage actor who also appeared in silent films, including the Shakespeare adaptation Re Lear (Gerolamo Lo Savio, 1910). 2. Fra Diavolo and La muette de Portici are both operas by the French composer Daniel Auber and were first staged in 1830 and 1828, respectively.

9 HERMANN KIENZL Theater and Cinematograph First published as “Theater und Kinematograph” in Der Strom 1, no. 7 (October 1911), 219–21; here 219– 20. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Like Strobl (no. 7), the Austrian writer and theater critic Hermann Kienzl (1865–1928) saw cinema’s vaudeville aesthetic as ideally suited to urban experience, providing a means for city dwellers to quickly “replenish their exhausted energies” in a way that theater never could. But Kienzl’s comparison of film screenings to narcotics also underscores the ambivalence with which the cinematograph was received—as something both fascinating and potentially dangerous, and hence in need of careful regulation. This question of cinematic innervation, which will be taken up in later texts in this chapter, was also of central concern to the cinema reform movement (see chapter 7).

The theater is now confronted with a dangerous enemy: the cinematograph. For all of the latter’s real and potential merits, it cannot be denied that the cinematograph keeps many people out of the theaters. Let it not be said that we should not concern ourselves with people who would rather see animated picture books than enjoy art. For the task of popular art is precisely to educate and transform children into mature adults. Rejecting cinematographic representations disdainfully and out of hand would be as foolish as surrounding every theatrical performance in a cloud of art. Many film series offer more by way of spiritual values than, for example, the performance of a comedy by Robert Misch.1 But this is not the issue! At stake is not this or that performance. At stake, rather, is the competition between theater and cinematograph. It goes without saying that the theater, in its greatest achievements, produces the strongest artistic effects. And may God save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction for the sake of even seven just men. Neither Shakespeare nor Ibsen would survive the Great Flood if the cinematograph really were the future of the theater. Here, the flood does not rise from below, washing away low-lying objects. Rather, the raging waters fall down from above. That our times are averse to serious art certainly cannot be blamed on the cinematograph. But its glory nonetheless draws sustenance from the generalized banality. The competition between theater and cinematograph is thus not an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it should be seen together with the gradual decline of artistic theater.

A New Sensorium

31

The psychology behind the triumph of the cinematograph is urban psychology. This is not simply because the big city represents the natural focal point from which all social life radiates, but also and especially because the urban soul—this ever-curious and insatiable soul, constantly on the go and tumbling deliriously from impression to impression—is truly the cinematographic soul! City-trotters generally lack the requisite stamina and concentration for affective and intellectual absorption, not to mention the necessary time—especially in Berlin, this metropolis gripped with work fever. The same need for trivial relaxation that drives city dwellers into operettas and comedy shows in order to replenish their exhausted energies also leads them to seek the effortless pleasures offered by movie theaters. And because city dwellers have grown just as accustomed to nervous stimuli as the drug addict to his poison, they are especially grateful for films involving crimes or some other exciting story told à la minute. The cinematographic drama is a drama after the city dweller’s heart. Here, he can experience Othello or Richard III in less than ten minutes. What a saving of time! All “superfluous” (that is, poetic) elements are eliminated. There remain only the exciting situations, the spine-chilling deeds. This is the path from plays to films, from the theater to the cinematograph. Note 1. Robert Misch (1860–1929) was a German writer and librettist primarily known for comedies, farces, and satires.

10 ADOLF SELLMANN The Secret of the Cinema First published as “Das Geheimnis des Kinos” in Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie 1, no. 3/4 (1912), 65–67. Translated by Eric Ames.

Taking up the frequent comparison between theater and cinema, the following text attributes the latter’s popularity to its optical lure and the lighter intellectual demands it places on modern mass audiences, whose senses film “effortlessly penetrates.” Like the cinema reformers (see chapter 7), Adolf Sellmann, a Protestant theologian and secondary school teacher, is also concerned about the possible dangers of film’s sensual appeal. He published the book Der Kinematograph als Volkserzieher? (The cinematograph as national educator? 1912), and worked with the Catholic film association Lichtbilderei GmbH, which founded the cinema-reform journal Bild und Film (1912–15) from which the present article is taken.

Probably no recent invention has stimulated so much discussion in the daily press and in daily conversation as the cinema. Everywhere new cinemas shoot up overnight like mushrooms. One can no longer even picture our big cities at night without the gleaming portals of the movie houses. But it is not only the common people who press toward the “narrow gate of grace.”1 Even the educated man—along with science, the school, the state, the city, and the rural council—has grasped the cultural meaning of the cinema; they all take another step toward using and establishing cinemas themselves. Who would treat this burning question with indifference? But the most important question is this: how can we avert the dangers that, emanating from some cinemas, still threaten our people? How, in the interest of true education,

32

Transformations of Experience

can we make living photography useful? Above all, it is our city and state authorities that find themselves faced with this difficult question. Things cannot remain as they are today. Cinemas remain too embedded in the hullaballoo of fairground booths. They still offer much too much trash and nonsense. Thus one has to wonder all the more how, in spite of all this, the cinema has expanded at the rate of a high-speed train. It poses a serious threat to the theater now. We must ask ourselves how such a wide and fast distribution of the cinema came about in the first place. What is the secret of its success, of its enormous popularity? Let us attempt to answer this question. The image, the illustration, has always exerted a powerful charm over people. The eye is especially hungry for training and easily allows itself to be captivated. Visual instruction is particularly vivid and clear. A classical witness for this claim is Aristotle, who writes, at the beginning of his Metaphysics: “All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses; for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight. Not only with a view to action, but even when no action is contemplated, we prefer sight, generally speaking, to all the other senses. The reason of this is that of all the senses sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions.”2 This preference for perception through vision holds for the image in general. In a peculiar way, however, “living photographs” hold out a fascinating and captivating lure. The constant alternation of images elates and fuels the imagination to an unusual extent. As soon as the screen lights up, everything else sinks into the dark night. Lustfully, all eyes fix upon the living pictures as they flit past. And the mind must quickly link together what has been seen only fleetingly. All of us have surely experienced the way in which the word accompanying even the most common slide image captures us in its spell far more intensely than speech alone. How much stronger is the power of film, of the “living picture,” especially when watched by children and the masses. From the beginning, the latter were the core troupe of cinema patrons, so much so that for many of them, moviegoing became routine; here, one can already speak of a passion, of a “cinema epidemic.” In addition to all this, there are other factors. In the theater, one has to arrive punctually at a certain time. But one can enter the cinematographic theater at any time, and leave at any time as well. The modern person likes it this way—this disconnectedness from time, this escape from the discipline that enslaves us to the clock from morning to evening. In the theater I always have to practice a constant mental exertion. I have to pay attention to the words and thoughts, which often confront the audience in concise and finely polished form. Such a taut line of thought is not necessary in front of the screen. Here the eye, above all, does the work. The eye enables me to capture movements, gestures, and facial expressions effortlessly. And the flickering effortlessly penetrates my senses. Intensive contemplation is not for everyone, to be sure. But even leaving these people aside, one can still ask, Who would hold it against the exhausted people of today—and above all, against those who work with their hands—if, after hours of difficult and dull work, they search for some relaxing entertainment in the cinema? Theatrical works, furthermore, usually represent a unified main idea. Most of the time, a common mood runs throughout the entire play: a comical mood in a comedy, a tragic one in a tragedy. At the movie theater, by contrast, a motley mixture flits past the eyes: comical and serious, instructive and entertaining, near and far, past and present. This optical potpourri is usually accompanied by the sounds of a piano or a gramophone, and perhaps also by the explanatory words of a lecturer or the resounding laughter of the

A New Sensorium

33

audience responding to a hit comedy. In short, film adheres to the saying, “He that gives much, gives something to all classes.”3 The language of the cinema is that of gesture, movement, mimic expression, and pantomime. The words of the lecturer are themselves unnecessary and tangential; they merely make things more understandable to the public. This language of gestures addresses everyone alike, whether educated or illiterate; deaf or hearing; European, Turk, Armenian, or Indian. The cinema takes this Volapük of gestures to the outer reaches of culture, indeed, to the savages.4 The Malaysian and Chinese coolies supposedly are among the cinema’s most enthusiastic viewers. The international language of gestures defeats all national languages. Films of the Rhine can be enjoyed with equal understanding on the banks of the Bosporus, the Ganges, or the Nile. In this way, the cinema stormed across the globe, swift and victorious in battle. From the beginning, the film industry could say: The world is my domain.5 The appeal of novelty also helped the cinema into the stirrups and spurred it along on its breakneck ride. Now the cinema is sixteen years old. It is still immature. Still too arrogant in its youth, it tramples every barrier and leaps into aesthetic and literary arenas, which are the holy land for actual art. But soon it will mature. And then it will also become more level-headed; in many ways, it already is so. We should all help it to reach this goal with good will. Private speculation, mass instincts, sensations, and fairground advertising still dog its heels. May the victory cry arise from amidst the battle: The trash film is dead, long live the cinema! Notes 1. The phrase here (“enge Gnadenpforte”) is a quote from part 1 of Goethe’s Faust (itself drawn from Matthew 7:13). We use Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Faust (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 69. 2. Hugh Tredennick, trans., Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vols. 17 and 18 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), I.980a, 21. 3. The quote here (“Wer vieles bringt, wird manchem etwas bringen”) comes from part 1 of Goethe’s Faust. Again, we borrow Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Faust, 73. 4. Volapük was a new international language created by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879–80, later overshadowed by Esperanto and Ido. 5. Sellmann here invokes the motto of the Hamburg-Amerikanische Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG, or Hamburg America Line), “Mein Feld ist die Welt.” This motto was emblazoned on the HAPAG ocean liner the SS Imperator, the world’s largest ship at the time of its launch in 1912.

11 ARNO ARNDT Sports on Film First published as “Der Sport im Film” in Der Deutsche Kaiser im Film, ed. Paul Klebinder (Berlin: Paul Klebinder, 1912), 72–74. Translated by Sara Hall.

The link between modern athletics and cinema can be traced back at least to the chronophotographic experiments of Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Georges Demenÿ. Many of the first Skladanowsky films shown in Berlin were of acrobats, and pioneers such as Birt Acres filmed sporting events as early as 1895. For the sportswriter Arno Arndt, the affinity between sports and cinema resided above all in the sensations that could only be conveyed through images in movement. In its call to cultivate the thrill of movement on film, Arndt’s article can be seen as a forerunner

34

Transformations of Experience not only to sports newsreels but also to representations of sports in films such as Arnold Fanck’s mountain films and, more famously, Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938). Béla Balázs also devoted a section to sport in Visible Man or the Culture of Film (1924).

All sporting activities consist of flux and constant motion, thus offering a mosaic of momentary images. Each phase of this motion cries out to be filmed, and thus sports make a worthwhile subject for the big screen. Whether we are dealing with a field of racehorses, galloping over the racecourse at full speed and jumping over trenches and hurdles; a field of cyclists crouched behind their pace vehicles and racing along the cement; colossal automobiles or airplanes moving with more velocity than an express train; tennis players hitting the ball; runners picking up their legs; hunters taking a shot; rowers who put their all into the oars; or sailors fighting the waves—captured on film, all these scenes come to life once more. They all make a more powerful and vibrant impression by virtue of their proximity and condensation on film. The sports film offers not only a feast for the eyes but also a natural means of instruction and reporting. It is all the more valuable to the world of sports given that a history of sports remains unwritten and that every day brings about new impressions. Life on the green lawn and the murderous struggle of horse and rider become enchanting pictures on the screen; they trigger dramatic suspense. Whoever has not dared to go to a racetrack can experience the steady drive on the turf. Whoever already knows it well can experience it all the more powerfully: from the massive image of the grandstand and the lawn before you to the grooming of the horses, the jockey’s mount, and the gallop up to the starting line. Interspersed with all of this, you will see the gamblers making their sacrifices to Mammon at the betting machine. Meanwhile, the field has assembled at the starting gate. It is an even course. The film rolls and rolls, and the eye observes how the four-legged warriors dance restlessly back and forth before the gate at the starting line; they absolutely refuse to obey the man at the start or line up calmly. Before this can happen, the flag is lowered and the pack flies up and away in a wild chase. The fight for positioning has begun. The leader falls behind, one of the trailing horses pulls ahead, and then comes the finish—the hot struggle before the post at which the judge stands. Finally, the victor stretches his head across the finish line. On the big screen, the horserace rushes past even faster than in real life. Depending on the shot, it sometimes appears in an overview and sometimes broken up into fragments. The picture becomes even more turbulent, galloping over high obstacles as we watch the film of a steeplechase. Whoops! A horse falls and his jockey flies out of the saddle. He somersaults and lies there with a broken leg. Film’s art lies in its ability to show spectators how horses fall and how their riders, nimbly or not, save themselves from the fall and slide down from the horse’s neck. The English Derby in Epsom, the Grand National steeplechase in Liverpool, the Blue Ribbon at the Horner Rennbahn in [Hamburg,] Germany, and the Grand Prix in Paris have already proven their mettle on film. Film preserves the splendid action of a noble thoroughbred, its expansive galloping leap, and the entire machinery of the horse’s body better than any painter’s brush or any photographer’s exposure plate could do. It is a souvenir more permanent than the multifaceted equine museum. And rather than following the example of the Duke of Portland, the great English trainer who had the ribs of his famous racehorse St. Simon exhibited and its soft brown hide nailed to the wall of his castle, today’s contender can watch his four-legged friends in full motion at the cinema, even if they were long ago put to rest under the green lawn. Watching an automobile race on film is a nerve-wracking experience. While the driver disappears deep into his seat at the steering wheel and the mechanic hangs halfway out beside him, the car shoots over the stretch at a terrific speed. It laps up the earth, kilometer

A New Sensorium

35

after kilometer, and the soft humming and singing of the film provides the harmonious melody for the motor’s hellish music as it races along its course. The path of the automobile appears on film with uncanny focus. The landscape and the people fly past; the street extends further and further, straight ahead, until a sharp curve comes up; then the driver reduces the speed and the car, tossed around, continues its tour. Or a car misjudges the evil curve, approaches at full speed, and rolls over, burying everything beneath it. Occurring on film, the scene appears in all its gruesome clarity. Or an automobilist dares to race against a train. Steam and fuel fight it out for kilometers. On a straight path the motorcar is always faster, but on the curves the locomotive gains some ground, and the duel comes to an end only when a station or the bar of a railroad crossing comes between the automobile and the object of its hot pursuit. Recent films of automobile races clearly illustrate how much the entire structure of motoring has changed with the times, how the old clumsy, horseless machines have given way to snappy race cars, with slim lines and a fast pace. The automobile’s little brother, the bicycle, also receives its due in live photography. Innumerable races have already been captured on film, both on cement tracks and on open roads, which today are coming to serve more and more as the arenas of bicycle races. The motor-paced races are the most exciting. The starter shoots the pistol. In rows and packs the column of riders takes off. A hundred meters behind them, the roaring motors have already started out, and each cyclist tries to crawl behind his pace vehicle and begin the chase. Even if occurring only in an image, the quest for the draft, the battle for the lead, and the cutting in and out cannot help but captivate the eye. The bicycle races on open roads offer more exterior scenery; the massive image reveals a column often consisting of over one hundred warriors on their steeds. In every stage the group becomes smaller; the weak are weeded out until finally only a small pack survives every inch of the murderous battle. Nothing from the domain of sports can avoid film, not even the airplane that soars across the sky, nor the dirigible. Airplanes in flight can be recorded in two ways: from the outside, standing on the ground or some object, or from the aircraft itself. The aircraft circles in a terrifying rise and fall. Shaken by the gusts of wind, it whips back and forth, turns, and leans into the curves in such a way that it is frightening just to sit before the screen. The giant bird then disappears into the clouds, only to climb to a high altitude that cannot be captured on the recording plate. Or it suddenly crashes. Like a lump of lead, the machine falls straight to the earth. We see the wild chaos; among the rods and broken pieces of the motor, a motionless human body tells bleakly of yet another victim of aviation. One of the most watchable aircraft films dealt with a hunt from an airplane and was skillfully shot from the machine itself. The screen shows the foremost section of the airplane, rocking up and down, where a hunter sits. Forest and field glide past quickly underneath the aircraft. A whole flock of chickens flutters up from the earth. The hunter aims and shoots, and shoots again. Then they land, the hunter joyfully recovers his bag, and the plane flies home.

12 CARL FORCH Thrills in Film Drama and Elsewhere First published as “Die Sensation im Kinodrama und anderwärts,” in Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie 2, no. 7 (1912–13), 164–65. Translated by Sara Hall.

36

Transformations of Experience A German government official working in the patent office, Carl Forch published one of the first histories of film in 1913, Der Kinematograph und das sich bewegende Bild: Geschichte und technische Entwicklung der Kinematographie bis zur Gegenwart (The cinematograph and the moving picture: The history and technical development of cinematography to the present). In the article here, he situates the cinema within an economy of suspenseful and “thrill”-based entertainment forms, including serial literature, variety shows, circuses, and fairgrounds.

The serialized novel, presented to the newspaper reader in daily portions, has accustomed us to suspense in literature. Every hundred lines there comes a climax that leaves us anticipating the next day, when we will discover the resolution. If we were able to read the novel in one sitting, we would experience this aimless rising and falling as irritating. But we are assisted in enduring the enforced twenty-four hour intermission. Life in the metropolis, with its mounting excitement, dulls us, so we instinctively crave more intense ways of spurring our attention than do people living in a peaceful environment. Here is where the filmmaker comes in. He has unlimited opportunities to present images that convey the excitement novels merely describe, an excitement the theater and the circus can show us only in exceptional cases. No wonder he makes the most of his capacity to offer to us exactly what the entire world thirsts for, what everyone, each according to his taste and education, wishes for himself in various forms. This person wants his excitement in a spicy sauce, that one in a fine purée. But almost everyone is satisfied. Anyone would admit that up to this point, the writers of the film dramas have taken full and conscious advantage of the possibilities afforded by the cinema. As directors, they have understood their métier. Whether they have occasionally treated this art form a bit too roughly is another question entirely. When they tried to raise themselves to a higher niveau, they closely followed the existing models. Today, things could change. A year ago, the theater world and its loyal community of writers declared war on the cinema, condemning as a wanton betrayal of the sacred theatrical arts any assertion that the cinema was at all justified in presenting drama. This issue was resolved remarkably quickly, when they later concluded that the cinema was worthy of drama.1 They declared peace and wanted to offer their pens to the service of the cinema. Then the proponents of film spitefully posed the question as to whether stage writers would in fact have to relearn certain things before they could write effective fi lm dramas. If they succeed in doing so, the very cinema programs that once reluctantly withheld the names of screenwriters will probably soon display those names that figure on today’s theater programs much more frequently than Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, and Hebbel. For the time being, we must wait and see what effects it will have on the quality of film drama when men whose names enjoy a good reputation in German literature withdraw their works from the glistening stage lights and make their way toward the long-derided flickering lights. We shall hope for the best. But one thing is certain: even the greatest authors will have to reckon with the need for a more solid plot where the spoken word is lacking. There is a strong possibility that the plot will become coarser. In this regard, the cinema is indeed a product of its time, which has raised the superficial to infinite heights and runs the risk of losing sight of the value of objects. People have often criticized the theater for having lost an appreciation for the artfully spoken word, favoring instead the exaggerated naturalistic proclamation, or its opposite, the whispered word. The breed of master orators has died out, without leaving behind a worthy heir. Now the word has disappeared entirely. It will be replaced by gesture, as dialogue is to be replaced by people’s comings and goings. It is no wonder that, under the circumstances, cinema must degenerate into the farthest extreme of pantomime and sensation.

A New Sensorium

37

On the basis of most of the plot summaries and notices for films one reads in the cinema journals, one is inclined to agree with those who fear that even the assistance of our literary greats cannot effect a change. Cinema can satisfy the hunger for nervous stimulation more easily than the theater, the variety show, and the circus because it can film under optimal circumstances, as they occur once and never again, whereas the others are dependent on good fortune every evening. It is true that cinema is suited to completely satisfy this hunger. It does not always do so in such coarse form and with such crude means as is the case in one film that is now receiving the usual fanfare. Even Hagenbeck worked on this one, making available and then sacrificing a bear, which was useless to the trainers because it was so wild. 2 The bear, set free for the first time, stands across from the little, childlike film actress, “who, in her naïveté, of course had no idea that the huge snarling bear edging towards her was capable of killing her. For security, three guards were posted with heavily loaded weapons, and the three-way shot rang out just in time: at that moment the bear sank, dying, into the sand and writhed in his own blood.”3 But that is still not enough of a thrill. In the same drama, an acrobat walks on a tightrope across an open lion’s den. “Underneath her are gathered a total of sixteen of these violent beasts, staring upwards and awaiting her sacrifice.” “I swear,” someone later exclaimed, “all of our hearts stood still as the brave fi lm performer stepped onto the treacherous course. We all exhaled when we saw that it was a success, for the slightest false step would have brought certain death.” It is true that when Blondin crossed the Niagara Falls on a rope,4 a false step would have meant just as certain a death sentence, but in our case the thrill lay in the presentation of a scene that had to take place in the cage, where the tightrope walker could suddenly fall victim to the lions. Precisely the threat of battle between man and animal—or more aptly, the potential defeat of the defenseless human beneath the claws of the well-armed animal—makes this scene so coarse and hearkens back to the amphitheater in the age of the Roman Empire. But let us be honest! Is not much of our variety stage and circus artistry just as sensational and life-threatening? And what about thrill rides, looping the loop,5 and other similar tricks from times past or yet to come? At least we know for sure that the film we were shown cost no human lives. When you sit in the circus, though, and the small car is let loose and begins to roll, inscribing a full circle, upside down, within two seconds, or breaks free of the groove in the track and lands on the other side; when, as it was once performed, two cars, one following the other, pass each other in the air so that the one that began in the rear whizzes past the other and lands first on the other side—in these seconds you never know whether or not this ride will be the last. More powerful, breathtaking, and all the rougher is reality in comparison to the cinematic image on the screen, in which we can know that the events will not end in catastrophe. Thus we encounter thrills on either side. In one case the cloak of artistry better disguises them; in another, it reveals more honestly the actual content. The variety show, circus, and cinema are a matter of business, and all too often the businessman is not and may not be held accountable when he enters those regions where large circles have been known to follow. But we must avoid going too far; we should not encourage audiences to demand ever-stronger fare. They can be satisfied with less spice when they have not tasted of the hottest flavorings. Hopefully, the journey will not lead farther into the territory that already borders closely on that of the gladiators and bullfighters. But we should also work against the theater’s sense of superiority over the cinema. After all, do the spectacular shows of some of our theaters not feature the most artless thrills? Not the dark thrills, but thrills of color, size, and lighting effects are the rule in such theaters. Intellectual content has become a side issue in all of the revues playing every evening through the entire winter and selling out the house weeks in advance. Because of them, a considerable emptiness

38

Transformations of Experience

manifests itself in the seats of the better theaters. Across the country, when people speak of Berlin theaters, they generally know the names of only these pseudo-artistic locales. Whoever has to spend a few days in the capital does not miss a chance to seek out the revue theaters, but he is surely outraged upon hearing that film holds sway in two hundred movie theaters. The more naïve populace seeks the thrill of fear at the cinema, just as it finds it in the chamber of horrors, in the curiosity cabinet that offends people of more refined taste. The latter, by contrast, finds his entertainment in the bright and colorful images at the revue. In the spectacular show of the circus, he admires the lighting effects and polar bears that plunge into the water basin from the heights of a wooden mountain—when possible, a dozen at a time. In the variety shows he holds his breath as the trapeze artist whizzes through the air and catches the trapeze on the other side with a fantastic agility—less than a tenth of a second determines the fate of a human life. Both here and there, one encounters the same material. Only the threads are a bit coarser in the cinema, while in the revue, they are a little finer and intertwined with chains and coverings in a different manner. Everyone seeks stimulation for the nerves and a treat for the eyes, but the means thereto differ among differing social strata. Notes 1. Three German theater organizations passed a short-lived resolution at their meeting on March 18, 1912, forbidding members from becoming active in the film industry. Later that year, the Verband Deutscher Bühnenschriftsteller (League of German Playwrights) performed an about-face, entering into a partnership with the largest German cinema association, the Union. These events form an important background to the emergence of the German Autorenfilm, as documented in chapter 6 of this book. 2. Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913) was an entrepreneur importing exotic animals and the founder of Germany’s best-known private zoo, the Tierpark Hagenbeck in Stellingen. 3. A. M., “Hagenbeck als Helfer für die Kinematographie,” Lichtbildbühne 5, no. 45 (November 9, 1912), 8, 17. The article describes the film Die lebende Brücke (1912), directed by Friedrich Müller, produced by the Komet-Film-Compagnie, and starring the Danish actress Margot Petersen and the Viennese actor (and later director and producer) Rudolf Meinert. Hagenbeck had allowed the cast and crew to film at his zoo and to kill one of the zoo’s own animals, a large bear, within the fictional drama. 4. Charles Blondin (1824–1897) was the first to walk over the Niagara Gorge on a tightrope in 1859. 5. This phrase appears in English in the original text.

13 LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ Cinema First published as “Kino,” in In der Schule bei Freud: Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912–1913, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Zurich: Max Niehans Verlag, 1958), 102–3. Translated by Sara Hall.

Whereas Freud’s relationship to cinema was one of indifference and even hostility, the Russian-born writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) devoted an entry in her diary to this underappreciated “Cinderella of art,” whose diverse spectacles she saw as a counterpoint to the monotonous or circumscribed routines of laborers and intellectuals. Perhaps most notable is her insight that only cinematic technology can produce a rapidity of images comparable to our “imaginative capacity.” Thirteen years after Salomé wrote this journal entry, Freud’s associate Hanns Sachs would write that dreams themselves were like private films “that every man produces from his own psychic material” (see chapter 13, no. 198).

A New Sensorium

39

The discussion evening (February 19) brought Dr. Weiß’s paper on rhyme and refrain,1 which Freud somewhat reluctantly praised. Beyond that he did not say much about it. On Saturday (February 22), the second-to-last lecture was cancelled because of the slide show about the latest Roman excavations, and Tausk, the boys, and I indulged in a somewhat similar pleasure at the Urania.2 To be sure, the cinema itself plays no small role for us, and this is not the first time I have reflected on it. One could say many things about this Cinderella in the field of aesthetic appreciation in order to defend her honor—they would include a couple of purely psychological remarks. The first concerns the fact that only film technology can produce a rapid enough sequence of images to correspond, remotely, to our own imaginative capacity and imitate its disjunctive rapidity. In part, the weariness that overcomes us before theatrical artworks results not from the noble strain of artistic enjoyment, but rather from our effort to adapt to the ponderous life on the stage with its feigned movements. In the cinema, where this effort is absent, one can abandon oneself much more freely to the illusion. The second remark concerns the fact that, even if one can speak of the cinema as the most blatantly superficial form of entertainment, its diverse offerings shower us with forms, images, and sense impressions like nothing else can. This diversity alone offers a trace of the artistic experience of things, just as much for the everyday worker dulled by his monotone existence as for the intellectual caught in his professional or mental treadmill. Both of these observations bring to mind the question of whether a consideration of our psychic constitution could point to the future of the cinema—the small golden slipper for the Cinderella of art. Here in Vienna, I started going to the cinema because of Tausk, in spite of work, exhaustion and lack of time; often it takes only a half an hour, and I always have to laugh about this behavior that we engage in. Notes 1. Andreas-Salomé refers to a lecture by the Viennese doctor Karl Weiß. The lecture was published in the second volume of Imago in 1913 as “Vom Reim und Refrain: Ein Beitrag zur Psychogenese dichterischer Ausdrucksmittel” (On rhymes and refrains: a contribution to the psychogenesis of the means of poetic expression). 2. Victor Tausk was a psychoanalyst and a disciple of Freud. The Viennese Urania society was founded in 1897 as a counterpart to the Berlin Urania society for the popularization of scientific knowledge. The society’s building had been inaugurated in 1910 and featured film screenings every day in its large lecture hall.

14 WALTER HASENCLEVER The Kintopp as Educator: An Apology First published as “Der Kintopp als Erzieher: Eine Apologie,” in Revolution 1, no. 4 (December 1, 1913). Translated by Sara Hall.

Like many modernist writers, Walter Hasenclever (author of the expressionist drama Der Sohn, 1914) found in the movies a powerful “intensification of life’s pleasures” and an “enrichment of fantasies” ideally suited to the contemporary era. The same year as the present article was published, Hasenclever (1890–1940) contributed a scenario to Kurt Pinthus’s Das Kinobuch (1913), and he would go on to publish Die Pest (The Plague, 1920), billed as “the first film text printed in book form.”

The following press release has a certain appeal in our ethically impoverished era:

40

Transformations of Experience

the abduction of a wealthy heiress In London it was reported that a wealthy heiress, who had been resisting the wooing of her admirer, was abducted on Saturday. As she returned home from a walk, someone standing in wait grabbed her and threw her into an automobile in front of the house. Her hands were bound and her head entwined with scarves. Once the car was moving, the girl managed to get enough air to scream, and the driver steered the car to the nearest police station, where the abductors were arrested. The driver states that he had been hired to drive for a honeymoon trip. When he saw how they wrapped the scarves over the girl’s head, he believed it was all a joke. But when he heard the lady screaming for help, he immediately drove to the nearest police station. Hardly anyone who reads this metropolitan synopsis in the newspaper under the heading of “Miscellaneous” doubts that it is the dramatic sketch of a modern Kintopp. Of all the artistic products of our time, the Kintopp is the most powerful, for it is the most contemporary. In it, space and temporality serve to hypnotize the spectator; where is there any vitality, where is there a single dimension on this earth that it cannot reach in its unlimited capacity? It is as though the Kintopp were the most extreme consequence of human expansion, and only in it, as in a fi nal form of reflection, can the horror of being appear. When we place the chaos at a distance by seemingly having reproduced it, we renounce its reality. If the Kintopp thus appears—considered physiologically—no less rich in props and scenery than the world God himself created in seven days, then it is also necessary. Beyond the euphoric charge of worldliness, however, it also harbors a deeper meaning, and with that I return to my beginning. When someone gets married, sees himself robbed, or travels to America, are these but coincidental, unfated occurrences, or does a metaphysical event not also take place for him? Why is he moved by the tears of some stranger weighed down with pain; why is he frightened at the sight of the red hands of an old servant woman; why does he suddenly press a mark into the pocket of a dirty beggar, even when he himself is only an average Joe? What would his world be if it were not desire and symbol—a distressing phenomenon! Here the Kintopp draws from the same well as lyric. For it announces something; it becomes an attraction; it arouses a state. The Kintopp begins with activity; it then rises up into a feeling for life; and it ends with sentimentality. I would like to assert unphilosophically that for this reason, it amounts to the most psychological representation in our era. It complicates mimicry and situations through the speed with which it expresses mental processes. The only card in its hand is the dramatic function; herein lies its intoxication. The animosity toward the Kintopp is founded on a misunderstanding. It is not art in the sense of the theater; it is not a sterile form of intellectual activity; and it is certainly not an idea. Therefore one cannot lift it up (as is repeatedly attempted) with injections of atmospheric music; it will still get the measles every time. The Kintopp remains somewhat American, ingenious, and kitschy. Herein lies its popular appeal; this is what makes it good. And no exceptional law [Ausnahmegesetz] in the Reichstag will hinder it from doing good business, for its modernity expresses itself in the fact that it satisfies idiots and intellects alike, each in a different way, but each according to his own mental structure. Who among us has not traveled with the Kintopp to the moon, as did the Herr Baron von Münchhausen of old! Who has not been attacked as a gold miner on the prairie! Who has not been run over by a carriage and had to marry a rich widow (and not only for that reason)! Who has not marched off to war after watching Czar Ferdinand wave

A New Sensorium

41

from his carriage window! When will they finally understand that the Kintopp is an intensification of life’s pleasures, an enrichment of fantasies! Would they tear Indian tales and sea heroes from the children’s hands because the children dream both day and night of fame and the cosmos? Would they have the heart to steal from poor servant girls the twenty-penny romance novels that allow them to escape the lonely world of their kitchens and imagine a heroic reality? Who would want a feverish childhood without Karl May and even Nick Carter?1 They should just let us go to the Kintopp in peace, where we have always spent a portion of our lives in this world. They should not sour this naïveté for us with all their preacherly drivel about more noble art. We will not become any worse than we are (and whoever is predisposed to become a criminal or to go insane will do so anyway). If anything, we will become happier; for happiness means the ability to laugh and cry. How few people can still do this today in the theater, where we are merely tickled, or at best amazed. I wanted to speak of the ethics of the Kintopp and forgot to do so for all of its melody! What was once Die Braut von Messina [The Bride of Messina] seems today to have become Die Braut des Sklavenhändlers [The bride of the slave trader]. But what Schiller meant when, in his preface to Bride of Messina, he spoke of the highest pleasure as the “abandonment of the spirit to the free play of all its faculties” becomes, if you will, even in The Bride of the Slave Trader, an event. 2 I do not mean boyish delight in automobile chases and pleasure houses, but rather fear, sympathy, and salvation. The engineer Karl Pfeil, who loves Edith and frees her from the claws of the robbers in order to celebrate their engagement in the aunt’s house, makes us (despite everything) stop and think. He is more than a type; he is something from time immemorial. He is the promise that someone out there is fighting for the right to love and to hate, that someone who loves must help, that someone suffers. As Philipp Keller writes, “You should know that everyone must start off with love!”3 Notes 1. Karl May (1842–1912) was the author of popular adventure novels set in exotic locations such as the American Wild West. Nick Carter was a private detective character who appeared in pulp fiction, cinema, and other media. 2. The quote is taken from Friedrich Schiller, “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,” trans. A. Lodge, in The Works of Friedrich Schiller: Historical Dramas Etc. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), 440. 3. Philipp Keller was a doctor, writer, and friend of Walter Benjamin when both were students in Freiburg. The quote comes from his novel, Gemischte Gefühle, which was published in 1913.

15 WALTER SERNER Cinema and Visual Pleasure First published as “Kino und Schaulust,” in Die Schaubühne 9, nos. 34–35 (1913), 807–11. Translated by Don Reneau.

Walter Serner’s key term Schaulust resonates with Freud’s early-twentieth-century writings on Schaulust (scopophilia or visual pleasure)—a concept that would have a long career in the work of Lacan and psychoanalytic film theorists such as Laura Mulvey. But Serner’s understanding of the term, associated with a quasi-atavistic drive to witness violent spectacles, can be situated more specifically in early-twentieth-century debates about filmic sensations (see, for example, no. 12 above) and their potentially

42

Transformations of Experience explosive effects on culture (see especially chapter 7). His defense of cinema as a means of providing an outlet for the pleasure of violence also looks forward to Kurt Pinthus’s arguments on the “ethical potentials” of film in chapter 12 (no. 177). A native of Bohemia, Serner (a pen name for Seligmann, 1889–1942) moved to Berlin in 1912 and began contributing to the expressionist journal Die Aktion; he would later become associated with the Dada movement, authoring the manifesto Letzte Lockerung (Last loosening, 1920).

It has been only a few years since certain variety programs began to end with a presentation of cinematographic images. That was the beginning. After a few years, even the smallest provincial city had acquired its cinema, and Berlin its three hundred cinemas [Kinos] and movie theaters [Kammerlichtspiele]. To be sure, many factors contributed to the cinema’s resounding success: the ridiculously low price, the convenient location on the thoroughfare, the nearly unlimited hours of operation, the continuous program that repeats itself a few times a day, and, not to be forgotten, the friendly darkness. Nevertheless, none of this can fully account for the unprecedented advances that have everywhere been the cinema’s fortune. The factors at work here must lie deeper than suspected. But if one focuses on the spot where the cinema collects every last dime and gazes into those strangely twinkling eyes, which point far back into human history, the answer suddenly looms large: visual pleasure . . . This is not the harmless variety, consisting only of movement or color or both, but that terrible lust, no less violent than the deepest of them; this is the pleasure that raises a fever in the blood, causing it to rage until the unfathomably powerful excitation common to all desire frenzies through the flesh. This is the visual pleasure that stood before Troy with gleaming eyes, overwhelmed by the flames; the one that witnessed the magnificent rites of old; the one that promenaded in the light of Nero’s living torch and sang the red hymn of blood and fire to a burning Rome; the one that surrounded the public executions and witches’ pyre of the Middle Ages and howled; the one that flocked to the tournaments, its expectations constantly renewed (and usually disappointed); the one that perched in a window on the Place de Louis Quinze and watched the torrents of blood gushing from beheaded bodies and the most vulgar of debaucheries behind windows across the square; and the one that even today maintains its old intense and bloody frenzy. Greedily it drinks of the red jet shooting from the neck of a bull and out of the artery of the Salsa’s sacrificial victim. Fire and blood reign today as always over the common lot of Parisian slums and the rabble of Berlin, who have found a modest compensation in witnessing the rowdy uproars of the cellars and the scuffles in the dives, and who often take part in clashing knife fights and behave madly, as if drunken, after a fire. But in everyone else, too, smolders this gruesome visual pleasure in abomination, strife, and death. This is the pleasure that, almost singlehandedly, drives people to the morgue, to the scene of the crime, to every prosecution and every brawl; it has people crawling—after paying money for the privilege—in the wake of bestiality. And this pleasure is what pulls the people, as if possessed, into the cinema. What our growing civilization increasingly steals from people, day by day; what neither the magic of the stage nor the tired sensation of the circus, variety shows, or cabaret is able to produce—the cinema now restores this to us almost to its former degree: the voluptuous pleasure of looking. The stage, whose illusion is weakened even for the most enthusiastic spectator by the overbearing stage sets, can only disillusion those in search of visual pleasure. Whoever comes here seeking something other than art finds no flame to meet his heated gaze. And even those venal stages serving the dull mania for mass entertainment offer the eyes only cheap, chaotic movement, nonsensical event-mongering, and

A New Sensorium

43

all-too-flawed finery. Here, even the will to illusion is gone. There remains only a bad joke, which the spectators all too often laugh at in the belief that this is amusement, before finally rising from their seats, possessed of a dreary feeling combining dissatisfaction with half-hearted scorn. The only things making these gaudy mass stages bearable are the thickly powdered and besmeared nude bodies, the obscene articulations of bellies, and other suspicious forms of stimulation. And even these bodies, which have long since grown weary, only manage to rattle and stagger their way through the dark nights. The imagination, which enters the hall seeking stimulation, exits betrayed and bored, knowing that it could outdo the Sunday power of this weak-kneed eroticism on any weekday. Then there is the desperate frenzy of an American eccentric performing his furious nosedives through windows of sugar glass, the equestrian acrobatics of torsos in tights on coughing Pinzgauers, and the salto mortale from the highest tower in the circus tent, the jumper dressed in five layers of sweaters, fleecy woolens, and larger-than-life mittens— but all of these attractions offer no less tiresome surrogates to the eyes of those starved for the pleasures of looking. In truth, it did not take the cinema to crack the brittle varnish of this putrescent apparatus of amusement. What pushed cinema into the forefront was neither a swift victory over moribund predecessors nor the triumph of a perplexing profitability. It was the stimulating adventure of a tiger hunt, a daredevil mountain ride, or a death-defying automobile trip; it was the breathtaking pursuit of a wounded and bleeding “rowdy” over New York rooftops so high as to make one dizzy; it was the dismal outskirts of a city, with misery, disease, crime, and the entire detective-romanticism of murder and strife; and it was the bloodred pictures of fire, death, abominations, and horrors, which all those eyes, so long deprived, sucked in with great thirst. It was an act of seeing, full of speed and life; it was pleasure. With such images, the cinema triumphed without a struggle. The cinema is entirely devoted to the eye and to its pleasure. It serves visual pleasure firstly in having learned the unremarkable lesson that no other sense is harder to fool with trickery than the sense of sight. With this knowledge, it summons up the paltry courage to spit in the face of illusory tricks. It throws the stage set out the window, heads into the streets, and takes photographs. In this way, it gives to the eye what belongs to the eye and also acts in its name. What the eye sees is no trick; for it, the greatest lack of illusion becomes the greatest illusion of all. The cinema shows image after image in a true-to-life procession of movement; this is neither stage nor image, but rather life. And into this life (which whets the appetite of visual pleasure in the delicious form of exotic nature shots, the interesting Pathé-Journal,1 and the occasional educational film), the cinema then inserts that more hidden life, life in its horrible, bloody, and burning forms. That to this end, the cinema employs uninhibited amateurs with no talent is not so bad; the refreshing muteness compensates for even the most oppressive lack of appropriate gestures and facial expressions and allows, with a mere touch of the lips, connections to emerge and fade that should neither emerge nor fade. But this muteness also makes the actor into nothing and his actions into the main thing; his actions become as if absolute, functioning as the means only to deeds or pursuits. And that is what the cinema comes down to above all else. Since the powerful veto of censorship generally washes the blood of the deed from the cinema screen, there is a great danger that the cinema will disappoint the eye by withdrawing the terrible sights; but it counters this danger with overly long, obstacle-ridden paths to action, with its allbut-eternal pursuits—elements that the cinema favors all the more since it recognizes movement as the most important component and the essential nature of visual pleasure. And the cinema possesses a masterful understanding of how to use a pothole, a breakfast roll, or a hairpin to raise the emotional effect of movement to a pitch; through the strangest incidents and most blustering events of nature, it is able to multiply the excitement to

44

Transformations of Experience

such an extent that a bloody act or a terrible catastrophe could scarcely have a greater effect, and the loss from the latter is by no means so painful. Many pathetic, stupid, and improbable tragedies—whose ambition to be beyond life would be better served if they took their own lives—live wholly at the mercy of the topsy-turvy alternations of scenes and obstacles, of the uninterruptedly interrupted gallop of action. Truly, many a dismal drama is dedicated solely to a three-act escape maneuver with a continuously rising tempo. Love functions here only as the most plausible excuse for running sheep to their deaths, gunning down horses, or blowing up walls. And since the whole thing is trimmed to meet ethical requirements, the censors allow the mutilated body of the evil rival to lie there on the screen, since they see moral values blossoming from it for the audience. They do not realize that their concession with regard to the bloody corpse is always in error. The body emits a seditious influence, proving Goethe’s realization, perhaps one of his most profound, that there exists no crime he could not himself have committed. 2 The crime is projected and the spectator shares in the lascivious enjoyment of the real criminal, thus finding satisfaction for his rudimentary primal drives in an image. Admittedly, all of this proceeds mostly on an unconscious level; the cinema cannot attain that quantity of baseness that this excitement can only produce when fully conscious and in possession of its full power. Nonetheless, the level it is allowed to attain is low enough to favor the condition of excitement necessary to make visual pleasure fruitful and to link it with that terrible form of visual pleasure from centuries past. Fortunately, for some time now, the cinema has also attracted theatrical ambitions. As long as the latter are combined with silly amusements wrung from the most frantic of pursuits, they will find their audience. But if the cinema is to serve the sort of visual pleasure that is unwilling to satisfy itself with sham stage sets, music, and colors, this situation cannot continue for long. The necessary success achieved by sets on the stage amounts to farce onscreen; when photographed, the stage set provokes a double disillusion, and when the Titanic is made of cardboard, its sinking takes down cargo for whose loss the box office is eventually going to have to pay. Color, too, is bad. Against color cinematography there can be no objection; fully perfected, it would be able to offer the eye something nearly colossal. However, painting film by hand—a process that has received attention due to an insane business sense—is a ridiculous affront, which incidentally has already failed spectacularly more than once. Color may well be important for visual pleasure, but for any eye unwilling to let itself be cheated, a painted-on canal scene appears like a bandage used to repair a tire. When the cinema uses monotonously throbbing music to allow the ear to counter the distraction of the eye caused by silence, then the effect is generally flawless; by no means, however, can this be achieved by a tortuously incomprehensible tooting of the gramophone, which so thoroughly distracts the eye from the choreographed kitsch of moveable scenery that one must leave the hall. But the cinema will not be satisfied with all of that. It seeks to harvest from the rich fields of love what censorship does not allow it to sow, even sporadically. For this reason, the eroticism it delivers occupies the same area as that of the most pathetic nightstage and whistles helplessly from the last lookout point. Even the admittedly meager supplement of illusion, which here allows the most overused demoness to still have some effect, is not capable of supplying the missing surplus of intensity. That sensitive types sit in Berlin cafés and dream with teary eyes of an erotic cinema—which may in fact exist somewhere—only confirms the existence of a special need and a voyeuristic concupiscence, whose well-kept fingers reach out for the ultimate stimulation no less than the red paws of the Jacobins once did. And this phenomenon can quite possibly be generalized, for the cinema’s dalliance is not in the position to arouse even the common state of stimulation that is the first condition of visual pleasure. The cinema’s flirtatiousness is rather more painfully reminiscent of the impression produced by the dead rival, which leads one

A New Sensorium

45

to the conclusion that it is not worth buying a ticket simply to practice feminine geography on the image of a full-length negligee. Incidentally, it is not true that the cinema presents competition to the theater; seveneighths of all cinemagoers went just as rarely or just as often to the theater before the cinema appeared as after. And the cinema’s flirtations with theater are unsuccessful; they lead no one to mistake the screen for a stage, and they cause some to lose their allegiance to the cinema itself—although admittedly not to the point that they go to the theater. The censor’s oversights, a matter sometimes of excusable error, though all too often of sheltered naïveté, are thus in a certain sense counteracted. This, however, is no reason to attack the cinema. It more than satisfies the desire for visual pleasure, which once had to go begging. But the cinema also corresponds to a deep, undeniable need, which, when denied, learns to satisfy itself. The didactic and other valuable characteristics of the cinema fail by far to overshadow the possibility that it could also provide visual pleasure without resorting to the base means to which it is allowed to resort. In this fact, so shameful for culture, is rooted the cinema’s greatest danger as well as its greatest attraction. Notes 1. The first film newsreel; see also the text by O. Th. Stein in chapter 2 (no. 18). 2. A reference to a passage from Goethe’s Maximen und Reflexionen that has been distorted through its history of translation and quotation. The original reads: “Ich sehe keinen Fehler begehen, den ich nicht auch begangen hätte.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poetische und prosaische Werke, vol. 1 (Stuttgart/ Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1836), 439.

16 ALBERT HELLWIG Illusions and Hallucinations during Cinematographic Projections First published as “Illusionen und Halluzinationen bei kinematographischen Vorführungen,” in Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde 15, no. 1 (1914), 37–40. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Albert Hellwig (1880–1950), a criminologist and legal expert, was also a leading figure in the cinema reform movement who popularized the term Schundfilm (trash film) in his 1911 book Schundfilms: Ihr Wesen, ihre Gefahren und ihre Bekämpfung (Trash films: Their nature, their dangers, and the fight against them; see chapter 7, no. 93). Though alarmed by film’s potential to incite crime through its “suggestive power,” Hellwig, like many psychologists at the time, was also deeply interested in cinema’s effects on spectators’ sense impressions. Like his colleague Naldo Felke (chapter 7, no. 99), he could also see the cinema as a kind of laboratory for studying the human sensorium. The text below explores the relation between visual and other sense impressions, a topic taken up around the same time in the art-historical studies of Alois Riegl and recently revived by phenomenological (Vivian Sobchack) and haptic (Laura Marks) theories of film spectatorship.

In recent years, many of us have drawn attention to the strong suggestive power of cinematographic projections.1 Our observations have led us to the conclusion that any and all available repressive measures must be employed to prevent the projection of trash films [Schundfilms] that threaten public safety (especially criminal trash films). 2 At the same time, however, we believe that the graphic representations offered by cinematographic

46

Transformations of Experience

projections should be put to a far more systematic use in the service of school curricula and popular education.3 A very interesting form of supporting evidence for our arguments can be found in a set of observations recently published by an Italian scholar.4 Since only very few Germans have access to this treatise, it will not be out of place here if I summarize his most essential findings.5 Studying both his own reactions and those of others during cinematographic projections, Ponzo made the following observations. He found that under the influence of cinematographic projections, spectators interpreted other sense impressions in such a way as to associate them with the events shown in the moving image; indeed, Ponzo was even able to confirm some cases in which, in the absence of any sense impression beyond the projection itself, spectators imagined impressions to go with the events on the screen. As for the latter type of illusion, it is often the case, for instance, that a spectator sitting before images of a waterfall, machines in motion, or a traveling vehicle believes he hears the corresponding sounds. Since daily life has accustomed us to hearing certain sounds in the company of such sights, these auditory sensations arise involuntarily at the sight of the cinematographic image and intensify the illusion considerably. Often, the suggestive power of the cinematographic projection—its power to simulate real life—is so strong that we momentarily experience the compulsion to applaud, forgetting that the figures before us are not flesh-and-blood people but merely a representation. Of course, these hallucinations cannot make as strong and clear an impression on spectators as illusions triggered by real external agents. Especially frequent in this respect is the tendency to link noises audible in the theater to the events shown on film. We often have the illusion that a certain sound entering our ears is coming from the direction of the screen, when its provenance in fact lies in a completely different location. For instance, we might involuntarily associate an element of the music accompanying the film with the events on the screen. We have the sensation that this sound is coming from the same direction as the light waves, and we unconsciously interpret it accordingly. Ponzo describes how surprised he was one day as he watched a film shot in Burma, in which two boys used sticks to ring the bells of a pagoda. With every strike, Ponzo heard not the sound of bells but rather the particular sound made by a stick being swung through the air. As he later set out to clear up this illusion, Ponzo found that it had resulted from his association of his visual impressions with some bass notes coming from the string instruments in the orchestra. [. . .] Although such auditory hallucinations are the most frequent and easiest type to observe, one can occasionally observe other types of hallucination as well. Thus, during a film depicting the sufferings of the damned as described by Dante, a man sitting next to Dr. Ponzo suddenly began to feel a damp and cold sensation, which he associated with the images on the screen. In reality, this sensation came from the cold and damp air in the screening room. During another film that showed crashing waves, Ponzo’s mother suddenly exclaimed that she could feel the refreshing sensation of spraying seawater; she had associated the sensation produced by the fresh air coming from a fan in the theater with her visual impressions. A typical example of olfactory illusions can be seen in an experience Dr. Ponzo and Professor Kiesow had simultaneously—although independently.6 The film depicted a stable containing a large amount of hay. When the image of the hay appeared, Professor Kiesow remarked to Dr. Ponzo that it was as if he could smell the hay—and this just as Ponzo was turning toward Professor Kiesow to make the same remark. The two later decided that the smell of hay must have come from a woman who had entered a few

A New Sensorium

47

moments earlier and taken her seat not far from them. She was wearing a type of perfume whose scent they could not identify precisely but that was in no way really reminiscent of hay. The illusions and hallucinations observed by Ponzo are of a type that all of us have probably experienced while attending cinematographic projections. We are particularly susceptible to them in those moments when we abandon ourselves completely to the representation rather than watching the film with some other goal in mind—especially the goal of making psychological observations. Spectators will recognize the character of these illusions and hallucinations even if they cannot always comprehend their origin sufficiently. Another characteristic of such illusions is that they last only a few moments and leave no aftereffects. Be that as it may, the numerous cases in which cinematographic projections are able to trick the senses of mentally healthy subjects7 offer exceptional illustrations of the intensity of the impression such projections make in the psyche of spectators.8 Notes 1. Original footnote (translated): See Hellwig, Die Schundfilms: Ihr Wesen, ihre Gefahren, und ihre Bekämpfung [Trash Films: Their nature, their dangers, and the fight against them] (Halle a. S. 1911); Sellmann, Der Kinematograph als Volkserzieher? [The cinematograph as educator of the people?] (Langensalza 1912); Gaupp and Lange, Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmittel [The cinematograph as a medium of popular entertainment] (Flugschrift des Dürerbundes); Götze, “Jugendpsyche und Kinematograph” [Youth psyche and the cinematograph] (Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung, 1911, pp. 416–424); Hellwig, “Die Beziehungen zwischen Schundliteratur, Schundfilms und Verbrechen: Das Ergebnis einer Umfrage” [The relationship between pulp fiction, trash films, and crime: The results of a survey] (Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie, vol. 51. pp. 1–32). 2. Original footnote (translated): Hellwig, “Öffentliches Kinematographenrecht” [Public cinematograph law] (Preuß. Verwaltungsblatt, vol. 33, pp. 199–204); Rechtsquellen des öffentlichen Kinematographenrechts [Legal sources of public cinematograph law] (Mönchen-Gladbach 1913), Introduction; Die Reichsfilmzensur: Eine dogmatische und rechtspolitische Untersuchung [Film censorship of the Reich: A dogmatic and legal policy analysis] (Berlin 1914). 3. Original footnote (translated): Ernst Schultze, Der Kinematograph als Bildungsmittel [The cinematograph as educational medium] (Halle a. S. 1911), as well as numerous articles in the journals Bild und Film (Mönchen-Gladbach) and Film und Lichtbild (Stuttgart). 4. Original footnote (translated): Ponzo, “Di alcune osservazioni psicologiche fatte durante rappresentazioni cinematografiche” [On certain psychological observations made during motion picture screenings] (Atti della R. Academia delle Scienze di Torino, vol. 46). The author generously sent me a special copy. 5. Hellwig here refers to Mario Ponzo’s 1911 essay cited in note 4, which is available in English translation on the website of the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories (http://filmtheories. org/). 6. Frederico Kiesow was a German-born psychologist and also Ponzo’s teacher at the University of Turin. 7. Original footnote (translated): For observations of subjects with nervous illnesses, see d’Abundo, “Sopra alcuni particolari effetti delle proiezioni cinematografiche nei nevrotici” [About certain effects of film screenings on neurotics] (Rivista Italiana di neuropatologia, psichiatria ed elettroterapia, vol. 4, no. 10)—which the author most generously sent to me and which I will probably report on in the Ärztliche Sachverständigen-Zeitung. 8. Original footnote (translated): See also Laquer, “Über die Schädlichkeit kinematographischer Veranstaltungen für die Psyche des Kindesalters” [On the harmfulness of cinematographic events for the psyche during childhood] (Ärztliche Sachverständigen-Zeitung, 1911, no. 11); and Hellwig, “Die Schädlichkeit von Schundfilms für die kindliche Psyche” [The harmfulness of trash films for the child’s psyche] (ibid., no. 22).

T WO

THE WORLD IN MOTION

17 H. STE. The Cinematograph in the Service of Ethnology First published as “Der Kinematograph im Dienste der Völkerkunde,” in Der Kinematograph 50 (December 11, 1907). Translated by Tara Hottman.

The travel film was one of the most popular genres of early cinema, representing a particularly modern form of visual production, consumption, and experience. If, as Tom Gunning has argued, this cinematic genre followed an extended trajectory of modern travel imagery1—including panoramas, dioramas, magic lantern slides, stereographs, and postcards—it also bore a distinguishing feature: depicting the world in motion. As the following text indicates, cinema’s promise to offer access to distant spaces was often articulated in terms of a colonialist desire to discover and “capture” indigenous peoples and their customs. The text focuses on the scientific uses of the cinematograph for the ethnographic study of Africa, where the German Empire had colonial territories from the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 until the First World War. Over fifty films were shot in Germany’s colonies between 1905 and 1918, and these films were exhibited in a wide range of contexts, as exemplified by the illustrated lecture in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) described here.

A scientific expedition for the exploration of foreign lands must now absolutely include a cinematograph in its equipment if it wishes to claim that it is apace with the times. The single images of the usual photographic camera are not adequate, especially when it is a matter of recording the customs of natives from completely unknown or little-studied areas in their original, traditional form, as yet untouched by culture; this is where only a recording device of living photographs is appropriate. It alone offers the possibility of capturing in every detail processions, rituals of assembly, funerals, and other ceremonies of indigeneous peoples through its long chain of continuous images. Natural and cultural documents are thus created, as it were. Such material is of an infinitely greater value for the study of the customs and development of peoples than the meager remains of the culture of our ancestors that are at our disposal in the piles of shards and burial sites that are passed on to us. In Africa, however, the cinematography looking for new subjects for exhibitions has preempted the cinematography working for scientific purposes. The large-scale and costly expedition of the London firm Raleigh & Robert brought home numerous films from the dark continent, 2 which primarily offered splendid box office draws at public screenings but also made it very clear to the scientific world what rich treasure troves of study material were waiting to be opened up by the cinematograph in the black continent.

48

The World in Motion

49

The large audience at a lecture evening recently organized by the Breslau division of the German Colonial Association [Deutscher Kolonial-Verein] in the Breslau concert house demonstrated that broader circles also possess a lively interest in living pictures recorded from a scientific standpoint. More than 1,600 people belonging to the most prestigious social circles filled the large concert hall in which Professor Weule, director of the Museum of Ethnology [Völkermuseum] in Leipzig, reported on his trips to the Wakonda highlands.3 About a year ago he visited these areas in the south of our East African colonies on behalf of the Commission for Regional Study [Kommission für Landeskunde] of the Imperial Colonial Office [Reichskolonialamt] in order to investigate the social relations of the natives. Among his travel equipment was a small cinematographic recording device that served him well. During his approximately six-month stay in the Wakonda highlands, Professor Weule made the acquaintance of a Dane who had lived there for years, and through his help, he was able to witness the mysterious, hitherto-unknown puberty festival of the natives and to film the corresponding processions, ceremonies, and dances using the cinematograph. These images were exhibited during the lecture and won express recognition through rounds of resounding applause. The small Ernemann cinematograph,4 which costs 180 marks, proves that despite its low cost, it possesses the capacity to completely fulfill greater demands. Since the distance between the apparatus and the white wall was only around seven meters, the small filmic images appeared approximately one square meter large. But their sharpness and clarity was so great using a 10-amp arc lamp that even in the far corners of the giant hall, all of the details could be clearly discerned; in any case the images could have been enlarged significantly more. The good results achieved by the cinematograph gave Professor Weule a reason to arrange for a particularly extensive cinematographic outfitting of a new expedition on which he will soon embark. Even Dr. Neuhaus of Berlin is taking an Ernemann cinematograph with him on his next trip to Africa. Notes 1. Tom Gunning, “ ‘The Whole World within Reach’: Travel Images without Borders,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 25–41. 2. Charles Raleigh and Robert Schwobthaler began an agency in Paris (not London, as the article says) in 1903 to sell the films of American Mutoscope and Biograph, as well as Warwick Trading. Their company, Raleigh & Robert, later produced French films and distributed British, Danish, and French films in England, France, and Germany. 3. Karl Weule (1864–1926) had focused on the customs of the Wakonda during his time in German East Africa in 1906. Wakonda is likely here confused with Makonde. 4. Founded by Heinrich Ernemann (1850–1928) in the late nineteenth century, the Ernemann company produced cameras, film cameras, and movie projectors.

18 O. TH. STEIN The Cinematograph as Modern Newspaper First published as “Der Kinematograph als moderne Zeitung,” in Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie 3, no. 2 (1913–14), 25–28; here 25–26. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

While “actualities” date back to the earliest years of cinema, the newsreel genre arguably began with Pathé Fait-Divers in 1908, with German productions following in the early 1910s. Seeking to cultivate the newsreel as a novel and even revolutionary means of press coverage, the following text explores the possibilities of cinema as a

50

Transformations of Experience “journalist and tool for depicting the world.” Associated with cinema reform efforts in the years before and during the First World War (see chapter 7), O. Th. Stein also contributed to fi lm trade publications including Der Kinematograph and Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung, as well as pedagogical journals such as Pharus and Archiv für Pädagogik.

The most striking evidence that cinema is still at the beginning of its developmental potential is the so-called newsreel. Were I to claim that the newsreel contains the seeds of an unforeseen but total revolution of our press, I can already see the lips of all journalistic experts curling in scorn. The cinematograph as reformer of the press: ridiculous! And yet, it has all the necessary assets to do so. It needs only to learn how to exploit them. I frequently wonder why the film industry does not go about expanding the news sector both stylistically and in terms of content. Apparently, it is too distracted by its onesided preference for drama. What is causing the film industry—especially in Germany— to not attend systematically to the news could perhaps be the lack of journalistic knowledge. What is the “newsreel” today? Not yet a living newspaper, for it is still missing one thing: journalistic depth and well-roundedness, coherence and quality as “news in itself.” The newsreel’s ambitions are set too low; they must be raised significantly. The sequences, often haphazardly shot, cutting off abruptly, and frequently not even relating the essence of the news in question, are merely an imperfect supplement to the printed word. In addition, there is the abundance of trivial events that often return in similar form. We see too many funerals, for example, that have no value (illustrated newspapers admittedly make the same error), too many meaningless sporting events, and by contrast very little material of a folkloristic or national character. We also lack commercial images from many areas of everyday life, which could be integrated quite well into such a newsreel. Short depictions of travel could also be taken up in the newsreel, as a below-the-fold feature, so to speak; likewise, representations of interesting national customs, illustrations of jubilees, commemoration days—in short basically everything that illustrated newspapers currently cover. We do not need to shy away from the use of photographs, as long as they do not depict animated scenes, but rather portraits or architecture, for example. I do not know whether film companies provide basic principles or instructions for the style of reporting, nor to what extent the many “empty” spots are to be blamed on the company’s administration or the cameraman himself. Nevertheless, the cinematograph is unfortunately emulating the bad habits of journalism, which also pays too much attention to the frivolities and vanities of life, and generally has no room for “grand,” “monumental” material. Thus, in its pursuit of dull everyday banalities, the cinematograph misses an extraordinary number of good and interesting events. And when the film closes—as is the case with Pathé—with the pompous claim “Sees everything and reports on everything,” another company would be justified in ridiculing this little boast at the end of its own revue. None of the newsreels offer what the cinematograph could achieve as a journalist and tool for depicting the world. Admittedly, this could be the fault of current circumstances, a lack of appropriate cameramen. The average camera operator rarely or never has the journalistic-writerly streak that would be necessary. Thus, for the time being, the newsreel is like a mere talent that cannot fully develop in an unfavorable environment. Precisely because it must be tailored to the needs of cinematic theaters, to their current capacities, it is forced, so to speak, into a Procrustean bed. It is compelled to take on tasks that do not represent the best of what could be expected from it. In the limited frame of the cinematic theater, cinematography will, in any case, never be able to work up to the position, the significance that it has already attained in and of

The World in Motion

51

itself. For this reason, the newsreel, too, must grow out of this frame toward independence. This requires first and foremost the interest of capital, which a far-sighted journalist would have to try to attract. We see precious few new thoughts or ideas that would be capable of pushing cinematography in entirely new directions. The mistake of private capital is that it fritters itself away in worthless uniform undertakings in the cinema industry, instead of focusing on the creation of new, higher values. Do not speak to me of the need to accommodate the industry’s current state and prevailing circumstances. Private capital simply lacks intelligence and foresight. People trot sluggishly along on the beaten track. Otherwise, they would long ago have taken a step that is only a matter of time: the systematic, consistent transfer of cinematography to the realm of journalism. The cinematograph as a revolutionary, invigorating moment for the contemporary press: that is what we need and what the coming years could give us.

19 HERMANN HÄFKER Cinema and Geography: Introduction First published as “Einleitung: Was will dieses Buch?” in Kino und Erdkunde (Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1914), 3–5. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

One of the preeminent German film theorists of the prewar years, Hermann Häfker (1873–1939) contributed to Der Kinematograph as early as 1907 and to the cinema reform journal Bild und Film from 1912 to 1915. The following is an excerpt from the introduction to the second of his three major books on cinema, this one devoted to practical issues related to the production and exhibition of natural science films. (See also selections from his Kino und Kunst [chapter 6, no. 83] and Der Kino und die Gebildeten [chapter 8, no. 112], as well as his pamphlet Die Aufgaben der Kinematographie in diesem Kriege [chapter 8, no. 113].) Prioritizing the documentary and educational functions of cinema, Häfker emphasizes the potential of geographical films to spread “knowledge of the earth,” especially through magnifi cent views of natural landscapes. In this regard, he recalls Georg Kleibömer’s call for images from “the domain of ‘living nature’” in his 1909 essay, “Cinematograph and Schoolchildren,” which is included in chapter 7 (no. 91) of this volume.

From the moment when the first moving images entered public life through “varieties,” one eagerly hoped that they would spread both knowledge of the earth and a pleasure therein. Time and again, all generous patrons of this technology have identified grand images of nature as its greatest achievements, and, time and again, the entire movement toward elevating and reforming cinema—especially for those who wish to see it used in schools and popular education—returns to “cinema and geography” as the essence and practical starting point. Nothing enchants everyone and also seems to be the intrinsic task of motion picture art like the reproduction of landscapes and everything that moves within them. Cinematography achieves nothing so perfectly by comparison. In doing this, it requires no means that are artificial or foreign to it—no stage, machines, scenery, or artificial light. No one has to posture in front of it and feign interest through false sentiments. It shows things more or less in their natural size and movement, just as we are used to seeing them; in this regard, our imagination does not need any assistance.

52

Transformations of Experience

Cinematography also does not require a microscope or other devices; the object stays still and always behaves in its full, sublime truth. In fact, it is only here that our technology achieves the “unadulterated reproduction of reality”—which we have recognized as the true calling of cinematography—in the highest sense, namely, that of reality, which also appears to the unaided human senses in this way and is their home. And, finally, nature is also the true realm in which the “beauty of movement in itself ”—the drama of the world’s rhythm, which is free and yet governed by secret laws—occurs in its purest form. On the other hand, here is precisely where cinematography is capable of achievements with which no other art or technology can compete. As much as painting, poetry, and descriptive and scientific accounts have the advantage over cinema even in depicting nature, they have to grant it priority in one area: in the very exactitude and wealth of details that the photographic eye captures. Here is where humankind, notwithstanding still photography, has indeed been bestowed with a new artificial sense, a new tool for overcoming the confines of space and time. One cannot say this to the same extent about cinema’s other realms—not if one conceives of “geography” as broadly as possible, understanding it to mean everything that occurs against the vast backdrop of nature. Thus, it is precisely here as well where all those expectations and forces converge that have been unsatisfied with and repelled by cinematography’s other areas of activity and that fervently aspire to elevate cinema to a means of educating humankind and wish to partake in this endeavor. Science is seeking to employ it as a new means of research and specialized teaching, and the world traveler wishes to be accompanied by the cinematograph. Schools envision cinematographic geography lessons. Organizations for natural science and popular education would have begun to enrich their geographic and ethnological presentations through moving images a long time ago, if only they knew how. The farsighted would like to see such images used to spread international understanding and the exchange of goods, as well as knowledge of the homeland and of the colonies. Artists and art lovers are best disposed towards cinema when it presents grand images of nature. Cinema theaters, which—half out of necessity, half on their own accord—wish to align themselves with the efforts of those visitors to whom the future might belong (and who might also be more willing and able to pay in the long run), have the ambition to feature geographical films. Accordingly, even in large film companies, there is a greater creative drive in this direction. But it hasn’t occurred with sheer willpower or even with so much “capital” alone. Here, one has to work carefully and conscientiously, and above all, one must know quite a lot to satisfy experts with the production and presentation of films while also satisfying amateurs and exciting them more than trash dramas [Schunddramen] do. My work wishes to serve all those who are interested in learning something about geographical moving images, the art of their production and presentation, their sources and conditions, and the possibilities and limits of their use in one of the aforementioned ways.

20 YVAN GOLL The Cinedram First published as “Das Kinodram,” in Die neue Schaubühne: Monatshefte für Bühne, Drama und Film 2, no. 6 (June 1920), 141–43. Translated by Don Reneau.

The World in Motion

53

A French-German poet associated with the expressionist and surrealist movements, Yvan Goll (1891–1950) authored Die Chapliniade: Eine Kinodichtung (1920), which included four illustrations by Fernand Léger and envisaged Chaplin’s two-dimensional image on a poster coming to life. Published the same year, the text below celebrates film’s kineticism in an age characterized by unprecedented motion and speed on a global scale and also addresses the dynamization of art in early-twentieth-century modernism. For Goll, the motion picture not only “frees the image from the confines of the frame-space” but also promises to transcend boundaries of class and nation. Goll’s essay appeared in the same issue of Die neue Schaubühne as “American Cinema” (chapter 9, no. 126) by his wife, Claire Goll, and “The Transcendence of the Film Image” (chapter 3, no. 39) by Friedrich Sieburg.

For years, a new speed has been making our world spin three times or even ten times faster on its axis. The planet has received a shock. We have entered a new age: the age of motion. All of this has occurred thanks to technology. For its sake, the countenance of the entire globe has changed. The bubbles of gigantic train stations swell up in small cities. New York’s skyscrapers are a mountain range of lights, and broad, white hangars for airplanes stand on fertile plains. The calculation of time, the calendar, and the twelve-hour clock have all been turned upside down. Night chases day with ever increasing speed; the hour becomes a day, the minutes too. Everywhere, we see motion, only motion. Business drives business. Experience follows on experience. Image replaces image. Nearly overnight, a windmill or an obsolete postal office—perhaps soon even a barracks—becomes a historical monument, and so it is with cultural phenomena as well. A new element, like radium or ozone, is becoming palpable throughout the whole of art: motion. It transforms all genres: poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance. In all of them, handcraft stands dead and mute for a moment. Things cannot go on as before. This revolution has been making itself felt for some time. Futurism, simultanism, Picasso in painting, and Stramm in poetry all foresaw it.1 But more has happened. Static laws have crumbled. Space and time have been caught by surprise. For the first time, technology makes it possible to meet the highest challenge of art: synthesis and the play of opposites. We now have film. That is, we do not yet (at least, not in Europe) have film, but we do have film factories, a film industry, and film profiteers, recruited from the ranks of genuine money brokers and fake writers. However, the cinema will be the basis for all new art. No one can create art any longer without this new movement, for we are all spinning at a different speed than before. Film has discovered and realized the unexpected, the egg of Columbus. Film paints a painting. Through the succession of different ascending and descending oppositions, film frees the image from the confines of the frame-space and allows it to breathe in time. The Swedish painter Viking Eggeling has been working toward this invention for years.2 Tomorrow there will be an art of film painting. And how much closer, how much simpler is the problem of the new motion-drama. A drama born of motion, which must indeed be its most essential, most sensual content, its blood! What does dramatic art mean if not the expression of intensive, inner motion?

54

Transformations of Experience

Already, the fi lm palace is replacing the public theater. But the theater can avenge itself on the cinema by devouring it. That is, the theater can make the cinema its own. With complete justice, noble minds loathe the cinema in Europe, because neither in Germany nor in France nor in Italy is there a single fi lm company that cultivates art rather than industry. It is for this reason that we see two separate camps. Things are different in America. There, both screen actors and audiences understand fi lm as a sign of the velocity of our times; it has already become an essential component of American life. There, filmmakers do not adapt the old, worn-out stage sets—plays by Sardou and novels by Hauptmann3 —but rather produce their own and our art from the elemental material of film: from “motion,” which also characterizes modern, everyday life. Even in America, all of this is only a beginning. At first, the European finds incomprehensible the breakneck accumulation of totally unconnected situations and illogical action; for it is not the action, but the motion that is the basis of film. Acrobatics contort what is natural. Space is boundless in film, more boundless than it once was for the gods of Olympus and Elysium. Every dream is achievable in film. What a magnificent thing for the poet! What unheard-of possibilities for the playwright! Dead and gone is the fable of unified space, five acts, and stage props. The revolving stage, of no use to modern drama anyway, has fallen out of usage. Gone is the time when a breathless runner narrated “dramatically” the tales of war from atop the castle battlements! Film has replaced all of this. In a synthesis, present, past, and future move in the same instant through the consciousness of the stage. Film is dramatic; it is nothing else. Photography is epic, movement dramatic. Nor will film continue to lack the “metaphysical word.” We have faith in the coming inventor who will give us the “talking cinema.” Meanwhile, the author has enough to do, writing the scenario and dictating into the gramophone. His arrangement of filmic situations will be poetry in motion. His people, walking onto the stage in flesh and blood, will speak like all of us. Behind them the “demonic” life will flit across the screen, whether as an illustration of narrated events or as mere decoration existing for its own sake. At the same time, the author will recommend a moving rhythm to the orchestra. The cinema will project landscapes of tremendous explosive power. Thus all arts will take part in the cinedram; it will incorporate not only writing but also painting, music, sculpture, and dance. Here, then, lies cinema’s social significance. The new work of art will not be created for one country or played for a single urban elite; rather, it will belong to the whole world and to the people in the cinemas outside the cities. Artists of all kinds, rather than fretting “individualistically” in their garrets, will contribute to great, general, and valuable works of art. Their lives will be secure. And a new form of art will become possible, an active and collective art, as was the great art of all centuries: the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the temples of Asia. Notes 1. The staccato texts of German expressionist poet and dramatist August Stramm (1874–1915) broke with standard diction and syntax. 2. On Eggeling and the dynamization of painting, see chapter 14 of this volume. 3. Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) was a prolific French dramatist, and Gerhart Hauptmann (1862– 1946) was a German playwright and novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1912.

The World in Motion

55

21 HANS SCHOMBURGK Africa and Film First published as “Afrika und der Film,” in Illustrierte Filmwoche 48–49 (1922), 684f; also printed in Schomburgk, Bwakukama: Fahrten und Forschungen mit Büchse und Film im unbekannten Afrika (Berlin: Deutsch Literarisches Institut, 1922), 261–66; here 261, 265–66. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

A big-game hunter and procurer of exotic animals, Hans Schomburgk (1880–1967) also became a well-known director of adventure films set in Africa. Recalling the opening text of this chapter (no. 17), Schomburgk here highlights the cinematograph’s ability to capture and preserve the rituals of indigenous groups, thereby enacting a kind of salvage ethnography. In its paradoxical quest to record unadulterated traditions via a technological medium, Schomburgk’s work may also be seen as an early variant of ethnographic filmmaking—a mode of filmmaking often exemplified by Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, also from 1922.

The sun glares down relentlessly on the East African steppe—merciless, as if it wanted to remove the last bit of strength from the limbs of the small group of people trudging along in single file on the path between Kilossa and Morogoro. It is the year 1908; my grand African expedition is nearing its end. Morogoro beckons, the terminus of the German East African Railway in those days and therefore the final stop on this long, arduous journey straight across the dark continent. For six years I’ve seen no railroad, no stone houses for five. [. . .] A mother hippopotamus, her baby on her back, surfaces languidly and slides onto shore to rest on the sandbank without any of the crocodiles giving her the least bit of notice. A still life in nature. It is impossible to creep up on anything along the river. We have to make an arc over the steppe. A grass fire swept across the area the day before. We try our luck on our hands and knees, pushing the camera in front of us. Slowly, step by step. Our lungs feel as though they’ll burst. The ash particles settle on our eyes and drift into our noses. We look like Moors. Sweat traces furrow down our faces. Hands scratched, knees bruised and bloodied. But onwards, ever onwards, the kill is too enticing. The thrill of the chase has never before made my heart beat quite like this, even when facing down the mightiest bull elephant. We are still a hundred meters from the edge of the river. A short break—we lie on our backs to catch our breath. Onwards, ever onwards! We have reached the embankment. I cautiously raise myself up slightly to steal a glance. No more than twenty meters separate us from the animals’ peaceful idyll. The camera is pushed forward . . . there—a fluttering of wings—we’ve been spotted by the oxpeckers. The crocodiles sink into the deep without a sound. The hippopotamus pulls itself up dozily, uncertain whence danger threatens—it slips the baby ungently into the water and disappears after it. The sandy bank is empty—all that effort for naught! We collapse in exhaustion. A failure, as so often before. But it is in these failures that the real allure of the cinematographic hunt lies; after all, none of them is immovable in a way that it would perish or fall victim to a predator, as so often happens. Just as we do with the wild animals, we capture the savages too, the Negroes, their customs and practices, their games and dances. We preserve these ancient traditions, which will be swept away by the advancing civilization, on film for posterity. The construction of Telefunken’s station in Kamina has also been saved by us in moving pictures for future generations. This masterful example of pioneering technology

56

Transformations of Experience

transmitted radio communications between Nauen and Togo,1 but it had to be detonated by our own troops so as not to fall into enemy hands. The poles will remain unchanged for all eternity. The customs and practices of the African natives that have not been preserved on film, however, will be forgotten. The bloodless conquest of Africa—this is a credit to cinematographic explorers. A caravan makes its way—singing—across the glimmering steppe in Africa—and at that very same moment, it crosses the flickering screen in Europe. Note 1. From 1911 to 1914, Telefunken had built the Kamina Funkstation in Togoland for wireless communication between Nauen, Brandenburg, and the German colonies in Africa.

22 FRANC CORNEL The Value of the Adventure Film First published as “Der Wert des Abenteuerfilms,” in Reichsfilmblatt, no. 36 (1923), 16–17. Translated by Sara Hall.

Written in the aftermath of world war, revolution, and the loss of German colonies (as stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919), Franc Cornel’s text defends the oft-maligned adventure film as a genre that could offer ideals for a weary and seemingly constricted German body politic. The text appeared in the Reichsfilmblatt (1922–35), the official organ of the Reichsverband deutscher Lichtspieltheaterbesitzer (National Association of German Cinema Owners), and demonstrates a nationalist investment in the cinema as a form of virtual travel during a highly tumultuous period of German history.

A predilection for adventure dwells deep in the blood of every healthy German. It is the brother of the ancient Germanic migratory instinct, and romantic sentimentality is the sister of both. This predilection for adventure has arisen once again in our people as they revolt against the mechanization and standardization of life and work, against the oppressive imperative that reduces the human being to a machine. Romanticism was the child of a time in which people could see beyond their financial worries and material poverty to a better earthly existence. Its blue flower blossomed after the blood-soaked years of the great French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and in our days it will bloom once more on the body-strewn battlefields of a Europe turned upside down by Bolshevism and the World War. And the migratory instinct expresses itself on our overpopulated continent more powerfully than ever in the form of an instinct for emigration, perhaps on grounds of political or economic dissatisfaction or in the pursuit of personal freedom (which, despite all the cries of freedom, is everywhere stifled today). Among the broadest social strata, this migratory instinct feeds an exotic interest in foreign lands and peoples, thus establishing the assumption that the near future will stand under the sign of exotic romanticism—both in fine literature and film. There are already multiple indications of this phenomenon. There are always numerous exotic-romantic travel and adventure novels on the market (think of authors such as Otfrid von Hanstein, Ferdinand Emmerich, F. R. Nord, Olaf Eljens, Sven Hedin, and Ejnar Mikkelsen). And gradually, after many failed attempts, the style of great adventure films—the sorts of films to which John Hagenbeck, for example, aspires—has begun to develop.1

The World in Motion

57

Aversion toward everything about adventure films remains the rule, particularly in educated circles. We must admit that most such films offered so far have been pitiful efforts, which have driven away anyone familiar with life abroad and left him horrified and indignant at this dumbing down of the people. Those atelier Indians, such as the ones featured in the quintessential example of film kitsch Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha [The maharaja’s favorite wife], are terrible. 2 And it is embarrassing for us as Germans when the makers of another film employ a studio-built Somali village to represent Calcutta. Yet we can now take some consolation after having encountered endless American films that are no better than their German counterparts; movies about Africa are filmed in California and show South Sea islanders dancing happily and Central Asian camels wandering about; Bedouins present their weapons like well-trained white soldiers; all of the Africans modestly wear bathing trunks, and their wives wear long nightgowns; lions and even tigers spring up in packs in the jungle; and white farmers live deep in the Sudan. This foolishness, which naïve audiences marvel at with belief, is an outrage. It is quite understandable when such examples lead the educated individual to condemn everything with the label “adventure film.” And yet he should not do this; instead he should take pleasure in the people’s preference for such films and do his utmost to ensure that they convey a genuine exotic milieu, genuine in terms of the landscape and the people with their customs and lifestyle. Have we not also seen a whole series of adventure films of undeniable quality? Just think of Die Herrin der Welt [The mistress of the world], Der Mann ohne Namen [The man without a name], Tarzan (in its first two parts),3 and the films of John Hagenbeck AG. These films provide the foundation for further development. We should welcome this exotic-romantic development in film with open arms. Such a development demonstrates improvement and entails a distraction from base instincts, especially erotic ones. The only objection one could raise against them is that, like certain examples of pulp fiction, they could awaken a dangerous predilection for adventure. But apart from the fact that, as a result of the war, we now live in an atmosphere permeated by more and more gruesome adventurousness than any film could ever show, one must admit that a healthy sense and spirit of adventure cannot harm our German people, educated as they are in an all too scholarly style. On the contrary, exotic-romantic adventure films contain a wealth of educational value. For the most part, their heroes are exceptional individuals both physically and mentally, individuals who, particularly in the eyes of our youth, could present a valuable ideal. And ideals are precisely what people of today’s generation—including those over eighteen years old—so desperately need in their spiritual exhaustion. Their eyes should shine and their cheeks should burn with noble enthusiasm. They should think of their heroes in their games and look to them as role models in their dreams for the future. Daily life will differentiate what is attainable from other aspirations. The essential point is for the people and the youth to recover their belief in an ideal, a belief lost amid the immorality and bare egoism characterizing the business of our times. We cannot overemphasize the political significance of quality exotic adventure films. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English have encouraged the development of entertainment genres such as travel and adventure novels; in so doing they have instilled in their people the interest in, and understanding for, foreign cultures—in particular, for the English colonies—so necessary for their world politics. We Germans have frowned upon this literature and relegated it to the level of trash. By itself, this attitude does not fully explain the insubstantial knowledge about the world and its cultures predominating among our people, even among the educated classes who are otherwise so encumbered with all kinds of knowledge. We also did not understand how to arouse the

58

Transformations of Experience

interest in foreign lands through high literature. Clearly, however, once this curiosity has been awakened, someone reading a suspenseful novel set, for example, in Mexico will gladly reach for an instructive treatment of Mexican conditions. With the help of the exotic-romantic adventure film, we can quickly make up for our past mistakes in this arena. Such films bring the landscapes of foreign regions and the life and customs of their inhabitants before our eyes in a lively form with a gripping story. And success is all the more guaranteed when film and literature operate skillfully hand in hand. Under such conditions, the German people will then no longer sit ignorantly within their borders, judging all political events around the world from their isolation; instead, one global people will develop among the various peoples of the world. We must finally cease to see in the adventure film nothing more than a conglomeration of so-called sensations, acrobatic performances, and a plot devoid of all logic. We must begin to make more of such films than in the past by committing serious work to the genre. Then, owing to its popular character, this great film form will take up a great cultural mission, whose final impact on our German people we can only begin to imagine today. Notes 1. John Hagenbeck (1866–1940) was the half-brother of Carl Hagenbeck and a well-known organizer of Völkerschauen (human zoos, or ethnological expositions). In the early 1920s, he produced several adventure films, including a six-part animated film series, John Hagenbecks lustige Jagden und Abenteuer (John Hagenbeck’s hilarious hunts and adventures, 1920/21). 2. Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha (1917) was a popular Danish film directed by Robert Dinesen. The film was followed by two sequels in 1918 and 1920, the latter of which was made in Germany and directed by Max Mack. 3. Die Herrin der Welt was Joe May’s eight-part serial from 1919, and Georg Jacoby’s six-part Der Mann ohne Namen was released in 1921. Cornel here likely refers to Scott Sidney’s Tarzan of the Apes (1918) and Wilfred Lucas’s The Romance of Tarzan (1918), both of which featured Elmo Lincoln in the title role.

23 BÉLA BALÁZS Reel Consciousness First published as “Kurbelndes Bewußtsein,” in Der Tag, no. 829 (March 22, 1925), 3–4. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Whereas Hans Schomburgk (no. 21) juxtaposed an ever-modernizing Africa with the earth’s eternally unchanging poles, Béla Balázs here explains the fascination of Antarctic exploration documentaries in testing the limits of both human life and visual representation. An existential meditation on cinema, consciousness, and mortality, Balázs’s essay suggests the complex interplay of visual technology with embodied perception and with humanity’s experience of the vast, inscrutable world of nature. Balázs (1884–1949) had already discussed Antarctic expedition films in the famous section of Visible Man (1924), “The Close-Up” (see chapter 15, no. 222), and he would later repurpose passages from the following essay in a section of The Spirit of Film (1930), also entitled “Kurbelndes Bewußtsein.”

The posthumous film of Captain Scott,1 the Antarctic explorer who filmed his own death just as if he had screamed his death cry into a phonograph, is already the second film of its kind. Last year, one could see the film of the Antarctic journey of Shackleton, 2 who

The World in Motion

59

crossed his natural limit in his conquering expedition. The latter film showed man’s struggles far more dramatically, even though Shackleton escaped with his life. Especially remarkable about these films are not the images of the close combat, the hand-to-hand fight with deadly nature, nor the depiction of daring, determination, and heroic solidarity. For all of that could be made up and staged far more effectively by a good director. Nor is it the reality of these occurrences, for we already know many reports of men who could look death firmly and calmly in the eye before these English seafarers and geographers did. What is special and new in this case is that these men looked death in the eye through the lens of the camera. This is the new, objectified form of human consciousness. As long as these men do not lose consciousness, their hands will not loosen from the grip of the camera. Shackleton’s ship is wrecked by the masses of ice. It is filmed. Their last dog drops dead. It is filmed. The way back to life is blocked; all hope is gone. It is filmed. They drift at sea on an ice floe, which melts underneath their feet. It is filmed. Or Captain Scott pitches his last tent and goes inside with his comrades, as if into a tomb, to await death. It is filmed. Just as the captain on the ship’s bridge and the telegrapher in front of the Marconi instrument continue in their posts until the water reaches mouth-level, so too does the operator stay at his post and film until his hand freezes on the camera’s grip. This is a new form of self-reflection. These people reflect themselves by fi lming themselves. The inner process of accounting for oneself has been externalized. This selfperception until the final moment is mechanically fixed. The film of self-control, which consciousness used to run within the brain, is now transposed onto the reel of a camera, and consciousness, which has mirrored itself for itself alone in internal division until now, delegates this function to a machine that records the mirror image for others to see as well. In this way, subjective consciousness becomes social consciousness. The machine has the advantage here that it has no nerves and is more difficult to bewilder than consciousness. And the psychological process reverses itself. It is not that one films as long as one is conscious; rather, one is conscious as long as one films. Presence of mind is mechanically buttressed from outside as it were. Presence of mind is here the presence of the camera. And in the presence of mind, one acts as one would in the presence of some other stranger, with more self-control than when one is alone. That is the secret of the “attitude” that the Anglo-Saxons have already exemplified so impressively on many an occasion. Because they set aside reflection with such difficulty, they don’t know the experience of beautiful ecstasy—nor that of panic. A young woman behind us in the cinema asked her companion, “Why did these men have to die? What was the use,” the sober and smart woman asked indignantly, “of all this effort, all this pain? What did it do for anyone? It would have been a useless struggle, senseless heroism, strength wasted for nothing, absolutely nothing,” she insisted. She was far too smart to believe in those grand scientific goals with which her companion attempted to excuse the poor English captain. Provided that these goals existed at all, they indeed bore no relation to the victims. One would have had to explain the sense in such senselessness to this little rationalist with other, perhaps entirely irrational reasons. One could have said, for example, that in such a reckless endeavor, which has no practical purpose at all in life, the specifi cally human element of man first reveals itself. For everything else is just a more differentiated form of his survival instinct, which does not distinguish him from animals. In such a film, the soul appears in its clearest and purest form, and that is why it is still so gripping and beautiful, even in its most absurd senselessness. One could have also told the little Viennese woman that these Englishmen are true terrestrials. They have a conscious “sense of the earth” (much as one speaks of a sense of

60

Transformations of Experience

the State, for instance), which is also connected with a certain sense of responsibility: one must know where one is, right? They live not in Vienna and not in London; they live on the earth like they would at home, and they look at all the cellars and attics of their ancestral property. For one is not at home in a place as long as one does not know it. What’s more, one could have pointed out to the little bourgeois woman how the entirety of human civilization, with its great metropolises, suddenly seems so provincial—like a remote area of the planet—when one views this unending expanse of white, where the Antarctic night flows immediately into the night of the universe. Isn’t it conceivable that someone who knows of the oppressive constriction of Berlin, Paris, London, or New York, for instance, would develop a yearning for the vast life in which the short life of man must founder? As to the purposelessness of such manifestations of energy, it must be said that man is never given his goals at the outset so that he can subsequently develop his strengths toward them. It is the new ability that sets itself the new goals, and the growing strength stretches the oneiric boundaries of the impossible. The fire must first burn so that we can see what there is to be illuminated. That is the sense of each human fire, even if its immediate purpose does not become clear to us right away. The purposeless act of heroism of these English seafarers was perhaps nothing more than a maneuver for demonstrating man’s moral artillery. But one must know of what one is capable. For in an “emergency,” such a measure becomes compulsory. Notes 1. Robert Falcon Scott was a British officer who led two expeditions to Antarctica. He and his entire crew died in 1912 during the return journey of the second trip, the Terra Nova Expedition. Balázs here refers to Herbert G. Ponting’s documentary The Great White Silence (1924). 2. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who led multiple expeditions to Antarctica. The film under discussion is likely Frank Hurley’s documentary South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (1919).

24 COLIN ROSS Exotic Journeys with a Camera First published as “Exotische Kamera-Fahrten,” in Das große Bilderbuch des Films, ed. Hubert Miketta (Berlin: Film-Kurier, 1928), 44–46; here 45–46. Translated by Erik Born.

Colin Ross (1885–1945) was an Austrian journalist, documentary filmmaker, and one of the most popular travel writers of the interwar period, later becoming notorious for his racist views and support for the Nazi Party. Discussing the difficulties of gathering footage for travel films, Ross’s text highlights an overlap between filming and sporthunting that extends back to nineteenth-century discourses of photography and would later find critical reappropriation in Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa, 1966). In On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag would also characterize the camera as “a sublimation of the gun.”1

Making a successful travel film is by no means an easy task today, in light of the higher demands that are made of travel films and of cultural films, as well as the blasé attitude of audiences, which have come to take the most difficult and dangerous shots for granted. Having good shots of a country and the people there is no longer enough. At the same time,

The World in Motion

61

getting these kinds of shots is hardly easy. For every scene depicting a street, a village, or a population, you always run into the problems of people not wanting to be photographed, running away, hiding their faces, or crowding around the camera and posing for it. On expeditions today, the static camera remains the fundamental device for any cinematographic work. In spite of the many handheld cameras that are currently available, a static camera, such as the Bamberg-Askania model that I’ve been using for years, may be heavy, but it is defi nitely reliable. 2 This kind of camera will hold up against any weather, any jolt or drop; it will put up with all kinds of rough handling; and it will continue to produce immaculate images to the very end. No matter how careful you may be, you cannot always keep an eye on your camera. And even if you can, at one time or another, you will probably knock it over with your car, or the pack animal carrying your camera will stumble, or the person you’ve entrusted with carrying your most important piece of luggage will trip and fall. Admittedly, the one disadvantage of a large camera is that you cannot work with it without being noticed. In many cases, it helps to assemble the camera in secret—in a house, in some bushes, or behind an artificial “screen”—although even those precautions do not always help. If you find yourself in an area where no cameraman has ever tread before, you can do yourself a favor by pretending that your camera is a measuring instrument. Otherwise, you’ll need even more patience than the natives; you have to wait until they get bored and take advantage of the few moments during which you’re unobserved to film some natural scenes. Those little spring-driven cameras are naturally a significant addition to photographic equipment, but they alone do not suffice for an entire expedition, above all because they are much too sensitive, at least for the time being. All the same, some scenes can be fi lmed only with a spring-driven camera. For example, in my most recent fi lm, Die erwachende Sphinx [The awakening sphinx], 3 I took the shots of a running ostrich with a handheld Ica camera.4 For these shots, we chased our fleeing quarry at a speed of 85 km/h—on the open plain, no less. At such a fast speed, any camera mounted to the car would have broken down, not to mention the fact that it would have made it impossible to keep the ostrich in the frame. Hunting your quarry by car is only one method of getting shots of animals. I have already mentioned the method of hiding behind a camouflage screen, which is especially useful at watering holes. This is the easiest way of getting shots, and it produces images that are really excellent, even if they are somewhat monotonous. The most interesting method of getting shots of animals by far, although also the most difficult and the most dangerous, is to stalk your prey with your camera. That’s how I got my shots of elephants and giraffes. To be sure, this method is not as simple as merely tracking your prey. You need to be extremely cunning in order to round up your quarry without disturbing it. Oftentimes, you have to burn down a hundred meters of the plains in order to be able to work. Nevertheless, it remains a beautiful, interesting sport, and personally, I far prefer hunting with a camera to hunting with a gun. Notes 1. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1977), 14. 2. Founded by Carl Bamberg in Berlin in 1871, the Bambergwerke (renamed Askania Werke AG in 1912) was a company specializing in precision instruments, which also produced film cameras in the 1920s. 3. In 1927 Ross made the Ufa documentary Die erwachende Sphinx, and he also published a nonfiction book of the same name. 4. Ica is short for Internationale Camera AG, which was created in Dresden in 1909 through a merger of four camera-making companies.

62

Transformations of Experience

25 ANONYMOUS Lunar Flight in Film First published as “Mondflug im Film,” in Scherl’s Magazin 5 (May 1929), 558. Translated by Tara Hottman.

As early as Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), film provided a medium for envisioning travel into outer space. Released at the end of the silent era, Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929) showed the intervening advances in special effects technology and the latest in scientific thinking, with rocket scientist Hermann Oberth (author of Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, 1923) serving as an advisor. A seminal work of science fiction in the tradition of Jules Verne, Lang’s final silent film not only served as a point of reference for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), but it also preceded the actual moon landing by four decades, famously introducing the rocket countdown. The following article traces a trajectory from Méliès to Lang in terms of technological development and the relationship between illusionism and reality. Lang’s film would celebrate its premiere on October 15, 1929, in an event at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast am Zoo attended by luminaries such as Albert Einstein and also broadcast on the radio.

Years ago we were able to experience an extremely peculiar trip to the moon in film, in an animated motion picture that overcame the difficulties of space travel with the stroke of a pencil that danced cheerfully and fantastically. Such a depiction of lunar flight was seriously imaginable only once technology had shown a way in which fabulation [Fabuliersucht] needed to be only a few steps ahead of the facts. In his filmic journey to the moon, Fritz Lang advanced the concept of a rocket vehicle and had that grotesque monstrosity, the lunar rocket, constructed entirely in accordance with the laws of aerospace technology. Motion picture technology celebrates its triumph in Woman in the Moon. With its help, the ascent of the spaceship was able to be depicted as it would happen in reality. Here, film again reframes illusions into realities; the moving image becomes apparent truth because it seems to be photographed nature. Thus the lunar landscapes are not decorative items or backdrops, but rather present themselves to the eye as natural mountains because they were erected, in masterful knowledge of the latest studio technology, to appear as nature does to the human eye. The rocket flight represents a high point of cinematic expressiveness, which may perhaps be reached or surpassed only by the fantasy of the plot.

26 LOTTE H. EISNER A New India Film: A Throw of Dice First published as “Ein neuer Indien-Film: Schicksalswürfel: Universum,” in Film-Kurier, no. 195 (August 17, 1929). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

Cinema served as a crucial site of fascination with India, not least in Joe May’s monumental two-part film Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1921). Whereas May had deployed European actors and huge sets constructed outside of Berlin, director Franz Osten (1876–1956) became known for featuring Indian

The World in Motion

63

actors and for filming, in his words, “in the historical location of the events, without any studio construction, any structural or other alteration of its setting.”1 Born in Munich, Osten collaborated with the lawyer and Indian film pioneer Himansu Rai on the German-Indian coproductions Die Leuchte Asiens (The Light of Asia, 1925), Das Grabmal einer großen Liebe (Shiraz, 1928), and Schicksalswürfel (A Throw of Dice, 1929). The following is a review of the latter film penned by Lotte Eisner (1896–1983), who wrote for Film-Kurier between 1927 and 1933. In celebrating the film’s sitespecific, “authentic atmosphere,” Eisner notably buttresses essentialist, Orientalist views of Indian people, here seen as outside of history.

A new film in the series of Himansu Rai fi lms, A Throw of Dice translates “Nala and Damayanti,” India’s beautiful old Mahabharata legend of the dice-obsessed royal gambler who loses wife and kingdom, into the purely human realm, freeing the story from the influence of demons and gods. The value of the Himansu Rai films lies in the fact that no European actors, with the help of make-up, imitate Indians for a few days of shooting. People of the noblest and oldest of all races play themselves—the maharaja’s favorite wives all pale by comparison. 2 The filmic action gains its compelling immediacy from this fact. Three Europeans were involved in the work: Max Jungk, who adapted the Indian legend; Emil Schünemann, the cameraman; and director Franz Osten. It is to their credit that they did not falsify the Indian atmosphere or force the Indian actors to adopt Western methods. The fi lm thus becomes a dramatic spectacle [“Schau”-“Spiel”] in the truest sense of the term.3 The element of spectacle [Schaumoment] is there on its own accord, emerging from what is, for us, the fairytale-like world of the East. And the dramatic action remains in the framework of Indian theater art: fixed gestures that lent a millennia-old culture eternal standing and that were passed down to these people in flesh and blood, the people’s appearances and departures rhythmically bound in their succession. Nothing of these gestures has been destroyed. What would have been a shortcoming of European film becomes a valuable element of Indian fi lm: the acute proximity to theater is its prerequisite for success. Franz Osten’s adoption of this tradition, his desire not to bridge the gap by filmic means, and his decision to let the entire scenic action play itself out lends the Himansu Rai film its unique character. An Indian, Promode Nath, created the sets when India’s cities and maharajas’ castles weren’t used. He, too, retains the authentic atmosphere. Nowhere does one have the sense of studio sets or cardboard pageantry. With plain certainty, he creates the requisite framework. The cameraman Emil Schünemann supports him in this regard with his clear, beautiful shots. He also leaves out mawkishness and false Oriental pomp. Images of the masses are striking. People making their way through jungle trees and underbrush with elephants; an armed throng in a cloud of dust—all of this is immediately captured and extracted. What’s compelling about the people in the film is their absolute timelessness. Modern Indians and Indians of the old legends: there is no difference. The unified interaction of all players becomes crucial as well. Himansu Rai, the Indian film star, does not set himself off from the others, even when lending the figure of the king sharp contours. In characterizing the figure, he remains within his race’s expressive will, within the fixed rituals of gesture.

64

Transformations of Experience

The others appear this way as well: Charu Roy, near-natural in his smile and in the radiance of his eyes; Seeta Devi, a lovely Sunita; the first child, Lala Bizoykishen; Modhu Bose, Sarada Gupta, Sincouri Chakrabarty, all striking in type. The audience had the sense of receiving something truly authentic and responded to the film with appreciative cheers. Notes 1. Franz Osten, “Lebende und tote Historie,“ in UFA Feuilleton no. 2 (January 10, 1929). 2. An allusion to Robert Dinesen’s Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha (The maharaja’s favorite wife, 1917) and its two sequels. See also Franc Cornel’s text earlier in this chapter (no. 22) and Herbert Tannenbaum’s in chapter 5 (no. 72). 3. Eisner here plays on the dual meaning of the term Schauspiel. While commonly referring to a drama, its theatrical production, or the building where it is staged, the compound noun can also denote a spectacular sight or occurrence. In the context of this film, the root word Spiel also evokes gambling.

27 ERICH BURGER Pictures-Pictures First published as “Bilder-Bilder,” in Edmund Bucher and Albrecht Kindt, eds., Film Photos wie noch nie (Giessen: Kindt und Bucher, 1929), 11–12. Translated by Sara Hall.

A critic for the Berliner Tageblatt, Erich Burger here observes a visual turn in mass culture with the advent and popularization of photography, cinema, and illustrated newspapers. With its emphasis on the ubiquity of images, the text recalls Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 “Photography” essay, where he had invoked a “flood of photos” and claimed that the world itself had adopted a “photographic face.” Burger’s text also anticipates elements of Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis in “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) insofar as it links film technology with the Betriebsamkeit (hustle and bustle) and dominant scopic regime of the modern era, as well as with the creation of a “second reality.” “Pictures-Pictures” is the introduction to a book with 1,200 film stills and brief texts by the world’s leading actors, filmmakers, and theorists. Burger had also published the study Charlie Chaplin: Bericht seines Lebens, which featured over 120 images; Kracauer reviewed the book in the Frankfurter Zeitung on December 2, 1928.

The key word of the times is the picture: the still picture, the moving picture, the picture in every guise. No longer does the photograph have the simple significance of a memento that you carry around with you in your billfold or that you carefully preserve in the most protected corner of a glass case. No, the days are gone when a picture was nothing but a museum attraction, eye candy for holidays, an apt activity for family gatherings, the filling for the gold frames of loving couples. The picture, the photograph, has penetrated our most mundane life, saturated every minute. Each second it races before our eyes in a thousand forms: another one, a new one, again and again. Suddenly the world turns more quickly; each second becomes precious. Who could ever be familiar with all the books that have been written? Who could read all the newspapers that are peddled in the streets, morning, noon, evening, and night? Who can listen to these eternal operas that start at five o’clock and end at midnight? Who can do it?

The World in Motion

65

Or is it all only a fairy tale? Is it all only the desperate attempt to come up with an alibi for superficiality, for nervousness, for a lack of concentration? Are we all kidding ourselves in the end when we want to set ourselves in motion with such marvelous agility, when no tempo seems fast enough, and no amount of horsepower strong enough? Let’s be honest here: we are spoiled. We are spoiled. By the picture, the still picture, the motion picture, by the picture in every guise. The picture, and now there is talk of the moving picture, of film. It has all kinds of possibilities. The picture is information. The picture is play. The picture is fate. The picture is restlessness. The picture is calm. The picture can be anything; it can provide everything when it runs through the projection machine—thirty small pictures per second. In the end the picture’s hellish tempo is the reason why we convince ourselves that we must always hurry and can no longer walk slowly. The picture is responsible for it all. A narcotic. A rush. We want to see. Foreign countries, foreign people. Travel—what for? The entire world lies spread before us in the picture, beautiful and glorious, so far and yet so near. A southern sky, the Grand Canal, the Colosseum, Notre Dame, the Bois de Boulogne, the gardens of Versailles—why bother with tickets, train travel, hotel receipts when everything can be reached so easily for one mark in admission, sometimes for less? We want to see more and more. We want to see what’s new, what just happened, the current events, the very latest. Wait a moment, please. That’s it. Two hours ago there were demonstrations in the city; an hour and a half ago, a huge fire; an hour ago, the greatest man of all time arrived in Berlin. It just happened and the man at the crank captured it with the claws of his camera. Already, it unfurls before our eyes, all for one admission price. We want to see more and more, more and more. A comic play? A triviality. From Harlequin to henpecked husbands, from the most ridiculed Greek king to the chic ice-dancer, everything is captured on film. The price remains the same. We want to see; we cannot get enough of it. Destiny. Why bother with experiencing it? Why bother going to see it staged festively with words? The picture, the fi lm with its long fi ngers, captures it too. It points its mighty eyes in that direction too. Its territory lies there too—immeasurable, inestimable, and perhaps for that very reason still lit from the worst angle. But it is also possible, even today, that a film would unfurl destiny. And one day— tomorrow or certainly the day after—the impossibility of the dangerous shadow of hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and dishonesty playing a role in film will completely disappear. For if film comes to completely possess that which is still a certain rarity today— clarity even in things human, genuineness, and assured honesty—then the last hurdle has been faced, the last, the most difficult, the most significant. Then we have reached the end-object of all possibilities. But can film ever arrive at the end point of its many possibilities? Can the moment ever arise when one says, “It stops here, it cannot go any further”? Too many people have already burned their tongues in this matter. When it comes to film, too many people have seen their ideas surpassed and their words belied by new and unimagined facts. Anything is possible; that is the only standpoint one can take with film—with the moving picture, which can be the daily cause of new surprises, new developments and new blows to the status quo. The moving picture, its technology, and its own laws have created a second reality, a reality that exists free and lifelike alongside ours. The simplest, almost banally simple,

66

Transformations of Experience

example: the speed of a racing car chase, a speed that we could never, never, never achieve without breaking several bones—this speed is suddenly there, irrefutable and visible: a fact on the screen. Who would continue to doubt this new reality, which is a deception and still reality, which is a scam and yet genuine? The second reality, which makes every utopia wildly and uninhibitedly tangible, could be a life that we all wish for ourselves, a life that were we to possess, however, would quickly be over because our legs would buckle on the new terrain. But up there, on the screen of the cinema for half an hour or more, yes, there the wish for such a crazy and limitless life does not end. Before this dream play can come to an end, the entire to-do is over and we are once again in the middle of our own ordinary reality. If, however, the second reality becomes something more than the shadow of a dream, if it is built out of the bricks of our own reality; if at this point these two realities touch upon one another, then playful artistry would give way to bitter seriousness, the seriousness of a new art. The Russians, radical huntsmen of reality, have borne the flag here, and when the life that they found in the picture differed a thousandfold from our life, the foundation stood fast and invincible. No human being wants to see himself portrayed down to a hair in moving pictures. Oh God, no. But he does want to be able to recognize something that resembles him, even if only in a motion, in a stride or a small tilt of the head. It will move him, and it moves him doubly when he experiences an intensification of his own life, a similarity that erases itself, a relationship that is vaguely but surely perceptible. The restlessness of the picture is our restlessness; the calm of the picture, our calm. The relationships become clear; their existence is not limited to the length of time today’s human being spends in the cinema. Restlessness and calm—again the film, the moving picture, has placed something new in the world between them: slow motion—motion in calmness and calmness in motion. At first one laughed about this strange invention—the fastest runner condemned to a snail’s pace. Was one’s own speed insulted? Then the laughing stopped, and people recognized the salutary mean between calm and restlessness. In the end, the same picture that spoiled us gives us the sign: regulating our speed via slow motion.

28 ALFRED POLGAR The Panic of Reality First published as “Panik der Wirklichkeit,” in Das Tage-Buch 11, no. 38 (September 20, 1930), 1524f. Translated by Sara Hall.

Alfred Polgar (1873–1955) was a Viennese writer and critic who published in numerous newspapers and cultural journals during the Weimar era and later wrote film scripts for MGM in Hollywood. His text here considers film’s spatiotemporal relations in light of the advent of sound technology, which, as he argues, allows newsreels not only to extract and infinitely repeat audiovisual phenomena but also to exert a stronger, even uncanny grip on the external world.

The audible newsreel—or one might just as easily say the visible news recording—which the Fox Company had the honor of presenting, made a deep impression on all the

The World in Motion

67

viewers and listeners.1 From now on, therefore, whatever happens in the world will happen again as often as we need or desire it to; we will be able to experience what we did not experience; whoever once screamed (whether from desperation or for any other reason) will scream again on demand; events will come to those who were not present; and incidents will find witnesses they did not have. You see, my son, time is becoming space here. Chariots of war, equipped and manned by the Fox Company, are rolling over the earth. Gigantic and threatening, these police tanks in the service of the terrible cinema are for the moment 110 strong. They capture reality in sound and image; there is no escape. Without mercy, they raid the world of phenomena, snapping up anything suspected of being interesting before it can even think of taking fl ight. Quick as death, Fox sneaks up on things and people; they have to go, whether prepared to or not. In defense of reality—which would otherwise fall into a state of ongoing panic, losing all traces of its simplicity—we could require Fox’s terrible chariots to sound a signal upon their approach, like fire trucks and ambulances. Is the insecurity of urban streets not already bad enough? Do we also wish to see things deteriorate intellectually to an unbearable level? Is it not enough to see the violence that the talking fi lm inflicted on the theater—that artfully polished mirror of reality? Do we also wish to see it destroy all semblance of balance in reality itself, by confronting reality with the constant threat of sudden capture? The first audible newsreel presented, among other things, the genuine sounds of Indians crying out in pain as they were pummeled by the English police in the streets of Bombay; it showed life-size—or actually death-size—images of a young American pilot fatally plunging from his airplane. Both numbers enjoyed great success; both gripped the public and earned great critical favor for the company that had the honor of presenting them. True to life, the Indians whimpered and writhed beneath the blows of the civil militia, and the young pilot fell “in heavy, slow somersaults” into the ocean. 2 His misfortune was Fox’s good luck. Nobody asked the pilot whether he wanted himself and his demise to be recorded in sound and image. And so today, for a paying public, although earning no royalties himself, he continues to plunge, over and over, in heavy, slow somersaults into the ocean—twice on workdays and three times on Sundays. Sound film is a wonderful thing, if only because it makes 50 percent of the cinema’s magic accessible to the blind (though, to be sure, it takes from the deaf 50 percent of their previous pleasure in the cinema). But now, set loose upon reality, it appears as gruesome as life itself, whose incidents, accidents, and disasters it hunts down with an unquenchable greed and, for the moment, 110 war chariots. Will anyone who falls under the wheels of a car, for example, also have to fear, from now on, falling into the clutches of the audible newsreel? The full life of mankind, blessed with the ominous talent of being interesting wherever you grab hold of it, is already moaning sufficiently on account of the bad habit poets have of digging into it. Now the sound film is behaving like the poets in order to meet its need for raw materials to appease its clientele. Could we blame reality if, hunted as it is, it loses its desire to be present altogether? Notes 1. Fox had presented its first sound newsreel—later renamed Fox Movietone News—at New York’s Roxy Theatre in April 1927, and this newsreel ran until 1963. In Germany, the Fox Tönende Wochenschau (Fox Sound Newsreel) ran from 1930 to 1940 and from 1950 to 1978. This newsreel had its debut on September 11, 1930, just a week before Polgar’s article was published. 2. See also Kracauer’s essay “Todessturz eines Fliegers” (An aviator’s fatal plunge), Frank furter Zeitung, February 5, 1932.

68

Transformations of Experience

29 BÉLA BALÁZS The Case of Dr. Fanck First published as “Der Fall Dr. Fanck,” foreword to Stürme über dem Montblanc: Ein Filmbildbuch von Dr. Arnold Fanck, nach dem gleichnamigen Film (Basel: Concordia Verlag, 1931), v–x. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

An illustrated book accompanied Arnold Fanck’s Stürme über dem Montblanc (Storm over Mont Blanc), which premiered on December 25, 1930. In the foreword, Béla Balázs defends Fanck’s corpus of mountain films against common criticisms, celebrating their grand images of nature and seeking to recover a Romantic “feeling for nature” (Naturgefühl) for a progressive politics, especially at a time of fierce social struggle. Published almost two decades after Häfker’s Cinema and Geography (see no. 19), Balázs’s text—alongside “The Weekly Newsreel” by Siegfried Kracauer (no. 30)— reveals how politically contentious representations of the natural world had become by the late Weimar era. (See also Kracauer’s 1925 review of Fanck’s Der Berg des Schicksals [The mountain of destiny, 1924] in chapter 3, no. 42.) In 1931, Balázs would write the screenplay for Leni Riefenstahl’s mountain film Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932) and would move to Moscow to work on a film project for the Meschrabpom production company.

There is a “Case of Dr. Fanck,” because people get worked up over him. Dr. Fanck is not praised, but rather loved—not criticized, but rather attacked. Appraisals of his work do not just contradict each other, but also themselves. He is an annoyance to many who admire him. He is a problem child whom people often mistreat, as if it were a matter of principle. The opposing camps, one suspects, may be more than just cinemagoers with differing taste. There is a Case of Dr. Fanck, and if we want to examine it, it would be best to establish what we can all indisputably agree upon in all camps and countries: Dr. Fanck is the greatest cinematographer of nature. He was the first to allow for the enormous pathos of full-scale cosmic images to emerge on film. He opened up a gargantuan world of titans for us and, with his camera, threw our human vision into the middle of it all, forcing us to live amongst them. (Since even his enemies grant him this, we may perhaps be permitted to interpose a question before proceeding. How many filmmakers—or creators of any kind—do we have in Germany today of whom we can say that they opened up a new world, that they created something for the first time and are unsurpassed in the entire world in this regard? Or is it historically insignificant when nature appears as a living being for the first time in an art form and lends cosmic monumentality to a form that had been all too anecdotal until that point? And will Dr. Fanck be properly recognized, as such an undisputed accomplishment surely deserves?) But there are many who reproach Dr. Fanck for mixing stories of petty human destinies into the grand images of his mountain world. This is one of those critiques that contradicts itself. Is there another way to represent grandeur than to juxtapose it with the relative minuteness of everyday human life? Not even spatial grandeur can be represented any other way, let alone the gargantuan pathos of the grandeur of a natural force. One of us must have already sensed it, in order for us to feel it; one of us must have already suffered it, so that we can experience it. For before Dr. Fanck, others had already photographed series of beautiful landscapes. But his mountains become dramatic because

The World in Motion

69

they take part in the drama. Dr. Fanck directs glaciers and avalanches and storms over Mont Blanc. Natural elements become dramatic elements, living beings, because they encounter human beings. The cliff seems threatening because it is threatening somebody and is seen through the eyes of the person being threatened. The snowstorm becomes a terrifying fate because it intervenes in the fate of humans. It becomes the antagonist in the struggle because it opposes the aims, the fierce will of a human. Thus, nature has a countenance in Dr. Fanck’s films. And that is how art begins. For nature itself, when seen objectively, is the domain of science or picture postcards. Whoever praises Dr. Fanck’s images of nature praises their lyrical significance as experienced by people, as well as the role they adopt as dramatic characters in a dramatic plot. “Yes, but this plot,” people often say, “is artificial and kitschy.” Do not poetry, direction, and dramatic action start with the creation of figures, characters? And are the vast majority of figures and characters in Dr. Fanck’s pictures—namely, his mountains and storms—not indisputably recognized as staggeringly monumental? In Dr. Fanck’s films, they become active figures. Is the creator of such figures not a poet, not a director? “Yes, but his people,” they say, “but his people!” . . . Now, take his hero, his meteorologist, that Sepp Rist!1 . . . Was there a single critic who could have doubted that he was a part of this natural environment, that every move, every glance, every gesture was born from these stones and storms? But in the optical art of film, appearance decides the character that the director creates with his selection of human types. Is the person who discovered this man not a poet, not a director? And those who proclaim loudest that film directors should not use professional actors but people from real life and from nature reproached Fanck because Rist was not an actor, but simply a person. No, he is not an actor [Darsteller] but a peerless embodiment [Darstellung] of stark, authentic, unkitschy masculinity. Neither an athlete nor a film hero, but rather someone whose job requires dangerous work. That childish fear in his stony face at the sight of his frozen hands! That tearful frailty in the snowstorm! Certainly one of the most significant film performances of the last several years . . . Was it recognized? “Yes, yes, but this superfluous love story” . . . Of course, nowadays, the German press is, from head to toe, against love, 2 and there may be good reasons for it. But is it not striking that this Mont Blanc love story indeed proceeds without a single love scene? Those who accept schmaltzy love songs and kisses that last for fifty meters in every other film without making a fuss refuse to recognize that hardly a romantic glance is exchanged in this long film? If we nonetheless understand that two people are in love, the director must have conveyed this with a very delicate touch. “But the whole story is so outlandish and improbable.”—Admittedly, there is some truth to that. The incidents of normal, everyday human life don’t usually occur at an elevation of over four thousand meters. Indeed, this is exactly why we take an interest in this amazing place, which establishes the amazement of the story. For what kind of people might naturally come together at this height? Meteorologist, pilot, astronomer. Perhaps this purely logical construction is a bit naïve and fantastic. But there is nothing more fantastic than a natural setting in which we are not at home. What we see there is truly unadulterated nature. That we see it is completely unnatural, for it is not intended for the human eye, for it is not natural to see storms that no human being could possibly survive. It is not natural to experience death incarnate. But during the meteorologist’s primordial struggle against the snowstorm, which streams over the avalanche’s dark crevasse to the pealing of bells and the chorus of “Dies irae” on the cabin radio, the possibility of such situations is the most uncannily fantastic.

70

Transformations of Experience

But people are afraid of the fantastic. Not without reason, to be sure. Overly anxious people (those romantics with their bad omens) celebrate every day-to-day banality as if it were a redemptive discovery. Though they are capable of it, the overly anxious do not recognize that the two aforementioned storm scenes in Mont Blanc are among the most powerful that film has ever produced: Heroic battle scenes of the creature that has transgressed the natural boundaries intended as his home, to stand face-to-face with the dark universe. Beyond the boundaries of life, where only the miracle of the human will can hold out. In spite of all that, there are surely some things to take issue with in the Fanckean film stories. And people indeed do so with vigor and vehemence, as if all other films were irreproachable masterpieces. And that is the suspicious part. Mistakes seldom draw such attacks. Upon closer examination, it is usually the quality films that are so provocative. In the Mont Blanc film, people again attacked the love story. But I don’t think that was what aroused so much opposition; rather, it was what was generally recognized: the grandness of the images of nature. We are in the midst of a difficult social struggle, and one cannot hold it against those who are dead serious about this struggle if they reject representations of a natural struggle between creature and cosmic elements as ostensibly outside the social sphere, indeed even potentially “distracting” with their seductive beauty. In this form of opposition, which should be taken very seriously, resides the greatest recognition of Dr. Fanck’s artistic, formative power. However, the antipathy toward Fanckean natural pathos reveals itself above all in those circles that are not so deadly serious about the social struggle, certainly not enough to wish to derive any consequences from it. Rather, their antipathy is directed toward the grand revolutionary pathos of the Russian fi lms as well . . . and thus apparently toward pathos in general. It is best to leave them dryly uninvolved in their comfortable objectivity, which demands no commitment, no sacrifice, no fanaticism. But those who are serious about the social struggle should be the last to allow feelings for nature to be monopolized by those who use it as a form of diversion and opium—just as they should not cede music to them. The sirens’ song did not become dangerous for Odysseus, and it will likewise be unable to divert anyone who has bound himself firmly enough to his ship’s mast and is determined to stay the course. Notes 1. The Bavarian Sepp Rist made his debut as the male protagonist, Hannes, in Storm over Mont Blanc, and went on to star in Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S. Eisberg (S.O.S. Iceberg, 1933) and Der ewige Traum (The eternal dream, 1934). Rist had a forty-year acting career in German cinema and television, including in postwar Heimatfilme. 2. Balázs here makes an ironic reference to Friedrich Hollaender’s song, “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt” (literally, “I am, from head to toe, ready for love,” or in the English version, “Falling in Love Again”), as sung by Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930). Balázs’s original text reads: “Die deutsche Presse ist heute von Kopf bis Fuß gegen Liebe eingestellt.”

30 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER The Weekly Newsreel First published as “Die Filmwochenschau,” in Die neue Rundschau 42, no. 2 (October 1931), 573–75. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The World in Motion

71

Recalling ideas from “Photography,” his famous essay of 1927, Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) here issues a critique of the newsreels produced by major studios, arguing that they both distract audiences from socioeconomic circumstances and naturalize the current social order. Much as O. Th. Stein, writing in 1913–14 (see no. 18), had criticized the slogan of Pathé newsreels (“Sees everything and reports on everything”), Kracauer condemns the rhetoric of the Ufa, Fox, and Paramount studios, contending that their claims to comprehensive, global coverage obscure the ideological biases of their newsreels. In 1931, Kracauer had written two other articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung on the newsreel genre—“Fußball, Vorkriegsliebe und Revolution” on February 2 and “Mischmasch” on September 22—and he draws significantly from both texts in the essay here.

The weekly newsreel, whether produced by Ufa, Fox, or Paramount, knows no greater aspiration than to encompass the entire world.1 However, the world in these weekly reports is not at all the world itself but rather that which is left over when all the most important events have been taken out. A shabby residual world, which the fi lm industry either actually believes to be the cosmos or which it just places in front of the audience in order to defraud them of the sight of the true world. In any case, the argument put forward by people in production circles to defend the standard newsreels—namely, that they have to limit themselves to the things shown there due to a lack of resources—does not seem very sound to me. It is not thrift that is chasing our chroniclers away from the world; it is the unacknowledged, or even conscious, fear of the world’s disenchantment. For if they showed things the way they are and as they tend to happen, cinema spectators could become agitated and begin to doubt the benevolence of our contemporary social order. Naturally, the film industry, which is quite interested in this order, wants to avoid that at all costs. And since it is not in a position to provide the people with bread, it at least treats them to circus spectacles, which malnourish them with illusions. One part of the permanent repertoire is the elemental catastrophe. Even granting that burning oil tanks, railroad catastrophes, and flood plains are among the most gratifying subjects of film, recognizing this fact neither justifies their regular reappearance nor does it disprove the possibility that there are other, no less gratifying subjects whose representation would be far more enlightening. The fact that the weekly newsreel producers do not take advantage of such opportunities, but rather persist with earthquakes and destructive storms, comes not least from their desire to avoid events taking place within human society. Through images of natural turmoil, to which they retreat over and over again, the viewer gets the idea that societal events are just as unavoidable as any flood disaster. Constantly receiving outbreaks of natural violence served up as news, the spectator automatically transfers natural laws of causality to human conditions and inevitably ends up mistaking the crisis of the capitalist system for a geological tremor. This effect of the weekly newsreel, if not intentional, is certainly welcomed by interested parties. It is tantamount to a mythologization of social life; it makes us believe in the immutability of our social infrastructure and cripples our will to change it. Scenes with children and animals follow the activities of elemental forces. Surely a week has never gone by in which zoology has not celebrated a triumph or a baby has not enraptured audiences. The occasional appearance of this being who does not—or at least not yet—belong to the social world, would be a permissible distraction; its continuous depiction signifies a diversion from the reality of adults. We suffer from this reality, and in order to avoid exposing it, they divert to Neverland, whose eternal intrusion into the weekly newsreel also testifies to the audience’s desire, gladly indulged by producers, to

72

Transformations of Experience

see themselves reflected in the preconscious state of children. This onslaught of babies corresponds to the tendency of wide swaths of society to renounce their maturity, which would require a conscious analysis of social relations on their part. 2 For easily comprehensible reasons, they resist an upheaval of the status quo, and instead of looking adversity in the face like men, they return to the repressed state of those creatures that as yet know nothing of this adversity. I remember an animal film narrated by Hagenbeck in a fashion that can only be described as childish. 3 It is not that I want to scold him for unhesitatingly referring to a female elephant as “Mrs. Mama.” But his tone verifies the one thing that concerns me here: that this passion for babies and animals demonstrates the infantilism that is either present in the masses or is being bred into them. And this artificial childishness corresponds completely to the stubborn naïveté that is satisfied ad nauseam by not only filmstrips on the raging elements but also the expedition films that have become so popular. By the power of an unofficial customary law, athletic competitions have also been granted a regular spot in the weekly newsreels. Alongside the dedication of monuments and battleships, military exercises, and other pageantries—which are seldom actually captivating, more often supporting reactionary tendencies or serving as fillers that say absolutely nothing—such competitions turn up with a tenacity that borders on monotony. In Germany, in the United States, in England—indeed everywhere—one sees soccer games, motorcycle races, and horse races, always in the same venues and always met by an enormous crush of enthusiastic masses, and always filmed. No doubt, these stereotypical shots of sporting events, which are already familiar before we have seen them, are not only supposed to satisfy the audience’s expert interests but also to reinforce the attitude that gives rise to the alarming exaggerations of sports culture. Just as the all-too-frequent recurrence of such films lends athletics a significance that does not befit it in comparison with social and political activities, it also obstructs the recognition of many events that are definitively more newsworthy than athletics. Such films thus fulfill almost the same goal as the uninterrupted repetition of images of children and animals. Besides, the cursory quality of most sports reports serves as proof that they are an expression of thoughtlessness, whose only purpose is to close our eyes and ears so that we can neither see nor hear. Not long ago, a radical film society, which has since disbanded, made an attempt to use archival material to put together a newsreel that really penetrated into our circumstances.4 It was subjected to censorship and lived only a short life. In any case, this experiment teaches us that simply by arranging the standard newsreel differently, one can make it more incisive. Furthermore, it seems to me that without running any appreciable risk, the film industry could confidently show more of the world than it currently chooses to encompass. There is still a lot of material to film in Germany, and the audience would probably have no objection to learning a little, every now and then, about the human or inhuman circumstances in which we live. Notes 1. Ufa’s newsreel had superseded the Messter-Woche newsreel in 1925. In 1930, Ufa’s first sound newsreel included a short presentation by Emil Jannings, who stated: “Nothing will ever happen again anywhere in the world without your being an eye- and ear-witness to it. If a volcano erupts, our cameraman will be there. If a tiger roars, our cameraman will be on the watch for him. Our sound camera won’t miss a thing. It will bring you the crowning of the beauty queen and the heavyweight champion of the world’s greetings to his country.” Quoted in Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 177. 2. See also Kracauer’s essay “Zum Paradies der Babys,” Frank furter Zeitung, September 12, 1931.

The World in Motion

73

3. On Hagenbeck, see note 1 in the text by Cornel (no. 22). See also Kracauer’s essay “Über den Umgang mit Tieren,” Frank furter Zeitung, September 28, 1930. 4. Kracauer is referring here to the Volksverband für Filmkunst (see chapter 11), about which he had devoted an article in the Frank furter Zeitung on May 1, 1928. The film in question is Ernst Angel and Albrecht Viktor Blum’s short compilation newsreel Zeitbericht—Zeitgesicht (Report of the times—Face of the times, 1928).

THREE

THE TIME MACHINE

31 LUDWIG BRAUNER Cinematographic Archives First published as “Kinematographische Archive,” in Der Kinematograph 97 (November 4, 1908), 1–2. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In 1895, Thomas Edison had already characterized his moving picture camera, the Kinetograph, as a “new way of recording history,” especially through its capacity to faithfully reproduce phenomena and to re-present them for centuries to come. “What a way to write history!,” exclaimed Edison in an interview. “How much more effectively one could convey to future generations an idea of the President than words and writing could! In fact, written records would cease to have their historical importance.”1 Countless early German commentators shared this sense of the new medium’s potential to reshape conceptions of time and history. Among them was Ludwig Brauner, a film critic and regular contributor to Der Kinematograph, who here calls for the creation of “cinematographic archives” in German municipalities. Like Edison, Brauner juxtaposes film with traditional sources of historical reconstruction, distinguishing the new medium not only for its impartial recording of past events but also for its vivid and effortless documentation. In this regard, as Brauner suggests, the cinematograph facilitates a novel mode of historical experience, providing an alternative to the dry antiquarianism of nineteenth-century scholarship. Brauner was not, in fact, the first to propose a film archive; ten years before, Boleslas Matuszewski had authored a brochure, Une nouvelle source de l’histoire (1898), advocating the establishment of a Depository of Historical Cinematography in Paris. In a chapter entitled “Cinema at the Service of History: The Role of Newsreels” from an unpublished book manuscript (ca. 1936), French filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac would echo Brauner, writing: “What lessons could have been learnt if the cinema had been invented a hundred years earlier, if it could have captured the ancien régime and then the events and people of the French Revolution! A newsreel is a machine for writing history.”2

Among the most reliable sources of historical scholarship are certainly those collections of papers, accrued through official means and preserved for official purposes, to which historical significance should be ascribed as testimonies of the past. But in these collections, which are called archives, only records and files find admission—that is, dry documents from which a vivid picture of a particular past era must be laboriously reconstructed with the help of a keen combination of records and descriptions from contemporaries stored in libraries. But even the finest descriptions of past conditions do

74

The Time Machine

75

not provide a fully clear image of the vanished period, because those who oversee its restoration customarily regard them from their personal, not always unbiased, point of view, such that unclarities creep in time and again. Let us imagine the possibility that the cinematograph today boasted not an age of a little over ten years but rather one of a hundred years, and that motion pictures of the socalled good old days were handed down to us. What a vivid picture these unaltered, truthful documents would offer us of a past era! A single fi lmstrip would be able to reveal more to us than two dozen books created through laborious research and protracted study. Let us take only a street scene. What information would it offer about the life and goings-on in a small city back then? It would show us not only clothing and shoes but also the way of walking, the salutations, the social forms, the types of movement on the street, the traffic on the street—in short, everything that we currently have to first imagine on the basis of surviving paintings, engravings, and descriptions. A single filmstrip would give us information about a thousand little things that we no longer know and that therefore appear unfamiliar and strange. A single filmstrip would offer us the possibility of capturing the spirit of that time in living form; it could serve us as an infallible model for costume designs, for theatrical figures and scenery, for applied arts, and so on. Such images would be of inestimable value for cultural history and thereby the best and most welcome study material. The phonograph, Edison’s ingenious invention, which first appeared in usable form in 1877, has been placed in the service of scientific research for around a decade and fi nds particular use as a linguist and conservator of voices and modes of speech of famous contemporaries. In several countries there are already phonographic archives in which not only the voices of many greats are preserved for posterity but also, in those under scientific leadership, work is directed toward conserving the differences in dialect of a small, local linguistic regions on cylinders or records for future generations. Because of these archives, our descendants will always be able to hear the voices of long-dead national heroes or to discern how the dialect of a particular region has changed through better public education, immigration of foreigners, or other circumstances. How much more interesting and, above all, how much more significant it would be for science if, through the cinematograph, one would preserve in living form particular moments from the developmental history of our cultural sites for the coming generations. Systematically recorded images of the current conditions of our streets, our squares, our games, our social forms, our means of transportation would be material of practically infinite value for the generation that, in the year 2000, will probably not only rule the solid earth but also the air. Would it not be wonderful if this very generation had a wellmade image of that historical moment when Count Zeppelin completed his grand longdistance journey and, for a moment, had to emerge defeated in the struggle with the natural elements?3 Whereas the phonograph, the conservator of the sound perceivable by the ear, can give us a complete picture only of a particular occurrence, such as the approach of the fire brigade, with the help of our imagination, imagination is entirely unnecessary with the cinematograph, the conservator of the real event. It gives a surprisingly clear, completely lucid image and allows the researcher to make each individual little picture into an object of thorough investigation with the help of a magnifying lens or the projection.4 The cinematograph fixes the event, so to speak, into occurrences of hundredths of a second and is thus infinitely more valuable than the phonograph. But entirely separate from scientific research, the larger cities and municipalities must also be intent on the establishment of cinematographic archives. In all larger cities,

76

Transformations of Experience

especially those with historic pasts, folk festivals and pageants recur every year in different variations, or parades on the occasion of some anniversary are staged at not-insignificant cost, as well as receptions of foreign deputations, visits of monarchs, or other events that involve a festive or commemorative day for the city in question. They will surely be neatly registered in the so-called city chronicle and preserved through photographic records, but these are just descriptions, not living representations. However, if cinematographic films, in which important and interesting events are recorded in living motion, were to be incorporated into the archive, then a considerable advantage could emerge from it not only for posterity but also now and again for contemporaries. How pleasant it would have been, for example, for the arrangers of the Imperial Tribute Parade in Vienna if they could have visualized the famous Makart Parade of 1879 in palpable vitality!5 From the entire splendor of this unsurpassed parade, nothing remains but the models for the parade groups and floats, as well as some miscellaneous photographic records. From the occasional celebrations of other cities often not even this remains, and yet no dynastic or patriotic festival, no city anniversary, no commemorative festival of a momentous historical event goes by without a parade. The ceremonial laying of the first stone of municipal buildings, the unveilings of monuments, dedications of bridges or churches, and countless other occasions that represent a milestone in communal development for the township in question should prompt every municipal area to record such moments on film and to incorporate them into the municipal cinematographic archive. These occasional recordings alone would constitute an inestimable enrichment and improvement of the current archives, but the value of such collections can still be considerably increased. Systematically recorded images, which would be replicated every ten years, could track the entire developmental history of a city in living pictures; they could later provide precise information about important details of our entire contemporary traffic system, our business life, our industry, our political life, and so on. Once municipal cinematographic archives exist, it is only a step toward state cinematographic archives and an imperial archive, which would need to have their particular spheres of activity. Unfortunately, apart from the recognition that it has already received in some cases in the realms of foreign ethnology and of scientific, especially medical cinematography, the cinematograph is still too often regarded as a toy or a curious device whose potency one can well marvel or laugh at in variétés or in a specially built theater, but which one does not yet think properly capable of a serious cultural mission. And yet, for the realm of a cinematographic archive, there are no limits at all, and its benefit is so obvious that it is surprising not to see it introduced yet, at least in Germany. Already in 1905, the city council of Paris passed the praiseworthy resolution to set up a cinematographic archive and, through separate municipal operators, to have systematic pictures of notable public events and images of urban and folk life recorded. Cinematography must now show gratifying progress in Germany, as well, and our cinematographic manufacturers would do well to interest the administrations of the major German cities in the establishment of municipal cinematographic archives. In many cases, it will require only the proposal to win over city councils for this purpose, and once it becomes known that this or that magistrate has authorized the establishment of a municipal cinematographic archive, then there is a sure chance that smaller cities will also follow and take an interest in the establishment of cinematographic archives for the benefit of the domestic cinematographic industry. Notes 1. E. C. Kenyon, Thomas Alva Edison: The Telegraph-Boy Who Became a Great Inventor (London/ Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1895), 112–13.

The Time Machine

77

2. Germaine Dulac, “Cinema at the Service of History: The Role of Newsreels,” in Sian Reynolds, “Germaine Dulac and Newsreel: 3 Articles,” Screening the Past 12 (2001), http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au /humanities/screeningthepast/classics/cl0301/gdcl12a.htm. 3. The first successful Zeppelin flight, twelve hours long, took place over Switzerland on July 1, 1908. It was followed by a devastating setback on August 5, 1908, when a sudden storm tore the airship from its moorings and caused it to crash. In sympathy for the national project, the German public collected over six million marks for the construction of a new airship. 4. A researcher would inspect the actual filmstrip and magnify an individual frame, as opposed to viewing the projected moving images. 5. The Imperial Tribute Parade (Kaiserhuldigungsfestzug) was a pageant on June 12, 1908, honoring the Austrian emperor Franz Josef I, who reigned from 1848 until his death in 1916. The Makart Parade of 1879 was a legendary pageant commemorating the silver wedding anniversary of Franz Josef and his wife, Elisabeth of Bavaria. Organized by the painter and designer Hans Makart, the pageant included theatrically decorated floats and thousands of participants dressed in historical costume.

32 BERTHOLD VIERTEL In the Cinematographic Theater First published as “Im Kinematographentheater,” in März 4, no. 20 (October 18, 1910), 173–74. Translated by Eric Ames.

In this article, written following a stately meeting of the German and Austrian emperors in Vienna, Berthold Viertel meditates on the uncanny temporality and the doppelgänger quality of cinematic representation, particularly in its obfuscation of the boundaries between past and present, and between lifelike images and tangible reality. Viertel’s description of moving pictures as ghostly doubles recurs in later texts in this chapter and also finds an echo in films such as Stellan Rye’s The Student of Prague (1913). His article also suggests the challenge that a technologically reproducible medium might pose to political sovereignty—a topic that Walter Benjamin would take up in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936). An Austrian-born poet and theater director, Viertel (1885–1953) also worked for Karl Kraus’s satirical journal Die Fackel from 1910 to 1911 and went on to write and direct films in Germany, the United States, and England.

Weeks have already passed since then, and the instant can now be safely seen as long gone, but that blessed moment had such pure symbolism, such vivid power, that the imagination never tires of conjuring up its wondrous presence again and again. Anyone who understands what it means to have memories will confirm that the raw, material abundance of events, for all its nourishing liveliness, tends to evaporate in an all too ghostly way, while certain shadow-play-like observations, which render our existence abstract and metaphorical, somehow persist with strange tenacity. Ordinarily, perspective has the practical value of orientation. One uses perspective without even noticing it. Yet sometimes a perspective creates an irony of the eye. One blinks and looks away, instead of looking on. The effects can be bizarre and sublime, exhilarating and shocking, comical and horrifying, depending on the situation. The pompously gesturing person becomes a marionette; the living heart perceives itself a bloodless doppelgänger. But it is precisely this ghost of life that persists in the soul, as if it were life’s essential meaning. That joyous time when our great ally, the German kaiser, made a symbolic visit to Vienna has also passed. Much good was done in those few days, many things worthy of

78

Transformations of Experience

eternal memory. Our city hall, otherwise home to the ugly heartlessness of petty bourgeois politics, kindly opened its doors to better, more dignified sentiments. The keeper of the cellar stood there in traditional German garb and offered a ceremonial drink. An homage painting was unveiled in all the wonder of its virginal newness. Gentlemen were introduced and deemed worthy of symbolic conversation. Heartfelt words about brotherhood, truly cordial words of love, were spoken and promptly transcribed in shorthand. The photographer was granted permission to shoot, and people posed for him in the court. And at five o’clock in the afternoon, the government business was moved to the hunting exhibition quarters. Yet all this seems to have passed once again. Not even the historical certainty that the Park Ring is no longer the old Park Ring can stop the irreverent flow of time.1 Soon I will have forgotten why the street has been renamed. But not this moment, when the two monarchs sat together in the cinematographic theater . . . and watched themselves. They saw a true likeness of themselves, one that appeared to speak, salute, and laugh. And the audience in the picture applauded. And the audience in the theater also applauded. And the monarchs in the picture showed their appreciation. And the real monarchs showed their appreciation in reality. But then, all of a sudden, one of the films ripped, and the theater went dark. At that moment, shivers went down my spine. What? Did that tear also go through the real people? Horrified, I asked myself, who here is the real one? I cannot get it out of my mind, this terrifying doubleness [Doppelgängertum] of representation. The chosen One, who ought to authenticate the existence of whole peoples simply by walking, talking, and saluting—indeed, walking, talking, and saluting as typically possible—doubled? Is one allowed to copy majesty so wantonly? Is it not too much for one moment to have two, no, four kings? Up there, on the screen, one of them fulfills his high duty, while below, in the theater, the same one sits as a mere mortal, taking human pleasure in the likeness of his dignity. Or does he merely fulfill his duty once again? Where does representation begin? Where does it end? And the people, twice present here, and therefore doubly delighted, cheering at their own cheers, hailing their naïve existence in the mirror: Is that not dangerous? Could they not become frightened, as if they had seen their own ghost? Could they not instinctively react and go mad? No, they cheer. If the film rips, it will be fixed. The danger exists only in the minds of those brooding thinkers and tinkerers who do not share the naïve mindset of the people anyway. And ultimately, even they must admit that the gestures of politics are especially well-suited for the cinematograph. Everything else is a ghostly apparition that vanishes in the light of His Majesty’s sun. Note 1. Vienna’s Park Ring was renamed Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring (after the German emperor Wilhelm II) in 1910, and it held this name until 1919.

33 EDUARD BÄUMER Cinematograph and Epistemology First published as “Kinematograph und Erkenntnislehre,” in Die Zukunft 20, no. 1 (1911), 7–10. Translated by Sara Hall.

79

The Time Machine From its early years, the cinematograph was noted for its ability not only to record, fragment, and re-present segments of time but also to stretch and contract them through the techniques of slow- and fast-motion. Written by a Berlin-based doctor, the following text examines the potential for motion photography to accelerate lengthy natural processes such as plant growth and thus to render otherwise imperceptible phenomena available for human observation and experience. Eduard Bäumer’s essay recalls the studies of chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey and biologist Jakob von Uexküll and also anticipates Weimar Kulturfilms such as Das Blumenwunder (The miracle of fl owers, 1926) as well as film-theoretical writings by Arnheim, Benjamin, Dulac, and Epstein. Invoking an intellectual-historical tradition of theorizing motion—one extending from Heraclitus to Constantin Brunner—Bäumer’s text is also remarkable for positing the cinematograph as a potential medium of philosophy. In this regard, Bäumer diverges from Henri Bergson, who had famously deployed the cinematograph as a metaphor for “the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge” in Creative Evolution (1907).1 See also Kracauer’s (no. 42).

text

on

time - lapse

photography

later

in

this

chapter

Cinemas cannot escape the accusation that other than instructive and entertaining films, much of what they have to offer is bad. While the “dramas” typically proceed quite dramatically, they are not particularly beautiful. Alongside the repulsive and deceitfully sentimental films proliferate the most extravagant robber romances, and comedies are no better. Berlin’s Urania made the commendable attempt to use the cinema as a tool for observing nature, and the preliminary screening of these efforts in “live animal pictures” [Lebende Thierbilder] deserves our highest praise.2 Such films make the observation of living nature a pleasurable experience and lend cinematography a new objective. Why couldn’t the cinematograph be employed even for the highest theoretical knowledge of nature, or for philosophy? We shall assume that sensory experience shows us something completely different from the teachings of abstract thought. According to our sensory experience, the earth stands still and the sun moves, while science teaches that the earth revolves around the sun. Let us take an even more familiar example, our own body. In our sensory experience, it appears not to change for long periods of time. Abstract thought teaches us, however, that our body is in the midst of continual change and motion. Heraclitus said we cannot step into the same river twice; today we know that we also cannot see twice with the same eyes or reach twice with the same hand. Our body does not remain unchanged for even a moment. Our circulating blood constantly courses through all parts of our bodies; we continually take in and expel substances. These examples show that our sensory experience falsely perceives an isolated, material existence and a persistence that abstract scientific thought dissolves into continual motion. The truth of the unitary, eternal motion of the world is not a new truth. It is already implied in Heraclitus’s words “Everything flows.”3 However, we have long failed to recognize its universality, its “general validity and necessity,”4 and thus to allow it the determinate influence it ought to have over the entirety of our thought. Constantin Brunner demonstrated the universality of the doctrine of motion in his main work, Doctrine of the Spiritual Elite and the Multitude,5 unfurling a grandiose world picture to which no work of ancient or modern literature can compare. Brunner was the first to conceive of the doctrine of motion in its complete depth and entirety and to demonstrate to us that the essence of this material world, this relative reality, lies in motion. Motion photography must be enlisted in the service of the doctrine of motion, the last and highest understanding of nature; in this area, as I will attempt to demonstrate, cinematography will attain a heretofore-unimaginable significance.

80

Transformations of Experience

We know that the organization of our senses is naturally limited. Where possible, we attempt to extend these limits in the interest of continually improving our knowledge of nature and in order to bring things indirectly into our purview that cannot be considered directly. There are many such means for expanding our sensory experience: for example, the telescope, the microscope, and the spectroscope. The moving picture camera, too, can help us to expand our sensory experience, to perceive movements that would otherwise remain imperceptible. Motion is only recognizable for us when we perceive a change of location, “a change of the sequence or the realization of another sequence.”6 A change of location means not only the transfer of an entire object from one place to another but also every transformation within the object itself; every change of state is a change of location or a movement of the object’s parts. Take the motion of plants. It is not directly visible as motion; plants appear immobile in our sensory experience. For this reason it is so difficult to convince children that plants are alive. My five-year-old son once answered me, outraged, “They are alive? But they don’t move!” The motions of growth, heliotropism, and geotropism are not directly visible to us because they are so slow and take place in such small increments that our eyes cannot grasp them as motion. Few plant movements occur such that we recognize them as motion; familiar examples are the motion of the Mimosa pudica, the Venus flytrap, the filaments of the Berberis vulgaris, and the like. But with the aid of the microscope, we can come closer to the idea of plant movements; with it we see the protoplasm of the cell moving and the chlorophyll nuclei turning toward the light. But even in the most favorable cases, these are small selections out of the total movement of the plant organism. If we want to make visible the entire sequence of imperceptible motion, we must film the plants. I can explain this by pointing to an example I saw in a quality color fi lm showing the blossoming of a chrysanthemum bud. If we actually wanted to observe this eight-day course of events without interruption, we still could not have a view of the course of continuous motion. When we film the flower blossoming, however, then the course of events takes place before our eyes in a few minutes. Something stirs in the still-closed bud; it swells and swells as though filled with a strong inner drive. Now it breaks open and the first petals show themselves. They grow before our gaze, bend, and stretch, and already the blossom is resplendent in all its beauty. Of course, upon such a surprising sight, we should remember Brunner’s warning and avoid hasty anthropomorphisms. Nonetheless, the moving picture camera shows us indirectly that even this life of plants, seemingly so strange, exists and is driven from within; it shows us that plants, albeit with another degree of motion, are just as animated and spontaneous as our trusted animal world. That is just one example. What a plethora of possibilities is opened up here! If we recorded a sunflower, the image would show us the persistence and, if I may say so, the desire with which the flower turns toward the sun. If one cinematographically observed our sundew, Drosera rotundifolia, as it caught an insect, one would see with what power and energy the rosette prevents the wriggling insect from escaping, how the plant finally kills and digests it—insofar as the insect is digestible (i.e., soluble) to the plant—and then, when the day’s work is done, prepares itself for the next catch. We could observe the shoots of our grape vines as they move around, groping to find a supporting base. In the filmic image we could see the quick, living growth of some plants (for example, the way asparagus shoots up). And we could also observe wilting and dying as the transition from one movement into another. By no means do we need to confine ourselves to the living world; certain events in the inorganic world are also ascertainable for the cinematograph. A particularly suitable object would be a crystal formation. We could see clearly the growth of a crystal in its

The Time Machine

81

mother lye. One can obtain truly fine specimens by submerging a small alum crystal on a string into the alum solution; on film, this process of crystallization would become visible as a sequence of motion. The crystal, the individual of the inorganic world, would appear as if alive. The cinematograph can provide a means for expanding our sensory experience, performing similar functions to those of the telescope and the microscope. The foundations of all natural science could become increasingly clear and visible in the more explicit, improved, and magnified views provided by the moving picture camera. With expanded senses, we will recognize motion in places where the naked eye cannot see it and come to understand more and more natural processes. (A new society founded in Berlin has established as its mission the task of employing the cinematograph for science. Only their achievements will reveal whether they intend to fulfill the wishes expressed here.) Notes 1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Camelot, 1911), 306. 2. On the Urania, see the following text by Franz Goerke (no. 34). 3. Bäumer here invokes the aphorism panta rhei, which is commonly attributed to Heraclitus. 4. “Allgemeingültigkeit und Notwendigkeit” comes from Kant’s introduction to the Critique of Judgment (1790). 5. Brunner was the pseudonym of German-Jewish philosopher, writer, and literary critic Arjeh Yehuda Wertheimer (1862–1937). The work mentioned by Bäumer was published in 1908. 6. Bäumer here quotes from Brunner, Die Lehre von den Geistigen und vom Volke (Berlin: Karl Schnabel Verlag, 1908), 228: “Veränderung des Nebeneinander, das Zustandekommen eines anderen Nebeneinander.”

34 FRANZ GOERKE Proposal for the Establishment of an Archive for Cinema-Films First published as “Vorschlag zur Einrichtung eines Archivs für Kino-Films,” in Der Deutsche Kaiser im Film, ed. Paul Klebinder (Berlin: Paul Klebinder, 1912), 62–68. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A tireless promoter of photography in the realms of science and education, Franz Goerke (1856–1931) was cofounder and chairman of the Freie Photographische Vereinigung (Free Association of Photography), as well as director of Urania, a society founded in Berlin in 1888 (with counterparts later opened in many other cities throughout Central Europe), which sought to introduce scientific findings to the broader public. In the following text, Goerke recognizes the cultural-historical and educational significance of cinema, and—like Ludwig Brauner (no. 31)—calls for a state archive to ensure the preservation of film prints for future generations.

If Jules Verne—with all his inventiveness, his spirit, his imagination—had ever used his enormously successful novelistic form to recount the miracle of a lifeless photograph suddenly able to attain life and movement, and even to speak and sing with the aid of a gramophone, we would have followed him into the wonderland of his flourishing fantasy, shaking our heads, just as we gladly accompanied him on the paths of his famous science-fiction novels, which took us on adventurous but always physically motivated journeys—for example, to the moon, to the center of the earth, to the North Pole, over the surface of the sun, or twenty thousand leagues under the sea in a submarine.

82

Transformations of Experience

Have not his boldest hypotheses been outstripped by reality? Do we not live in a time when we have nearly forgotten how to be astonished in the face of new scientific discoveries? Do we not live in an age when the realm of things that seemed impossible has grown much smaller, in an era when science and technology are solving incredible problems? This era has also seen the invention of moving photography. Where should we look to explain why the cinematographic apparatus and film have taken over the world, made countless millions, stirred the emotions of the aristocrat and working man, fired them up, taken their breath away—for better and for worse? It is not my task to go into detail here on potential applications of moving pictures, nor to show how, as an inferior exhibition form, they entertain the undiscriminating masses, thereby contributing to their mental decline and brutalization by pushing their desire for sensation in dangerous directions, whose consequences can be controlled only through strict containment by the government and police. Neither do I want to speak about the constantly increasing significance of film for education and research; there is hardly an area of knowledge that film has not impressively supported, thus rapidly gaining the sympathies of every scholarly circle—I will merely mention the names Comandon, Marey, and Kearton.1 Every day brings new surprises in the arena of scientific fi lm. Every day, hundreds, even thousands of meters of new film are “thrown onto the market” (if I may use this phrase) with alarming speed; the films come and go as quickly as they appear on and disappear from the screen, and if we try to find out what has happened to them just a few weeks later, we find the film in a more or less worn condition in some film distribution house—that is, if we are lucky; but usually, the film cannot be found again, the negatives have gone missing; the information that we get from the film manufacturer is insufficient as can be, because new subjects already “dominate the market.” Thus, it is often nearly impossible for an academic institute like Urania to obtain films for scholarly presentations whose existence we know about, but which have meanwhile been forgotten or even destroyed. Does it not stand to reason, then, that we need a central office, a collection point, a state archive for films, in order to save them from ruin? Museums are collection sites for visual artworks, just as all sciences, regional geographies, and ethnographies have their collections; libraries keep humanity’s intellectual achievements as enduring, immortal goods, and state archives preserve documents and files, which later scholars must put together in clever combinations to reconstruct a vivid picture of earlier eras; a state archive for cinematic film is equally important. Historical and cultural events rush by us. Photographic and cinematic cameras have captured them for all time. Won’t people one day ask, where did the documents go? Why have they been wasted, lost, destroyed? Isn’t it thus high time to collect films across all areas of scholarship and cultural history and preserve them for eternity? Just as the law requires that the publisher of any new work donate a copy to the royal library, we must pass a law that requisitions a copy of any scholarly, historical, or cultural film for a national archive that will be established. The constitution, administration, and film selection process for such an archive are issues of secondary importance, as is the question of cost for this kind of facility. Let us now think about the films that we are knowingly allowing to decay. In 1897, when I suggested that a governmental office be established for the collection of projected images from all academic areas, which would be available on loan to all kinds of educational institutes at no charge, my proposal fell on deaf ears. The educational significance of such a collection was wildly underestimated in those days. Ten years later, I returned to this idea, and once again its execution met with insurmountable

The Time Machine

83

obstacles; however, I never lost hope that it might one day be realized, and this is why I am appearing again today with my exhortation to the general public. It is not yet too late, for the film industry is still relatively young. Some part of the cultural value it has created can still be saved and preserved for posterity. Whether consciously or unconsciously, only a small part of what we do and create is for ourselves. If we lay the groundwork now for such a broadly conceived collection, our descendants will thank us. [. . .] Film has a greater cultural mission to carry out than “still photography” has. To be sure, the preservation of the written and printed word is admirable and necessary, but let us remember that only narrowly defined classes can make use of it. Images have a more concrete, instructive effect; they affect the senses in visual instruction, and in lectures they provide the most essential and effective support for the spoken word—and now we have the moving picture, which, if its dissemination is properly handled, could bring education and entertainment in the noblest sense of the word to people of all classes in thousands and thousands of theaters. And this threatens to perish with us, to disappear, because we are too selfish and shortsighted to realize that by preserving these pictures for coming generations, we preserve ourselves. We say to them: Look, this is how we lived and thrived, this is how we worked, invented and discovered, struggled, suffered and fought, this is how we celebrated, and so on. Companies that make millions from films, as well as more modest institutes of this kind, are therefore called upon to lend a hand in realizing my proposal, and I am convinced that they will be happy to do so, once they see that there is a strong, decisive, and serious desire for the creation of a film archive. Admittedly, this problem must be handled generously from the outset. Does not the kaiser himself, to whom this book is dedicated, provide the inspiration to preserve the present for posterity through film as well as thousands of photographs!2 He does so through the lively interest he brings to all arts and sciences, including photography (after all, the empress herself is a practicing artist), through his very personality, and through his travels. I still remember the days when color photography entered a phase of vital new discovery. The emperor immediately wanted a report on the current state of this invention and visited Urania to this end on April 9, 1902. According to his wishes, he was accompanied not only by his family, but also by the minister of culture, high-level ministerial employees, and many representatives of art and science, proof of his great interest in significant developments in photography. There is an excellent staff photographer, Herr Jürgensen, aboard the imperial yacht Hohenzollern, who stacks folders upon folders full of photographic documentation of everything that occurs on imperial voyages; recently, acting on a direct order from the kaiser, he has started making cinematic recordings, 3 which are shown not only to the kaiser himself, but also here and there in public screenings. These recordings will certainly be kept in a house archive, but one day, when our generation is no more, our descendants will have the right to learn how the kaiser traveled and how he lived on his voyages. This is just one example—in this case and in relation to this book the most obvious one—among the innumerable others that I could mention in order to support the case for establishing a national archive for cinematographic recordings. They want to build an archive like this in Hamburg; Paris built one using collective funds as early as 1905; London and Copenhagen already have film archives too—only our imperial capital refuses to budge. As far as I know, we currently only have a national phonogram archive,4 which, however, is available exclusively for music research. It is by far the most important one of its kind, and its publications are widely recognized as groundbreaking.

84

Transformations of Experience

It is not yet too late. We can still make up for much lost time. Just as we are intent on collecting specimens from the natural world, preserving endangered species for posterity, at least in pictures, and caring for plant and animal life in nature reserves, we should preserve the image of our life and pursuits, our deeds and activities, as well as our enduring creative works, for distant generations. The task is that much more urgent now that moving images have provided the means to leave the future world a more faithful record than documents can generate. Notes 1. Goerke here invokes Jean Comandon, a physician and pioneer in microcinematography; ÉtienneJules Marey, a physiologist and chronophotographer; and Cherry Kearton, a wildlife photographer and filmmaker. 2. Wilhelm II, German emperor and king of Prussia, was widely known for his interest in film and was regularly accompanied by a camera crew at public events and on his many travels across Europe. He was called the first media star. On the book The German Kaiser in Film, see also the text by Klebinder in chapter 8 (no. 108). 3. Court photographer Theodor Jürgensen had started using moving pictures to record the kaiser in 1904. 4. The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv was initiated in 1900 by Carl Stumpf.

35 J. LANDAU Mechanized Immortality First published as “Mechanisierte Unsterblichkeit,” in Der Deutsche Kaiser im Film, ed. Paul Klebinder (Berlin: Paul Klebinder, 1912), 18–22. Translated by Eric Ames.

Printed alongside Franz Goerke’s text (no. 34) in Der Deutsche Kaiser im Film (1912), the following essay by J. (né Isidor) Landau, a prominent theater critic and the editor in chief of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, takes up a prevalent turn-of-the-century fantasy of mechanical media as tools for “preserving and storing life and movement for all time,” well beyond the limits of individual existence. Invoking renowned stage actors and singers of the nineteenth century, Landau (1850–1944) argues that film’s culturalhistorical significance lies in its ability to record the ephemeral performances of great artists for the sake of posterity.

“Are you not opposed to the cinematograph?” a zealot recently asked me, hoping that I would testify against the living picture theater. “Opposed to the cinematograph? What a strange question! Should I be opposed to the train just because it occasionally runs off the tracks? Should I become an enemy of the telephone just because I sometimes receive an annoying call?” Without a doubt, the magnificent invention, the ingenious and often brilliant perfection of motion photography, has also had to endure serious misuse. Later, I will offer some examples of such blasphemous abuse of this genial method for preserving and storing life and movement for all time. But what great invention has ever escaped misuse? Chloroform and morphine, those means of relieving all bodily pain, can also become deadly poisons, and every well-intended new creation carries within it the seeds of noxious corruption. This is a rule almost without exception.

The Time Machine

85

From this perspective, cinematography’s degeneration ceases to be frightening. Indeed, it pales in comparison to cinematography’s surprising advantages—not to mention its blessings—and their potential for development. With the cinematograph and the gramophone, we have in effect realized the mechanization of immortality. What theology could never quite clearly or persuasively teach us, technology allows us to experience in all its visible, audible, tangible reality. Once recorded, human speech and human song survive the speaker or the singer. Long after he has departed this life, he speaks to all future generations. The warm breath of sensation drifts out to us from his speech; the joy, the sorrow that inhabited the sound takes hold of us long after he who once felt and expressed this joy, this sorrow has departed from our world of pain. To the same extent, instantaneous photography and its means of storage, film, preserve every agitation of mind and soul that expresses itself through movement. Portraiture, in every form and degree of perfection—whether made by an immortal artist who is able to render character and peculiarity through expression, by a sculptor who gives life to stone, or by a photographer who at the height of his powers shows us every line, every trace, every nuance of light on his photographic plate—portraiture can present us with only a single static moment. But every day and every hour, the cinematograph renews that Pygmalion-and-Galatea sense of wonder for our spoiled senses, which have almost forgotten how to be astonished in this heyday of technology. The image has lost its rigidity; it is no longer fixed in a single, unchanging pose as determined by the painter, the sculptor, or the photographer. It obtains soul, life, and movement. It shows us the hero in the epic, passionate actions that characterize him in moments of heightened existence. For recording banal activities of everyday life is surely not the task of instantaneous photography. Theater history, inasmuch as it was previously possible, has suffered from a certain lack. It was able to preserve the fame of a great actor, but not his essence. At best, it could transmit the description of a contemporary artist, which reflected his personal observations, his impressions. When perfected, such a description, based on the impression of a dramatic performance, can itself become a significant work of art. One can even think of accounts that are aesthetically more important than the artistic productions they describe. A piece of criticism by Lessing or Börne,1 for example, may be more significant than the drama they were discussing. Yet such descriptions, such critiques give us not the artwork itself but only a reflex of an impression that it evoked within a certain sophisticated soul. In its everyday, inartistic form, such a depiction compares to the artwork as the report of a good lunch would compare to the tasty, aromatic, nutritious, and satisfying meal itself. The description of an impression of an artwork relates to artistic perfection as a song of spring relates to spring itself. A poem by Lenau or Eichendorff depicting the smell of a rose or the song of a nightingale may be a poetic creation of charming appeal, 2 yet it is neither the smell of the rose nor the song of the nightingale, but rather the beautiful reflection of the impression that the artist’s mind received from them. The cinematograph, by contrast, enables us to immediately preserve the very life, movement, gesture, gaze, and expression of a great actor for all eternity. What an invaluable gain it would be if we could use the phonograph and the cinematograph to capture Josef Kainz in all his leading roles and possess them for all time!3 And to think that if the cinematograph had existed earlier like the phonograph, then SchröderDevrient, Catalani, Henriette Sontag, Döring, Devrient, Dessoir, Dawison, Haase, Marie Seebach, and Niemann-Raabe4 —all could have lived not only in their time, but forever! Then we would continue to possess not only their names but also their lives and their essences. The immortality of fame would be replaced by the immortality of their art! Just as the gramophone forever captures every sound of Caruso, the very magic and

86

Transformations of Experience

melodiousness of his soft, sensitive voice; just as the gramophone takes the rare artist and multiplies him a thousandfold, transmitting the unparalleled pleasure of his song to the entire world, to all countries and all cities simultaneously; just as the gramophone made Caruso beloved and famous long before he actually came to us; and just as it will preserve him at the peak of his abilities, long after he has retreated from the stage, long after he has retreated from life—so instantaneous photography, perfected as it is in the cinematograph, will capture the performance of the great artist in all its exquisite nuances and enable it to endure for all eternity. That would be more than just a gain for the history of art, which would see its dry work transformed into blossoming life. It would be more than just an invaluable benefit for the maturing youth, who would always and everywhere have before him a literally “illuminating” example. No, it would mean nothing less than robbing death of its spoils. From then on, death could only snatch the body away from us. The souls of artists would endure in their creations, in all their forms and magnificent effects, and they would endure in this world, visible and tangible to us all. What the great artist accomplished would benefit not only his countrymen and contemporaries, but all countries and all ages. We leave it to the experts to show what the cinematograph can achieve as a sharp observer of nature and what it can contribute toward solving the great questions of biology. Here we can only hint at its potential. So what does it mean when, in spite of all this potential, back-alley movie theaters show miserable horror stories and indiscriminating audiences delight in foolishness or dirty jokes? It is sad and lamentable, to be sure, but it is merely an unavoidable side effect. To condemn the cinematograph because of certain crude and bloodthirsty shows, which attract the connoisseurs of trash, would be tantamount to condemning our entire literary tradition, with all its classical treasures, simply because cheap and racy novels are also published and widely read. Perhaps another time we will discuss the cinematograph as an educator. Notes 1. The critics are Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) and Carl Ludwig Börne (1786–1837). 2. The poets are Nikolaus Lenau (1802–1850) and Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857). 3. Josef Kainz was one the most famous actors in Austrian and German theater for more than thirty years. He died of cancer in 1910, just two years prior to Landau’s article. 4. Landau here refers to famous opera singers and theater actors of the nineteenth century: Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, Angelica Catalani, Henriette Sontag, Theodor Döring, Karl August Devrient, Ludwig Dessoir, Bogumil Dawison, Friedrich Haase, Marie Seebach, and Hedwig Niemann-Raabe.

36 HEINRICH LAUTENSACK Why?—This Is Why! First published as “Warum?—Darum!,” in Lichtbild-Bühne 23 (June 7, 1913), 161–62. Translated by Eric Ames.

A German author who began writing screenplays in 1912, Heinrich Lautensack (1881– 1919) here defends the cinema against its critics by underscoring a dual relation to time. On the one hand, in an argument that André Bazin would develop in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), Lautensack presents cinema as the

The Time Machine

87

fulfillment of an ancient desire for immortalization. On the other, he sees cinema’s popularity deriving from the experience of transitory moments, captured and re-presented on film. This article appeared alongside contributions by a dozen film directors (including Franz Hofer, Joe May, and Stellan Rye) in a special issue of Lichtbild-Bühne in 1913, “Art and Literature in Cinema.”

Why is the public overrunning the cinemas now? Out of a love—discovered late enough, at least by us in Germany—for pantomimes? Only the most impressionistic commentators see film as nothing more than photographed pantomime. Or do the movie houses fill up every night, in all five parts of the earth, because a Volapük1—in signs of light and shadow—has finally been invented, a new Esperanto, truly available to all peoples and requiring no study in advance? It is really not too much of an exaggeration to claim that the invention of the Lumière brothers—namely, the cinematograph of 1895—took on a significance that only Gutenberg had realized before them, around 1447. In any case, the situation is a little different than how the enemies of the cinema, with their deceptive ways, would like to see it. They believe, namely, that the public crowds into movie houses in terrifying numbers only because movies offer novels or plays with as few poetic digressions as possible. But it is simply not true that the main cause of these mass visits to the theaters lies in a hunger for the raw material, a hunger the crowds could sate with anything at all! (And as a consequence, it is not true that one should damn the art-film factories as the principle instigators!) It is far more the honest and childlike pleasure in the cinematograph as the (newly invented and oh, so ingeniously conceived!) thing in itself that drives this incessant pilgrimage to the temples of cinematic art!! It is because—in other words—the cinematograph is not only a great immortalizer but also and at the same time the greatest re-presenter of the moment that it everywhere enjoys a phenomenal enthusiasm and nobody has yet grown tired of it. And they never will! Of course, not even one in a hundred people would say this in anything like the precise and definite words I have used here. And yet, the situation is as I have described it and not otherwise. The cinematographic theater lures the spectator again and again, because the cinema itself is an immortalizer, as I have called it. Because it once again carries out, with the highest, most contemporary perfection, what man, in his most primitive conditions, announced as his first urge toward something approximating art and culture: namely, the urge to copy a thing, a human, or an animal from his environment. There are incontestable parallels; the paleo-ethnological man (from the fi nger-numbing Ice Age please!) shapes a primitive Venus statue or stylizes an animal image as the first cultural activity or artistic accomplishment . . . and the Gaumont newsreel captures the wedding of a princess and a three-emperor summit on film. . . . But at the same time, I also called the cinema the greatest re-presenter of the moment. First of all, a cinema drama’s moment of original performance is forever preserved! Or has any of us ever attended an Asta Nielsen film and experienced what can happen daily in one of Prof. Reinhardt’s “proper” theaters: 2 namely, that we never get to see the real Asta Nielsen, but rather a fifteenth or twentieth understudy? Or has anyone ever had to put up with what a theatergoer often has to suffer through an entire evening: in the 379th performance, all five Frankfurt performers extemporize, egging each other on, until they themselves can no longer perform out of laughter! I ask you, in

88

Transformations of Experience

the twenty-fourth week of a Bumke-Impekoven fi lm, has one ever seen Bumke extemporize?3 All joking aside, however, the cinema, the greatest re-presenter of the moment, as I have described it, is still much more sublime. It offers us moments of nature and culture instead of mere decoration: images of the ocean, the forest, the mountain, the valley, the plain, the field, the meadow, the tree, the rain, the brook, the garden, the flower, the metropolis, the village, the railroad, the steamship, the factory, the bridge, and all of today’s motor vehicles in all of their uses—and none of this is any longer immobile or imitated only by its “sound” behind the curtains! And among them now, the very image of God, that is— But, right in the middle of my sentence, the editor in chief urges me to come to a close. And so I will hurry (at the risk of rushing things too much). Just as the public has demonstrated, by its regular and repeated visits, its pure joy in the cinematograph as a thing in itself, so it has also given a special applause to film dramas, which cannot be evaluated according to the critical standards of theater reviewers because these standards fall far short. And besides, they are wholly inappropriate! And if I have not bored my reader with this article, I will soon write about the special quality of fi lm dramas themselves, a topic that follows naturally from the present observations. Notes 1. Volapük was an international language created in 1879–80. (See Sellmann in chapter 1, no. 10, note 4). 2. Max Reinhardt’s productions were at Schall und Rauch, Neues Theater (a.k.a. Theater am Schiffbauerdamm), and Deutsches Theater in Berlin. 3. Bumke-Impekoven films were a series of one-reelers from 1913 featuring the comic figure Bumke (played by Gerhard Dammann) and Sabine Impekoven.

37 E. W. The Film Archive of the Great General Staff: What a Camera Operator Reports First published as “Das Filmarchiv des Großen Generalstabs: Was ein Kinooperateur erzählt,” in Berliner Tageblatt 44, no. 168 (April 1, 1915). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Appearing in the liberal Berliner Tageblatt (1872–1939), the following article considers the cinematograph’s role as a historiographical tool during the First World War. Much as Ludwig Brauner’s text (no. 31) imagined the cinematograph being invented a hundred years earlier, this article considers the benefits of a “systematically organized film archive” with reference to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which had taken place on the same ground as current battles. On the nexus of war and visual representation, see also chapter 8 of this volume.

In the current war, cinematography has, for the first time since its invention, been put to official use in the writing of history and elevated to a historical tool. Alongside the officer who keeps a chronicle of the troop unit in his charge, alongside the journalistic war

The Time Machine

89

reporter and the painter and drawer, the film reporter is now taking his place, using his instrument to create an accurate record of the war in its actual essence, development, and movement. Even the Great General Staff of the German Army organized a crew of camera operators at the beginning of the war. Like war reporters, they are vetted and then assigned to individual army commands, from which they receive their orders. Their film recordings are certified by officers in the field and then delivered to the Great General Staff, which has them developed in Berlin by personnel specially hired for this purpose. Some recordings are released to cinemas for official presentation, while others are incorporated into an archive that has grown to encompass over two thousand films to date; here they await their future use. The knowledge that we and our descendants stand to gain from a systematically organized film archive is doubly clear if we think back fortyfour years. What we would give to be able to watch a film of great historical moments in the War of 1870–71. [. . .] The war in the west offers particularly attractive tasks for film chroniclers. Almost forty-four years to the day after France’s destiny was fulfilled on September 1 and 2, 1870, battle raged once again over the very same fields. And in the same old weaver’s cottage on the road to Donchery, where Bismarck met with Napoleon, German generals and soldiers returned as victors. In the cottage, now riddled with bullet holes, the same old-fashioned birch chairs where Bismarck and Napoleon sat are arranged around the same round table, and the gray-haired woman who pleasantly receives her German visitors and shows them around had the chance as a young girl to offer Bismarck and Napoleon a refreshing drink. And not far away, in the crypt at Bazeilles, where the mummified corpses of French and German casualties from Sedan lie uncovered1—the Landwehr men with their long beards, the nurses in the tall leather boots that they wore in those days—wounded German soldiers walk forty-four years later, in silent emotion, breathing the chill of a soldier’s death, which grazes them so palpably. In these places, world-historical epochs become interlaced, and recording them in moving images is one of the worthiest tasks of the film war reporter. Note 1. The Battle of Sedan (September 1, 1870) led to the capture of Napoleon III and spelled Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The crypt at Bazeilles contains the remains of some two thousand French and German soldiers who fell in 1870.

38 HANS LEHMANN Slow Motion First published as “Die Zeitlupe,” in Die Umschau: Wochenschrift über die Fortschritte in Wissenschaft und Technik 21, no. 22 (May 26, 1917), 426–30. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Although the invention of slow motion is generally attributed to the Austrian physicist and priest August Musger, the first slow motion system was presented to the public in 1914 by Hans Lehmann on behalf of the Ernemann Company in Dresden; Lehmann (1875–1917) had been in correspondence with Musger for years but failed to credit the early pioneer. In the text here, Lehmann focuses on the possibility of extending human vision through what he calls the “Zeitlupe.” Still used in German today, the term is constructed from the words Zeit (time) and Lupe (magnifying glass) and thus literally

90

Transformations of Experience refers to the magnification of time. Like Eduard Bäumer’s essay earlier in this chapter (no. 33), Lehmann’s text considers the cinematograph to be a means of registering motion invisible to the naked eye. Walter Benjamin would later channel this excitement about film’s ability to extend the human senses in his famous discussion of the “optical unconscious.”

The famous physicist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach—who passed away last year at the age of seventy—dedicated much of his work to expounding on the difference between habitual thought processes and those employed by science, especially the natural sciences.1 Habitual thought concerns itself only with sensual data, with phenomena available to our natural perception—that is, with the external world as it actually appears. Scientific thinking, on the other hand, deals with nonsensual data, aiming to understand the essence of things and their inner connections. It deals, as it were, with supersensory data—that is, with supersensory phenomena not immediately available to our direct or natural perception. Such is Ernst Mach’s thesis. Thus scientific thought requires additional means, subtle and precise tools with which to extend our natural sensory organs. These tools include not only intellectual operations, such as logic and especially mathematics, but also scientific experimentation. In order to carry out experiments, the researcher requires instruments and apparatuses. Scientific apparatuses can be divided into two general categories. The first includes all those apparatuses used for reproduction and demonstration—and thus also for teaching. In this group we find, for example, the normal photographic camera, as well as its optical inversion, the slide projector. We also find the cinematograph, the phonograph, the gramophone, and other similar instruments. The apparatuses of this group normally do not show us anything exceeding our natural capacities of perception. They only make perception easier and clearer and help us to arrive at our goals more quickly. The second group includes all of those apparatuses used for scientific research. They extend our natural powers of perception in various directions by allowing us to recognize certain things which, for one reason or another, lie below the threshold of our natural perceptive capacity. In this group, we fi nd instruments such as the telescope and the microscope. Such optical instruments extend our sense of sight by making objects visible that, because they are either too small or too far away, lie below the threshold of our perceptive capacities. Now, there exist certain instruments belonging to both of the categories outlined above. A typical example is the photographic camera. As it is normally used, the camera constitutes only a means of reproduction and demonstration; it does not exceed our natural perceptive capacities but simply makes perception easier, more rapid, and more complete. But the photographic camera can also function as an extension of our sense of sight, insofar as it captures phases of movement occurring too rapidly for the naked eye. Thus snapshot photography gives us a tool for extending our sense of sight. Related to the photographic camera is the motion picture camera, which is nothing but a photographic camera that allows each exposed photographic frame to be replaced very rapidly with another. As is well known, cinematography allows us to reproduce movements and to experience them again and again at any time, and it does this with a penetrating intensity that no other means of representation—neither painting nor sculpture nor any other expressive medium—can attain. In this sense, cinematography belongs to the first group of apparatuses mentioned above. It depicts movements just as we see them with the naked eye. In order for cinematography to function as an extension of our sense of sight, it would have to show us clear and comprehensible images of movements which, on account of their excessive speed, cannot be perceived by the naked eye alone. In fact, it can do precisely this.

The Time Machine

91

Here is how this new cinematographic procedure works. With the help of an appropriate fi lm apparatus, one takes a very large number of snapshots—that is, of fi lm frames—a number some fifteen to twenty times higher than that obtained in normal cinematography. Normally, film runs at sixteen frames per second, but in this case, we shoot at a rate of two to three hundred. If one were to project such a film at the same speed at which it was shot, it would certainly reproduce movements with an exceptional degree of clarity, but in general, we would still perceive nothing more than what we can see with the naked eye. But we wish to obtain an extension of our sense of sight, and to achieve this, all we have to do is to allow the film shot at high speed to roll through the projector slowly—that is, at the usual speed of sixteen frames per second. Now our eye can see the filmed movement slowed down by a factor of fifteen to twenty and without any irregularities or disturbances in the representation. The advantages of this new procedure are manifold. First of all, because of the high number of frames from which the filmed movement is constructed, it eliminates the famous flicker, even in images of rapid movements. In addition, kinetic artists, technicians, and sculptors can now clearly perceive movements that interest them but occur too rapidly for the eye to grasp. Finally, in watching these new types of films, we notice one factor in particular. The first snapshots caused a big stir in the 1880s when, showing people in the act of executing a movement, they captured certain phases that had previously escaped our eye because of their excessive speed. Similarly, these new films reveal, in addition to such peculiar and characteristic bodily positions, previously imperceptible forms of movement. Watching human movement slowed down, for example, we hardly recognize the original movement, and yet this representation, occurring with mathematical precision, corresponds exactly to nature. I have given this new apparatus a somewhat unusual name. I have called it die Zeitlupe [slow motion]. This term is explained quite simply by what I stated above. In comparison to optical instruments such as the magnifying glass or the microscope, which magnify the three spatial dimensions of physical objects, slow motion can magnify the fourth dimension, namely the time in which an object executes a movement. As is well known, normal cinematographic cameras, in which the fi lm is pulled through frame by frame in a series of sudden jerks, do not allow one to obtain frequencies much higher than sixteen frames per second. The high frequency in slow motion, however, is obtained by enabling the film to move through the camera at a continuous, uniform speed. In order to do this, slow motion cameras contain an optical device, the socalled balancing system, which holds the image stationary on the film by making it follow the film’s movement. Optical balancing can be performed in various ways: through the use of lenses, prisms, or mirrors, or through a combination of these. Optical balancing by means of rotating mirrors has existed for some time. In addition, a primitive type of slow-motion was already known thirtyeight years ago in the form of the praxinoscope invented by the Frenchman Reynaud,2 who took out a German patent on his apparatus in 1878. Slow motion thus began long before the existence of cinematography in its present form. Now, however, with the recent advances in technology, it has become possible to combine such filming methods with a system of optical balancing. In the military, slow motion has already found various uses in observing such phenomena as airplanes in flight, artillery being fired, flying projectiles, and the functioning of airplane motors. In addition, it will serve a variety of purely scientific or technological purposes requiring the observation of movements too rapid for the naked eye to follow. Artists, as well, will be able to employ this method of representation when necessary in order to obtain models for their work. A noted sculptor from Dresden, for example, who had received a commission to sculpt a leaping horse, was able to choose good models from a filmstrip showing a racehorse jumping over a hurdle. [. . .]

92

Transformations of Experience

Kinetic artists and especially physiologists will also find it worth their while to invest in this technology. The task of physiology has always been to analyze human and animal movements. In issue 27 of Die Umschau, Professor du Bois-Reymond describes the attempts of a French military academy to help gymnasts better understand an exercise by showing them individual frames or snapshots of it.3 Du Bois-Reymond comes to the conclusion that this method cannot accomplish its task. What is needed, rather, is a means of making the form of the movement more clear, and slow motion will undoubtedly make this possible. Slow motion should also come in handy in testing the functioning of prosthetic arms and legs. As far as I am aware, the only person to use the technique of slow motion up to now was the Parisian photo-physiologist Marey, who died ten years ago. But Marey had to work with much more primitive means. In those days, people had access only to paper filmstrips, which were extremely short and not very sensitive to light. In addition, the movement of the film in the camera still followed the old jerky pattern, and they were thus a long way from obtaining high frequency. Finally, the only way to show these images was by means a relatively primitive viewing mechanism, the famous zoetrope. One should not confuse the technique of slow motion with the methods of “electric snapshot photography,” which, although it indeed allows a very high image frequency, can be used only in darkened rooms and produces only silhouettes of relatively small objects. Notes 1. An Austrian physicist and anti-metaphysical philosopher, Ernst Mach (1838–1916) was a pioneer in rethinking absolute notions of space and time, as well as a pathbreaking figure for the Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. See also Wertheimer’s “Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung” (Experimental studies on the perception of motion), Zeitschrift für Psychologie 61 (1912), 161–265. 2. Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844–1918) was a pioneer of moving image technologies who in 1877 invented the Praxinoscope, which produced the illusion of movement by placing a strip of images within a spinning, mirrored cylinder. In 1888, Reynaud created the Théâtre Optique, which used a modified Praxinoscope system to project animated images onscreen. 3. A likely reference to the sports physiologist René du Bois-Reymond (son of the physician and electrophysiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond).

39 FRIEDRICH SIEBURG The Transcendence of the Film Image First published as “Die Transzendenz des Filmbildes,” in Die neue Schaubühne: Monatshefte für Bühne, Drama und Film 2, no. 6 (June 1920), 144–46. Translated by Eric Ames.

A prominent conservative literary critic in 1950s Germany, Friedrich Sieburg (1893–1964) began his career in the Weimar Republic as a writer and film critic, working as a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in Copenhagen, Paris, and London. In this early text, published one year after he received his doctorate in Münster, he uses the disconcerting experience of viewing a film without musical accompaniment as the occasion for considering the ontological bases of cinema, especially with regard to time and space. For Sieburg, music is instrumental to the dynamic relationship between moving images and spectators and also enables the filmic image to reach a transcendent absolute. See also Ernst Bloch’s “Melody in the Cinema, or Immanent and Transcendental Music” in chapter 15 (no. 218).

The Time Machine

93

In act 3, as the Fürst der Diebe [Prince of Thieves] 1 was roaring along in his car (his shawl fluttering like a flag, wind blowing briskly through the high grass of the flowing landscape), the musicians in the small orchestra—violin and piano for lively scenes, organ for death scenes—suddenly decided to break for dinner. The music stopped. Silence. The reels whirled. The light hissed. The action sped ahead. I tell you, it was frightening. I felt as if I were six feet under. Only with great difficulty could the figures onscreen be carried through by the action. Depth disappeared; the roads lost their distant curves; and the actors seemed as if asleep, like silent, moving corpses. Not knowing what would become of all this, I cautiously removed myself. Outside, I calmed myself with the following reflections: Through the silencing of the accompanying music, the film image loses all relation to the viewers. The give-and-take between spectator and image breaks off. The image seals itself, becomes absolute, inhuman, incidental—godless. The image exists in space; or rather, it is a space within space. Closed off, it remains impenetrable and uncomfortably forbidding. Relationships can be constructed, but not on their own accord. Film exists in time. Or does it? Logically connected events simply file past, one after the other, in a racing sequence. Does this lead to the lack of relation? Wherever man is placed in relation to an object, reality always sets in. In this case, we can conceive of only two sorts of reality. Most immediately, there is the photographic reality, the recognition of the object. This possibility for the simplest reality is cancelled out by the action of the film, however. For just when the spectator’s reason has identified the Grunewald spruces in a moment of joyful recognition (the most common form of the bourgeois sense of reality, the worldly piety of little Moritz), 2 the action has already inserted itself and banished the assiduous spectator to Canada or who knows where. Photographed reality is thus constantly called into question by the action set within the landscape. Indeed, so impossible is it for any primitive naturalism to function that a vast and multifaceted world of film romanticism has formed on its own—a world where the gentleman staggers between pajamas and coattails, where the most sophisticated people toss their just-opened envelopes onto the ground, where a bowl for calling cards is a household fixture. I believe that the first actor who, showing good manners, simply laid a letter on the table as one generally does in space and time, instead of throwing the envelope of the fateful letter onto the ground (who could conceive of such a catastrophe?), would unhinge all of fi lm ideology. Even less can we speak here of that singular, most profound reality lying within the law of the artistic image. For where is the experience? What material is the artist forming? Where is the act? No, we must completely expel this mystical association of the law conjured up by the concept of the “image.” It is here alone where human relations could grow; in film, however, the “image” is not a question of form, but one of format. The secret of that silent ghostliness must therefore lie in the essence of music. Music exists in time. With that, however, we have said very little. At the very least, music derives its law from the logically flowing intellect. At the innermost level, however, it points to the transcendental and puts one in touch with the absolute. Whatever is touched by music relinquishes its form and dives into ancient chaos. If film existed in time, it would be possible to realize and activate a concept of time through the concatenation of spatial conceptions. Or would it? No, that would be possible only within the processes of thought, and even then only on condition that one abandons the concept of space. Then, the sum of all spatial conceptions would give way to the newly won thoughts existing in time.

94

Transformations of Experience

Film replaces the thought process with action. The action represents an extracted, projected thought process. But because it receives a certain universal validity by becoming absolute, the action rescues the conception of space from that of time. Action rounds the curves of time into a spatial circle. A factor of action, space races through time. Thus the frightening, false, and spectral quality of film without music, the alienating impression of a loss of relation, the unreal—all of this lies in the essence of the absent music itself, or rather in the peculiar effect that it has on the image. If the film image is supposed to maintain a relation with the spectator, it must transcend, it must be constantly drawn less to humans than—we might as well go ahead and say it—to God. Is that sacrilege? No, even the most pitiful little studio set simulating a stairwell and a wind-blown flowerbed, even wood and cardboard illuminated with blue spotlights, must reach with the heights of their phony splendor into the unfathomable stardust. As I said above, the law of the artistic image is lacking in fi lm! At some point, then, the fi lm image must break through and flow into the absolute. And this is something that only music can do, as it hurls forth its magical, uncanny powers of incantation. Music, exploding and dissolving, disembodying and pushing into nothingness—music must rescue the film image, draw this last power of spatial imagination into the illumination of the eternal; otherwise, man, horrified, blown cold by the decaying ghosts of his benumbed feeling for the world, will flee the silent dance of death of his world. Yet figurative redemption lies elsewhere. Notes 1. Viggo Larsen’s four-act film Der Fürst der Diebe und seine Liebe premiered in Berlin on November 4, 1919. 2. Moritz is one of the title characters of Wilhelm Busch’s famous illustrated story Max und Moritz (1865).

40 AUGUST WOLF Film as Historian First published as “Der Film als Historiker,” in Film-Kurier 3, no. 245 (October 20, 1921). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

In this remarkable short essay, August Wolf characterizes film as an ideal practitioner of contemporary history, indiscriminately registering aspects of everyday life, and he also notes the medium’s basis in motion, acuteness of observation, and impartial accuracy of memory. Favoring cinema’s documentary function over attempts at dramatic artifice (“Oh felicitous film, which requires no dramatic arts”), Wolf’s text anticipates Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960), which would postulate a “basic aesthetic principle” prioritizing visual engagement with the infinite, transitory, and fortuitous realm of physical existence. See also Wolf’s text in chapter 5 of this volume (no. 73), which appeared in the same issue of Film-Kurier.

Film is the practice of history in the sense of Xenophon, who went among people, to prostitutes, craftsmen, and whoever came his way. He handpicked his characters from everywhere, while lingering on streets and plazas, wherever it so happened. To him, without

The Time Machine

95

arrogance, it seemed possible to see something interesting develop in every area. The anonymous moment in heroic time—that’s roughly how he perceived history, as a corroboration of the metaphysical concept of personhood: where I am is what I am. History experienced in wandering. Film was also invented with a feeling for things in motion. Its memory is the camera with the unrolling image, a memory that records accurately and shows in slow motion the acuteness of observation of which it is capable. And what a felicitous memory! It thinks existentially, shows the tree as tree, without an atmospheric stimulant, in the joy of naïve viewing. The pure fact that I live, which I feel by seeing trees blossoming, branches moving on the street—film also presents this fact as uncomplicated trope by showing me once more how trees blossom and branches move. It does not distract or mediate through interpretation what it has to say. As in life, its decor is once again nature. Film does not need to be agitated, does not need any summoning gesture in order to let nature appear; indeed, nature, just as it is, lives in the image. Oh felicitous film, which requires no dramatic arts.

41 FRITZ LANG Will to Style in Film First published as “Stilwille im Film,” in Der Kinematograph 887 (February 17, 1924). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Published shortly before the premiere of Siegfried, part 1 of Die Nibelungen (1924), Fritz Lang’s article celebrates the medium of film for its ability to transcend its immediate historical context. Much as Wilhelm Dilthey had invoked “the substratum of a general human nature” as a common ground for historical understanding,1 Lang (1890–1976) contends that certain emotions and themes remain constant over time, changing in manifest form rather than in principle. Directing Die Nibelungen, according to Lang, thus involved the reanimation of people from a bygone era through adherence to inviolable stylistic laws. By evincing eternally valid dramatic elements, his work would revive the thirteenth-century epic poem through film, “the liveliest art form of our time.”

Just as a hiker who is headed for a beautiful, distant destination encounters no more annoying obstacle to his fresh, forward steps than absurdly rampant undergrowth, the film pioneer has no greater struggle than with those favorite manifestations of thoughtlessness: prejudices. And there is only one way to deal with prejudices: to shed so much light on their object that anyone who has eyes and wants to see can recognize its true form, clear as day. Born of our time, film is this era’s true image, in both positive and negative senses. Negative in its ability to accommodate the superficial entertainment needs of the mentally lazy masses, which has brought it into disrepute particularly among educated and cultivated people; positive in the aspect that is crucial for those of us who have completely penetrated it: its unlimited possibility. It has unlocked the realm of magic for us. There is something of the mystical quality of creation about it. A will says, “Let it be so!” And see, it is so! It is made through the most modern of all tools: perfected technology. There are concepts of neither space nor time for film. Through it, it is possible to bring the same image to life for millions of people in all five parts of the world at the same time, and to

96

Transformations of Experience

address it not to their ears, which understand only the language they are familiar with, but to their eyes, which can understand what they see without translation. This is where I see the ethical duty of film, and especially of German film: go out into the world and teach all peoples! This is the pivotal element of my desire to make Die Nibelungen. For us and for the world in general, except a handful of people, the sublime glory of the Nibelungen is an untapped treasure. Who, in the chaos of our time, has the leisure and calmness to read the Nibelungenlied? Who has the opportunity to let the drama affect them, the heavy words, the static frames of the stage, from which they can only be told about the crucial element: mystical magic? The dragon that Siegfried slew, the lake of fire that surrounded Brunhild’s castle, the battle that Siegfried fights for Gunther, the deception of the magic hood, even the Nibelungs’ distress in Etzel’s burning palace—these are all things that we basically have to take on good faith. But film gives us a living image. We watch the events; we don’t just hear about them. And on the broad foundation of the beginning, the undreamed-of bitterness of the first fault up to the final sin, emerges visually before us. But if the Nibelungen film was going to become a new form of the old epic, it was necessary to find a style for it that would crystallize and shed light on the idea of the work. The majesty and fabulous vibrancy of German cathedrals had to breathe some life into it; alongside them, the inexpressibly beautiful simplicity of folk song. It was appropriate to unite the ghostly twilight of foggy meadows, where demons dwell and dragons writhe lethargically toward the water—the last whisperings of a belief in fairy tales— with the deep fervor of earnest prayers in the cathedral, the secret of the ur-elements with the secret of frankincense. As I approached the task of making the Nibelungen film, I often encountered people who shook their heads and asked, “How can you make people from back then comprehensible to people today?” I still owe them an answer, given that an exhaustive reply was impossible for me, for they would never have believed the only answer I had. Also, there are no “people from today” or “people from back then.” There are only people. The differences that have arisen from the passing centuries fade to nothing when flesh-and-blood beings—these elements have remained the same, after all—are confronted with the first principles of all feeling: love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, friendship and revenge are the same today as they have always been, and we react to them in exactly the same way as we have always reacted to hunger. At most, the form in which we react has changed a little: the difference is of an incremental, not of a categorical nature. The only thing I needed to do was to bring people of yore to life through contemporary people, so I subjected them to the gentle but inviolable laws of style. People in garments that look like they were fetched from the Naumburg Cathedral walk differently and embrace each other differently than people in tails or gowns. But transcending the costumes—now as then—is the eternally tragic, the eternally enigmatic, the eternally auspicious: the human countenance. Between smiling and tears, laughter and yelling, destinies unfold that have always been the stuff of human tragedy. And I have not tried anything other than to rebestow one of these tragedies, as beautiful and as contemporary as I myself found it, upon the people of today through film, the liveliest art form of our time. Note 1. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” trans. Fredric Jameson, in New Literary History 3:2 (1972): 243.

The Time Machine

97

42 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Mountains, Clouds, People First published as “Berge, Wolken, Menschen,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (April 9, 1925). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

Although Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) famously associated the Weimar mountain films of Arnold Fanck with a protofascist mentality, his writings from the 1920s initially celebrated their magnifi cent images of nature and their use of modernist cinematic techniques. In the following review of Fanck’s Der Berg des Schicksals (The mountain of destiny, 1924), Kracauer rhapsodizes about the film’s “distortion of time” (Zeitverzerrung), especially through time-lapse photography that radically accelerates natural processes. On Fanck’s mountain films, see also the texts by Balázs in chapter 2 (no. 29) and Riefenstahl in chapter 4 (no. 55).

The Mountain of Destiny, which will be showing at the Neue Lichtbühne beginning on Holy Thursday, is a nature film of an exceptional kind. It takes place in the Dolomites, and its subject is the ascent of a rock spike called the Guglia del Diavolo. Two generations strive to conquer it. The father, played by the well-known skier and sportsman Hannes Schneider, falls from an overhanging rock during a stormy night, without having reached the goal, while his boy is already learning to climb on their home’s chimney. The lad, looked after by the mother (Erna Morena) and grandmother (Frida Richard), grows up into a brawny fellow, portrayed by the Tyrolean climber Luis Trenker, and proves to be a worthy successor to his father. On her own initiative, his girlfriend (Hertha von Walther), a tourist who also has some talent, attempts to climb the devil’s spike, which he had vowed to avoid. But since she gets stuck and signals distress during another stormy night, he scales the peak, which had remained virginal until now, saves the wayward girl, and shines as double conqueror. More essential than the plot, with its benedictory ending, are the glorious images of nature, which were captured under the most difficult circumstances and through months of patient perseverance. The rock formations of the Dolomites—Cimon della Pala, Latemar, Rosengarten, and whatever they are all called—protrude skywards in every kind of lighting. They are reflected in the lakes, and masses of clouds crowd around them: cumulus clouds, giant white massifs that disintegrate, seas of clouds that well up and ebb away, striped drifts and vast herds. Faster than in reality, they rush by and dissipate, cheated of their duration by the time lapse. They shroud the peaks, encircle them, and momentarily draw back from the siege: a kaleidoscopic spectacle, always the same and ever new. Rarely have such heavenly settings been seen in film; their curious allure derives above all from the fact that processes requiring many hours to unfold in nature are here presented in a few minutes. The cloud events concentrate and the distortion of time produces an enchanting optical intoxication. Added to that is the view of trained climbers on the rock faces. The cameraman Arnold Fanck, who filmed them, deserves all admiration, as he also had to follow the action “always along the wall” in order to capture the images.1 Chimney and wall climbers in sun and fresh snow are perfectly rendered. Like every distinct display of physicality, the litheness of the mountain climbers provides aesthetic satisfaction. But there is more: anyone who has ever been driven to climb seems to feel the lure of the rock. May many see the film; it shows the passionate affinity between man and nature from a singular angle.

98

Transformations of Experience

Note 1. Kracauer here invokes the popular song “Immer an der Wand lang!” (1910), with lyrics by Hermann Frey and music by Walter Kollo. The title refers to a drunken reveler’s attempt to find his way home by staying close to the walls.

43 JOSEPH ROTH The Uncovered Grave First published as “Das aufgedeckte Grab,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (December 31, 1925). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

Famous for essays and novels such as The Wandering Jews (1927) and Radetzky March (1932), the Viennese writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939) also worked as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung’s feuilleton beginning in January 1923. In the following essay, he refl ects on the film image’s uncanny historicity in relation to newsreels depicting Russia before and after the revolutions of 1917. Thematizing cinema’s relationship to mortality and world-historical transformation, Roth argues that film conjures up “a historical round dance of the dead, a torn-open grave that once looked like a throne.” In this regard, Roth’s essay belongs to a trajectory of writings on photography and death by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes. Two years after Roth’s essay, Esfir Shub’s documentary The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) would compile and repurpose archival material (including old newsreels) to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

In the newsreel at the cinemas, one can see the Russian czar, the imperial family at one of their last outings in Petersburg, the czarina, the little heir to the throne, all the court servants, the stiff front of the guards of honor.1 This image is followed by the footage of the Red Army parade that Trotsky staged in Moscow. 2 From both filmed excerpts of world history, the audience learns about the changes over time. One should have done it in reverse: first show the image of the red millions, commanded by someone who did not go to the Army General Staff school but was trained as a man of letters, and only then, only then the last Russian czar with his family. After this image of the czar, the screen would have to remain white, white and plain like a linen sheet, and a frozen silence would have to rest upon it, making the silence of a Siberian tundra seem loud and raucous by comparison. For not even an unknowing and unfeeling film screen could have displayed the images of these hundreds upon hundreds of dead people without any reaction; this momentary resurrection of ghosts, who were already dead when they were newly and cheerfully depicted onscreen, and whom one did not really murder when one murdered them; the life was not extinguished in them, but rather an irreality whose whiff is deceptively similar to life. The last czar reigned, banished, hanged; he had scorched, plundered, and killed. Yes, he was even shot on film. But he did not live, as the film now shows. A breath emanates even from graves. It wafted so deceptively through the bodies of the czar’s family that one believed that they all lived: the prince, the princess, the stiff guard, and the little successor to the throne. The czar proceeds first. He is wearing a richly embroidered and knotted coat, a sort of hussar’s uniform, his face mounted on a pointed beard as if by means of a screw drilled

The Time Machine

99

through his chin. His heavy eyelids are like lowered blinds made of wooden skin. The glassy gaze is probably directed at the lens. It is like a stare against the muzzle of a gun barrel set to fire a few years later. The czar moves rather quickly, his movements those of a creature made of puppet material and spectral shadows. He disappears toward the right, where the white screen plunges into a black abyss. And at no point is one’s consciousness aware that a filmstrip just ran to its end back in the projector. Rather, it is like the summoning of demons at a spiritualist séance. The czarina and all the ladies of the court wear the dresses of prewar fashion, the large hats with the broad brims that curve down in the front and up in the back, clamped to high hairdos with skewers so that they don’t sway. The hats hang at a slant and enshroud the one profile, so as to disclose the other one without any protection; they look so bold and have the false audacity of the robber’s hats at masked balls and a futile coquetry like a musty fragrance that would like to entice. The dresses are long and closed up high, little clasps bar the neck like a garden fence that is too narrow, and the bosoms, demure but emphasized, bulge under lots of impenetrable material. Their hair is painfully pulled up above their ears. These ladies are even older, even deader than the hussars’ uniforms. In the quick movement of the procession, the ladies form the flow, and although they are all dressed in white, they look like black veils with feminine forms. That all lasts scarcely three minutes. It is nothing but one of those countless awful moments of world history in which the festivities of crowned heads take place. A film camera recorded this one and transmitted it to posterity. The filmstrip is somewhat worn down, the images flicker, but one does not know whether it is the holes, owing to the ravages of time, or the molecules of natural dust that enshroud the seemingly living objects like a cloud. It is the most dreadful irreality that film has ever conjured up; a historical round dance of the dead, a torn-open grave that once looked like a throne . . . Notes 1. The last czar of Russia, Nicholas II, reigned from November 1, 1894, to his abdication on March 15, 1917 (following the February Revolution of 1917). He, his wife, their five children, and their servants were assassinated by the Bolsheviks on July 16–17, 1918. 2. Leon Trotsky served as founder and first commander of the Red Army in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917.

44 FRITZ SCHIMMER On the Question of a National Film Archive First published as “Zur Frage des Reichsfilmarchivs,” in Lichtbild-Bühne 19, no. 79 (April 3, 1926), 11–14. Translated by Erik Born.

Fritz Schimmer was a secondary school teacher who led the Sächsische Landesbildstelle in Dresden from 1924 to 1936 and 1945 to 1950. A regional archive of visual documents (the first of its kind in Germany), the Landesbildstelle is today known as the Deutsche Fotothek. In the following article, Schimmer (like Joseph Roth, no. 43) highlights the material decomposition of filmic images over time, and he calls for both proper archiving on a national level and the institutionalization of film study. In his conception of the archive as a means of “wresting objects away from their fate of

100

Transformations of Experience impermanence,” Schimmer evokes what Jacques Derrida would later identify as the dialectical other of “archive fever”: namely, a sense of “radical fi nitude.”1 On the eventual founding of a German national film archive, see the editors’ comment for the text by Balázs at the end of this chapter (no. 46).

The question of a national film archive has been discussed for some time now. People recognize that the treatment of film is outdated compared to that of other artistic and scientific works, and that we need to make up for lost time. Germans have a marked predisposition for archives and museums. No other nation on earth has collected everything with such fervor and such scientific thoroughness, everything that is or could somehow be the object of scientific research. The essence of any archive, its true purpose, consists in wresting objects away from their fate of impermanence, since they would otherwise be doomed to loss and decay, would get swallowed up and worn away in the stream of time. The true purpose of any archive consists in conserving objects and putting them in order, thereby making it possible to group them together or apart from one another by means of comparison. The possibility of comparing things that are similar or different is the basis for all of science, which also requires experience and knowledge of many things that need to be permanently and easily accessible. The aim of every science is to create a system, to create order. Indeed, order is what reveals the spirit of things. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution was premised on an enormous amount of collecting and minute organizing. In fact, people can collect anything: sculptures made of stone and bronze, paintings on canvas, etchings and engravings on paper, animals in formalin and alcohol or stuffed or skinned, stones and minerals, books and manuscripts, and so on. Our museums are full of such things, and anyone who wants to get a picture of the organic world or of the cultures of various peoples has to visit a museum or an archive. However, the necessary condition for every object in a collection is that it be preserved more or less unchanged. Whenever this is not the case, the work of conservation comes in—or, at the very least, every museum’s tasks include protecting and caring for the objects that are being preserved there and taking measures to minimize the destructive effects of time to which everything eventually falls victim. The most fortunate situation (apart from natural and cultural objects like stones or sculptures and bronzes, which are virtually imperishable) is that of the book. To some extent, a library is imperishable, so long as it is not a collection of manuscripts, since the books in its collections are usually not unique but rather reproductions. A book’s paper and typesetting can be updated without changing its actual contents, which are intellectual. This is even more apparent with sheet music: the score that is being preserved counts for nothing, and it only becomes something, becomes reality, when an instrument and a masterful hand reproduce the composition that has been fixed in the notes of the score. Likewise, a book counts for nothing, and it only becomes something when I read it. What is essential is the temporal flow of the mental processes that occur while reading, whereas all other objects do not need to be converted into temporal, dynamic events (images, plants, and animals exist only in space and not in time). What happens with film? The actual process (action during fi lming) is unique and never recurring, but it gets fixed on a filmstrip in the form of a negative. For its part, the filmstrip itself is also unique, like a manuscript or original typesetting, but it can be reproduced a thousand to two thousand times. However, as for the material used to fix both the negative that once existed and the positive that is repeatedly used to play the film, this is more perishable than anything that could ever possibly be collected, because

The Time Machine

101

the film ages—namely, it ages chemically. If we were to preserve one copy of every single film in a film archive, then we would have to unroll and view that copy whenever we wanted to view and study the film. In other words, we would continuously have to use the copy mechanically, because films that may be stored so well when rolled up in metal capsules are nothing more than dead lumps of celluloid. In addition, the continuous chemical decomposition of films due to age is a factor, since films are made of nitrified and camphorated cellulose, a material that is keratinized on the surface and becomes brittle over time. This happens not only to the positive copy that I use for every viewing but also to the original negative that is being preserved and that I would want to use to produce a new positive copy after ten, twenty, thirty or more years. For the time being, conservation and restoration processes like those used for old or, in any case, more durable objects like oil paintings, decaying bones, and textiles have not yet been invented for films. So we seriously have to raise the question of what the task and activities of a film archive should be, if it does not, and should not, merely wish to show the cross section of a cultural epoch. All of the suggestions that have been made so far come from a librarian’s perspective, as though the question of film archives would be resolved if we would only start lining up filmstrips carefully and neatly next to each other on shelves, like books. To be sure, we will have to proceed in this fashion as well. However, the main mistake in the librarian’s and archivist’s perspective on film is that it emphasizes the object—that is, the “what” of a film’s contents. We could certainly put films in order according to their contents, but the content is not as important, at least not in feature films, as is the “how” of the representation. This “how” is what changes and develops, what it is necessary to compare and to study. We will have to consider seriously what would need to happen for fi lm to become the object of scientific research, since filmic material, as the bearer of a particular nonrecurring process, cannot be conserved. Similarly, the life of times past has not been preserved directly but only in different forms of cultural and artistic expression (architecture, sculptures, images, poetry, household objects, etc.). Time, and everything that occurs in time, vanishes. All that remains is what exists in space alone. Film—“preserved time” as it were—shares the same fate as life: it too perishes; its basic materials, appearing in space, change quickly, and with them, so does the breath of life that was cast over it like a spell and that may seem to create the illusion of a temporal event again through a wonderful mechanism in the light of the projection lamp. In this respect, film’s cousin, the gramophone, which preserves the human voice, is apparently more fortunate, though hard rubber plates get worn out and change chemically—or, at least there are temporal limits to their age. There is some consolation for all of this: there are also temporal limits to people’s interest in scientific things, and so it will hardly be necessary to preserve every single film for posterity for an unlimited amount of time. What is necessary, however, is mastering the increasingly difficult problem of getting a complete picture of film, i.e. sorting out the essential from the non-essential. There is still not any authoritative scientific nomenclature for film; the essence of scientific films, educational films, and Kulturfilms is not yet clear, and the sphere of the filmic artwork— or the “art film” [Kunstfilm], as Professor Meister2 of Vienna calls it—still has no easily discernable limits; indeed, these limits fluctuate wildly. There are just as few precise descriptions of fi lms as there are authoritative value judgments that could be handed down to posterity. In short, we lack nearly everything we would need to make film, as it stands today and as it is developing, into the object of research that the filmic artwork, first and foremost, demands to be. The current method of preserving fi lms, simply

102

Transformations of Experience

stockpiling them and statistically registering them, is at best only a prerequisite for the description and cataloguing that will eventually animate the science of film. I view this as a decisive and noble mission for the Germans—indeed, given the current state of affairs, a mission that only the Germans can successfully accomplish. If appearances can be believed, the German art film has arrived at one of those turning points where it is showing its superiority so clearly that we will have to hold the mirror of science up to it if we do not want its current ephemerality to be its doom. Imagine a positive future: the state has recognized that film is of the highest priority—not only economically but, above all, culturally. So it takes action, protecting and supporting films, and it does so in the noblest way befitting a state—by creating a cultural heritage site for films (let’s call it a national archive for now, though it would make more sense to speak of an institute of film studies or a film studies institute). Here, every aspect of film—technical, economic, cultural, artistic—would have its own area of research, and none of them would be constrained by the filmic materials. The institution would also not be disturbed by the film industry, which is involved in a global economic fight, nor by those who are already “fully occupied.” It would demand that scientific disciplines deal comprehensively with the problems that film poses today. However, before this kind of research can seriously begin, we first need to highlight all of the problems that film poses in general and discover film’s connections with other areas of science, its research area not yet being delimited. To give only one example: who could make a pronouncement about the psychology of gestures and of facial expressions, or about the metaphysics of the dynamic as such? We see things in film, which first opened our eyes to them; we enjoy them and experience them, but we do not know why a filmic effect is like this in one place, like that in another. This is where the significance of research comes in: we learn from scientific results, and the clarity of knowledge has always gone hand in hand with the clarity of the creative spirit, or it has made that clarity possible. Let us finally put an end to all of the useless and chaotic dilettantism that gets spread in the gossip about film, in the extensive literature on film, in magazines, programs, and other places! An end to Kintopp façades that increasingly discredit film in the eyes of the intelligentsia! And create a suitable exterior for the enormous forces that fi lm, and especially the German fi lm, has at its command! If film were to receive its own home, where it would be cultivated, at least to some extent, for its own sake (since that’s the perspective of science and art on things), the interaction that could emerge here would have the deepest consequences for the creation of films. It is incomprehensible that the film industry (which is really not exclusively an industry but only appears as such to outsiders) has not seriously entertained the idea that it should finally bring the cultural artifacts that it has been cultivating under the protective roof of one single temple. Far too often, film is treated only as film—that is, people measure it in meters and consider its material aspect, that all-too-perishable “membrane,” to be its essential element. But over this thin gelatin membrane, which covers the celluloid band unwinding before us, there is another even thinner layer—a layer that defi nitely belongs to the visible world, yet also to the spiritual world. Let us finally ensure that film no longer denies its higher origins in the world of the spirit. Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 9–63; here 19.

The Time Machine

103

2. The Austrian scholar Richard Meister had given a lecture, “Der Unterrichtsfilm: Seine Didaktik und Methodik” (The instructional film: Its didactics and methodology), at the Deutsche Bildwoche in Vienna in 1925 discussing the ideal feature film as a Kunstfilm (art film). Meister’s lecture was published in Die Wiener Bildwoche in 1926.

45 ALBRECHT VIKTOR BLUM Documentary and Artistic Film First published as “Dokumentarischer und künstlerischer Film,” in Film-Kurier, 9th Beiblatt (June 1, 1929). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Albrecht Viktor Blum (1888–1959) was an actor, director, and editor known for his work on documentaries, Kulturfi lms, as well as promotional fi lms for communist organizations in the late 1920s and early 30s. Often assembled from preexisting newsreel footage, Blum’s work, like that of Esfir Shub, offers an early version of the compilation or found-footage film. In the following text, he suggests possibilities for repurposing and reassembling documentary film material from the archive— a practice that has become more pervasive in an age of digital mash-ups and remixes.

In the film archives of a single German film company such as Ufa, there are hundreds of thousands of meters of unused film material. These are images of life; documents showing the existence of humans, animals, and plants; factual images of landscapes, buildings, cities, and objects of every kind; images of the conventions and customs of people from every nation, of natural catastrophes, accidents, work processes, and everyday events—images not staged but rather shown as this everyday life appears before the cameraman’s lens. These filmic documents encompass the entire life of contemporary humankind. This indescribable wealth of raw material for Kulturfilms remains largely untapped. To be sure, the large production companies rid themselves of a portion of these film documentary images (in order not to be suffocated by their sheer mass) through the creation of “cultural” films [“Kultur”-filme].1 The tediousness of such films can be partially blamed on their lack of any ideal foundation (idea—general basic concept), and mainly on the use of long, banal intertitles, which anticipate the object about to appear through didactic words—a tactic that at least has the practical advantage of obtaining tax exemption for these “Kultur” films by classifying them as educational films [Lehrfilme]. (It would be easier if we could finally agree on the term “civilization”-films [“Zivilisations”filme] for these compilations.) In order to produce meaningful representations of contemporary history in montage films created from this archival wealth, it would not even be necessary to have the hand of an artist, as long as the films were made from ideal perspectives. One could forego artistic-aesthetic ambition altogether. The objects, in themselves and in their truth, already attain their full value as soon as a clean and sensitive hand arranges them in some sensible order. Of course, when doing this kind of work, one constantly risks becoming distracted by the abundance and charms of the material and turning away from the straight path to the specified goal.

104

Transformations of Experience

Hence, it is necessary to exert spartan self-control and, for the sake of the clarity and objectivity of the idea, to refrain from such seductive but incidental embellishments and ornamentations. With this kind of self-discipline, the images will arrange themselves according to a more profound law; true montage will not succeed by chance but will develop with necessity! Associative paths lead from image to image, but the conceptually binding principle must be purposeful and intellectually determined. If such montages avoid all sense of “puzzle” play produced by an emphasis on external resemblances, then felicitous combinations will produce a blend of functional and stylistic logic in the image sequence. The superiority of these documentary films over fictional performances and staged productions lies in the fact that, while acted human expressions are transitory, people themselves are everlasting to each other! In and of themselves, all the combinations, conflicts, and situations of narrative film are more or less indifferent, depending on whether they are subordinated to a vital idea of time and life or the reverse. In Chaplin films, all situations, without exception, are subordinated to the idea; this is why these films are among the most spiritual of our time. Chaplin and the non-acting figures in the film, such as plants, animals, and children, are the only ones who earn the title “fairy tales of reality.”2 But the exaggerated expressions of actors—that is, any expression that simulates a pleasurable or nonpleasurable sensation—cannot hold up against reality itself. Let us compare a scene “overheard,” as it were, with a staged scene depicting the same events, no matter how well acted: For example, a nervous person crosses a very busy street. This person, caught on camera without his permission or knowledge, is not faking his lack of confidence in this situation; rather, he is in a state of uncertainty, which even the greatest dramatic performer could not express more truthfully. The proximity to life that most deeply enthralls us in representation, whenever artistic concepts become “events” in the form of works and lead us to believe a formal reality is appearing to us as a “higher” truth—we can now achieve this same proximity to life through film, without performance, without playacting, without simulation. And this not only in 100-percent documentary films, such as Das Dokument von Shanghai,3 but also in “narrative” films, as has been demonstrated by the Russians, and in particular by Pudovkin.4 His actors, for example, the Mongolian farmers and merchants, were positioned in a situation suggested by the director, and all the performers in the world would not have sufficed to act out the hundreds of affects that we saw here collected in one image. And this is the world-historical significance of this “technical” invention, “film”: to extract the event itself from our lived reality and to sense it so formally that we truly begin to take part in the experience of a “new art.” Notes 1. Blum is referring to the series of compilation films on various topics that Ufa released under the title Das Auge der Welt (The eye of the world). These so-called Querschnittfilme (cross-section films) reused footage from the Ufa archive. The first film of the series, Oskar Kalbus’s Henny Porten: Leben und Laufbahn einer Filmkünstlerin (Henny Porten: Life and career of a film artist), premiered in Berlin on September 27, 1928. 2. Blum here invokes the German title, Märchen der Wirklichkeit, of a collection of fairy tales by Maxim Gorky. 3. Yakov Bliokh’s Das Dokument von Shanghai (The Shanghai document, 1928), was a German-Soviet coproduction that depicted living conditions in Shanghai and sought to elicit sympathy for Chinese revolutionaries. Blum served as editor. 4. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia (1928) depicts a Mongolian herdsman’s rebellion against British troops.

The Time Machine

105

46 BÉLA BALÁZS Where Is the German Sound Film Archive? First published as “Wo bleibt das deutsche Tonfilmarchiv?” in Filmtechnik, no. 16 (August 8, 1931), 8–9. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

The transition to sound prompted increasing efforts to document and preserve the history of film; the 1930s indeed saw the advent of film festivals and cinematheques in various countries as well as the publication of book-length histories such as Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now (1930). In the following text, Béla Balázs calls for a “museum of film art” that would allow film practitioners to study and build on innovations in sound film aesthetics. When it was published in 1931, Balázs’s article was introduced as follows: “In the context of the programmatic speech given by G. W. Pabst, the new chairman of the Dachorganisation der Filmschaffenden Deutschlands [Umbrella Organization of German Film Professionals], the intention was declared to establish a special archive for sound film productions. We publish here the essay that provided the initial impetus for the creation of this sound film archive.” The first German national film archive, the Reichsfilmarchiv, was in fact inaugurated by Hitler and Goebbels in 1935—the same year that saw the opening of the Cinémathèque Française and the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library, and two years after the establishment of the British Film Institute. In 1938, these four institutions were the founding members of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF).

There are libraries and art galleries. There are museums of art history and of general cultural history. There are special collections and archives for everything. The slightest product of human creativity becomes a document of development through the sheer fact that things were once different, and thereby gains historical distinction. It is the first sign of a guild or trade’s self-regard when it commemorates its own history. History is the spiritual [geistige] area for beginning to advance into the future. Cobblers, tailors, and brush-makers find the works of their ancestors in special museums. In technical museums, one can trace the development of the lavatory. Yet there is no museum for film art. In the Louvre, there is a large and meticulous collection of metal buttons that the gamekeepers of past centuries wore on their liveries. Yet initial, pathbreaking masterpieces of a new art (which, more than any other, also captures real life) are nowhere and no longer to be seen. There are of course large museums of theater history. Between collections of set designs, programs, props, and “written-out” production scripts, there are also portraits of famous actors on display, and here and there a fixed stage design drawn according to memory. When film emerged, one hoped that from then on, the future would wind garlands for the actor as well.1 But for the time being, this future does not extend beyond four or five years. Perhaps there are brave directors of such theater museums, who have, apart from portraits, also acquired a few film reels from actors. In any case, there is no museum, no archive of fi lm art. This fact, which is beyond compare as evidence of a thoughtless self-contempt, will endure as the single historical document of the beginnings of film. It is always enormously difficult to establish with evidence the emergence and development of something that dates back centuries. Even the best museum is incomplete because past generations, lacking historical consciousness, did not think of diligently supplying material for future study. But with film, we have a unique and singular opportunity in

106

Transformations of Experience

cultural history. We are eyewitnesses to the emergence and rapid development of a new art form. We are in the position to authentically record where and how something first came into being. This would be of such inestimable value for scholarship alone that it is inconceivable why to date no official site has earnestly set itself this task. For those of us who make films—and who also thus make film history—an archive of the development of our craft would have an even greater significance than a historical and scholarly one. We have to be up to date. We want to learn. What excites us most about our new art is the immeasurable opportunity and, with it, the perilous responsibility for bringing forth something new. Thousands are working on it. Each of us is a pioneer. But our efforts and achievements do not add up. For none of us is able to watch all films and to scrutinize where, perhaps at 30 meters, some technical or artistic problem was solved for the first time or better than before, or where a new optical, acoustic, or technical effect was attempted. It is unthinkable that a modern technician would begin constructing a new machine without knowing exactly the latest achievements and experiments in this field and including them. But we know the achievements of our art form, which is also a craft and technique, only incidentally or even accidentally, for we lack an opportunity to take stock of them. How often we see something already superseded in dramaturgy or direction in an otherwise carefully made new film; how often is something newly discovered, with the unease of a first experiment, which has already been attempted elsewhere and which could have been tested for its potential capacities. Our efforts and experiences are not gathered anywhere. We lack the opportunity for cultivation in our art, in our craft. Setting up an archive of the entire German film production would also, of course, have a cultural-historical significance. It could be the task only of the state, which could procure and preserve a copy of every film, like the state library does with every book printed in German. Yet cultural historians would occasionally get lost in this primeval forest. Such a general film archive would not be useful for those of us who want to study our craft, nor would it be for the amateur who is eager to learn. One could imagine a museum of film history, in the manner of art history museums, in which only those films are collected that are of particular historical interest or artistic value. A pantheon of films. How much ardent effort, devotion, invention, and ingenuity would thus be saved from oblivion—from an unnecessary, careless oblivion. Setting up such a museum of film art would be the urgent task of the state, especially in view of Germany’s significant role in the history of film art. For silent films, we are almost too late. What has already been lost is no longer to be accounted for. Should nothing at all remain of sound film, either? In such a museum of film art, entire films would have to be collected, which would be chosen based on their total aesthetic value. Yet it is not easy to study in such a collection—particularly for those practitioners who, beyond merely seeking general aesthetic impressions, wish to get their bearings on the latest techniques. For a film can be an artistic masterpiece without necessarily containing something totally new and innovative in its technique of expression, and a fi lm that may be quite mediocre as a whole can include innovative technical solutions or entirely new forms of expression. For this reason, we are envisioning a collection of a different sort, which would be even more useful and urgent for our further training than a museum of fi lm art. We want to set up an archive of sound film excerpts. Regardless of the aesthetic worth or worthlessness of the entire film, passages should be collected in which specific problems of sound film were solved for the first time, or in which particular capacities of sound film were shown for the first time or most successfully. Documents of development in dramaturgical, directorial, and sound technique. This collection should be routinely supplemented, always up

The Time Machine

107

to date, and it should represent the current state of development. The excerpts should be classified just as they would be in a library, according to the realms in which they represent a particular achievement. A catalogue with a precise description and appraisal of this achievement should give the visitor the opportunity to find what interests him right away. This catalogue should be routinely published, perhaps in the form of a yearbook—a living monument of productive film work, which would also put an end to the unjust anonymity of the pioneers of film. Each of these original ideas and designs should also retain the names of their creators. Procuring this material would not be very difficult. Every producer, director, dramaturge, cameraman, and sound engineer has an interest in establishing the precedence of his creation and making it known. The Berlin “umbrella organization”2 can form a committee for choosing the material. The storage facility, screening room, and administration of this archive will of course cost money. Would it be impossible to receive this little amount of money for such an eminent cultural enterprise, particularly since this archive would not only be for professionals but would also serve pedagogical purposes, and would most definitely attract broader circles of the public interested in film? At some point, it could subsist through usage fees alone. Who is responsible for this endeavor? Who bears the moral responsibility for its completion? If one neglects an important matter because one does not think of it, it is negligence. But if one neglects it after reflecting on it and becoming fully aware of its significance . . . but why become bitter already in advance? Notes 1. Balázs plays here on a phrase from the prologue to Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager: “Dem Mimen flicht die Nachwelt keine Kränze” (The future winds no garlands for the actor); see The Robbers and Wallenstein, trans. F. J. Lamport (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 166. 2. A reference to the Dachorganisation der Filmschaffenden Deutschlands (Umbrella Organization of German Filmmakers).

FOUR

THE MAGIC OF THE BODY

47 WALTER TURSZINSKY Film Dramas and Film Mimes First published as “Kinodramen und Kinomimen,” in Die Schaubühne 6, no. 39 (September 29, 1910), 989– 92. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The wave of “body culture” that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century— including both athletics and the various schools of modern dance—would be unthinkable without photographic media. Journals such as Die Schönheit (1903–1931) served as forums for visualizing and propagating the new ideals of the body in images. To this nexus of bodily imaginaries and visual media, film added the element of movement, and theorists quickly touted the medium’s superior ability to visualize bodies in time.1 It is thus hardly surprising that many of the earliest efforts to theorize film’s specificity as a medium would have recourse to arts of bodily movement such as dance and pantomime. Balázs, for example, characterized film and dance as two analogous arts for rendering visible the body’s expressivity in the introduction to Visible Man (1924), while also praising film’s ability to reach a broader audience. This chapter brings together various refl ections on the fascination exerted by bodies in film: on modes of performance, the power of filmed gestures, the use of film to propagate body cultural programs, and the relations between film, dance, and pantomime. In the first article, written for a popular theater journal, Walter Turszinsky offers insight into the conditions of silent film acting circa 1910, calling for an acting style based on succinct gestures and a capacity for acrobatic feats in contrast to the intellectualism of German theater. While such acrobatics would continue to play an important role in slapstick, the rise of close-ups in subsequent years would also bring about a new emphasis on subtler modes of expressive performance. Turszinsky (1874– 1915) was a journalist and writer who turned to film in 1912; his screenplay credits include Carl Wilhelm’s early comedy starring Ernst Lubitsch, Der Stolz der Firma (The pride of the firm, 1914).

A vast and wide hall. Tucked away in a corner on the right, hardly noticeable, sits the stage, reduced to the opposition of black and white. In theatrical rehearsals, a barrier is erected between the external world and that of the drama, into which, gradually, for a few hours every morning, the actors strive to transport themselves. Theater mimes work in the semidarkness of the theatrical auditorium. And every ray of light streaming in through an open door, every unfamiliar sound, disturbs the actor in his concentrated search for gold. In the hall where rehearsals are followed by the staging of the fi lm drama, on the other hand, light is everything. Here, in order for the spectacle to succeed,

108

The Magic of the Body

109

a sufficiently bright and unclouded sky must shine through the studio’s wide roof with its countless glass tiles. Then the actors with nothing to do can talk all they want, and the set designers, propmen, costume designers, hairdressers, and other members of the crew can make all the noise they care to, for on this small island of a stage, the word is of secondary importance. Indeed, this exciting, colorful and constantly changing bustle behind the scenes can even serve as a stimulus to the fi lm mimes, whose acting techniques employ only the face and the body. The leaders of theatrical rehearsals—director, producer, and author—spend hours practicing their art on a single scene. On the film stage, the only painstaking work is that involving the creation of the setting: the countryside, a cabin on a ship, a train compartment, or the ocean floor. The main job is executed in prestissimo tempo. The morning’s blessed sunshine must suffice not for one but for ten scenes. These scenes are not even necessarily parts of the same film. What counts, once again, is the scenery; scenes from different fi lm dramas requiring the same setting are grouped together for one morning session, while the filming of those events taking place somewhere else is reserved for a second session. Speed is of the essence. The golden rule for film mimes is that gestures must be clear and succinct. If the modern theater actor today excels in discrete and suggestive gestures, the cinema stage, along with its audience, demands movements executed with absolutely blunt clarity; but despite their bluntness and their clarity, these movements must follow one another with lightning speed. Clearly, German actors will require training in order to attain such volubility with their limbs and facial muscles, just as they do to attain that magical eloquence possessed by the typical speaker of Romance languages. Because of this, the first attempts to develop the cinema in Germany were bound to fail; German actors could not forget their national inheritance overnight; they could not free themselves, in the blink of an eye, from that thoroughness characterizing German movements to take up the presto of Italian gestures. Now, however, they have hired teachers, and it is a true pleasure to see, for example, Mr. Decroix from Paris working to train them. 2 This gaunt man with a quick temper, who is known to hurl the camera over or to smash a few props when his temperament needs an outlet, left the theater of Réjane for the film studio of the Pathé brothers in Paris.3 Having ordained the latter, so to speak, into a higher artistic office by bringing in good writers and important actors, he now intends to cultivate the German soil for his designs and according to his principles. [. . .] If this Parisian understands how, even in Germany, to lend form to the human material so necessary to the cinematograph, this is because he himself is a master of those gestures that race forward while nonetheless sharply emphasizing the moment. It is because, true to the principles of his craft, he has eliminated the spoken word. It is because he demonstrates rather than lectures. I wish to describe this more closely. The actors enter the studio without the slightest idea about what roles they will play. Elaborate acting techniques, resting on solid spiritual foundations, require a lengthy preparation, but for those depending on the skillfulness of gestures, one does best to leap in, unprepared, in medias res. Not until they greet each other in the morning are the actors told how they will be made up, which costumes they should put on, and in which situations they will be placed. Then they discuss the job at hand in whispers on the little stage. I will pick out two completely different scenarios I saw unfold on two different afternoons, in the few minutes from the first attempt to arrange them to the moment at which they were ripe for the stage. In the first, a “young woman” receives a surprise visit from her “good friend,” who discovers a gentleman there. In her naïve optimism, the friend takes the man for a thief, but he is really a suitor. The friend informs the woman’s clumsy, bumbling husband out on the street, who enters the room with his newly purchased and loaded Browning. The husband, himself fearing

110

Transformations of Experience

the bang of the gunshot and its consequences, lets the gun go off into the closet, which the lovers had earlier vacated and carefully left open. The experienced actors naturally know in a minute’s time how to perform the scenario, which the Parisian hurriedly sketches for them from his manuscript in his stuttering half-German—and this they do in the first rehearsal. But then Monsieur Decroix brings his vivacious technique of expression to bear on the situation. Setting the example, he livens up the gestures of the young woman, gestures at first apprehensive, then taking on an air of suspense, and finally turning desperate. Although at first acting with classic German stiffness, she finally manages, with the help of the supple Parisian, to sink over the chair as if her spine were broken, as if she were completely independent of the resistance of her bone structure. Likewise, the clownish fear of the husband, who is a coward and hero at once, becomes more and more sharply delineated with the help of the living model: that is, when the director shows the actor how to hold his eyes and mouth wide open; to use long, straight steps when sneaking closer to the closet; to slide the barrel of the revolver around the corner of the closet door with a comical gesture of caution; and, at the end, to lean on the front of the closet with the rigidity of a jointed wooden doll. One sees here how to double the intensity of the cinematic effects by eliminating nuances, raising the comedy to crude explicitness, and then returning to somewhat softer means of expression. Now the scene changes abruptly; before the count of three, the rapid cinematographic apparatus takes us from the comedy of adultery into the tragedy of adultery. Amidst the excitement of an elegant officers’ ball given by the crew of a flagship, a gentleman in tails comes upon a lady by surprise as she reads a letter just given to her by a gentleman in uniform. She hurls the letter away. Another officer, entering from the side and catching the entire scene, chivalrously covers over the corpus delicti with the sole of his patent leather boot, an action for which he then receives a slap in the face from the glove of the jealous husband. In the first attempt, this scene comes off quite thin and pale, since the actors, all of whom come from comedy houses, are trying their hand at it for the first time. But then the crack of the director’s whip, his illustrative gestures, the passionate play of his facial muscles, his grotesquely rolling eyes, and his voice emitting hoarse, fragmentary sounds transform, in the blink of an eye, the child of nature into an actor worthy to play Othello, the Amélie of the Residenztheater into a first-rate tragic actress, the comic philanderer into a superior man of style. He whips this acting trio into a passion for which they have only expressions, not words, at their disposal. Shaking his fists, he suggests such an ecstasy to the three actors that the grip with which the enraged husband clutches his wife’s arms becomes tighter and tighter—and that, in opposition to this, the third figure coming to the woman’s aid lights his cigarette with more and more elegance, with cooler and cooler reserve. When the time finally comes, when, after these rehearsals lasting a total of nine minutes, the small camera begins to roll, the hum from the film compartment, in conjunction with the driving influence of the director, intensifies even further the power of the hypnosis. Monsieur Decroix stands opposite the stage, signals changes in the scene with a “now! . . . now!,” and bangs on the nearest piece of furniture with his fist when he wants emotions to run higher. With complete spontaneity, however, the actors murmur out a text to accompany their gestures: “Give me that letter!” “I haven’t got any letter!” Indeed, in the heat of the moment and the improvisation, this text can also take on a more vulgar character: “You haven’t got any letter? Just you wait, damned wench! I’ll teach you!” Later, in the evening projections, this text can no longer be heard. The cinema stage has no horn to project the sound from the stage to the stalls. And these rudimentary phrases, forced out by the excitement of the director and of the moment, serve only to make the image appear more natural and the cinematic scene more realistic.

The Magic of the Body

111

Thus the film mime must employ an art that is more emotional than intellectual. Here, Schildkraut will win out over Bassermann; 4 acrobatic and mime training will leave all intellectual performance in the shadows. Here—and I report according to the facts— people are needed who, disguised, for example, as overzealous amateur photographers plagued by bad luck, can tumble down steep embankments, let themselves be pulled out from under automobiles, test the thickness of their skulls against hard oak trees, and get soaked to the skin in dirty ponds. And they must do all of this while avoiding serious accidents. For such accidents would only damage the reputation of the cinema in its eternal search for new, sensational effects. Here, people are needed who are willing to fall from a boat into the water and be washed up by the waves onto the shores of the Baltic Sea, who have no qualms about being dragged by wild horses over the street pavement or jumping from a train traveling at lightning speed. The cinema stage is thus rehabilitating all those qualities that German actors have learned to frown upon since the triumph of intellectualism in the theater. It will be exciting to see whether the cinema will have a profound enough influence to create a core of German actors really willing to submit, for the long haul, to its wishes and principles. Notes 1. See for example Leopold Schmidl, “Bühne, Leben und Forschung im Lichtbilde,” Der Kinematograph, no. 208 (December 21, 1910): “All theoretical treatises on the language of the body, no matter how rich they may be, cannot lead to an understanding of life as long as they are supported only by dead photographs.” 2. Charles Decroix was a well-known French director and film producer who worked for Pathé beginning in 1909 and then in Berlin between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War. 3. The Théâtre Réjane (now the Théâtre de Paris) was opened by French actress Gabrielle Réjane in Paris in 1906. 4. Rudolph Schildkraut (1862–1930) was a legendary stage and screen actor in Central Europe and later the United States. Albert Bassermann (1867–1952) was a distinguished stage actor in Germany, who would accept the starring role in Max Mack’s film Der Andere (The Other, 1913) and would later act in many films in Germany and abroad.

48 FRIEDRICH FREKSA Theater, Pantomime, and Cinema First published as “Theater, Pantomime und Kino,” in Dramaturgische Blätter, no. 6 (April 1916), 125–30. Translated by Eric Ames.

An ancient art of gesture, pantomime was often cited as a precursor to silent film, and there were indeed many cinematic adaptations of pantomimes, such as Mauritz Stiller’s 1913 film version of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das fremde Mädchen (The Mysterious Girl, 1911). For the author and dramatist Friedrich Freksa (1882–1955), however, the refined art of theatrical pantomime was little suited to the cinema, where audiences sought diversion through action-based content and easily consumable visual language. Freksa himself had written a stage pantomime, Sumurun, which was staged by Max Reinhardt in 1910; this production was filmed by Deutsche Bioskop—one of the first attempts to film a stage production—and would later be adapted for the screen by Ernst Lubitsch in 1920.

112

Transformations of Experience

The viability of today’s theater has suffered greatly from the exceedingly rapid growth of film theater. The masses are searching for the most convenient means of distraction. The cinema, available at every hour, meets their natural needs; when the workday is over, the many people who wish to dream themselves into another world or forget about life for a few hours find what they desire in these houses of shadow plays. Hard-hit and angry theater owners have therefore launched a propaganda campaign against the film theaters; at the same time, a group of serious men, genuinely concerned with the good of the public, have committed themselves to fighting this latest pseudo muse, the cinema. To make a fair assessment of the situation, one must have a solid basis on which to make a judgment. That means finding a position on this question from which one can view the foundations of the theater, pantomime, and the cinema that grew from the latter. On the theater stage, it is the living human being who provides the artistic material; he comes into existence with all the gifts of body and soul. Everything that surrounds him, all the arts of the painter, the engineer, and the lighting technician, should serve as means of bringing human nature to a more colorful and powerful expression. Wherever man is overwhelmed by the stage apparatus, the theatrical arts appear to us as empty and soulless. The art of the stage director is to bring the melodies shaped by the writer into harmonious relation with the environment that he has created for poetry on the stage. He thus resembles a musical artist who makes the work of an old master conform to a modern orchestra. The actor, whom I would like to compare to an instrument, possesses two registers for expressing himself: the body and the voice, the latter being tied to the words of the poet. The upper limits of each scale consist in the silent, wordless gesture and the raw cry of nature. Both can attain the highest level of affect. The silent gesture represents a moment in which the word is born or can no longer be born. The cry of nature stands for that other moment, when nature no longer has words at its disposal. The poet cannot hold them apart or control them both. In the theater, it is the art of the actor that prevails, as long as he possesses creative power. The words of the drama make up the solid foundation upon which the light, colorful world of the play is constructed. Words are the means for mediating between intellectual life and the everyday world. All that is external relies on the gesture, on the act, commanded by the words and their conditions. In this sense, the old saying in the theater holds true: “In the beginning was the Word.” Yet following the words requires constant interaction. This is a task that requires of viewers and listeners a relatively strong concentration. The mere act of watching distracts from the words. Anybody who has tried to follow a speaker knows how difficult it is to process the words in one’s mind as quickly as they are spoken. For all of the sentences do not capture one’s interest to the same extent, and so one listener remains on this sentence, while another listener remains on that one, only to catch up again by jumping over what has already been said. Modern man, tired at the end of the day, can pick up a more limited number of words than audiences of an earlier time, when life was not so full of impressions as it is today. The Greeks understood the structure of a speech by Demosthenes according to pauses of breath. Alongside the thoughts, they also appreciated the construction of a sentence; indeed, they were all sensitive to the artistic disruption that occurred when a speaker paused at the wrong time. Today, we have lost this talent for clearly and effectively comprehending the formal elements of rhetoric. In its place, we demand from drama stronger physical attractions.

The Magic of the Body

113

Actors have to intensify individual verbal expressions to stimulate the thoughts and feelings of the spectators and listeners. In accordance with such laws, dialogue has decreased. Audiences can stand great cascades of words only when the actor provides the necessary elaboration through facial expressions and gestures. If he wishes to be effective, the actor must deliberately break up the flowing rhythm and construction of speech to emphasize isolated, intense moments. Evidence of this can be found in the art of Albert Bassermann, who, breaking with the absurd tradition of the Burgtheater, speaks in his dialect and in an unappealing voice.1 The result of this process, for drama, involves the suppression of the intellectual in favor of the instinctual. A further consequence is the increase of sexual pathologies in dramatic literature. Actors whose original methods triumph because of this contemporary development experience the need to give expression solely to the body in motion, unfettered by words. In this way, the modern theatrical arts have naturally gravitated toward a rejuvenation of pantomime, which in earlier times had served more as a comical improvisation. The basic laws of the modern pantomime can be sketched in brief as follows: The events on the stage should be comprehensible without words. But words should not be replaced, as in the old fairground pantomime, by stereotypically ridiculous movements. Rather, the event should naturally call for a wordless execution. For example, we might see a room in which a character is sleeping who should not be wakened. Or one might depict the same event as if from a great distance. For example, one might show life and activity at a market. From the chaos there emerge lively scenes, and we see the whole play from a distance through a window. The art of the dramatist now consists in composing images so clearly that the audience can completely intuit the words. The painter and the stage designer assist him in this task. But it is clear that such circumscribed modern pantomime has very limited possibilities. The silent play on the stage will never become the rule. The pantomime itself will always remain merely one showpiece in a broad theatrical repertoire, and to a greater extent than the spoken drama, it will achieve its artistic value only in the initial performances. For a series of silent movements unsupported by words becomes more dull and banal every day—as I know from personal experience. Musical accompaniment seems to be especially necessary for the pantomime. Here appears yet another means for corporeal expression, one no longer bound to performative and dramatic elements, but rather to the rhythmic and the musical. A new sort of art could emerge from dance pantomime of the type practiced by the Wiesenthal sisters.2 In his ballet, Little Ida’s Flowers, Paul von Klenau has made a very successful and beautiful attempt in this direction.3 But even the dance pantomime will form only a peak in this larger history. After all, even the musical artist writing for the stage will never wish to do without the possibilities opened up by words. What the cinema offers the audience is totally distinct from these kinds of silent plays that emerged under strictly artistic conditions. On the surface of the white screen, it is not the human figure that produces an effect, but rather, to a certain extent, merely its photographic abbreviation. The screen lacks the colors and the modulation of atmosphere through lighting, which make up the magic of the theater. Since the cranking of the camera tends to accelerate movements, the film actor must compensate by elaborating his gestures. To the actor’s deficit, his movements must become cruder, and he must overemphasize everything having an immediate effect upon the emotions.

114

Transformations of Experience

The drama has its own laws. The epic has to resolve itself in dialogue; the lyrical has to build harmonies with words. The drama demands its own specific construction. None of the figures appearing on the stage can simply fall from the sky with a banner reading: “I am so and so.” Rather, they must develop, and it is from this development and confrontation of characters, from the direction provided by the play’s action, with its beginning, climax, and end, that the higher laws of theater emerge. No one can transgress these laws without paying the price; at best, if one is gifted, one can interpret them anew. These elements are foreign to the film theater. The cinema, with its hunger for content, cannot succeed by the methods of theatrical pantomime. It lacks the conditions of color and light. The cinema thus resorts to the written word inserted into the show. Here the figures do indeed fall from the sky onto the screen, where the explanations are likewise illuminated. The result is that the movie theater exhibits not the dramatic, but rather a chain of epic images. We learned long ago that filming theatrical dramas could not succeed in the cinema. On the contrary, filmed novels offer better material, if the novelist understands how to develop his plot in terms of images. And therein lies the main attraction of the cinema for the man on the street. He can take in any kind of adventuresome story or idea in the easily comprehensible form of the image. Artistically speaking, the cinematograph has two attractions: The richness of living nature, which can never appear on the stage, comes to life in all its glory on the screen. And like living ghosts, the cinema can conjure up events of a grotesque and magical kind, which never take place in life and could never appear on the stage. This clearly marks the territory that could become meaningful for the art of cinema. However, the masses do not want to see artistic effects in the cinematograph. They simply want to gobble up action. They need a diversion from the confines of everyday life, a diversion from their worries or sorrows. Since people go to the movies in masses, the problem of the cinema is no longer just an artistic one, but a social problem for the state. Today, anyone can become a director of a cinematographic theater if he can raise the required amount of money. He is bound neither to the past nor to unwritten rules like the stage director. He is instead dependent on the large film factories, or better, on the film factory that supplies the program from week to week. Without a doubt, it would be in the state’s interest to intervene here and to make use of the entire system. We could levy a tax, which the public would readily pay. The desire to watch images could easily be put to use here for education and enlightenment. Norway has led the way with its nationalization of the cinema industry. Let us hope that Germany—where, after the war, money and education will be of vital importance— will soon follow. Notes 1. The Burgtheater in Vienna (a.k.a. the Austrian National Theatre) is known for so-called Burgtheaterdeutsch, a variant of German understandable to all theatergoers regardless of their seat in the theater or their regional background within the German-speaking world. 2. The Austrian sisters Grete, Elsa, and Berta Wiesenthal founded a dance ensemble in 1908 known for a nonclassical style and for particular swing techniques. Max Reinhardt featured the sisters in his production of Sumurun, a pantomime that Freksa had written. Grete Wiesenthal would also play the title role in Mauritz Stiller’s Das fremde Mädchen (1913). 3. A Danish-born composer, Paul von Klenau completed the ballet Klein Idas Blumen (Little Ida’s Flowers), based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, in 1916.

The Magic of the Body

115

49 CARL HAUPTMANN Film and Theater First published as “Film und Theater,” in Die neue Schaubühne 1, no. 6 (June 1919), 165–72. Translated by Eric Ames.

The older brother of naturalist poet, novelist, and playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, Carl Hauptmann (1858–1921) published this essay at age 61, toward the end a long career as a writer and dramatist. Whereas Freksa (no. 48) argued that film is inadequate for the newly revived art of theatrical pantomime, Hauptmann here argues that the dynamic new medium has unveiled a realm of “originary” gesture, thereby joining the fine arts and influencing all contemporary aesthetic production. In this way, Hauptmann outlines a terrain for aesthetic claims about cinema that Béla Balázs would develop throughout the 1920s. On gesture as an international language, see also Stindt’s essay in chapter 9 (no. 133).

It was by chance that I grew curious about the inner essence of the art of film; for a time all I could do was watch films, and then I also began to read through a series of film manuscripts. After that, my own film took shape, according to my own peculiar, purely intuitive way of working.1 And post festum—that is, after celebrating the production and exhibition of this work—I tried to examine more carefully in my own creation the artistic demands placed on a film. The following are my observations. The art of film is still in its infancy. It is not yet an art. As it typically appears to us today, with very few exceptions, film represents a form of popular entertainment and business. There is a perfectly logical reason for this. When the bioscope, or bioscopic photography, was invented, the technicians recognized in it an excellent means for reproducing the scenery from our theater stages and thus for creating a cheap copy of the latter for the broad spectrum of people excluded from the world of theatrical art. This is the state of film today. Film is currently a cheap, colorless, and inadequate copy of the theater. It is chicory instead of coffee for the people. Given this one-sided economic and technical understanding of film for the people, only literature could be seen as its basis—bad literature, of course, so as to lure the broadest masses of people. Dramas are thus thought to be the foundation of film, although their actual mission is to be spoken by living actors. Film employs modern conversation pieces, plays centered around dialogue, mostly colored in colportage fashion, and to which only language can give fluent expression. For this reason it is not surprising when film and film actors— overburdened with convulsive gestures—adopt means of expression bordering on grimacing. For grimacing naturally results whenever one tries to express something intended for speech without language, only with gestures. Thus, as a mere copy of theater, film has been going down a dead-end road from the beginning. One can even fi nd filmic versions of the most successful dramas from our theaters. But film will never progress by mere photographic imitation. This chicory will never become coffee. When it follows this path, film will never become art. Yet film does have one very clear and certain chance of becoming art. We must simply clarify the nature and the essence of the great invention of the bioscope.

116

Transformations of Experience

As we know, the purely visual arts—that is, painting and sculpture—can grasp and represent all living gestures and all of life’s movements only, so to speak, in a transitory moment. The continual play of all living movements was left for the theater alone. Whenever technology has dared to represent living, moving, or even speaking human beings mechanically, it has only produced spooky, horrible mechanical monsters. We also know that the visual arts have always strived to intensify in their works the transitory moment of gesture, so that it achieves the illusion of movement full of expression. I am thinking of the attempts and the observations of Auguste Rodin. He describes a process of creating the illusion of living gesture in sculptural works. He speaks of the statue of Marshal Ney,2 which awakens the impression of a charge, because a series of moments in movement are brought together in one frozen moment of sculpture. When it comes to living gestures, the visual arts have always found themselves in this dilemma and faced with this limitation. But into this situation came the great invention of the bioscope. The bioscope can do more than painting and sculpture. Its peculiar, absolutely specific ability is to objectify absolutely the process of all meaningful movements, the living gestures of all beings animate and inanimate. Perhaps it is already apparent by now what an abomination it was to exploit fi lm merely for copying stage sets, to restrict it to dependency on the theater of the spoken word. The bioscope is a pictorial enhancement of the highest order. It greatly multiplies the artistic means at the disposal of the visual arts. Only by paying attention to its specific capacities can we make progress in the search for film’s artistic appraisal. I want to demonstrate the point with the fine arts. No, I want to demonstrate it simply with the arts, since all arts are fine. Goethe’s appeal to the poet was not gratuitous: “Create, artist, do not talk!” . . .3 The musician creates with sounds. The musician has his piano. The sounds of the piano are ideally tuned to perfection: drops of sound, round like pearls and pure like drops of water. Absolutely melodious sound is the musician’s elementary realm, from which he creates his highly crafted work of ideal, spiritual expression. The painter has pure, ringing, and refined colors for his elementary realm. The sculptor has his marble, stone, ivory, wax, and so on! These are the sculptor’s elements. Now suddenly the bioscope offers us an instrument for objectifying the living gestures of all things in their original and true form. Does this not bring to life a view until now missing in the fine arts? What is gesture anyway? What is the meaningful movement of the living body? Even the soul makes itself comprehensible in gesture, without language. Indians from America can basically converse through gestures with the deaf mutes in a Berlin asylum. Gesture is like the sound of the musician, the light (the color) of the painter, the word of the speaker, a means of expressing the soul. Spiritual communication is not limited to the word alone. Gesture is the original realm of all spiritual communication. Look at Michelangelo’s Moses. Inner revolt quivers through the entire powerful body; it becomes feverish in his hands, which dig into his beard; it strains his neck as he suddenly turns away from the abomination of idols; it stretches the balls of his feet and his huge toes toward a sudden jump. Gesture is more than just linguistic communication. Language is that part of gesture that for humans became sound, and which we, in the narrow circle of communal life, have developed and objectified in the most refined manner for the purposes of social and intellectual communication. Try abstracting from a person’s spoken language the ability to express moods through facial expressions, through “actions,” and above all through modulations in the rhythms of breath and heartbeat; the

The Magic of the Body

117

spiritual value of linguistic communication will then shrink to a minimum. Here we have a person before us who can communicate his experiences only through purely factual oral signs; this is the man from the fairy tale, the man without soul. A dog does not understand the disposition of his master through words. He grasps it immediately through the silent play of his master’s gestures. People who had never understood Italian were overwhelmed by the ideal substance of human destiny when they saw Eleonora Duse.4 And only days later did they remember, accidentally, that they actually had not understood a word of what she said. The realm of the gesture is a cosmic realm. It is the original realm of all spiritual communication. The theater is based on linguistic communication between people. Poetry serves to create its work on the stage with the subtlest means of communication through words. Yet the most basic passions express themselves far beyond the realm of comprehensible communication; they pervade the animal kingdom, the entire realm of nature. The whole world is a vast empire of meaningful gestures. And thus we have gained in the bioscope an instrument that can objectify and isolate these universal elements of spiritual communication from the entire cosmos. And with them, as with light (colors) or sounds, it can set in motion an artistic play. Perhaps now you recognize what a fundamental expansion of the fi ne arts the bioscope has given us; at the same time, perhaps you also see how restricted it would be to limit rigidly this splendid discovery to the imitation of the theater. Of course, we could add much more. Even the instrument of the theater needs its poets and its painters. Even here the stage text must conform to the stage set. In this sense there is a similarity between film and theater. Both rely on the showcase. Both film and theater deal with a living, ideal, and developing image of fate, and with a progressive sequence of stage pictures. But the meaning of theater—its innermost means of expression—lies in the art of words; that is, poetry. The meaning of film, its innermost means of expression, lies in the originary form of communication through gesture. Both figures, the writer and the creator of film, must—in absolute contrast to theater—demonstrate their art and their show of fate with gestural elements alone, taken only from the originary realm of gesture. A vast empire opens up here, more vast than that of human beings. There emerge the possibilities to play with the gestures of animals, plants, rocks, stars, furniture, and houses, and to exploit artistically the entire animated cosmos. But that, of course, does not mean merely to photograph reality as it exists. Artistic images can come only from an artist with a personal vision, who knows how to use photographic plates toward artistic ends. Every image in a film must be treated in this sense if a film seeks to present itself as an art film. In an art film, one can no longer seek to represent the abundance of chance details of the sort that the mere photogram extracts from this world. The fine artist must be just as personally invested as the poet, who takes fateful communication, perceived in gestures, as the basis for film as text. Perhaps we should qualify that. Even aside from the spoken word of the actor, one cannot completely do away with linguistic expression and labels in theater. The theater program itself contains an abundance of verbal clues that are necessary in advance for a clear understanding of the production on the stage. Film, likewise, cannot be fully understood without the help of manifold verbal clues given in advance or in the midst of the show. But perhaps there is a clear artistic sensibility for the extent to which one can smoothly introduce such verbal clues into the film as it is playing. A film that insists on using gestural convulsions to convey ideas only expressible with words will always be a bad film. And spectators will always welcome those intertitles that interrupt the destiny

118

Transformations of Experience

unfurling on the screen and offer them the words indispensable for interpreting the ideal content of those fateful images. Such words bring to the viewer the necessary inner quiet of contemplation; they complete and enrich the ideal impression and make it whole. And therefore they must be treated as a fully justified artistic element of film and developed artistically as such. Today it is considered a bad sign if any work of art appears to be influenced by film. That is easy to understand as long as one considers film a cheap theater for the people, which merely adds a kind of sensationalist drama to the sensationalist novel. With very few exceptions—and here I am thinking of Paul Wegener’s films that are so rich in fantasy, as well as certain fantasy films from Italy, which, for instance, attempt to present Dante’s Inferno5 —films today have almost completely abandoned the Muses and Graces. The odium of the poorest taste cannot be shaken off. Yet the inner essence of the discovery of film—regardless of what the mere inventors and entrepreneurs actually made of this discovery—has unconsciously and instinctually influenced all contemporary art, in that it opened the original realm of gesture. Contemporary art in its entirety has moved away from the placid, sated, and over-intellectualized ideals of the traditional arts, with their conventional rules of expression and their conceit of beauty, insofar as the latter appeared to bind and tie the creative soul of the new artist in its expression. Contemporary art suddenly senses again the expanded realm of original communication in gesture; passionately, it has felt its way back beyond sanctioned culture into an original and natural realm; it has reopened the path, beyond the sterile, complicated, overrefined extravagance of the sated salon spirit to the original passions—and from this substance, it has begun to create the dreams of art anew. Think of Reger, how he took the peaceful idylls of broad musical compositions of mere harmonics and pounded them in, as if with hammers; how he created a music, not for salon patrons and concertgoers to enjoy, but rather, with the anger of the artist and the powerful forces against God and cosmos, in order to probe the realm of the world-soul with new musical gestures.6 Think of one Franz Marc, who, in images of the deepest inspiration, created a whole new realm of the love and understanding of animals.7 Think of the gestural city images, which, in many exhibits of futurist or cubist artists, provoked the facile outrage of the lay public. Film has also issued a warning to the poet that he must take a logically refined and highly intellectualized language, all too removed from sensual bodily expression, and lead it back into the original realm of gesture; he must regain the sensual, visual, stirring, and lively force of original communication. Use breath, not words. Today’s language is a logical filigree, tightly interwoven and complicated by syntactic miscarriages, filled with all-too-difficult meanings, depraved by the necessities of everyday life, by business, hurrying, and inadequate education; it still lacks an alluring image of higher taste in all the areas of public life. Suddenly, a spiritual ideal has revealed itself to today’s poet. The poet yearns to restore to his language its original value, the value of gesture. What has been the goal of Der Sturm—the most extreme manifestation of such a basic yearning—since its founding ten years ago?8 All expressionist artists have struggled for years with communicating the original message of the soul in such a new, lively, unmediated, and spontaneous way. For this reason, the bioscope is one of the most characteristic discoveries in the field of the arts. For even in its usage today it has emphatically presented to our eyes the deep contents and the sudden communicative value of gesture. And I cannot doubt that, for this very reason, the discovery has been decisive for the future of art. Certainly, one will have to learn to liberate the bioscopic photogram from photographic chance, from all

The Magic of the Body

119

chance realia. One will have to learn how to handle it as raw material, in order to represent the purely gestural elements of all things through it and to create the kinds of images that are born from the viewpoint of an artist and that are rejuvenated once again by true, living gestures. Thus for now, the film drama will continue to exist in the form it has taken. The exceptional—the lonely model, patterned not after gold, but after the alluring image of perfection—must remain forever scarce in this world. But “of all of life’s necessities, highest rank goes to the superfluous.” 9 Notes 1. Hauptmann refers to the film Ihr Sohn (1917), which was based on his novella Franz Popjels Jugend, adapted for screen by E. A. Dupont and directed by Willy Zeyn. His brother, Gerhart Hauptmann, had also allowed his 1912 novel Atlantis to be adapted into August Blom’s 1913 Danish film of the same name. 2. Rodin had noted the “movement” and “development” of François Rude’s statue of Marshal Ney (1853) in a 1911 book of conversations with Paul Gsell, L’Art. Auguste Rodin, Rodin on Art and Artists (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1983), 32. 3. The quote comes from a motto with which Goethe introduces a collection of poems entitled Art that appeared in 1815. 4. One of the most celebrated actresses of the fin de siècle, Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) is known for her efforts to replace a conventional set of gestures with an expressive technique later characterized by Eva Le Gallienne as “the elimination of self,” whereby the actor strives to meld with the character. Eva Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 19. 5. Hauptmann is likely thinking here of Wegener’s films such as The Student of Prague (1913), Der Golem (The Golem, 1915) and Rübezahls Hochzeit (Old Nip’s wedding, 1916). See also Wegener’s text in chapter 6 of this volume (no. 88). The 1911 Italian film L’inferno was released in Germany as Die Hölle. 6. Hauptmann here refers to German composer Max Reger (1873–1916). 7. Franz Marc (1880–1916) was a German expressionist painter and a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), known for his depictions of animals. 8. Der Sturm was an avant-garde journal devoted to art and culture that appeared between 1910 and 1932 and was edited by Herwarth Walden. 9. A likely reference to the line “Le superflu, chose très-nécessaire” (The superfluous, a very necessary thing) from Voltaire’s poem Le Mondain (1736).

50 OSKAR DIEHL Mimic Expression in Film: Guidelines for Practical Instruction in the Art of Film Acting First published as Mimik im Film: Leitfaden für den praktischen Unterricht in der Filmschauspielkunst (Munich: Georg Müller, 1922), here 9–14, 25–30. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The German term Mimik, which we have elected to translate with its English cognate mimic or mimic expression, should not be confused with mimicry. Derived from the Greek mimikós, the term denoted the art of the mime (actor) and had come—at least since the great aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century—to refer to the bodily and facial expressions thought to render the interior movements of the soul legible on the body’s surface.1 The call for more subtle and “natural” expressions as opposed to the rigidity of masks in theater director Oskar Diehl’s manual for film actors is a far cry from Walter Turszinsky’s plea for “acrobatic” acting published twelve years earlier (see no. 47). Despite Diehl’s evocations of nature, however, Mimik was never simply a “natural”

120

Transformations of Experience language, but rather a technique that had to be learned and practiced. Diehl’s instructional book joined a plethora of volumes such as Franz Ferdinand and Elsa Ferdinand-Bielitz’s Wie werde ich Kino-Darsteller? (How do I become a cinema actor? 1916), Max Otten’s Der Filmschauspieler (The film actor, 1918), and Max Künzel’s Wie werde ich Filmschauspieler, Filmschauspielerin? (How do I become a film actor, actress? 1921).

The Face

Every man has a unique face; its expression resides in the combined effect produced by the eyes, the nose, the forehead, the mouth, the chin, the cheeks, and the parts connecting them. Our eye is accustomed to recording the total impression of all of these individual parts of the physiognomy. (This is precisely the perception that we designate as “the face.”) I call a man’s face as it normally appears—that is, free of internal or external influences—the normal or basic face. Although it generally contains no specific expression, this normal face does nonetheless show a unique total expression. Not without reason is it said that man’s character finds expression in his face. But while this expression is stable and can be more or less clearly defi ned, it allows at the same time for varying hypotheses concerning one’s character traits. In addition, physiognomies sometimes show contradictions. Thus we can imagine a face in which kind and gentle eyes shine forth over a chin that suggests a violent character. In general, however, the basic face shows no specific expression. Physiognomies are formed over this base according to the requirements of the moment; one expression follows another, or the physiognomy is dissolved back into the normal face. In the chapter “Movements of the Limbs,” we will encounter an analogy to this. The driving force behind facial expressions, behind the transformation of the physiognomy of the basic face into any sort of expression, is inner emotion. When an emotion dies down, the physiognomic expression dissolves back into the basic face. All inner experience, all of the feelings that take hold of us, produce physiognomic expressions to a greater or lesser extent. The goal of instruction in film acting is to maximize students’ capacity for expression, that is, to teach them to speak with their face. This increased capacity for physiognomic expression presupposes the correct functioning of the student’s facial musculature down to the last detail. Just as the gymnast preparing for the larger gymnastic task trains his entire musculature by exercising each muscle individually, so the film actor must systematically work over his facial musculature in order to become capable of great expressions. The most important goal here is for the actor’s facial expression, whatever it may be, to appear convincing. No matter how different from his normal face, the face he shows must always be believable. At every moment, he must have a natural face, and at no time should he give the impression that he is simply making faces. Even less can he allow the abundance of faces to deteriorate into hollow grimacing. Faces and inner emotions always correspond to one another. Beginning students occasionally show a tendency toward grimacing. Students who at first have trouble with these “facial gymnastics” tend to exaggerate them. In a great many cases, the muscles, completely unaccustomed to performing the individual movements, show a kind of sluggishness. Training sessions should generally be kept short, since the education of the facial muscles is very tiring and extremely demanding, especially in the beginning. The teacher is strongly advised to have a mirror present during instruction. Nonetheless, students should use mirrors only when they are confused about how to execute a muscular movement clearly or when they wish to see what they are doing wrong. For home study, the use of a mirror is essential. In general, the mirror constitutes the most important prop for teaching and

The Magic of the Body

121

learning the art of film acting. The film actor should always be able to answer questions such as “How do I look?” “What effect am I producing now?” and “How is my posture?” Schiller’s words on the art of acting in his magnificent prologue to Wallenstein—“For swiftly flits the actor’s wondrous art / Before our senses, leaving not a trace”2—are not valid for the film actor. The latter’s art is not lost to posterity. The photographic strip retains every last detail with mathematical precision. It records and reveals each mistake and every unpleasant effect. It is absolutely essential for the film actor to possess an exceptional faculty of self-control. The goal of instruction must be to lay the groundwork in students for proper self-discipline. Naturally, the majority of instruction consists in training students in mimic expression, for which the practice of facial movements is decisive. Mimic is unthinkable without physical ability. It would be an utter mistake to believe that one could improve facial expressions with makeup. Although this idea is tempting, since one can indeed impersonate characters with the help of makeup, false beards, and false noses, it is nonetheless wrong. Masks pose the greatest danger for the speaking face. In their dramatic performances, the ancients employed masks, which the actors held before their faces. They had, for example, the comic mask for the actor playing amusing roles. Of course, in the use of such masks, one can recognize the dominance of the spoken word in the theatrical art of that time. Since they remained motionless, always showing only a single (in our example, comic) expression, such masks rendered any mimic performance on the part of the actor impossible. The same holds true for the cosmetic mask formed with makeup, which smothers every facial expression. For example, a face with large painted wrinkles on its forehead will always show these wrinkles, even when it should be radiating with joy. Moreover, it serves absolutely no purpose if, in a moment of great fright, the film actor throws his eyes wide open and furrows his brow; for his brow was already furrowed before the character became frightened. This example should suffice to show that all expressions can and must result from the acting itself. The question of makeup—which we will treat below—is useful for the actor only insofar as it does not restrict the physiognomy’s natural capacity for expression. In every case where this capacity is either diminished or suppressed, actors should avoid makeup at all costs. Let us also take this opportunity to remark that film makes any simulation in this respect utterly impossible. The bright lights illuminating the studio set ruthlessly reveal all imprecision and uncertainty, and a mask of makeup, which might have had a brilliant effect on the theatrical stage, appears on the screen as a kitschy, naïve collection of paint splotches. [. . .] Gestures and Movements of the Limbs

In general, man uses language in order to communicate thoughts or feelings. In so doing, he accompanies the spoken word with facial expressions and emphasizes or illustrates the latter, in their turn, with gestures. When they do not serve a purpose of their own, such gestures remain subconscious (reflex movements). The extent to which a person uses gestures depends on his temperament. One finds confirmation of this fact in the animated state of those (southern) peoples who possess an especially vivacious temperament. What was said above with regard to the basic face is also valid for man’s posture as a whole; we can designate as man’s basic or normal posture that which is free from any alteration by movements. Essentially, movement falls into two categories. First, it can serve a specific purpose (pointing or signaling). In this case, a movement reacts to an external agent. Second, it can be a form of expression, or it can accompany or illustrate the latter. Here, the movement’s driving force comes from within. Deciding how to execute both types of movement can be an important part of character performance; that is, one can (consciously) perform one’s movements as a whole, in a way typical of a certain character. If one wishes to employ movements in the development of a role, they must of course exhibit

122

Transformations of Experience

a naturalistic quality. It is an undeniable fact that a man expresses his profession to a certain extent in his spontaneous movements. For example, the movements of a carpenter, who spends most of his time working at the wood-bench and thus usually holds his arms a little bent, will generally start out from this basic posture, and they will allow observers to imagine him holding in his hand some sort of tool, such as a plane. Students attempting to develop a character must remember this factor. Moreover, insofar as these movements contribute to the development of a character role, they must not contradict one another. There must be no gaps, and the movements must be of a consistent nature. In this regard, the famous line from King Lear “Every inch a king” could not be more correct.3 The expression of majesty must spread over the actor’s entire figure and, to paraphrase Shakespeare, be legible on every square inch of the screen. [. . .] The Film Actor’s Body

Having analyzed more closely the individual means of expression available to the film actor and their capacity for development, let us turn once again to the film actor’s body as a whole. The artist should know that not only the limbs and the physiognomy but also the body as a whole can serve as a means of expression. In this respect, the film actor would do well to familiarize himself as much as possible with the products of the fine arts. In particular, he should study classical sculpture, where he will find an abundance of ideal models. Here, instructors will find an inexhaustible—and, incidentally, inexpensive—source of teaching aids. For this reason, practical instruction should include visits to any museums lying within a reasonable distance. For works of art not housed locally, students can look at photographs. Another reason these sculptures are so extraordinarily instructive is that the scenes they represent, both in their individual details and in the effect of the whole, have didactic potential. Consider, for example, the facial expression of a Niccolò da Uzzano (Donatello), of a Colleoni (Verrocchio), or of a Laocoön.4 Paintings also offer a valuable tool for training film actors. Notes 1. In this sense, Mimik was closely related to the study of physiognomy popularized by Johann Kaspar Lavater and in fact overlapped with what Lavater called Pathognomie. Johann Jakob Engel describes the relation between Mimik and Physiognomie as follows: “Both set out to observe expressions of the soul in the body, but the former investigates the fixed traits from which a person’s general character can be deciphered, whereas the latter examines ephemeral singular movements, which reveal this or that state of the soul.” Johann Jakob Engel, Ideen zu einer Mimik (Berlin: Mylius, 1785), 7. 2. The translation here comes from The Robbers and Wallenstein, trans. F. J. Lamport (London: Penguin, 1979), 166. 3. Quoted in English in the original. 4. Diehl refers to the bust of Niccolò da Uzzano attributed to Donatello and to the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni by Andrea del Verrocchio, both from the fifteenth century. With “Laocoön,” he means the ancient marble sculpture Laocoön and His Sons.

51 BÉLA BALÁZS The Eroticism of Asta Nielsen (In the Film Erdgeist ) First published as “Die Erotik der Asta Nielsen (Im Film ‘Erdgeist’),” in Der Tag 127 (April 6, 1923), 7. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The Magic of the Body

123

Of all the European stars of the silent era, Asta Nielsen was often seen as the most quintessentially “filmic” on account of her extraordinary wealth of facial expressions and gestures. Béla Balázs had already devoted an article to Nielsen in Der Tag on January 5, 1923, and he concluded his 1924 book, Visible Man or the Spirit of Film, with a portrait of her (repurposing his two articles from 1923). The following piece praises Nielsen’s onscreen eroticism as “spiritual” (vergeistigt)—a judgment that presupposes an understanding of on-screen “mimic” as the visible corporeal expression of the soul (Geist). Balázs’s refl ections on Nielsen are also quoted at length by Max Brod and Rudolf Thomas in their treatise Love on Film (no. 154 in chapter 10).

Whenever one starts to despair of film’s destiny to be its own genuine art form, worthy of representation by a tenth Muse on Mount Olympus; whenever it almost seems as if film were nothing more than crippled theater, comparing to the latter as a photographic reproduction compares to an oil painting; whenever one begins to doubt, then Asta Nielsen is the only person who can restore one’s faith and conviction. Not Leopold Jessner, who in the theater uses actors as though they were his own limbs, but whose artistic accomplishment in Erdgeist consists entirely in creating opportunities for Asta Nielsen and staying out of her way.1 And we thank him for that. The play? There is no play here. The sole content of this film is that Asta Nielsen trifles with, teases, flirts with, and seduces six men. The content of this film is this woman’s erotic charisma, which provides us with a huge, comprehensive gestural lexicon of sensual love. (Perhaps this is even the classical form of film art, where no “plot” requires particular gestures for external purposes; rather, every gesture simply has motives and therefore points inward.) Eroticism—it now becomes clear—is the most innate topic for film, film material in itself. This is, first of all, because eroticism is always—or at least is always also—a bodily experience, and therefore visible. Secondly, only in eroticism do we find the possibility for complete silent understanding. Lovers can carry on a dialogue exclusively with their eyes, without leaving anything unsaid, and trite words would only be disruptive. Games of love and expression [Minnenspiel und Mienenspiel] have always been sisters. Asta Nielsen’s variability of gesture, her wealth of mimic expressions is stunning. In poets, a large vocabulary is a sign of greatness. It was said of Shakespeare that he used fifteen thousand words. Only after our first dictionary of gesture has been assembled with the help of cinematography will we be able to measure Asta Nielsen’s gestural vocabulary. Asta Nielsen’s eroticism is particularly valuable because it is thoroughly spiritual. It resides above all in the eyes, not in the flesh. Her abstract leanness is a single quivering nerve with a distorted mouth and two burning eyes. She never undresses or shows her thighs like Anita Berber (whose face and rear can hardly be told apart), 2 and yet this dancing vice could take a few lessons from Asta Nielsen. With all her belly dancing, Anita Berber is nothing but a lamb next to a fully dressed Asta Nielsen. For the latter can convey obscene disrobement with a look, and she can flash a smile that the police would have to impound as pornography. This spiritualized eroticism is dangerous and demonic; it can penetrate through any layer of clothing and have far-reaching effects. It is for this reason that Asta Nielson never appears sexually aroused. She always maintains a childlike quality. But in this role where she plays a prostitute who begins to observe and calculate as soon as she gains dominance—in this role as a prostitute, her naïveté appears plant-like. She is not immoral, but rather represents a dangerous force of nature. She is innocent like a predator. When she feeds on men, she harbors no evil intentions, and her goodbye kiss (she kisses the man she has just shot) is more moving than all the tears of abandoned virgins on film. Lower the flags before her, for she is incomparable and unattainable.

124

Transformations of Experience

Notes 1. Leopold Jessner’s 1923 film Erdgeist (Earth spirit), an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s play of the same name, starred Asta Nielsen, Albert Bassermann, and Carl Ebert. 2. On Berber, see Hans Feld’s text in chapter 10, no. 152.

52 FRIEDRICH SIEBURG The Magic of the Body: Observations on Acting in Film First published as “Die Magie des Körpers: Betrachtungen zur Darstellung im Film,” in Der Film von morgen, ed. Hugo Zehder (Berlin: Rudolf Kaemmerer, 1923), 33–43; here 33–39. Translated by Michael Cowan.

A writer and foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Friedrich Sieburg also frequently commented on film (see his article in chapter 3, no. 39). Ascribing a quasityrannical power to film acting to shape public tastes and modes of embodiment, Sieburg here calls on film actors to eschew the conventionalized formulas of the theater and to strive for a “magic” that would compel the audience through the purity of its emotional content. In this sense, Sieburg’s text is as much about the power of stars over audiences as it is about acting, and it looks forward to Balázs’s 1926 article on film stars included in chapter 10 (no. 146).

What is the magic of the body? It is the ability to make visible an invisible process by bodily means: the ability to transplant an event full of inner symptoms from the spirit into physical space. Further, it is the strength to take interior movements linked to unique and incommunicable qualities of the personality and make them compellingly comprehensible to all, and to do this by means of that which all people have in common: the body. The body—the face and eyes, the limbs, and the form of the whole—creates a tangible counterimage to the image of the soul; it interprets thought in living space. What is a film actor? He is a type who terrorizes the public. He imposes his appearance as a model onto the tattered and culturally insecure masses. He does not take his sustenance from the form of the society that bears him (since this is really no form at all); he does not take his gestures from existing convention (since this convention has no gestures). Rather, the film actor determines to a great extent the unsteady and fluctuating contours of society’s “culture.” He launches fashions, propagates bad habits, and even influences audiences’ facial type—in short, he exercises a reign of terror in the domain of taste. Is this his fault? Not at all. He gropes around in his environment for something with which to give form to his inner being and finds nothing; he searches among the propertied classes for elements with which to define his style, and searches in vain. He is a necessary consequence of the collapse of the European theater. His is not an intellectual task, but rather a sentimental one: not to interpret, but rather to suggest. He stands before a new breed of people, which expects from him not a reflection of itself, but rather its own completion. In the past, people demanded an image of life in its fulfilled state; today, however, it is a question of filling up the empty space in people’s empty lives. The film actor thus populates the sentimental fantasy of the streaming masses. He completes what life leaves empty. He is the man desired by those growing numbers of poor women in an aging and decomposing world. He is the hero dreamt of by a mass society structured only on economic principles and thus incapable of heroism. In short, instead

The Magic of the Body

125

of transforming that jaded form of romanticism coming to dominate today’s society, he provides a partial and cheap satisfaction for it. By what means? By means of a disappearing theatrical tradition. A certain stock of acting techniques, remaining after the theater’s bankruptcy, has proven adaptable to cinematic performance as well. This stock is low, containing only the most essential expressions, movements, and gaits. It in no way overlaps with those expressions that, in human life, almost mechanically accompany certain emotions. (If it did, of course, there would be no problem.) Rather, these techniques have a long history behind them. They had already become conventional formulas in the theater, where they were adapted case by case according to the text. They were then carried over as such into film and continued to function there as formulas: twice removed from nature! But the difference lies in the effect. While in the theater, such formulas at least aimed to provoke a certain concentration—a task facilitated by the specific meaning of the spoken words—the opposite occurs in film. There, the acting schema functions purely as an indication, as a suggestion, as a sort of actor’s shorthand, as a stimulus. A certain stereotypical gesture— usually exaggerated by the actor to the third degree in his fear that, due to the lack of words, he will not be “understood”—elicits the corresponding idea in the mind of the spectator. But this idea cannot be pinned down, because the expression producing it is far too general, rigid, and impersonal to command precision. Rather, the gesture customarily used to suggest the feeling of being in love triggers, in the spectator, the entire enormous and endlessly flowing complex of love. The thousands of associations, suddenly arising at lightning speed, encounter no resistance. This is the most extreme form of mechanization, which of course always goes hand in hand with the most extreme sentimentality; the actor gives a signal from his stock of formulas—and in the spectator, there arises a whirlwind of adjacent ideas. Meaning flows into the empty space of romanticism. It is for this reason as well that bad film actors are so successful. They afford the highest degree of free play to the audience’s imagination. They function like violin adagios and military marches played in beer gardens in the evening. A certain melody (gesture) superficially indicates sadness or courage—and the listener, hardly having been grazed by the sound, immediately errs away from this stimulus (gesture) into the wilderness of his ideas. However, he is grateful to the melody (to the actor’s performance) for not constraining him, for allowing him to go his own way rather than compelling him to follow another one. Next to erotic attraction, this is the main reason for that tenacious gratitude with which the masses cling to their favorite fi lm stars. I am speaking of stars with dark and murky artistic origins. Their nondescript faces, as impersonal as can be and containing all of the conventional features of an obliging character, are the most suitable sort for the production of imprecise mimic formulas. In such features, there is nothing that might disturb or take hold of the spectator; a flourish of expression appears and immediately releases the grateful spectator into the sea of his own associations. It is for this reason and in this way that dozens of actresses, who possess neither talent nor personality, but for the sake of whom millions of marks are accumulated, occupy the brains of today’s men. And it would be unfair to condemn these stars altogether, for at least they are not weighed down by those equivocal stage techniques which do not even elicit emotion. No doubt, these stars end up confusing the emotion they create, but they at least create this emotion in the first place. (The existence of such stars also has its economic reasons, which are both interesting and complicated. Unfortunately, this is not the place to go into them. Let me simply point out that the tenacious maintenance of their star status, while in most cases certainly owing something to personal connections, is mainly the work of the agent, who is responsible for just about everything questionable in film.)

126

Transformations of Experience

Whoever draws boundaries and undertakes to delimit territories is one-sided. I am no exception. With every search for fundamental principles, one neglects those less clear-cut cases, which are always the most numerous. In Germany, we have the film stars I just spoke of. We also have truly great film performers, all of whom draw their inspiration from the efforts to found the theater anew, the spiritual struggle for a living stage. And between the two, we have a large gray area of film actors. The star’s performance lives off of the old theater and the remaining stocks of mimic formulas. But he makes film into a popular medium; he unleashes emotion, even if he distracts this emotion in the process. He has a sentimental effect. The film actor uses his theatrical methods, which can certainly be full of life. For him, film is “almost like the theater.” He will never disturb or hinder anyone. But he will never change anything either. He is carried along by a development that he is powerless to influence. Ultimately, the great film performer compels an improvement in the quality of films, not in terms of their content, but at first simply on the level of the directing. However, he will inevitably have an effect on the content as well. He commands a concentration of emotion by concentrating audiences on the character. He binds the spectator’s inner stirrings, allowing only those in conformity with his performance. By taking emotion out of the murky swamp of associations, he purifies it. While the star produces a sentimental effect, the great performer produces a moral one. By what means? By means of the body’s magic. At present, this magic remains a utopian dream. But the great performer is striving for it. This is what allows him to be effective. The magic of the body is thus a performative technique belonging exclusively to film. This must be understood! The future performance, the ideal one, will belong only to film; it will have its roots in film and will hardly be comparable to other spatial arts (such as theater or dance). The new theater functions through the material of words and melody; the new film performance functions through the material of the body. Both techniques originate in the spiritual center and advance to the periphery of expression and beyond. Magic is the compulsion toward insight, an insight that cannot be of a personal nature but must be oriented by the performance itself. Magic is the compulsion toward a concurring idea on the part of the entire audience; it is the compulsion toward a purification of emotion, which ascends from half-musical associations to spiritual recognition. What does the spectator, compelled by the magic of the body, recognize? That the performance is “right.” How? Through the clarity of his emotions. Thus the path leads through doubt to conviction. With the “star,” the path led in the other direction, through recognition to uncertainty. Because the spectator knew, after seeing a certain expressive schema, that this or that emotion was intended, he wandered away from this recognition into the brew of emotions.

53 MAX OSBORN The Nude Body on Film First published as “Der nackte Mensch im Film,” in Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit: Ein Film über moderne Körperkultur in sechs Teilen (Berlin: Kulturabteilung der Ufa, 1925), 15–28. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The Ufa Kulturfilm Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (Ways to Strength and Beauty, 1925), which featured many of the major dance and gymnastics groups operating after World War I, was the most comprehensive filmic representation of body culture in the Weimar Republic. Although often seen as a precursor to the cult of the body under Nazism (and

The Magic of the Body

127

to Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, 1938), the film in fact contained an eclectic mix of nationalist and bourgeois-democratic sentiments. In this article from the program brochure, Max Osborn (1870–1946)—an influential art critic for the Vossische Zeitung who would emigrate to Palestine, France, and the United States after 1933—seeks to distinguish the classical ideals presented in the film (and in the German nudist movement more broadly) from the kind of salacious eroticism discussed by Kurt Tucholsky in chapter 5, no. 71. Many of the film’s stylized representations of nudism drew directly on aesthetic conventions from photography, but there were also more prurient scenes, such as a reconstruction of a Roman bath.

Nudity in film? Nude bodies on the screen? I see raised eyebrows, frowning faces, and eyes full of suspicion. Is this possible? The words recall all sorts of things we have seen before: episodes of undressing designed for the delight of curious and lascivious spectators; titillating bathing scenes, in which a fade-out just at the moment of danger holds the heated imagination of the front rows in suspense; the calculated introduction of scantily covered figures in contexts where there is no compelling motive for them; and instances of half-nudity, which are shown for utterly transparent reasons. But such practices have nothing to do with the appearance of nude bodies in the new Ufa film, a film with which Ufa’s Kulturabteilung [Cultural Division] aims to promote athletics and a meaningful cultivation of the body. Far from having any questionable intentions, this film takes up the problem of nudity as a most serious question and offers a surprising and convincing solution. Because the filmmakers wished to illustrate the entire array of athletic activities that can save men of our day from the decline of their physical well-being; because they wished to provide an urgent and powerful demonstration of the consequences of our neglect for the physical basis of our existence, it was absolutely necessary to make visible the refinement of which our neglected bodies are capable. And here, it became evident that film constitutes a perfect medium to put such sound ideas into practice. In intelligent and tactful hands, this curious instrument, which offers limitless possibilities for producing effects, can also become a forum for moral liberation. We like to speak of the influence exerted by the culture of antiquity throughout the millennia, an influence that, to our benefit, we still see as decisive in the present. With a new longing, more devout than in any recent decades, for a magnificent expression of form, we bow today in reverent admiration before the art of the ancients; even under the harsh conditions of our time, we have rightly maintained and protected the classical ideal of edification throughout the age of machines and mechanization. However, when it comes time to take the decisive step and adopt the free sovereignty of the ancient way of life for our own existence; when it comes time to bring the distant past into harmony with the near and present; in a word, when it comes time to draw practical consequences from the theory we observe, we stop short. The nude body! For so many of us, this has become an unfamiliar and strange concept. In our idea of man, the image of the body covered from head to foot stands as something primary, almost as the body’s natural and given form; we arrive at the concept of the nude body only by undressing the clothed one, although the opposite path ought to seem natural. We have, as it were, lost all connection to our own bodies. We have forgotten that all of our efforts to improve and develop humankind must remain half measures as long as we ignore our own constitution as natural beings. However, the decisive element in that harmonious form of ancient culture that we so admire was precisely this: that they became aware of this absolute dictate and placed it at the pinnacle of their sublime way of life.

128

Transformations of Experience

Whoever has had the good fortune to spend some time in Greece has experienced this great truth in a way not possible through the study of a hundred books or a thousand pictures or cast reproductions. When we take a stroll through the incomparable Acropolis Museum in Athens, where one can observe the sum of all research into Hellenic art, our eye suddenly learns to see; we immediately recognize that the core not simply of Greek art but of the entire Greek worldview lies in the comprehension of the human figure. Here, the incredible transformation introduced by the Greek spirit into the history of mankind becomes clear as never before. [. . .] The great games and physical exercises of the Greeks were not institutions somehow existing alongside life’s other activities. They were not simply means of—as we would say today—keeping the young in shape, although this goal also played a role. Their significance was not exhausted in practical intentions. Rather, they were inseparable from all those ideas arising from the pursuit of human perfection. They were organically connected with man’s spiritual, religious, and mystic needs. There was no gaping chasm between the people practicing athletics and intellectuals. When the masses came together in the cities for a festival; when the pilgrims set out from all over the countryside for the holy sites of Delphi, Olympia, and Dodona, they knew as a matter of course that not only would services be rendered to the gods, not only would ceremonies be performed with bloody sacrifices, not only would songs be sung and music ring out, tragedies and comedies be staged, and epic poetry recited. They knew that the runners in the stadium would also race down the track for the olive branch, that the boxers and wrestlers would also display their might. One sphere belonged to the other, and only the sum of all of these institutions made up the festival. For while it was important to pay tribute to Zeus and his Olympian company, to placate the raging deities with the sacrifice of animals, and to amuse and move crowds with artistic works, it was just as important to show how young people in the prime of life could harden their nude bodies, cultivate their strength in contests, and make beautiful, graceful, pleasant, and skillful use of their limbs. The Greeks were human too. Glimpsing the nude figures of young bodies in the flower of youth, they surely did not escape the sensual attraction exerted by such sights. But why should that have bothered them? Was there not also something natural and simple in it, something even “permitted” within their zealously maintained morality? They accepted this attraction as an element of that natural beauty pointing the way toward the divine, which they honored as the supreme ruler of their lives. Should we wish to achieve a harmony of existence resembling the model of the ancients, we too will have to fill ourselves with the spirit of beauty. In the millennia that have passed since the development of Greek culture, the battle between different worldviews has raged back and forth. From the very machine age that enslaved the body, however, there has arisen a new movement to liberate our bodily existence. We are perfectly aware that this is only the beginning. As a form of physical exercise, athletics first arose in America and England, later to become an essential occupation of many people on the European continent and here in Germany. But it still does not constitute an immanent element of national culture. It still stands, as it were, beside life, but it has not yet fused with life itself. The brotherly greeting between physical and intellectual cultivation has yet to take place. Nonetheless, even if we have not yet bridged this last and decisive divide, we have found the path. The goal is within sight. Driven not by an idea but rather by the real needs of existence, we have once again recognized the meaning and the natural law of our bodily being. Simultaneously with this recognition, the idea of the nude body as an honorable concept inevitably arose anew. But it still has to struggle for recognition and for its free development. It has met with all sorts of prejudices arising from different customs, from suspicion with its ironic smirk, and even from honest convic-

The Magic of the Body

129

tions drawn from the views of the past. People fear the sensual attraction that the undressed body might emit; they worry about the dangers for morality. But there is no question that this attraction, where it appears uninhibited and without secret intentions, will immediately flow over, just as in the time of the Greeks, into the magic performed by the beauty and harmony of our bodily miracle. It will become an element of the great image, always appearing as a new mystery, in which our humanity unfolds before us, sublime, over the filth and the dirty secrets of sexual lust. Eroticism, in the ancient sense, will once again rise from the muddy waters of dark impulses, which have dragged down this divine element of our life, bespattered it and rendered it unrecognizable. Parting company from sexus, eros will foster a higher, free morality. I remember how, as students at the Gymnasium—and as true children of an epoch that had turned the sense of the term gymnasion on its head1—we went to the museum, full of secret lust to do something forbidden and observe statues of nude women. Standing before these works of art, we recognized that they showed the way into a sphere that resisted our unhealthy curiosity: a sphere we could not have imagined previously. These works put us to shame and delivered us from our boyish lasciviousness. A similar experience awaits anyone who beholds the nude bodies in this film: the refined suppleness of their limbs, the precision of their bodily functions, and the rhythmical possibilities of their movements. Spontaneously, against his every expectation and perhaps even against his own intentions, the viewer will feel his contemplative gaze transported through a purifying filter; he will feel the slag of ordinary desires falling away from him, leaving a pure enjoyment of calm beauty, pleasant lines, and life molded into a simple, visible expression. In this process, he very well might still experience men as men and women as women, but this experience, as the reflection of a feeling perceived and acknowledged without inhibition, will have been refi ned to achieve the higher unity of aesthetic pleasure. For by means of its particular conditions, film at once reproduces reality and offers— by transposing this reality into the black-and-white image—an abstraction. Film requires order and selection. It thus takes up a position between mechano-realistic and artistic reproduction. Film can impart ideas. It can demonstrate athletic exercises, methodical systems of body culture, and modern efforts of dance reform; in the hands of people with pure intentions and mature experience, it can bring an understanding of all these efforts—efforts of inestimable importance both for the present generation and generations to come—to a wider audience than any other means of propaganda. Film can speak to the conscience of the indifferent or the doubtful, who today still refuse to acknowledge the absolute necessity of this movement. It can pry them out of their comfortable idleness, and it can contribute decisively to the elimination of prejudices against bodily exercise performed openly in the nude—which goes hand in hand with all of the above. When Ernst Krieger, the head of the cultural division at Ufa, developed the project for the film Ways to Strength and Beauty, it was clear that, in addition to the other images of athletics, the film also had to include nudity. The filmmakers undertook the project with the greatest care. A physician, Dr. Nicholas Kaufmann, drafted the script and provided the medical expertise. The director, Wilhelm Prager, called in not only talented cameramen but also the expert advice of an eminent architect and one of the most expert connoisseurs of ancient culture, Dr. A. Köster, the curator of the Altes Museum in Berlin. 2 He was able to make brilliant use of that mixture of immediate and artistically selective reproduction in order to obtain visual effects that at once convey reality while simultaneously raising it to the level of an interpretive language. When film operates with such simple elegance; when it carefully distinguishes its images from anything that might lead viewers to mistaken interpretations or cause them to focus on the wrong things; when it forms—through the regulation of light, that is, by means of its own technical

130

Transformations of Experience

conditions—its material into a pure vision; and when it demonstrates, through the connection of beautiful bodies to nature, the meaning of this integrated whole of methodical work—then film is able to lead the general public back to a state of uninhibited simplicity before the natural appearance of nude bodies. Working toward this goal has genuine cultural merit. Its realization can open up completely new paths of influence for the healthy and serious will driving our athletics, our cultivation of the body, and our longing for a beautiful and graceful human race. With the purification it brings about, it can actively bring us closer to our ideal of a harmonious education of our people’s youth, an education based on the balance of all human powers. One could say that this ideal coincides with the longing, pronounced by Henrik Ibsen’s Julian the Apostate, for the “third empire”:3 the longing for an epoch in which the ancient view of life, with its veneration of beauty, will blend with that of the Christian epoch, with its crusade for the internalization of the soul. We used to consider this a poetic vision. Today we sense that the weight of modern civilization compels us toward a reform of our way of life, a reform pointing us down the path to that third empire. This is the new landmark that has appeared before our eyes. Let us welcome whatever leads us toward it. Notes 1. Osborn here plays on the difference between the Gymnasium (a German academic high school) and the ancient Greek gymnasion, which was the site of educating young men in athletics (and, later in its history, in intellectual pursuits as well). The Greek word gymnasion derived from the adjective gymnós (naked), since exercise was done while undressed. 2. August Köster (1873–1935) was a classical archaeologist and maritime historian who worked for Berlin’s Antikensammlung (antiquities collection). 3. In Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean (1873), the figure of Maximus invokes a “third empire” that would represent the synthesis of flesh and spirit. Julian the Apostate was the last non-Christian Roman emperor and sought to revive pagan religious practices and thereby suppress Christianity. See also Ernst Bloch’s discussion of the term Third Reich in Heritage of Our Times (1935).

54 BÉLA BALÁZS The Educational Values of Film Art: A Speech at the Sixth Deutsche Bildwoche in Vienna First published as “Bildungswerte der Filmkunst: Eine Ansprache auf der sechsten deutschen Bildwoche in Wien,” in Die Filmtechnik, no. 13 (November 5, 1925), 277–79. Translated by Michael Cowan.

In this public lecture, delivered a year after the publication of Visible Man or the Culture of Film (1924), Béla Balázs elaborates his argument about the potential of film to “educate” audiences in eloquent bodily expression. Balázs delivered the lecture at the Deutsche Bildwoche, an annual congress focused on the educational uses of film and visual media. The event was co-organized by the German Zentralinstitut für Erziehung und Unterricht (Central Institute for Education and Teaching) and the Austrian Bildspielbund (Association for Image Use), an organization devoted to helping schools integrate film and slide projections into teaching. Rather than addressing didactic films for use in schools, however, Balázs highlights the potential of popular cinema to provide a broad-based “aesthetic education” in eloquent bodily expression—and calls on all educators to attend to film’s aesthetic dimensions.

The Magic of the Body

131

Any conference of public educators ought to include a discussion of art film; that is, of “entertainment film seen in terms of its educational potential.”1 I am not suggesting that we should attempt to use art film to smuggle a “general education” among the people. A disguised pedagogical film will always be a bad art film, and bad art discredits the best teaching. We would thus be serving neither the cause of art nor that of general education. In any case, I do not wish to speak of general education here, but rather of a specifically aesthetic education; and this is a topic that should certainly interest educators as well. Today, an aesthetic education in matters of film is more important than any other type. This is because it applies to the largest groups of people. For 99 percent of the population, having a correct artistic understanding of ancient engravings or fine porcelain is of no importance, for they never come into contact with such objects. Nor should their limited understanding of ancient Egyptian art concern us, because they will rarely have the occasion to make mistakes in this domain. On the other hand, this same 99 percent makes frequent trips to the cinema. Possessing a correct understanding of film art has thus become decisive for the destiny of any people’s culture. Indeed, this question is decisive for the destiny of film art itself. For on this point film is different from all other art forms. We demand that all the other arts—and not without reason—educate the tastes of their audience. Every other art form is shaped by the taste and talent of the artist alone. In every other artistic domain, the artist can create something despite the lack of understanding on the part of the masses. One can write a book, paint a picture, or compose a sonata and wait for the comprehension of later generations. One can attempt to educate the taste of the public a posteriori with good art. This is not possible with film, simply because the production of a film is so expensive that no enterprise can risk racing ahead of contemporary tastes for any substantial length of time. Hence, before good films can become possible at all, the public must already possess a certain degree of good taste. As paradoxical as this sounds, film requires a comprehension for something that does not yet exist; people must already be able to perceive film’s beauty before it can be created in the first place. In order to receive good films, then, people must first receive a certain theoretical-aesthetic education. And this, ladies and gentlemen, depends to a great extent on you. Here lies the great mission of the public educator. You must understand that by educating the public in the correct understanding of film art, you will be cultivating film art itself. For this reason, I believe that an aesthetic theory of film art is more important than that of any other art form, especially for the public educator. For he himself must first understand this art correctly before he can teach it to others. Today, however, this is only rarely the case, even among the most highly educated. Indeed, educated people lack this understanding more often than anyone else. For their education is primarily a literary one. It is precisely the arrogance of this education that gives rise to their literary prejudices, which prevent them from understanding the particular qualities of an utterly different form of art. The well-educated know that one cannot judge painting and music according to literary criteria. But they have not yet learned that such criteria are just as inappropriate for film. They pay attention only to film’s narrative content, which they generally find too primitive and banal. But they fail to notice what an enormous wealth of deeply symbolic images the simplest of film plots can harbor, and what a wealth of refined and profound inner experience mimic expression can convey. Is the content of classical opera any more profound or spiritually enriching than that of the average film? And yet you accept it for the sake of the music, which makes use of the plot only as a framework. In film, the plot is likewise the framework for an optical form of music! Indeed, what we ought to be awakening and developing in others is precisely a sense for this unique new

132

Transformations of Experience

poetry of gestures. Rather than reproaching film for lacking something it cannot offer, we should be pointing out what it does have to offer! Stringent critique is much in need here. But for this very reason, criticism should not compromise itself or risk its prestige by demanding something nonsensical. No more than in painting or music does a film’s intellectual content determine its spiritual worth. What matters, rather, are the irrational atmospheric qualities of mimic expression. In literature, as well, great writers have molded the simplest and most primitive stories into immortal masterpieces. How? Through the text, through linguistic expression. The text of a film, however, lies in the artist’s use of facial expressions, which can lift up the simplest plot into the sphere of high art. Consider, for example, the episode of a man professing his love for a woman. As a mere occurrence, as “content,” this episode appears both in the cheapest novels and the most sublime works of art. What then is the difference? Only the text. Only what the man in question says to the woman. It can be trivial, or it can be extremely moving. Judged by the mere content of its plot, Romeo and Juliet would be an example of the most trivial sentimentality if the heroes did not speak of love with Shakespeare’s words. In film, too, it all boils down to a simple question of what the actor says. Only here, he speaks not with words but with facial expressions. The decisive question is not what his face makes audible but rather what it makes visible. In film, even speech appears only as a visual image; even this form of human utterance addresses another faculty, one no longer having anything to do with conceptual and intellectual thinking. When we see someone speaking, we experience something completely different than when we hear him speaking. A good film has no literary “content” at all. For it is “at once both kernel and shell” [“Kern und Schale mit einem Male”]. 2 A good film has as little content as a painting or a facial expression. For “the inside is on the outside” [Denn, was “innen ist, ist außen”].3 Film is an art of surfaces. This does not mean that it is without psychology. However, this psychology is visible—that is, it lies on the surface. In the gesture, emotion becomes visible immediately and with a subtlety that words could never capture. A writer would have to fill many pages in order to describe what is contained in a fleeting smile, and even then, an indefinable, irrational remainder would escape his pen: precisely that essential part lying outside of the conceptual and the literary. Consider also the tempo of facial expressions. The description of a gesture lasts much longer than the gesture itself. In the same amount of time, one can see one hundred times more spiritual experience than one could read. And description cannot convey the essential element: namely, the originary rhythm of emotions. As a means of expressing emotions, then, the play of facial features is much more polyphonic than spoken language. But precisely because the face can express such an incredible abundance of inner life, film plots necessarily remain extremely primitive. Otherwise, there is no room to act out—and no time to grasp—the emotional nuances. The more artistic and psychologically subtle a film is, the simpler its content will be. For the only psychology that counts in film is that experienced in visible emotion, not those inner conflicts played out in thought. Film art, then, is essentially a poetry of facial expressions, which, in its own way, can reveal at least as much depth and subtlety as the very best literature—and this despite film’s primitive content. For even in the simplest of films, it still happens that someone suffers, rejoices, loves, or hates, and these feelings can be represented wonderfully even in cases where the story is otherwise inane. In saying this, I do not wish to suggest that the content absolutely must be inane—of course not. By arguing the most extreme case, I simply wish to show that the plot of a film represents nothing but an occasion for mimic

The Magic of the Body

133

revelation and visual effects. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, it is less significant and less harmful to accept the presence of something inferior than to reject what is truly valuable. For education must be conducted positively, and the teacher accompanying his pupils to the cinema must know where he should direct their attention. Here, in the mimic revelation of emotions and in the atmospheric effects of images alone—images, for example, of a countryside, of a play of light and shadows, of drifting clouds, or of the surf pounding on the beach—herein lies the specific character of film art: a new territory into which literature can never lead us. But I do not wish to compare the two. On the contrary, I argue that they cannot be compared at all, and that film demands a completely different approach. This, above all, is what the public educator must learn. In the space of a lecture, it is impossible to elaborate an aesthetics of film art. I have written an entire book on the subject,4 and this is still far from enough. I simply wanted to sound an urgent warning about the danger residing in the literary prejudice of the literary elite; paying attention only to the bare content of film, they naturally find it too primitive. With this prejudice, we cannot teach anyone the correct understanding of film art, and film art itself can only suffer. When considering art fi lm, a public educator should take yet another factor into account. Just as literature imparts an entire intellectual and linguistic culture, which is why it is taught in schools, so film imparts a gestural culture of expressive movements. Language is not our only form of expression! Why is it the only one to be taught systematically? Why do we neglect the other one, the one containing a much greater wealth of possibilities? People with a large vocabulary of words often have a very small and clumsy vocabulary of gestures; as learned as their speech may be, their movements betray a lack of education. Void of all nuances, their gestures are primitive, expressionless, and ugly. Film is the art through which man can be educated in his capacity for bodily expression. Here we have a new and enormous possibility for educating the public, and with it a mission for public educators. This mission is of an immeasurable significance. For with its expanded capacity for expression, the soul itself expands. Make no mistake: the spirit expressed in words and that expressed in gestures are not the same, just as music does not say the same thing as poetry in a different way. The bucket of words descends into the depths of a different well than that of gestures, thus bringing to the surface a different kind of water. However, the well from which we draw no water at all inevitably runs dry. For already in advance, our thoughts and feelings are determined by the possibilities that we have for expressing them. Such is the economy of our mental organization, which is unable to produce anything that cannot be put to use. As psychological and logical analyses have proven, our words are not simply copies added belatedly to our thoughts, but rather the forms determining those thoughts in the first place. Bad poets and dilettantes might speak a lot of their inexpressible thoughts and feelings. In truth, however, it is extremely rare that we have thoughts incapable of being expressed in words, and when this does occur, we really don’t even know what we were thinking. Here too, as in every other domain, man’s spiritual evolution is a dialectical one. While, on the one hand, the growth and expansion of the human spirit increases its possibilities for expression, on the other, it is precisely these increased expressive possibilities that allow the spirit to grow. A culture of the body (understood in this nonathletic but, rather, spiritual sense) thus constitutes the fi nal result and, as it were, the fulfi llment of that education that you, ladies and gentlemen, must help to spread. (And let us not forget that spread can also be understood in the sense of spreading out over the entire human body!) For in general, culture appears to be taking the path from abstract spirit to the visible body. Can we not see the spirit of a person’s ancestors in his movements or in his delicate

134

Transformations of Experience

hands? The thoughts of fathers transform themselves, in their children, into a receptivity of the nerves, into taste and instinct. Conscious knowledge becomes unconscious sensitivity: it materializes itself as culture in the body. The body’s capacity for expression is always the last result of a cultural evolution; thus, however much today’s film might still represent a primitive and barbaric stammering in relation to today’s literature, it nonetheless amounts to a cultural evolution, because it represents an immediate transformation of spirit into body. For this reason, I ask you to accept the following proposal and to make it a general resolution of our conference: let us expand aesthetic education in the schools to include not only literature, music, and the fine arts but also film as the popular art of our time; and let us see to it that teachers are trained accordingly. Notes 1. Balázs wrote this lecture for a congress known as the Deutsche Bildwoche. Taking place in alternating cities beginning in 1920, this annual congress provided a chance for pedagogues to discuss possible uses of film in the classroom. 2. A reference to Goethe’s “Allerdings: Dem Physiker” (1820): “Nature has neither kernel / nor shell. / It is everything at once” (Natur hat weder Kern / Noch Schale, / Alles ist sie mit einemmale). 3. Balázs here invokes lines from Goethe’s poem “Epirrhema” (1819): “No thing’s inside, outside neither: / In is out and both are either” (Nichts ist drinnen, nichts ist draußen: / Denn was innen, das ist außen). Goethe, Selected Poems, trans. John Whaley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 127. 4. The book is Visible Man or the Culture of Film (Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films, 1924).

55 LENI RIEFENSTAHL How I Came to Film . . . First published as “Wie ich zum Film kam . . .,” in Ufa-Magazin, no. 18 (December 17–23, 1926). Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi.

Though best known for her propaganda films under the Third Reich, Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) first made a name for herself in the world of Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance). In the following article, she offers a stylized account of her breakout film role as the dancer Diotima in Arnold Fanck’s Der heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain, 1926). The film’s spectacular opening montage sequence, in which the rhythms of Diotima’s dance commune with those of the crashing waves, recalled a longstanding discourse on natural movement from choreographers such as Isadora Duncan as well as previous dance sequences in films like Ways to Strength and Beauty (see the article by Osborn, no. 53), in which Riefenstahl made a brief appearance. Riefenstahl would go on to act in several more films by Fanck and to make her own mountain films, Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932) and Tiefland (Lowlands, 1954). On Fanck’s Weimar mountain films, see also the texts by Balázs (no. 29) and Kracauer (no. 42) in chapters 2 and 3, respectively.

I could have also titled this essay “How The Holy Mountain Came into Being,” for that is what I wish to recount here. I am a dancer with every fiber of my being. And I was little moved by things that bore no relation to dance—nothing was to distract me—nothing to rob me of my days and

The Magic of the Body

135

hours. For this reason I had little trouble declining illustrious film offers time and again. I dared not work in film, for I did not want to divide my energy—I would not have sacrificed a single week to film. How I nonetheless came to film is what I wish to recount here. It was in June of 1924, following a “hot” season in which I had given nearly seventy dance performances within eight months. With a bad knee and tired nerves, I felt incapable of doing more. Then someone took me along to the Nollendorftheater, which was showing a fi lm, Der Berg des Schicksals [The Mountain of Destiny], by Dr. Arnold Fanck, the creator of Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs [The marvel of the snowshoe] and Eine Fuchsjagd auf Skiern durchs Engadin [A foxhunt on skis through the Engadin].1 I will never be able to describe what I experienced upon watching this film. I sat mesmerized in the crowd of people—what I saw was incredible—images of never-beforeseen beauty—mountains, cliffs, people who belonged to the crag, people who moved with vitality and beauty and complete freedom, as strong and wild as the giant rocks themselves. A longing then developed in me for this unknown world. I traveled to the Dolomites to see for myself what the film had shown me. I held in my heart a secret hope to meet people there, somewhere, who were involved in this film. This idea was extremely naïve, for I had paid no attention whatsoever to the name of the film’s director, did not know the names of the actors, and thus could have no clue where these people even lived. All I knew was that they had made the film in the Dolomites, and yet my wish would still come true. It was at the Karersee2—there I saw the lead actor of The Mountain of Destiny, that bold conqueror of the fearful Italian peak: Luis Trenker. In this moment I felt that I belonged from then on—I stepped into the circle of these people. I went to him—told him my impressions of the film, said that I had to meet his director in order to work in his world, even if I only received the smallest of roles. Smiling, he listened to me—I saw in his eyes that he took me for an overexcited romantic—but nothing could have taken away from me the desire to realize my wish. Overjoyed, I departed. In Berlin, I learned that Dr. Fanck was on his way from Freiburg to Berlin to hire the lead actress for his new film with Ufa. Would I come too late? I then went to him, a bundle of nerves, feeling as brittle as glass. “My name is Leni Riefenstahl—can dance and would like to work with you on your next film—” He gave me a strange look—we then spoke at length about The Mountain of Destiny. Two days later he saw me dance—and then I went to the hospital—a difficult knee operation—the fear of never being able to dance again, of having an inflexible leg—even in this feverish state the spell did not vanish—I saw mountains—rocks—the frightening Italian peak. The most difficult days were behind me. Dr. Fanck came to the hospital. “Inspired by your dancing, I wrote in one night what I previously could not have written in a year— my new work. And the leading role for you—the dancer, Diotima.” That was neither dream nor fantasy—in my hands lay a fi nished script: The Holy Mountain. Notes 1. Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs (1920) and Eine Fuchsjagd auf Skiern durchs Engadin (1922) constituted a two-part documentary. On Fanck’s later film Der Berg des Schicksals (1924), see the review by Kracauer in chapter 3, no. 42. 2. The Karersee is a lake in the Dolomites in South Tyrol.

136

Transformations of Experience

56 H. SP. The Charleston in One Thousand Steps First published as “1000 Schritte Charleston,” in Süddeutsche Filmzeitung, no. 3 (January 14, 1927). Translated by Tara Hottman.

While jazz had been on the European radar at least since World War I, the success of Josephine Baker’s Revue nègre in Paris and Berlin in 1925 helped to launch a new fervor for “jazz-age” dances such as the Black Bottom and the Charleston. The Charleston was featured in many films of the time including Monta Bell’s The King on Main Street (1925), Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926), and Jean Renoir’s science fiction comedy short Sur un air de Charleston (Charleston Parade, 1927). But film also offered an apt tool for dance instruction on account of its ability to isolate details and slow down movement. The 1926 instructional film reviewed here was directed by Franz Wolfgang Koebner, an author of popular dance manuals such as Das TanzBrevier (1913). Koebner’s four-part instructional film, shot by Fox-Europa as a program filler, formed part of a vogue of “interactive” shorts in the 1920s, which also included the crossword puzzle films (or “rebus films”) by Guido Seeber and Paul Leni in 1925–26.

A first attempt to teach modern social dance through film. We can absolutely declare it a success. The Charleston steps, presented in such a way that we can practice along while seated in the cinema, are broken down into preliminary exercises and summaries, into right and wrong, and so forth, with such thoroughness that it is hard to imagine a more comfortable and inexpensive dance lesson. We first have the basic exercise in front of us, which starts in the familiar, basic military position, and its development into the main figure of the standing leg, rotating like a fan, and the tapping foot. In the multitude of images we see only legs and shoes dangling from a bench, while the variety of the stockings, shoes, and types of feet suggests participants from all social strata. These shoes are practicing. In between we see, for even greater clarification, slow-motion images of the rotating and swinging legs. Lastly, there are summaries of the whole dance and sections of an elegant, exemplary Charleston with all the dancers. The intertitles are funny. The film is a welcome sight at the Munich Carnival, which now—after the Charleston has already become passé in the Western metropolises and is beginning to give way to new inventions, to the Black Bottom and the Waltz—is bringing the Charleston to the masses. It is a welcome sight in particular for the many people who learn by watching and, in this way, wish to make dance institutes superfluous. But none of this will improve the elegance of Munich’s average dance culture.

57 LEO WITLIN On the Psychomechanics of the Spectator First published as “Von der Psychomechanik des Zuschauers,” in Filmtechnik 3, no. 23 (November 12, 1927), 406–7. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The Magic of the Body

137

Like Béla Balázs, who saw the body’s mimic capacities as the “last result of a cultural evolution” (see no. 54 in this chapter), Leo Witlin—a set designer at Ufa—here presents the eye’s capacity to decipher mimic expressions in evolutionary terms as the result of “an immense amount of experience attained over the course of countless millennia.” For Witlin, this phylogenic, second-nature language of the body constituted the authentic realm of filmic language and experience. In arguing that “the natural movements of living beings and objects speak in the cinema,” Witlin here registers a rejection of theatrical gesture that had become commonplace by the late 1920s. This also explains why objects, children, and animals could appear most authentically “filmic” on the screen. Witlin’s interest in waves and his description of the eye as a “wireless sensor” also suggest the infl uence of radio and television on understandings of the body (see chapter 18, especially nos. 266, 270, and 273). Witlin’s text appeared in the journal Filmtechnik alongside Lotar Holland’s “Subjective Movement,” which is included in chapter 15 (no. 230).

We may describe the eye as an optical instrument. It is an instrument of extraordinary sensitivity and precision. As is well known, it receives rays of light traveling at the tremendous speed of some 300,000 kilometers per second and oscillating hundreds of billions of times within the same interval. At that speed, exceeding the capacities of the human imagination, the wavelength of a single ray of light measures only a few millionths of one millimeter. It is by perceiving the most minute differences in the oscillation rates or wavelengths of different rays of light that the eye can distinguish tones and colors. As a result of the same quality, it has learned to detect the position of objects in space with respect to one another and, above all, with respect to itself. It has acquired the faculty of rapid orientation in three-dimensional space over great distances. In this way, the eye is able to feel its way through space “wirelessly,” and it can thus be seen as a wireless sort of sensor. Of course, we are not considering the eye as an isolated, autonomous organ but rather as part of an organism and as the conveyer of impressions of light in the process of seeing. This process is a powerful weapon accompanying every living being through life, and it has been of the utmost significance in the evolution of the human psyche. Through an immense amount of experience attained over countless millennia, the eye has learned to recognize movements in space and to form judgments about their inner sense and meaning. These impressions have been deposited in the reservoir of the mind, and the appearance of similar or familiar phenomena can recall them to memory. There has evolved an entire lexicon of elementary mimic expressions, which possess a universal validity—universal in the sense that they are comprehensible not only to man but also to animals. A hand suddenly poised to strike calls forth a reflex response of fright in every creature sensitive to blows. A boulder rolling down from a mountain does not bode well, and any living being—be it an elephant, a human being, or a field mouse—will correctly interpret the meaning of this movement and run away. All creatures comprehend this mimic of nature immediately. In man, this capacity is extraordinarily well-developed. Based on another person’s movements, facial features, and appearance, one can make judgments about his psychological condition and psychic processes. Man knows how to read entire volumes of inner experience in the slightest twitch of the corner of the mouth or of the eyelid—that is, in features that the intellect is often incapable of grasping. Every human being, regardless of education or culture, possesses these faculties as an originary gift. The child understands mimic before he understands words, and we often take no account of the extent to which we communicate through mimic instead of speech. Mimic is a language, one that

138

Transformations of Experience

man has known for the longest time, that he learns the most rapidly, and to which he primarily owes his existence; a blind being, incapable of perceiving the mimic of nature, is incapable of struggle—and thus also of existence—in this same nature. It is the mimic of nature that dominates in the cinema rather the theatrical gesture, which plays a subordinate role as support for the spoken word. The natural movements of living beings and objects speak in the cinema. The eye recognizes every instance of falsity in this mimic, just as it does in life. Theatrical gestures in film lead to cheap cinema. And even if films are “staged” (a term which, along with a number of others, has been mistakenly borrowed from the theater), one can reach artistic heights by knowing how to “be” rather than to “act.” One must be capable of completely identifying with the scenario and giving expression, by means of the slightest gestures, to the appropriate interior life. As already suggested, if children and animals produce such a simple and pleasant effect in film, this is because they do not act at all; their mimic language is perfectly genuine and familiar. Our psyche is such that, placed in an unfamiliar environment, we search for familiar elements in order to orient ourselves and experience a feeling of satisfaction upon finding them. The most elementary movement of an animal—its gait— offers us an immediate and clear image of its psychic condition. Without having to call on the intellect, we immediately know whether this animal simply wishes to move forward, sneak up on someone by surprise, or enter into open combat. If we now turn our observations onto ourselves, we can easily recognize that every interior stirring has as its effect a physical movement of one sort or another. It is a law of nature that every form of energy, as soon as it reaches a certain level of tension, attempts at all costs to transform itself into another. The bigger the obstacles, the more turbulent is this process of transformation. We often see people walking down the street and talking to themselves. One recognizes from their appearance that they are agitated; the inner tension is expressed not only in their words and gestures but also in their facial expressions, which in the last instance are nothing but the movements of their facial muscles. This movement does not need to be strikingly visible. We draw our conclusions even from the simple sight of a face turning pale. Everyday life shows us thousands of instances in which, under the pressure of self-control, inner tension reaches a certain limit at which the psychic energy must find an outlet in words or gesticulations, indeed, even in fits and hysterical attacks. A psychic process is thus converted into mechanical movement. This is not the place to discuss psychological problems. These examples are only meant to illustrate the phenomenon of movement as an expression of inner psychic tensions: tensions comprehensible to both men and animals by virtue of physical movements. This elementary comprehension of movement is one of the basic building blocks of the universal human psyche, and it accounts for the irresistible effect of movement on living creatures. It is possible to choose one’s expressions from the mimic lexicon in such a way that the spectator will submit to them. The critical function of his intellect will have no part in this. A rapid succession of images, which in the shortest interval of time recalls numerous characteristics of a phenomenon, will undoubtedly place the subject in a state of agitation, calling forth in him a sense of “excited involvement.” One need not even show the entire movement; it suffices simply to provide a suggestion of what man has most certainly seen many times over the course of his evolution. The eye is able to judge the fi nest nuances of a movement. The process of seeing deposits impressions recorded by the eye into our psychic apparatus below, and memory calls forth the entire experience of the human organism’s endless history from its subconscious treasure chamber. All of this happens according to processes that we really do not understand. Nonetheless, it is according to these processes that events become experi-

The Magic of the Body

139

ences for us. When we see a movement, it calls forth in us a need to produce our own movement in turn. When executed correctly, it “hits” its target and infects us. (Examples of such captivating movements include running, losing balance, floating in the air, and fighting.) These are qualities that make man an appropriate object for film’s effect. This is the path on which to seek a genuine filmic language.

58 LOTTE H. EISNER AND RUDOLF VON LABAN Film and Dance Belong Together First published as “Film und Tanz gehören zusammen,” in Film-Kurier, no. 143 (June 16, 1928). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Rudolf von Laban (1879–1958) was one of the most important dance theorists of the Weimar Republic. Having shot to fame as a mystical “life reformer” in Ascona (where his dance pupils had frequent contacts with the Dada circle around Hugo Ball and Hans Richter), he went on to create one of the best-known systems of dance notation, presented in his 1928 book Schrifttanz (Script dance). He would go on to direct the Deutsche Tanzbühne in Nazi Germany and write an efficiency study, Effort, in 1947. In this interview published one week before the Second German Dancers’ Congress in 1928, Laban shares his ideas about cross-fertilization between dance and fi lm performance with critic Lotte Eisner. The second of three major dance congresses in the Weimar Republic, this one was attended by innovators of modern dance including Laban, Harald Kreutzberg, Gret Palucca, and Mary Wigman.

In a few days, the Zweiter Deutscher Tänzerkongreß (Second German Dancers’ Congress) will open in Essen. This is a sign of the increased value accorded to dance as an art form in and of itself. Rudolf von Laban, the chairman of the Kunstausschuss für Tanz [Arts Committee for Dance], recently clarified his goals: he is demanding a college of dance arts and a site for dance theater. This champion of new efforts in dance sees the significance of the congress vis-à-vis the Magdeburg congress. Beyond a congress, he sees the further development of dance arts with regard to other artistic means of expression, such as film. “Our first congress in Magdeburg,” says Rudolf von Laban, “was more or less only a preliminary attempt to combine our efforts. Here, there were not yet any actual artistic formulations, but rather discussions of more economic questions. “But it was precisely through intensive engagement with preliminary financial questions that Magdeburg became the basis of our second congress, in Essen, which is dedicated exclusively to artistic problems. “This ‘dancers’ congress’ in Essen will present a genuine cross-section of all achievements heretofore made in the area of dance, a clarification of all dance-related efforts—only a clarification, mind you—not an argument for one or the other. For the congress’s task should be to mediate between individual, and in some cases competing, trends and initiate contact among the various schools. Here, we will see and learn to understand the accomplishments of all dancers and dance organizations through theoretical and practical demonstrations, discussions, lectures, and a festival.

140

Transformations of Experience

“After all, these efforts are essentially dialects of one language, dialects that we must preserve and promote. “This is why our program has been designed as comprehensively as possible, from modern Russian artistic dance to traditional provincial folkdances. “The congress will not make the same mistake as so many other conferences. It will not only showcase long-recognized accomplishments in dance but also and above all valorize the work of younger artists. Thus, three afternoons are reserved for performances by young dancers. And a jury will have the difficult and, as always, seemingly dreadful task of testing and challenging up-and-coming artists. “Aside from the issues of the new generation, another important question will be up for debate and must be decided here. On Saturday, June 23, there will be a discussion of the problem of ‘choreology and dance notation,’ which will have revolutionary significance for the entire art of dance. “Since the sixteenth century, repeated attempts have been made to put dance into writing in a way analogous to the notation used in music. Again and again, such experiments have failed to take hold. My new dance notation will not only provide a means of inscribing and preserving dance. Through its analytical and synthetic potential, it will also bring clarity and simplicity—the demands of our era—into the arena of dance composition. “With that, I call for a meticulous dance composition, in the spirit of movement analysis and synthesis, which, in contrast to unreflective emotional or natural dance, could be called Schrifttanz. This would be a work of dance art created through the mastery of the innermost principles of movement. “Like musical notation, my dance notation depends on a running staff, representing in itself the rhythm. In the five-line system, the particular body parts that should follow the respective rhythmic impulses are indicated by the placement of block symbols [Laufbalken] in a corresponding space between the lines. “Every impulse has a direction; the slant or gradation of the symbols will denote these directions. “All curves and trajectories of movement can be expressed with three symbols, given the multiplicity of possible combinations. “In Essen, this clear and simple dance notation will be adopted officially for the first time. Essen thus marks the birth of written dance as a recognized art form. An art built on harmonic principles will take the place of arbitrary movement. “Furthermore, this dance notation will be significant for film. “Today, film shoots take a lot of time on account of the endless rehearsals required for particularly complex movements. But if every actor receives a movement script from the director to study in advance, the scenes can be shot much more quickly, and they are much less likely to be ruined through false movements. “For the moment, directors may think this study of movement roles is too complicated to undertake for an individual scene. It may take a while for them to understand how much time and labor can be saved by this method. But for sound film, movement notation will be necessary from the outset, because it will be impossible for the director to give commands or directions during the shoot. “Thus, in sound film, image, movement notation, and sound will flow together into a unified whole. “On the occasion of the sound film demonstration in Dresden, I personally created a cinematic dance pantomime for Bolten-Baeckers entitled Der Drachentöter [The dragon slayer],1 whose individual movements I laid out in advance in my dance notation.

The Magic of the Body

141

“I thus speak from experience. Here, during the filming of Der Drachentöter, the specification of movements proved of inestimable value and made the shoot much easier. “I will attempt to demonstrate the actual outcome of my dance notation in a longer dance film, on which I plan to collaborate with Wilhelm Prager. 2 However, I do not want to say anything about it, because we are still too early in the process. “Generally speaking, film and dance must become even more intertwined. Today, film directors do not see clearly enough how far the mutual influence of endeavors in cinema and dance can lead us. “On the one hand, I am trying to introduce film into dance instruction and to use slowmotion recordings to help students understand movements in their individual phases. I first tried out such experiments in the choreographic studio, and I want to develop them in college courses. “On the other hand, up to this point, little has been done to build a connection between film and dance. Occasionally, fi lmmakers bring in dance students and their teacher for interludes, but for the most part, they have the star and a few actresses dance as well as they are able. And yet, aside from questions of dance in the narrow sense, film actors have much to learn from dance movement, all the more so given the way that film mercilessly registers and displays every false or tense movement. “In a time when dance is finally being hailed as an art—for the congress in Essen amounts to the definitive proclamation of dance art and its formulation in dance notation—film cannot afford to ignore us. “Beyond the first steps in a film like Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit3, the great work of film dance must be created.” Notes 1. Heinrich Bolten-Baeckers was a German playwright, librettist, and filmmaker who specialized in film comedies. In 1927, he founded Lignose Hörfilm System Breusig, a sound film company; the first Lignose sound film was demonstrated in Dresden in 1928. 2. Laban is likely referring here to a film he was planning together with Wilhelm Prager entitled Tanz ist Leben (Dance is life). A script is preserved in the Laban estate at the Tanzarchiv Leipzig. 3. Laban is alluding to a section of Ways to Strength and Beauty (see the text by Max Osborn, no. 53) devoted to dance, in which Laban figured alongside several other well-known representatives of Ausdruckstanz.

59 FRITZ LANG The Art of Mimic Expression in Film First published as “Die mimische Kunst im Lichtspiel,” in Der Film 14, no. 1 (New Year’s issue, 1929), 2. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Fritz Lang often touted the potential of film as a tool for international understanding (see, e.g., his 1926 text in chapter 15, no. 228). In the article here, his paeans to the human face in close-up, the micromovements of physiognomy, and the ability of film to lend a countenance to objects resonate with the writings of Béla Balázs and Jean Epstein. This article appeared alongside essays by Gerhard Lamprecht and others in Der Film under the heading: “Zum Jahresanfang schreiben Filmkünstler über: Metaphysik der filmischen Kunst” (On the occasion of the new year, film artists write about the metaphysics of filmic art).

142

Transformations of Experience

Within the space of a short article such as this one, it is of course impossible to offer any exhaustive account of the development of mimic art in film. Such an account would have to discuss not only the ways in which the expressive potential of the human face has developed but also the faces of all those objects contributing to film’s form of artistic expression. Elsewhere, I have already argued that film is tantamount to a rebirth of the human face;1 by magnifying it many times over and showing it either as a totality or dissolved into its constituent parts, film taught us once again to see the face correctly. In addition, film is tantamount to a completely new attitude toward things. To a greater extent than any previous art form, it transforms things into participants in the drama. While theatrical performance relies above all on words, and while those words—like the expressions and gestures of the theater—must traverse a longer or shorter distance from the stage down to the spectator in order to produce their effects, film trains actors in eloquent silence. Intensified and stylized in a certain sense by the close-up, such silence produces all the more intense an effect the simpler and, as it were, quieter it is. If one can speak of silent instruments, then the human face on film certainly constitutes one. In the hearts of spectators, however, this instrument nonetheless functions—and perhaps precisely because of its silence—to elicit the most vibrant echo, the most melodious musical response. Did we understand, before the coming of film, how much can be expressed in the twitching of a closed mouth, in the rising and falling of an eyelid, in a head gently turning away? Do we not recognize today, for the first time, the absurdity of a completely still face, one whose only reaction to the catastrophes brought on by destiny is to look on without a word? The faces of things, similarly, appear to have come to life through the power of film; with it, they have brought their own complicated and charming immediacy to bear on the weaving of human destinies. For on film, things take part in the action—and they do so just as nonchalantly and just as naturally as children and animals. An empty chair, a broken glass, the barrel of a revolver pointed right at someone, the ghostly emptiness of a room no longer inhabited, a door closing or opening on its own—all of these objects are filled with their own life. All possess a face, personality, and mimic. And they flourish in contact with a material that our epoch has also rediscovered: light. Through the force and perfection with which a face—be it that of a person or a thing—is submerged from light into shadow or from shadow into light, film reveals itself as the rhapsodic poet of our time. It is the great storyteller of destinies, be they tragic or comic, unique or timeless. Moreover, it has this immeasurable advantage over rhapsodic poets from previous epochs: wherever it is most purely cinematic—that is, silent—film is equally comprehensible at all latitudes of the earth. Note 1. In his 1926 article “Wege des großen Spielfilms in Deutschland,” Lang had written: “The first important gift for which we have film to thank was in a certain sense the rediscovery of the human face.” Fritz Lang, “The Future of the Feature Film in Germany,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 623.

60 EMIL JANNINGS Miming and Speaking First published as “Mimen und Sprechen,” in Illustrierter Film-Kurier 12, no. 1381 (Berlin: Verlag Alfred Wiener, 1930), n.p. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The Magic of the Body

143

Sound technology not only reattached actors’ voices to their bodies, but it also shaped their very modes of vocal and corporeal self-presentation, as the tools of “Mimik” (described in the preceding texts of this chapter) no longer seemed appropriate. A celebrated silent film actor like Emil Jannings (1884–1950) had to adapt his manner of speaking and bodily movement to the new technology, toning down his expressionist style of performance. The following text by Jannings was part of the film program for The Blue Angel at its premiere in Berlin’s Gloria-Palast on April 1, 1930; the program also featured the text by Marlene Dietrich in chapter 10 of this volume (no. 153). Jannings had won the first Oscar for Best Actor in 1929 for The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command, but the transition to sound compelled him to return to Germany later that year. The Blue Angel was his first sound film and was shot with the same actors in both German and English versions.

The introduction of sound into film aroused so much opposition, especially among film’s admirers and adherents, because the first talking pictures made the understandable mistake of relying on sound for their entire effect. They thus neglected the image, which remains, after all, the most important factor even in sound fi lm. When the mute child suddenly started speaking, this event threw his parents, the producers, into such a state of frenzy that they totally neglected his appearance. The fact that film began to play music, speak, and sing so inspired the producers and the public under the spell of exaggerated American advertising that they wished only to hear the sound. Precisely the most valuable and most characteristic element of film—the art of framing, changing, and moving images—fell by the wayside. However, now that the initial excitement and fear are over, the primitive treatment of images in sound fi lms, which dubiously recalled film’s beginnings, has also been overcome. Sound film is continuing to develop, even visually, beyond the level that silent film had attained. The art of film is based on complicated technological developments. For this reason, it lies in film’s nature to continually enrich its possibilities of artistic expression through new technological inventions and achievements. Nonetheless, the essential function of film remains constant and overlaps with that of every other art form: namely, to represent, through specific means of expression and methods of artistic construction, real or imagined events. The film actor must adapt; the mime must become a speaking actor. Being an actor myself, I naturally can’t ignore this imperative. Because of the complexity of a film’s evolution, the film actor cannot be so independent in his work as his colleague on the stage. In silent films, he is dependent on the director and the cameraman; for unlike the audience before a theatrical stage, the cinema audience does not see the actor’s immediate performance but rather a technological reproduction in the form of the photographic image, which only comes about through the artistic, technologically creative, and mediating activity of director and cameraman. In sound film, we must add yet a third mediating agency, on which the reproduction of the actor’s acoustical performance depends: that of the sound engineer, the man controlling the microphone. He sits in a soundproof room and hears the actor’s words, not as the latter speaks them, but rather as they come over the electronic speakers, reproduced by this technology. The sound engineer can soften and amplify the sound, and he has the final say as to whether or not a sound take is successful. In the ideal case, of course, this technological apparatus would emit the sound exactly as it receives it. This purely technological question will find an answer sooner or later. Nonetheless, the actor, even the stage actor, will have to learn to speak for the microphone; he will have to get used to this odd little box, just as he got used to the camera in silent film.

144

Transformations of Experience

I am pleased to have been able to act in my first sound film in my native tongue in Germany, a film made at Ufa studios and produced by my old friend Erich Pommer. Josef von Sternberg directed the fi lm. I believe that The Blue Angel will prove to be another success for him and for us all. Further developments will hopefully allow us to collaborate again soon.

61 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Greta Garbo: A Study First published as “Greta Garbo: Eine Studie,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (February 25, 1933). Translated by Nancy Nenno.

Siegfried Kracauer wrote this essay shortly after the German release of Grand Hotel, the film adaptation of Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel. Kracauer’s text, which resists any reading of Garbo’s physiognomy in terms of identifiable “types,” exemplifies the kind of sublime awe that Roland Barthes might have had in mind when he later wrote that Garbo “belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy.”1 (On types, see also Béla Balázs’s article in chapter 10, no. 146.) Kracauer’s text was published only two days before the Reichstag fire and just three days before his panicked departure from Berlin to Paris.

If Garbo were merely beautiful, the wonder of her international reputation would remain inexplicable. Her beauty is certainly a rarity. The way her height harmonizes with her face, the way the facial features themselves agree with one another: all of it is arranged so correctly and so exactly that no single detail, not even one millimeter, could be altered. But there are other performers (Lil Dagover, for example) who also possess the attribute of beauty. Nonetheless, Garbo differs from them in her very appearance—that is to say, in the nature of her beauty. This beauty cannot endure any closer determination. It is not charming, nor is it grand, nor can one label it dazzling. It has no characteristics: it is beauty itself. Assuming that the essence of a human being is manifest in his appearance, it follows that such an ineffable beauty might point to two kinds of characters. One possibility is that it represents a state of utter emptiness. That is, it is completely conceivable that the beauty lacking in all characteristic features represents a being without content and that the harmony is but a mask behind which nothing hides. Beauty and stupidity often accompany one another. The other possibility, the one at work here, is that beauty derives from abundance and displays a full nature. Such is the case with Garbo. Her performance confirms that the beauty she has at her disposal is not rooted in poverty but rather in the wealth of existence. The nature out of which she creates is not simply of the elemental variety, one that colonizes the soul and empties the spirit. If it were simply that, then Garbo’s beauty would be subject to specification. It would be wild or even maternal, and Garbo herself would embody exclusively “the Female.” It is not as though she were lacking in simple nature. On the contrary, her being is completely conditioned by nature, and one senses again and again that it remains rooted in the earth. Something traditional comes through powerfully in her performance. The decisive point, however, is that the matter does not

The Magic of the Body

145

rest with the manifestation of nature in the narrowest sense. What is expressed in Garbo is more than refi ned nature. It is a nature that absorbs the spirit and allows it to pass through, instead of raging against it, and opens itself in general to all real powers related to human existence. It is united with intelligence and reaches out of the darkness of demonic obsession into the brightness of weightless emotions. In other words, Garbo is not so much “the Female” as she is “the Woman.” And it is a unique stroke of luck that various elements of existence come together in her, both unconscious and conscious, without any of them having to atrophy for the sake of the others. Where otherwise the usual conflicts that require a one-sided solution arise, here a relaxed latent balance rules and makes numerous solutions possible at any one time. The exact reflection of this balance is Garbo, who would be meaningless if she did not encompass the coexistence of many meanings. Almost more wonderful than such an endowment is the use to which it is put. It is to this use, and not simply to the present wealth of beauty and nature, that Garbo owes the world renown she possesses. This renown is connected to the fact that she has, with great ability and a perhaps greater instinctive assurance, realized that to which her gifts predisposed her: the Woman who is nothing other than Woman. Garbo’s true secret lies in the fact that she symbolizes a type that is not a type at all but rather, in a certain sense, a representation of the category itself. Truthfully, the form into which she transforms herself in her films achieves such a height of universality that all typical characteristics are as good as erased. One can usually guess the origin and fate of other actresses, or at least determine across the board certain special features and gifts they possess. They are such and such kind of women and their range of action is thereby limited. Garbo, however, escapes every such specification. Her age is constantly changing; her nationality plays no role; her appearance alters from that of girl to child and from child back to lady. She does not exaggerate, and she has no special lineament writ in her physiognomy. She is Woman as such and nothing else. She succeeds in illustrating the universal, the generic, by representing above all else that substance she finds in her being. She does not shine through gestures, nuances, and behaviors that are not conferred a priori, those that are gained only through entry into society and through numerous empirical experiences. Instead she evokes predominantly those states that, independent of external relations, may be easily retrieved from an existence such as hers. It is said that Garbo leads a very withdrawn life. No doubt she keeps to herself because she must eliminate those experiences and transformations that necessarily arise out of interpersonal relations. They tend to reduce the generic to a more or less typical exemplar. Which other performer is capable of fulfi lling a level of universality that is even higher than the type? When Garbo separates herself from the world, she obeys the instructions her nature gives her. This nature produces in and of itself, without outside assistance, all of the basic feelings and significant attitudes of a woman’s life. The main emphasis of her performance lies in these feelings and attitudes. In the film Grand Hotel she blossoms the most impressively when she celebrates her love. 2 It is, one might say, the joy of love in itself that she offers, a joy that has not yet passed through the filter of experience, but arises unveiled. When she brings it before our eyes in multiple variations, we have the impression that she needs only to look into herself in order to encounter the entire matter of joy. She touches the strings of her being and makes her own existence sing. This relates to the additional impression that she always performs a monologue at the climaxes. Her costar becomes for her an object with which she ignites herself; the plot provides her with an entrance, and the space she shares with the maid or the lover truly belongs to her alone. In no way does she take center stage at this moment. Rather, her being recedes out of the external world. The result is that she embodies in this film

146

Transformations of Experience

not only joy but also pain, disappointment, and the sacrifice of love. In reality her performance concentrates on the illustration of such fundamental conditions, which are characteristic not so much of a particular type of woman as they are of Woman as such. The price Garbo pays for her greatness is high. As a result of the extraordinary universality of her formulation, she runs the risk of evoking a decorative effect, particularly in an ensemble characterized by realist acting. In comparison with the other actors, Garbo’s efforts sometimes appear stylized, although she is far too rich to seek refuge in any stylization without solid foundation. But expressions that only signal the genre without getting involved with empirical elements can still create decorative side effects simply on account of their breadth. An even more serious consequence of Garbo’s greatness is that in order to maintain the universal validity of her characterizations, she must remain untouched. That means that she may not enter into real, everyday life, whose bonds would taint the purity of her existence. The distance she has chosen also reveals an (admittedly necessary) lack: a lack of in-between. Because she displays her nature purely, Garbo automatically foregoes any facial characteristics expressing not only a nature but also an existence modeled on interpersonal relations. Any representation of the basic female manners excludes those particular manners born out of an actual struggle for existence. One can always beat the latter out of oneself, the former never. Therefore, Garbo comes across much weaker while performing pronounced types or mediocre stirrings. In the film Anna Christie she plays a girl who appears in the beginning as a whore.3 But the whore in her remains unrealized and is only formally characterized. Similarly pale is her appearance in those scenes from the film Grand Hotel that precede the revelry of love. In them she was to give shape to the woes of the aging dancer whose fame had begun to wilt. However, the gesturing game that aids her in the presentation of this state of humanity is little more than a drapery that does not fit nearly well enough. Confrontation with the expressions of Joan Crawford, who portrays the character of the stenographer so perfectly realistically, reveals how schematic Garbo’s poses are. Here, where it comes down to crystallizing empirical features, Garbo stands at a disadvantage to Crawford. But who would not accept this inevitable weakness? In compensation for her inability to reflect the empirical world, she represents the world of the universal that can only emerge as experience through her. Notes 1. Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 56. 2. A star vehicle for Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and John Barrymore, Grand Hotel premiered in New York on April 12, 1932, and in Germany on February 14, 1933. Kracauer had also reviewed the film in the Frank furter Zeitung on February 17, 1933. 3. Based on a 1921 Eugene O’Neill play, Anna Christie (1930) was made in English- and Germanlanguage versions by Clarence Brown and Jacques Feyder, respectively. Garbo played the title role in both versions. Kracauer had reviewed the German-language version in the Frank furter Zeitung on April 14, 1931.

FIVE

SPECTATORSHIP AND SITES OF EXHIBITION

62 FRED HOOD Illusion in the Cinematographic Theater First published as “Die Illusion im kinematographischen Theater,” in Der Kinematograph 1, no. 11 (March 17, 1907), 1, 3. Translated by Michael Cowan.

For early-twentieth-century theorists, the cinema was not least a unique public space—a site of new forms of sociality, subjectivity, and experience that posed a threat to traditional bourgeois culture and values. Although it would be tempting to see the emergence and gradual institutionalization of cinema in terms of a shift from Wanderkinos (traveling theaters) to stationary venues, and from working-class Kientopps to bourgeois picture palaces, the texts in this chapter often defy such a streamlined narrative, highlighting instead the necessarily uneven, contradictory developments of a medium born under conditions of advanced capitalism. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Jürgen Habermas would advance a dialectical argument about film and other twentieth-century mass media, associating them with both the broad expansion of the public realm and a trend toward economic concentration and privatization. While foreshadowing Habermas’s interest in cinema as a sociological phenomenon, the following writings also point to the medium’s alternative potentialities—for example, in rearticulating gender and class identities and in enabling novel modes of social and aesthetic experience. We begin with a text by Fred Hood—the pen name of Friedrich Huth, a writer, publisher, literary agent, and editor of Die Skizze and other journals—who here upholds established theatrical aesthetics, arguing that cinematographic theaters should facilitate “illusionism” by obscuring elements of the dispositif such as the bare screen.

The rapid development of the cinematograph has given rise to a completely new class of entertainment venues; while some of them merit the title of theaters, others resemble mere show booths. What demands can we make of cinematographic theaters? Since I often visit cinematographic shows and since I have a good deal of experience with stage and theater techniques, I believe that I can offer a few useful tips to the owners of such entertainment venues. Leaving aside acrobatic numbers, the most important element of a theatrical performance is illusion. The spectator should be so captivated by the action on stage that he has the sensation of participating in the drama. Of course, it is not easy to raise the level of illusion in the theater to such an extent that the spectator completely forgets where he is. But just as an interesting book can claim our attention so thoroughly that we cease to see 147

148

Transformations of Experience

and hear our surroundings and feel as if we are standing in the middle of the novel’s action, experiencing events with its characters, so should we also forget our physical surroundings in the theater and, at least temporarily, share the experiences of the characters on stage. To what extent is this possible in cinematographic theaters? Given that the events appear on the screen with photographic fidelity, the level of illusion can reach considerable heights. When we watch images of boats floating on the open sea, of a train speeding towards us, or of workers performing various tasks in a foundry or in a glassworks, all of this appears so true to nature that we no longer even notice the lack of color. We have by now grown accustomed to imagining the natural appearance of color when looking at a photograph, and thus the fine gradations of light and shade suffice for us in moving pictures as well. Occasionally, however, the use of a tint to cover the entire projection screen in a single characteristic color can create astounding effects. For example, I once witnessed a captivating and thrillingly realistic sequence shot in the Alps; with a cold blue light covering the entire cinematographic image, the dreadful silence reinforced the impression of perceiving, through the clear air, a drama being acted out high up in the mountains: the rescue of two fallen climbers. The shimmering blue snow, the cold sky, and the silent actions of the tired people slowly ascending the mountainside were all so beautiful, so enthralling that one could no longer see it as a performance but only as a real event. I saw similar effects produced during the projection of a scene shot in a glassworks. Here, the entire picture was tinted with a red hue that seemed to be protruding from the slots in the ovens. But while a single hue can effectively express a mood, I do not believe it at all necessary to show every person and every object in all the details of their natural colors. Color images would perhaps even have a disturbing effect. Films of theatrical extravaganzas are often shown with numerous colors, but in my experience, the events do not appear any more natural for all that. What prevents most cinematographic shows from satisfying the educated spectator, however, is something different. The music designed to accompany the images—and generally played on a piano—fails to harmonize correctly with them. I did visit one theater in Berlin that achieved surprising results in this respect. On the screen, the film showed singers and musicians; the music—here emanating from an invisible phonograph—coincided with the beat of the melodies that the musicians were supposed to be playing.1 The sounds seemed to be coming from the mouths, the trumpets, and the violins of the filmed characters. But my point here is not really about synchronization. Even music used simply as accompaniment must not detract from the mood of the film. It should remain silent at moments such as the Alpine scene mentioned above; it must know how to produce funny, mischievous, and tender effects but also convey tumult, fear, and the roar of thunder. I once sat in a cinematographic theater and watched the film of a bank robbery. The suspense left us breathless as we followed the events on the screen from the edge of our seats. We saw the crooks trying to blow open the bank’s enormous safe. They took ample time to drill the holes and draw the fuses—and suddenly, the entire front wall of the safe was blown forward and there arose an enormous cloud of smoke and dust. All of this, however, occurred so silently that it was as if the mighty wall were made of cotton rather than steel. This, of course, completely spoiled the illusion. Expert noises should have been executed here as on the stage—only significantly dampened so that the spectators would have the impression of perceiving all of this from a great distance. The projection screen ought to function like a large window, through which we look out into the distance and become involuntary witnesses of these dramatic events.

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

149

Another factor often detracts from filmic illusion. When we walk into the theater, we immediately see the screen, which is nothing more than a blank surface inside a plush or wooden frame. We know that nothing can really happen on this screen; there is no stage on which people might appear. Theater owners ought not to hinder us too much in our desire to let ourselves be deceived. We enter a theater and wish to see a stage. Thus simply by showing us the typical theatrical proscenium and curtain in the front of the room in which we are sitting, cinematograph owners can produce an enormous effect. In reality, of course, the curtain need cover nothing more than the large screen whose edges are hidden; but our imagination conjures up an entire backstage area with wings, dressing rooms, trapdoors, stage machinery, and so forth. Note 1. Hood is likely referring to a presentation of Tonbilder (sound pictures; see chapter 17, no. 247).

63 ALFRED DÖBLIN Theater of the Little People First published as “Das Theater der kleinen Leute,” in Das Theater 1, no. 8 (December 1909), 191–92. Translated by Don Reneau.

Published twenty years before Döblin’s best-known novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, this essay already exemplifies the writer’s fascination with proletarian life in Berlin, here giving a glimpse into Kientopps in Berlin’s working-class districts. Representing the ambivalent, often-condescending views of Germany’s increasingly precarious Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie), Döblin (1878–1957) regards the cinematograph as a bloody, sensationalist form of entertainment for the working class, characterizing movie theaters as a modern version of “bread and circuses.” Ten years later, Döblin would also profile a working-class cinema in northern Berlin in his essay “Dionysos,” published under the pseudonym Linke Poot in Die neue Rundschau. Although such accounts of moviegoing may appear merely as instances of “slumming” on the part of Germany’s literary intelligentsia, it bears emphasis that Döblin also wrote an essay in 1930 positing a dynamic, bidirectional relationship between writing and film (see chapter 17, no. 260).

Little men and women are unfamiliar with literature, development, and direction. At night, they shuttle through the streets, gossip under railway bridges, or stand gawking at a fallen horse; they go out in search of excitement, stimulation, and thrills; they want to burst out laughing. The stronger the fare, the better. It is all about experiencing torture chambers and sea animals, and perhaps participating in revolutions. There are freak shows, curiosity cabinets, and cinematographs. All of these attractions are designed to astonish and shock spectators through and through. The value of a show is directly proportional to the intensity of the goose bumps it produces. At the entrance to the curiosity cabinet, a visitor hesitates with doubt: should he first pay his respects to the mournful faces of a royal family or inspect the thumbscrews? He reels between reverence and dread. Over there he spots a “mouth-pear”: “This was placed into the mouth of delinquents and screwed open; it expanded in four directions and stretched the jaws so

150

Transformations of Experience

severely that the unfortunate victims were incapable of bringing forth more than a whimper and often felt their oral cavities burst asunder.” The stranger gazes in wonder at a tottering Count Bismarck that looks like a giant potato. He observes the cut-open belly of a female sturgeon, producer of the beloved delicacy caviar; he sees a mentally deranged mother—Exhibit No. 486—simmering her own child in a kettle. Dead from exhaustion, he then drags himself toward a penitence cage from the region of Eisleben. And at the exit, the sight of the torture boots of Württemberg still lies in wait to deal our horrified stranger one final blow. For, you see, this highly educated man has very sensitive feet. The situation is too much for him; he concludes uneasily that institutions such as this provide a variable image of a progressing culture; he drinks a glass of beer at a decent price. Now he pushes his way toward the Kientopps. They lie in the north, south, east, and west of the city, in smoky parlors, useless shops, large halls, and vast theaters. The finest of them provide the opportunity to enjoy this photographic technology—the fabulous fidelity to nature, the optical illusions, and, in addition, amusing little dramas or novels by Manzoni.1 How proper! Oh, this technology has the potential for development; it is almost ready to become art. In the more ordinary theaters, Der Brand Roms [The burning of Rome] 2 is already glowing; human prey flees its pursuers across rooftops, through streets, and between trees. But the dives in the north are of a special genre; they exist well above the level of the merely artistic. Glaring lamps burn enticingly above the streets; in their light, colorful posters hang three feet high in front of the doors; a gigantic organ storms: “A murder has been committed.” Lining the entry hall are stuffed monstrosities behind glass and amusement machines. Inside the pitch-black, low-ceilinged room, a rectangular screen as tall as a man shines over a monster of an audience, a mass spellbound by the fixed stare of its white eye. Couples huddle in the corners and withdraw, entranced, their indecent fingers from one another. Consumptive children breathe flatly and shiver lightly with their evening fevers; the eyes of foul-smelling workers nearly pop out of their sockets; women in musty dresses, the painted streetwalkers, lean forward and forget to readjust their scarves. The call for “panem et circenses” finds fulfillment here. Entertainment becomes as essential as bread; the bullfight, a popular need. The arousing thrill is as simple as the reflex-like desire. One sees crimes with a dozen corpses, or terrible gangster chases rushing one right after the other. These then give way to extremely sentimental motifs: the blind man, the dying beggar, the dog that perishes on his grave, films entitled Achtet die Armen [Respect the poor] or Krabbenfängerin [The shrimper], 3 and scenes of battleships. Upon seeing the kaiser and the army, the audience shows no patriotism, but rather a venomous stupefaction. Clearly the Kientopp offers the remedy of choice for alcoholism and the strongest competition to the brandy shop. Perhaps the coming years will see a decline in cases of cirrhosis of the liver and in the birthrate of epileptic children. Neither smut literature nor the Kientopp should be withheld from the people and the youth; they need this very bloody fare—and without the tasteless gruel of folk literature or the watery infusions of morality. But the more educated man leaves the place, glad above all else that the cinema is—silent. Notes 1. Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) was an Italian novelist and poet. 2. A likely reference to either Edwin Porter’s Nero and the Burning of Rome (1908) or Luigi Maggi’s Nerone (Nero; Or the Fall of Rome, 1909), both of which were shown in Germany in 1909.

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

151

3. Die Krabbenfängerin (1907) was a French film, originally titled La Pêcheuse de crevettes, which played in Germany in 1907. Achtet die Armen could not be identified.

64 ARTHUR MELLINI The Education of Moviegoers into a Theater Public First published as “Die Erziehung der Kinobesucher zum Theaterpublikum,” in Lichtbild-Bühne, no. 112 (September 17, 1910), 6. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Appearing just one year after Alfred Döblin’s “Theater of the Little People” (no. 63), Arthur Mellini’s text reveals just how early efforts were undertaken to lend the stigmatized medium of film a greater degree of cultural respectability, especially through the gentrification of exhibition sites and the disciplining of spectators. Adopting elevated standards of social dress and behavior, picture palaces now reproduced the very bourgeois norms that cinema had initially seemed to threaten. Mellini (né Nothnagel) was the founder and editor in chief of Lichtbild-Bühne, an “illustrated daily newspaper of film” that appeared in Germany from 1908 to 1939.

Cinema is the theater of the little man! We have heard this said quite a bit lately, but it has never looked less true than it does now. The impressive advances in cinematography result not only from the technical improvement of the invention itself but also from the artistic improvement of the films’ subjects. At the same time, the cinemagoers’ tastes and sensibilities have matured as well. Gone are the days when people would watch a 1,000-meter-long program of practically anything as long as it was flickering onscreen in front of them. Nowadays, people have become more critical. They have learned how to see. We hear of new movie theaters being opened every single week. And each new establishment aims to be more elegant than anything the public has seen before. In the old days, you just rented a space, bought a screen, some old chairs, and the necessary device. Once the screen was hanging, you were open for business. Today the first question when opening a new movie theater is what stylistic effect you hope to achieve and which architect should lead the renovation project. It used to be that the bricklayer would come to tear down some plaster walls, the painter would touch up the lower half, and the paperhanger would take care of the top. Now craftsmen need to be brought in. This is not a job for a simple painter anymore, but for an artist. The wallpaper is gone, and the orchestrion has also played its last note. Everything has become classier and more modern, elegant, comfortable, stylish, and artistic. There is also a greater tendency today, wherever space permits, to provide a cloakroom so that visitors are no longer forced to accommodate their heavy outer garments in their seats as they enjoy the program. Without even really noticing, we are moving ever closer to the way things are done in the theater. This transformation should be welcomed. We all gain from the cinema’s metamorphosis from caterpillar to magnificent butterfly, from its newfound ability to truly assert the value of the motion-picture theater. This metamorphosis of the movie theater has been so profound that it has begun to affect the public too. The cloakroom in one large Berlin movie theater that opened some

152

Transformations of Experience

time ago was initially met with a good deal of skepticism by the public. It took time for people to get used to the idea that they should hand over their coats at the movie theater as well. Now the idea is so ingrained that the obligation to check coats is accepted in better movie theaters without a second thought. The more elegant, genteel, and modern a movie theater is today, the more the public begins to hold itself to the same standards. Several days ago the Berliner Tageblatt, for example, published a column well worth reading, under the title “The Cinematograph in Evening Dress.” The movie theater has not just become a veritable theater, it has become feudal and aristocratic, more papal than even the pope. The refined nature of today’s public and the accompanying expectations have grown so exponentially that we can scarcely keep up! Just like the movie theater, the public has metamorphosed as well. It is time to replace those brutal and eccentric films that are meant to be funny with sensitive, atmospheric paintings. Artistic drama is pushing aside maudlin family trash. Tinted films must abandon their loud and garish tones and be composed in gentler hues. There is demand now for regular pauses during the program to give viewers a chance to collect themselves; an actual overture and music between acts are also desirable. Movie theaters ought to have a foyer where the public can saunter, chat, and flirt. People want to see and be seen, and they certainly take care to look the part. We wanted the moviegoing public to wear clean clothes, not to turn up in their work clothes—and they arrived wearing tails. People got used to it and began to adhere to this new expectation when it comes to the theater. Some people started turning up at the movies in tuxedos, and there are even establishments where evening dress predominates. What more could we ask for? Some bold pioneers installed armchairs in the movie theater, hoping this would draw in the crème de la crème. And come they did, but they demanded box seats! There are now even theaters where simple box seats are no longer enough; people desperately want something loftier, and so we have the gentlemen’s box and the prince’s box. If things continue in this way, we will soon reach a state where even the president of the Chamber of Commerce will only be able to afford a plebeian seat on the parquet, and the cinema will be completely in the hands of the blue-blooded aristocracy. Yes, the cinema—that invention which until very recently was considered a form of popular entertainment for the masses, for the little man. Surveying the scene, many might proclaim: “Spirits that I’ve cited, / My commands ignore!”1 We wanted a better class of clientele, and we have gotten the best circles. Our ambitions climbed ever higher, and we immediately reached the summit. The upper crust flocks to us, and soon we will be so used to it that it will no longer be remarkable at all. Above all else, this invention of ours is distinctive, modern, and novel. Whereas most innovations aim to win approval from the top, assuming it will then trickle down the social scale to those below, we in this branch of theater have gone the other way around. From its origins in the cinematic expo and the traveling show with limelight, we had the cinema, then the theater, and now the meeting place for the top 10 percent. My, how times have changed. We movie-theater owners may take credit for the tactical and refi ned manner in which we drew in a better class of audience over the years, an effort that has met with resounding success. And this success of ours has been as brilliant as we hoped it would be. We have not only taught the public where to look and how to enjoy looking, we have simultaneously rekindled the pleasure in visiting the theater as an educational establishment. We have raised people into theatergoers, and this is more important from an ethical and social point of view than one is generally prepared to accept.

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

153

There are thousands of options for a public that is hungry for distraction. When you consider all the kinds of entertainment, amusement, and pleasure that are available to the average city dweller, you are forced to admit, objectively speaking, that motion pictures surely belong to the noblest among them. And that is why the ethical and educational value of cinematography cannot be overemphasized. Seen from this angle, we may rightfully be proud of our involvement in this noble art that is so much more than a branch of industry. It might even imply the solution to the social question. Note 1. The quote is from Goethe’s poem “Der Zauberlehrling” (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1797). The translation here is from Goethe, the Lyrist, ed. and trans. Edwin H. Zeydel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 109.

65 ANONYMOUS The Movie Girl First published as “Das Kinogirl,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 259 (December 13, 1911). Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Much as Arthur Mellini’s essay (no. 64) identified cinema as a potential solution to the “social question,” this anonymous text depicts the emergent motion picture industry as an “escape rope” for actresses who fail to ascend the ranks in the world of theater. The text is notable for postulating a dynamic interplay between film dramas and the lives of audience members, thus anticipating Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis of a loop effect between female typists and on-screen models in “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” (1927)—an essay similarly marked by a patriarchal attitude toward women.

Like everything involved in the development of a motion picture, and like everyone who serves the picture artistically, the movie girl is a renegade from the world [Welt] of the stage. Or the demimonde [Halbwelt], unfortunately, in the case of the movie girl who is not yet a movie girl. Great actors who turned their backs on the theater to serve the motion picture may still lament that the future winds no garlands for the actor,1 but they have already realized that by means of their art, they have built themselves a monument. Since that monument is film, there is no danger of it going unnoticed by posterity. The artist’s work is saved in it, preserved for all eternity. Every last person involved in the film shared in creating that monument, but the path taken by the more minor contributors is one of suffering. And this is why it is worth examining. The movie girl’s path from stage to motion picture is, after all, a social document. In this relatively short span of time—given that film has taken upon itself to present the great dramas that history and humanity have to offer—little has been done to educate the public about this transition that spells the answer to a social question. Whether drawn from ancient sources or modern life, cinematic dramas find unqualified and universal approval, but the fates of those who act in them remain obscured to the world. The reconciliatory ending is the essence of cinematic tragedy, even if it is altogether rare in real life. Good always triumphs, since no one in the audience wants to go home with a heavy heart. But were the public to know how many real-life sad dramas are avoided each and every day thanks to the rise of film art, it would find cinematic storytelling more credible.

154

Transformations of Experience

I would like to give a few examples of the tragic big-city dramas that film has helped to avert. Given how little the people on screen seem to know about how their work in film has changed their own lives, how can we expect these secrets to be anything but completely invisible to the general public? The path a young woman takes to the world of theater is no mystery to anyone who has any interest in theater or the girl. It is rare that anyone worries about how a young woman holds her ground onstage. But the public ought to know how many sad real-life dramas the motion picture prevents by showing dramas drawn from the lives of the public. Then we would no longer hear the old accusation that cinema pulls out the rug from underneath theater. People would see instead how cinema offers an escape rope to those who go under in theater. Note 1. A quote from the prologue to Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager: “Dem Mimen flicht die Nachwelt keine Kränze.” The translation is from The Robbers and Wallenstein, trans. F. J. Lamport (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 166.

66 ANONYMOUS Various Thoughts on the Movie Theater Interior First published as “Allerlei Gedanken über den Zuschauerraum,” in Lichtbild-Bühne 5, no. 33 (August 17, 1912), 26, 31. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Detailing considerations of comfort and artistic design in the process of theater renovation, this anonymous text demonstrates the enormous attention paid to the appearance of exhibition spaces during cinema’s “transitional era”—an era that witnessed the systematization of screening practices, as well as the broad-scale shift from a frontal “cinema of attractions” (Tom Gunning) to absorbing, linearized narratives. In the German context, this period also saw both competition and collaboration between the film industry and fi gures from the realm of literature and theater, as crystallized around the emergence of the Autorenfilm (see chapter 6).

“Comfort and Elegance”: this is the motto of today’s cinematographic theaters. While only some three years ago, audiences sat on wooden benches between walls that were either bare or plastered with the most basic wallpaper, today’s theater offers a pleasant abode for the most discriminating public. Even the small theaters dazzle the eye with their luxurious decor, while in the larger halls, the thousands of spectators have plenty of spectacles to look at even before the house lights go down. Decorations, ornaments, marvelous lights, and seats vie for the crowd’s admiration and applause. Tastes vary. What moves one person leaves another person cold. Nonetheless, it has become customary in the better theaters to match everything to the same color or at least to the same basic color scheme. One can introduce all sorts of gradations for effects, but one principal color should be present. In a small space, ornaments or flower patterns are inappropriate, and thus an artistic design, even if it makes things brighter, is out of place. While the furniture is the most important element, one should not forget the importance of the walls that surround it. Regardless of whether they are poor or rich, people can really feel comfortable only in a pleasant space. Exaggerated magnificence, splendor lacking in harmony, and imitated

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

155

tastes—often taken to the point of tastelessness—miss their intended effect. On the other hand, simple designs, well chosen and adapted to the conditions of the space, create pleasure and inner joy. In a sterile, bare space, even the best program falls flat; it disappears behind the oppressive scenery outside the film. Today, locations frequented by the masses should give pleasure to the eye and comfort to the body. Trains, ships, banks, and shops bear ample witness to this. However, despite the distinctions in ticket prices, cinematographic theaters should not distinguish between first, second, and third classes, as do train cars. The decor should be uniform throughout; the only distinction should be between the distances of the various seats from the screen—and possibly between a front or rear view of the image. It is a mistake to believe that impeccable decor requires large investments; whoever knows how to open and fit out a movie theater the right way will run a more economical shop than he who spends huge sums of money on annoying trumpery and decorations or loud effects. But the opposite extreme is also mistaken. Miserliness or a shortage of the funds necessary for the correct decor never pays off. Invested wisely, even half pennies can turn into gold. The decisive factor in theater design is not cost, but rather practicality and suitability. The best things are not the most expensive, and the most appropriate ones will always remain the most valuable, even if one can place no precise price tag on them. One should keep two criteria in mind. The first is comfort, and it occupies the attention of most— although not all—theater owners. Only a very few, however, pay attention to the second criterion: artistic quality. Whoever sets out to design a movie theater must first understand that his goal is to make money from future patrons. Above all, he must put himself in the place of the spectators; he must know them in advance and size them up exactly. He should never forget that the patron who has just paid the cashier outside should find immediate satisfaction upon entering, even before he sees a single film. Marble halls leave the average patron shivering, while bare rooms make him feel constricted. But he will be receptive to agreeable, discreet impressions. Wide aisles, a comfortable seat, and above all friendly reception and polite accommodation will keep him from noticing any decorative shortcomings. It will also produce a much more inviting effect to have him walk through a curtain rather than a door; rooms with a calm color scheme will stroke his inner strings harmoniously, while loud, garish colors will only pound on them. If the films he watches are of high quality, these will then have a greater effect on him than the same films projected in a pompous theater. The more he feels at home, the more attention he will pay to the film; his body must rest while his eyes do the work and his spirit is held captive. To mention only a detail: a spectator can never take pleasure in the images on the screen if he is afraid that his neighbor’s cigar might dirty his clothes or even set fire to them. Thus, the theater space should contain not only sufficient holders for beer glasses but also ashtrays—whose presence should not, however, disturb the arrangement, look, and impression of the whole. Perhaps this summer, many theater owners will ask themselves if they shouldn’t “renovate” their theaters—at no great cost to them—in the sense suggested here.

67 VICTOR NOACK The Cinema: Thoughts on Its Nature and Significance First published as Der Kino: Etwas über sein Wesen und seine Bedeutung (Gautzsch bei Leipzig: Dietrich, 1913), here 7–8. Translated by Michael Cowan.

156

Transformations of Experience Victor Noack was a cultural critic and social reformer who had characterized the new medium already in 1909 as “an orgy of tastelessness” and “a poisoning of the people [Volksvergiftung].”1 Like many members of the Kinoreform movement (see chapter 7), Noack approached the popularity of cinema as a question of public hygiene, as evidenced by the following description of a movie theater interior from his thirty-onepage polemical pamphlet from 1913. In “Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” (1983), film scholar Miriam Bratu Hansen would argue that such concerns over hygiene among cinema reformers were symptoms of a broader fear of the obfuscation of traditional social boundaries and roles, especially with regard to class and gender.

The rotation of cinema audiences takes place between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. (just as people’s “leisure time” begins). Without any intermission for ventilation, the next group of spectators, hungry for visual pleasures, is packed into the theater. Immediately, the projector begins to hum again, and the flickering shadows float ghost-like over the masses who can hardly breathe. With his small flashlight, the usher lights up a path for latecomers groping and stumbling their way to a seat. Now the “sprayman” goes to work. From a large bottle, he sprays “ozone” (as they mockingly call this movie theater perfume) over the heads of the audience gasping for breath. Under this watery mist, the atmosphere in the cinema, already lacking in air, grows even more stifling. All of the audience members breathe as if asthmatic; nevertheless, they endure it. They would rather risk a temporary loss of consciousness than miss the show they’ve paid for (just as one does not wish to forego a drink one has bought in a bar). There they sit, eyes inflamed, staring vacantly at the screen. Feverish, dizzy, and trembling with agitation, they collapse. Their lungs cave in like deflated balloons. One can feel the throbbing of the heart and principal arteries. They allow themselves to be carried away to the point of crying out with terror and then grow terribly ashamed when the lights come on again. These brutal “film dramas” go by the official designation of “hits.” How appropriate! They work precisely by hitting the nerves of the audience. As a result, the audience falls into a stupor. They come back to their senses only after 11:00 p.m., when they stagger out into the fresh air of the street— the same place where the inebriated tend to realize that they have had too much alcohol. Note 1. Victor Noack, “Die soziale Bedeutung des Kinematographen,” Das freie Wort, no. 17 (December 1909), 668.

68 EMILIE ALTENLOH On the Sociology of Cinema: The Cinema Enterprise and the Social Classes of Its Patrons First published as Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1914), here 78–9, 88–94. Translated by Sara Hall.

Emilie Altenloh’s dissertation, written under Alfred Weber at the University of Heidelberg and published in 1914, was one of the first German doctoral theses in the humanities and social sciences on the topic of cinema and also among the first sociological studies of film production and spectatorship. Altenloh (1888–1985) surveyed the population of Mannheim regarding its moviegoing habits and preferences and evaluated the data according to age, class, gender, and profession. The following excerpt focuses on

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

157

women, whose attitudes toward cinema, in Altenloh’s analysis, tended to be remarkably similar. As in other nations, women constituted a large proportion of film audiences in Germany during cinema’s first decades—a period that also saw their increasing entry into public life as both laborers and consumers.

Working Women

All the differentiating factors that shape various types of working-class men—the enthusiastic theatergoer, the union member—are absent from women of the same class. Women constitute a far more unified picture than men because their interests lie primarily in two areas—the theater and the cinematograph. The latter, especially as a form of entertainment, is most significant. Visits to the theater are still on average a little more common among women than among men. Concerts and lectures trail far behind. The academic or party interests that take up a great deal of men’s free time are lacking, so to speak, in women. To the extent that women belong to social-democratic organizations, they are enthusiastic party supporters. Occasionally, some women go to meetings and lectures. In general, however, the drive to acquire the solid knowledge that could serve as a basis for a political position is extremely weak. In this context it is understandable that the cinema plays an important role, especially for women who don’t have a profession. Once they are done with their housework, there are relatively few convenient opportunities for enriching their free time. They go to the cinema more often out of boredom than out of any genuine interest in the program. While the men are attending political meetings, women visit the movie theater next door where they’ll be met by their spouses when the screening is over. Gradually, however, this stopgap activity becomes an essential part of their existence. Before long, they are seized by a veritable passion for the cinema, and more than half of them try to gratify that passion at least once a week. During the screening they live in another world, in a world of luxury and extravagance that makes them forget the monotony of the everyday. By comparison, all other attractions appear meaningless; the number of those who have been to the theater only on occasion and who otherwise go only to the cinema is relatively large.1 At best, musical content comes to the fore here again, as one might infer from the operas frequently mentioned in the survey. In addition to Wagner, Bizet and Mozart (composers who were not mentioned by men) figure more prominently. Still, it cannot be first and foremost the music alone that motivates operagoing, for then concerts would also enjoy greater patronage. It appears rather that the simultaneous effect on the eye and ear, the musical interpretation of the plot, which opera and the cinematic drama have in common, appeals particularly to the taste of women. The same coincidence of a preference for opera and cinema music also repeats itself particularly often among salesgirls. [. . .] Female Shop Assistants

Just as among tradesmen, so it appears that among young women the appeal of going to the cinema chiefly corresponds to a certain age, after which it then gradually loses its importance. However, in those years of active cinema patronage, moviegoing never becomes in itself as important a part of their lives as it is for young men. Of all those surveyed, only 63 percent of women went to the movies, as compared to 79 percent of the male shop assistants. 2 The much-diminished interest shows up even more clearly when one compares the numbers of regular patrons. They stand at 11:21. The cause for this finding certainly lies in part in the greater dependency of young women. The daughter

158

Transformations of Experience

is always more closely bound to the framework of the family, and parents have a lot to say about how she spends her free time. She will hardly ever undertake anything completely on her own. From time to time, she too goes to the cinematographic theater with her family, and in later years, she will go more frequently with her “boyfriend” or “acquaintance”—very rarely, though, with female friends. Notwithstanding this greater dependency that stands in the way of regular moviegoing, it certainly appears that actual interest is not so great—otherwise, later, at times of higher earnings and correspondingly greater independence, an increased rate of moviegoing would emerge, as is the case among male shop assistants. Quite to the contrary, the highest rate of visits occurs among fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds, and from there it dwindles with each year. Women almost exclusively patronize the better theaters. This is due to their programs rarely mentioning robber and detective dramas—as rarely as pieces in the vein of Asphaltpflanze or Sündige Liebe.3 Young women also display only meager enthusiasm for Westerns and historical subjects. Already among fourteen-year-olds, love stories qualify as the main interest, and it is mainly the pieces that are closest in content to the lives of these girls or that reflect back to them an image of the outside world. The story is usually about the fate of a common woman; after much confusion it ends in either moral ruin or “a quiet happiness.” Most dramas of this kind distinguish themselves with a strong sentimental bent already obvious in the string of characteristic titles, here taken from the answers of female shop assistants: Die Rose der Mutter [The rose of the mother] , Fräulein Frau [Miss Lady] , Der Leidensweg einer Frau [A woman’s sufferings] , Die Kontoristin [The female clerk] , Frauenschicksale [Women’s fates].4 All of these dramas center on the conflicts within a woman’s heart. Accordingly, it is obvious that Asta Nielsen (in films by Urban Gad) should be extraordinarily pleasing and inspire tremendous adoration. The passionate temperament of the heroine, and the guilt and fate in which she thus becomes entangled, correspond to the image these women have of life, and they are able, therefore, to put themselves completely in her position. Aside from the dramas, images of nature inspire an equally strong interest in women as in their male colleagues. But women’s attitude toward them seems to differ from that of men. Young men more often cite footage of foreign countries and scientific images. An interest in content is absolutely fundamental. Young women answer more generally. Their preferences appear to be rooted primarily in aesthetic sensations. For example, they often mention images of water and the ocean such as “Italian waterfall” or simply “waterfalls and wave movement” and “drifting ice floes” without adding any more precise description. Comic images are, by comparison, less popular among women than among their male colleagues. In general, the level of interest in distinct subjects of cinematographic presentations is equally divided for both, but among young women the division is less pronounced. The preference for dramas is more pronounced only among upper-class apprentices. A more active theater and concert attendance corresponds to lukewarm interest in movie theaters. Still, even in these areas, characteristically, taste is only marginally defined. Apparently, fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls have seen on average more than boys of the same age. From the outset, girls’ taste develops strongly along musical lines. In this way, they take a different road in obtaining pleasures than boys. For the latter, at age fourteen, music means military music. Hence, in addition to the musical experience, patriotic feelings are also released. Girls entirely lack this characteristic. From the outset, opera melodies appeal more to their taste. In addition to Wagner’s music, which is valued to about the same degree by young male shop assistants, girls mention the romantic operas, such as Mignon, Martha, and Tosca,5 much more often than the boys. The soft music of the cinema ensemble is very popular among girls, and to a still greater degree than for male apprentices, the ensemble constitutes the decisive factor

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

159

in a girl’s choice of cinematographic theater. However, this delight in music leads just as rarely to a deepening and development of their taste as it does among lower- and middle-class women. Concerts are patronized more often by women than by the men. But women rarely mention specific musical pieces and favorite composers. Among women, a purely emotional experience—which has nothing to do with reason—appears to associate itself with music, so much so that even the titles remain an aside. Inasmuch as they grasp things through the intellect at all, girls remain behind their male colleagues. This disposition, which is oriented less toward the real and concrete aspects of life, corresponds to their very limited interest in lectures and scientific film images. Only very few attend lectures. In general, their taste doesn’t tend either to the high and serious areas nor does it get lost in the lowlands of decidedly bad taste. Among them one finds neither those who show an interest in Bach, Beethoven, religious questions, and social problems—at least when these are not incorporated into film dramas—nor those who limit their standards to acrobats, marches, and detective dramas. The Remaining Classes

Essentially the same goes for women of the upper classes—insofar as one is not dealing with a small intellectual elite here—as for the young female shop assistants (who have been considered separately above), except that upper-class women go to the cinema even more often, unless they, too, are limited in their free time by a job. It is particularly because of the Asta Nielsen dramas and historical pieces that they attend the shows. And the more uncomplicated and worry-free their own lives, the more they seek to integrate some extraordinary moments into them by empathizing with the individual films. Cinema brings to the small towns a reflection of the wider world, showing women how they dress in Paris, what kinds of hats they wear. With thrills, big and little, the cinema helps pass away the many empty hours of the day which, with the progressive simplification of housework, are becoming ever more numerous. The cinematographic presentation must be especially easily accessible to the female sex, of whom it is generally said that they always take in an impression in its entirety, purely and emotionally. In contrast, it appears difficult for very educated, intellectual people to lose themselves in the separate, often disjunctive, successive plots. Repeatedly, people who are used to dealing with everything in a purely intellectual manner say that it is extraordinarily difficult for them to apprehend the coherence of a film plot. With respect to cinematographic presentation, one can hardly speak of the taste of adult members of the upper class. They have none, save an attitude toward the cinema as a general phenomenon. Tellingly, the question about particularly popular pieces was rarely answered by regular moviegoers, who would seem to have precisely refined their opinions on this matter. Upper classes generally reject film from an artistic perspective.6 And as to the nature images, they can ascribe to them only a certain didactic value, “especially for the lower classes.” But all the same, they go—and rather often—to see them. They go in the evening if nothing else is on the agenda, but they prefer to go to the movies in the afternoon after shopping. They relax there, rather than in a café, escaping the bustle of the department store. Of one hundred people, over eighty have gone to the cinema at least once under these circumstances, and sixty go regularly. The latter come exclusively from the class of officers and businessmen, while the academic professions (including students) show proportionally the lowest number of movie patrons overall, as well as of weekly patrons. Whether the need for light entertainment is less strong among these classes because of their other intellectual activities, or whether it is found in another form that replaces the cinema is difficult to determine. Perhaps the more abstract mode of thought

160

Transformations of Experience

involved in these professions makes it easier to relax during free time, even while doing something more difficult. No greater exertion of concentration is required. However, the members of those professions oriented more toward purely practical and tangible goals are capable of enjoying art only after adopting an absolutely new orientation in their way of thinking. Doing so, however, requires intellectual exertion. Therefore, they prefer to resort to very light entertainment in their leisure time in order to separate themselves from working patterns of thought.7 “At night I’m too tired to give myself over to such difficult things as theater and concerts,” was a frequent answer, “and, therefore, I go to a cinematographic theater.” Next to professional exertion, hundreds of other things lay claim to people’s time: community activities, social responsibilities, the desire to remain oriented in the latest offerings of theaters and art museums, and the wish to retain a command of politics and modern literature. All members of this class have responsibilities of this kind, and to the extent to which men’s various interests pull them in different directions, the need grows for a counterbalancing activity that doesn’t make any demands on the individual. Light forms of entertainment, from which there is nothing further to be gained, become a necessity. Others, on the other hand, who have much time and few interests for filling it, find in cinema an appropriate surrogate with which to distract themselves in order to experience sensations. Something must be out there to satisfy these diverse needs: the wish to distract oneself, to relax from the demands of modern life, to satisfy boredom and the hunger for sensation. And had the cinematograph not been invented, some other possibility would have had to take its place. Perhaps cafés with artists’ troupes or variety shows would have experienced a still greater new development. But in cinema we have found the appropriate medium, one that has acquired power and meaning far beyond the framework of the entertainment apparatus to date. If it thereby infringes upon related areas and also keeps patrons from attending the theater and concerts—which appears already to be the case according to the complaints of theater directors about their worsening business ventures—then only those masses are to blame for whom the theater and concert were nothing more than a temporary diversion. But it is precisely this that all members of the upper classes desire from the cinema—nothing more than occasional entertainment, the opportunity to laugh heartily for once; but, for them, it should in no way replace the theater or other forms of artistic experience. The cinema appeals on the whole to very different kinds of needs. Thus, when it ventures upon higher, more artistic projects, it appears to many people ill suited. From this perspective, they also view attempts to elevate the level of performance by bringing in famous artists as experimentation on an unsuitable object. Such an attempt would eliminate the pleasant naïveté and simplicity of cinematographic presentations, unless the reduction of artistic work to the flatness of the average achievement were its only success. Still, in no way does the average film correspond to the farfrom-moderate demands of the upper classes, and that which is aesthetically bearable for the cultivated city dweller is by no means equal to the standards of the average film. “The sentimental tendency of films, the exaggeration of gestures” and the often tasteless packaging insult many viewers. Others even experience the inherent character of cinema, with its swift, jarring sequences of happy and sad, as unbearable. For the majority, the quality of films is not at all significant because their impression doesn’t last for more than a moment. Instead, other interests determine whether they go to the cinematographic theater. Real interest in the presentations is most often still the true stimulus for businesspeople and women. But for very few is the joy found there strong enough to prompt them to go to the cinema alone; only a few bachelors reach for this emergency remedy out of boredom. Among married couples, the woman (and more often among young people) motivates the couple to go. For the accompanying man, “she” is the object of more interest than the goings-on onscreen: “She is always moved to tears.”

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

161

Doing a psychological study of the viewers, especially of female filmgoers, is far and away more amusing to many than the films themselves, and, for a lot of people, reason enough to spend an hour in the cinema once in a while. Ask all these patrons why they really go to the cinema, and most will shrug their shoulders. “Faute de mieux,” a woman once answered. This “mieux,” however, has as many different faces as individual spectators. In any case, the cinema succeeds in addressing just enough of those individuals’ needs to provide a substitute for what would really be “better.” It has thus become a powerful force, in relation to which all questions as to whether the cinema is good or bad, or whether it should exist at all, are useless. Notes 1. Original footnote (translated): This finding appears to contradict observations made during visits to the movie theater in which the audience was predominantly male. But it is at best further proof for both assertions made above: (1) that with the increase in political interest, the cinema recedes. In a certain sense, those surveyed here fit this description because they are organized in unions, and this circumstance explains their relatively few visits to the cinema. The main body of the male moviegoing public draws more from the younger generations and the politically indifferent; and (2) that unmarried, working women are not independent enough to go the cinema alone. If the percentage of moviegoers were as high in general as it is among married women, then women would dominate the cinema audience even more. 2. Original footnote (translated): Missing from these percentages is the heavy impact of those who live in the country. They produce the lower attendance average among business students who form the basis of this study—especially among the younger male classes and almost entirely in the female section. The majority of the students have resided in Mannheim for a while. 3. Die Asphaltpflanze was a 1911 Danish film (originally titled Hulda Rasmussen or Dyrekøbt Glimmer) directed by Urban Gad. Sündige Liebe (Sinful love) was a 1911 German film directed by Emil Albes. 4. Die Rose der Mutter was a 1911 American film starring William Humphrey, originally titled A Message from Beyond; Fräulein Frau was a 1912 German film directed by Emil Albes; Der Leidensweg einer Frau was a 1911 Italian film originally titled Calvario, directed by Ubaldo Maria Del Colle; Die Kontoristin was a 1912 British film produced by C+M Cricks Martin; Frauenschicksale could not be identified. 5. Altenloh here invokes operas composed by Ambroise Thomas, Friedrich von Flotow, and Giacomo Puccini, respectively. 6. Original footnote (translated): Only here and there (mostly among younger people) does the opinion arise that noteworthy achievement in props and costumes and the expressiveness of famous film actors can still lead further to a new kind of interpretive art. 7. Original footnote (translated): The need for a counterweight of this kind that in no way places further demands on the individual but simply distracts is mostly apparent among businesspeople, engineers, and officers. The active patronage of the cinema among the latter group is explained by the fact that their profession leaves them more free time than the two other groups.

69 RESI LANGER From Berlin North and Thereabouts / In the Movie Houses of Berlin West First published as “Aus dem Berliner Norden und da herum” and “In den Lichtspielhäusern des Berliner Westens,” in Resi Langer, Kinotypen: Vor und hinter den Filmkulissen: Zwölf Kapitel aus der Kinderstube des Films (Hannover: Der Zweemann Verlag, 1919), 21–31. Translated by Sara Hall.

162

Transformations of Experience The following two chapters of Resi Langer’s short book offer a vivid account of a working-class movie theater in northern Berlin (cf. Alfred Döblin’s text, no. 63), as well as a bourgeois cinema in Berlin West. The author—a cabaret artist, actress, writer, and elocutionist—introduces her book as follows: “These sketches were written about two years before the beginning of the war, when film and cinema were still almost Biedermeier-like, cozy affairs and not almost exclusively the hotbed of trafficking and prostitution, as is the case today. These are thus dear memories of a nicer time.” Among the “cinema types” described by Langer is a “country uncle,” who recalls the title character of Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902).

From Berlin North and Thereabouts

Yes, this is the far north. True to life, right down to “the northern lights”—small lamps that herald the cinema in the evenings. During the day, it’s the lurid, kitschy posters. Their palette, spanning the entire color spectrum, from yellow through red and green to blue and even beyond, celebrates wild orgies. In a variety of images they bellow out to us the embarrassing title of some “sensational drama” or “highly suspenseful novel.” With her plump fingers, the young woman in the ticket booth, or “Cassa” (whose outward appearance has so often been faithfully rendered by Heinrich Zille),1 plucks at a block of identically colored perforated tickets. They will grant entrance to the inner sanctum. A green woolen curtain is pulled back, and the sensation created is “air.” Not the kind found in the high Swiss mountains (oh, if only one could can it like milk and sell it in tins!), but something more dense, something that takes your breath away. Eventually you will get used to that, too. A man with an electric flashlight directs someone to a seat. Above it, a sign is posted with the suggestive inscription: “First Place.” We sit, and a filmstrip rolls on the screen in front. It’s a bit worn away by the loving embrace of too many projectors, but that doesn’t detract from the enjoyment. It is over, and the room becomes light. Many a “smoocher” settles fully back into his own seat (which he only half made use of in the dark), and here and there a bun is laboriously pinned back up. A faint sigh in response to the indiscreet lighting passes through the room, followed by a second, a third, and sometimes even a whole string of them. Up front, in the first row, a young woman’s head turns around; turquoise earrings and a matching brooch tear pale blue holes in the dirty yellow-gold lighting. The man with the “ozone dispenser” goes up and down and is somewhat abusively teased on account of his odd occupation by several particularly witty people. There, up the middle aisle, comes someone with a “sailor’s gait”—no, let’s take the youth with a “coffee roaster” (as people have mischievously dubbed the stiff brown head-covering) and equipped with paper underwear (“I’ve worn them for seven years. I’ll wear them no more—” etc.). He spits on the floor because it is expressly forbidden and then sits down in an orchestra seat. For some reason he gets into a tiff with his neighbor and the following exchange ensues: “Man, you don’t need to puff yourself up. Can’t you be a gentleman?” “Shut up, or I’ll rearrange your face!” answers his equally unchivalrous interlocutor. At that point, Miss Turquoise chimes in, in the highest soprano: “Hey, did they drop you at birth? What do you want from William?” “Look, the tame little one is trying to pull something,” chimes in another feminine voice. The piano stifles this deft repartee and a “singer” (once upon a time!) appears, not on, but in front of the screen, illuminated by the footlights. He boldly states: “There lies a crown in the deep Rhine!”2 People seem to believe him—that a crown lies down there— because he extends this positive certainty through four stanzas and leaves the podium accompanied by applause.

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

163

Meanwhile, the “shuttle service” run by cyclists, which smaller Kientopps have organized in order to make the acquisition of film less expensive, has delivered the next box office hit and done its duty. Next, a notice of the police prohibition appears on the screen: no children may remain on the premises past nine o’clock. A band of girls and boys walks toward the theater exit. Well, tomorrow, having ingested Dämon Eifersucht [Demon jealousy],3 they will fail to perform their lessons to the satisfaction of their teachers; in the end they will have helped themselves to a hit from the cane. Now that the “wheat” has been separated from the “chaff,” a new screen wonder can follow the next: seriousness alternates with humor, and over the darkened room, the love god (even if only as a plaster mock-up) brandishes his torch, smiling happily. Hand finds hand and, most likely, mouth finds mouth, and a giggle erupts as, in their tender play, they miss the film’s ending and the harsh light illuminates a sweet love scene. In the Movie Houses of Berlin West

An oasis of light in a Berlin street! Aha! A Kientopp (Karl Kraus).4 In western Berlin it is known as a “movie house” [Lichtspielhaus], “movie theater” [Lichtspieltheater], even “film art theater” [Filmkunstspiele]. That is, when the temple of mute Thalia has not been dubbed some other characteristic or appropriately catchy name. It is foggy in the Decemberish streets, and you escape from the un-Christmasy weather to search out a safe little spot for yourself in a smooth, velvety chair, or behind the balcony banister of our numerous fashionable cinemas. You sink into contemplation of the types making up the audience. One type catches your eye right by the entrance; she isn’t actually part of the audience but a more permanent (not literally, of course) fixture of the theater—the cashier. That one is beautiful! That she is! “Of course,” say the envious, “the exception that again proves the rule.” Her hair is well-coiffed—perhaps she has touched it up a bit, but so what. It becomes her. With well-manicured white hands she dispenses the colorful tickets (which are in no way inferior to real theater tickets) to those who desire them. An eternal “Thank you!” floats over the beautifully reddened lips. Perhaps a little Leichner-brand red deepens the shade—perhaps it’s natural. The effect is good. All who wish to partake of the film goodies awaiting inside are dammed up in front of her little glass house. There is the “gent.” Fur, of course! Sable! God, he’s got it! “Fashionable”—top hat. He takes the most expensive seat. After tossing away his cigarette he surrenders the gorgeous fur cloak and stiff head ornament to the plump arms of the friendly, smiling wardrobe girl. His cutaway disappears behind the balcony door, in front of which a violet, or perhaps green, uniformed attendant is still recovering from his tip. A lady. Every inch a lady! The ash-colored, lolling plume flatters not only the fabulous hat rim, but also the nose of the person standing behind (who sometimes protests with a very distinct, powerful, masculine sneeze). The lady, an inveterate filmgoer, naturally has a regular seat in the balcony boxes. Her alluring violet dress glitters alongside the aforementioned cutaway, and over them both a cloud of seductive Khasana perfume hangs oppressively. The couple. Him and Her. He (monocle, wonderfully slicked-down parting oozing with Brylcreem, diamond pin on the necktie): “Which seat? A balcony box?” She: “Oh, darling, no . . . I prefer to sit in the orchestra.” He (turning to the cashier, playing with a piece of gold): “Miss, two orchestra seats, please!” You ask yourself, why? An impish voice answers you: Ha, she wants to show off her “bob” as “the latest thing” in fashion, and therefore sheds the protective aigrette hat. The country uncle has come. With very heavy steps, his clodhoppers trample the soft down of the red Smyrna runner. And at the ticket window at the top of the steps, he

164

Transformations of Experience

demands his (ever-stylish) orchestra ticket. Oh yes! (His twinkling, happy, piggy eyes tell all as they scan the scene.) He must, of course, have something of the “joys of the big city” to report to his cronies back home. Marveling, the country-ears of dear fellow citizens (usually it is 7,999, so the little hometown counts its inhabitants at 8,000) listen and take their fearless XYZ for, at the very least, a North Pole explorer. He thinks himself important, to be the gentleman from “somewhere”; he wants to observe, but is only observed— even making an unseemly sight of himself here and there. He moves somewhat insecurely along the narrow orchestra aisle. The button on his sleeve is forward enough to start a “dalliance” with the lace collar of a woman’s blouse, while his shoe marked with the size “too large to number” lands on another trotter. A not-too-loud but definitely penetrating “Ouch!” followed by “Damn!” drives the minor provincial foot off the bigcity instep, and in the maneuver, the button takes off a piece of the lace collar. He isn’t familiar with the division of “right” and “left.” He chases the occupant of No. 114 from his seat and proclaims his right. (He has been directed by an usher to the right side, where another No. 114 is located.) The country uncle always laughs, and of course in the most inappropriate places (even sometimes at sentimental moments), thereby attracting the most bitter contempt of the female audience. The salesman and the shopgirl. They are allowed—O noble principle—to go a quarter hour earlier and feel themselves as “men among men.” Under her white cambric blouse, a feeling heart fervently beats for the peculiar fate of the film hero, and the frozen red hand of the salesman gently rests on her gold-ringed hand; across his lips passes the shaky sentimental murmur: “Do you like it, Fräulein?” Her nodding “yes” unleashes a tear from the prison of her lashes, landing on the frozen hand—a quiet tribute to emotion. The familiar clatter of the film’s motion stops, and tasteful lamps stream brightness over excited faces, ruthlessly exposing yet more damp eyes. Then, accompanied by music, everyone streams towards the exits, and what was once a whole disintegrates into atoms, for today. Perhaps tomorrow the individual will once again form a vital part of the whole and allow himself to be bound up in another light oasis. Notes 1. Heinrich Zille (1858–1929) was a German illustrator and photographer known for his popular depictions of working-class Berlin life. 2. The lyrics come from the song “Das Herz am Rhein,” based on a poem by Heinrich Dippel. 3. Dämon Eifersucht was a 1912 feature film directed by Max Mack. 4. This presumably refers to Karl Kraus’s mentioning the word Kientopp in a quotation by an unknown writer in “Dilemma,” Die Fackel (January 1912): “The tempo in our lives has become a lot faster since we have the train, telegraph, auto, and airplane—and, last but not least, the Kientopp (Kinema).”

70 MILENA JESENSKÁ Cinema First published as “Kino,” in Tribuna (January 15, 1920). Translated by Sara Hall.

Milena Jesenská (1896–1944) was a Czech journalist, translator, and writer who contributed articles and feuilletons to various newspapers and magazines in Prague, including the liberal daily Tribuna. In the following article, she distinguishes cinema from the theater and characterizes moviegoing as a form of refuge from the complexities

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

165

of modern life, and even a drug of forgetting. The same year this article appeared, Jesenská published a Czech translation of Franz Kafka’s “The Stoker” and engaged in a passionate correspondence with the author.

I am always perplexed when I see the cinema being compared to the theater. Someone condemns or defends a performance, weighs one against the other, speaks of the artistry, or lack thereof, in the cinema. Many interesting things can be said about the cinema—for example, about its sexual effect upon the masses (more so than about its moral or aesthetic effect), its propagandistic function, or taste and decoration, in some instances also about its technical and, in many instances, its provocative side—but the insistence upon competition with theater strikes me as outright exaggerated, even superficial. If such a competition exists, it remains insubstantial: we can refer to the cost of a ticket, to the length and variety of the programs, to the heated spaces, to the low and high cost of entertainment (which corresponds to the level of the audience), to milieu, to a hundred other superficial things. But to cite an internal and artistic competition would not be appropriate because whatever artistry does emerge from the limited range of possibilities afforded by the cinema, it has not even a single element in common with the theater. When we speak of art in the context of theater, we refer to the author, the drama, the language, the problem, the depth of the idea, its connection to life. If we speak about art in the cinema, we can speak of the technical achievement that may be exemplary— whether it be the photography, the director, the actors, or the subject matter—but always in relation to reproduction. In the theater we do not enjoy ourselves; in the theater we listen, compare, learn, and look. In the worst case, we are interested. In the cinema? That is it precisely: What do we do in the cinema? I know people who sit every day from noon until night in coffeehouses. It is not as if they don’t have a living room at home, that they don’t have anything to eat, that they cannot cook, or find a quiet place. Nowadays all these excuses do not apply to the people I mean. Before the war, they sat in the coffeehouse (the difference being that they sat there longer because they were open longer), and they sit there after the war, too. I don’t mean the loungers and idlers who are useless by any standard. Many coffeehouse patrons are excellent artists who give form to ideas and notions through their respective media on a daily basis. Many pursue their bourgeois labor and spend the rest of the day in the coffeehouse. That is not an unrespectable life; it is the search for a neutral milieu; the opportunity to forget—not to have to think about oneself; the need to exist as a private ego as little as possible—a relief from life. Now yes! I know people who can go to the movies every day. It’s not that they don’t want to work or have nothing to do. Rather it is because it is a comfort to the soul to sit in the movies. Everything we see appears to be life. And still, such a powerful and such a comfortable difference. In the movies, it’s about love and hate, good and evil, honesty and depravity. Here, a villain appears, rolls his eyes, clenches his fists. Everyone knows with certainty that this man will be captured in the end and that nothing bad will befall the innocent girl who is ardently in love with a poor young man. The poor young man is true to her and does well for himself. Isn’t that nice? Nothing can happen to the girl; otherwise, it would not be ethical; otherwise, the film would not be approved by the censor. Here there are bad women in negligees who smoke, reclining on an ottoman, and good women who mend clothes, read books, play piano, or hug curly-haired children. We know with certainty that they are good and that it is entirely impossible to discover something bad in their souls; and about the evil ones, we know that they are evil and, therefore, that they have earned our contempt and absolutely no sympathy. We need not fear committing an injustice against them and can rest assured that they will be punished before we leave the cinema, and that the punishment will be just. Here heroic, honorable

166

Transformations of Experience

men risk their lives for the beloved woman—they risk honor, possessions, health, existence. While the others, who simply want to possess a woman, approach her from behind and grab her shoulders in a devilish way. If they should be rejected, they bow their heads elegantly; if not, they sit “afterwards” in an easy chair. But in every case they smoke a cigarette out of the corner of their mouths, which looks very cynical. They have pajamas and black hair. We recognize them immediately and disdain them with utter loathing. Really, how nice the world would be if it were so. How comfortable it would be if a person were either guaranteed good or evil, if the women were bad or noble, true or untrue, seducible or chaste, good-hearted or rotten! How lovely, how compassionate the world is in the movies, where simple dimensions appear in pure form that we never see, never comprehend, never fathom in life. In our world, people are simultaneously good and bad, true and untrue, reviled and proud. Every heart is complicated, every life is difficult and unresolved; luck is moody, independent of good or evil acts. Everything is a thousand times different from what we know. We cannot flee at the last minute out of the window of a high tower on a hundred-meter rope that we spun from our own shirt. We cannot, happily in the instances when we are good, or unhappily in those instances when we are bad, jump over the tops of moving trains or throw ourselves from bridges into the water. No villains immure our rightful inheritance in underground chambers and await our legacy, and the prostitutes whom we encounter are not demonic women nor are they women with tragic fates who stir our hearts with their confused lives. Our husbands betray us without being the scum of the human community, and our lovers are entirely ordinary officials, businessmen, ministers, and actors, not seductive and undependable rascals. We puzzle over the meaning of our existence. And look, at the movies the puzzle is solved, and done so with all the falseness of our fantasies about life. How pleasant! How charming! How comfortable! How sweet it is to think for a time with the mind of the screen heroes, to take a break from the problems of one’s own life, and to see a clear, selfevident life made up of light-phantoms; to experience the great passion with the strong, unproblematic, uncomplicated hearts of figures that stride about in beautiful dress and makeup (even when there is nothing to eat), lit by the shimmer of fantastic scenery and accompanied by waltz melodies strummed by an orchestra. Cinema is different than entertainment. We can compare cinema with a drinker’s alcohol, with an addict’s opium—it is something that allows forgetting, tickles pleasantly, and rocks one to sleep. Cinema is something that we cowards happily give ourselves in order to better endure life; it is something easier to bear, because in the face of our deformed lives, we are powerless.

71 KURT TUCHOLSKY Erotic Films First published under the pseudonym Peter Panter as “Erotische Films,” in Schall und Rauch, no. 7 (June 1920), 6–7. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A journalist and key fi gure in the intellectual scene of the Weimar Republic, Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) is known above all for his satirical takes on contemporary culture—here evidenced in his account of a late-night screening of an erotic film. The journal Schall und Rauch (1919–21) was associated with the literary cabaret of the

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

167

same name founded by Max Reinhardt and others in 1901 and re-inaugurated in 1919. Tucholsky had published an earlier essay (“Erotische Filme”) on the same subject in Die Schaubühne on September 11, 1913. See also his texts in chapters 7 and 8, nos. 104, 122, and 125.

Epicureans and those who aspire to this status are wont to gather around midnight, having paid a large sum to some unknown businessman, in a small cinema or a large private apartment, in order to watch a “really hot thing.” The small society comes together in awkward silence; they whisper as though in the vestibule of a sanctuary. The group is always the same: there are a few young people who, in spite of their best efforts, fail to appear blasé since they are not uninterested in the coming attractions; one or two old cavaliers who want to while away the night; a couple of fat women who may hope to find something for themselves or their protégées in this world so predisposed towards gentlemen—an icy and tall, slender woman of indeterminate age with her friend . . . the show begins. It is only ever the surroundings, the peripheries, and the accoutrements that are any fun. (We already know the rest.) They know it too—and yet they eagerly anticipate this market sexuality, this bed on Potsdamer Platz, the bacchanal, and the orgy. (Ah . . . orgy . . . if even one person in Berlin could say what an orgy is. This kind of tree doesn’t grow on the Spree.) Only the surroundings are fun: the film manufacturer’s scenery, with which he takes such deliberate pains to create for us the illusion of—ha!—a harem; the ineptitude of the cast when it comes to naturalistic performance; the complete indifference of the female protagonists in it for the money (“What? Interest too?”). Only the environment is any fun. The presentation itself is a bit of an old hat. And the audience is fun. This charming combination of wanting to be secretive but failing, this cocktail of sensuality, shame (really, shame!), and expertise, mixed with reminiscence—all that makes it much more worthwhile to look at the audience’s faces than at the screen or the scene. It is this stark sensuality, the same sensuality with which the merchant peers at indecent postcards. It is the mathematics of love. Of love? Of professional love. And the police run themselves ragged, and the respectable bourgeoisie is beside itself in the press and assemblies . . . I think people are overestimating it. No—this filthiness should certainly not be propagated. But we also must not make such a fuss about it, as though all of this made up an entire world. It is only a half—nay a quarter—world. But you want a critique? A serious critique? Gladly: “In the three-act comedy [Lustspiel] 1 Das gerutschte Strumpfband [The Slipped Garter], Ladies Emma Brösicke and Ludmilla Pachulla excelled in the lead roles. They fulfilled their difficult tasks with enthusiastic diligence. In the second—let us use the right term—act [Akt], 2 a bit more passion and truly southern temperament wouldn’t have hurt. Mr. Alois Naujoks offered this temperament in full measure. The smaller roles were pleasantly portrayed by Frau Plempe, Fräulein Piepsam, and a chaise longue.” Eh—not my kind of film!— Notes 1. Lustspiel is a German term for comedy, but Tucholsky is also playing on the double meaning of Lust. 2. The German term Akt can mean both “act” and “nude.”

168

Transformations of Experience

72 HERBERT TANNENBAUM Film Advertising and the Advertising Film First published as “Filmreklame und Reklamefilm,” in Das Plakat 11, no. 10 (October 1920), 450–57; here 453–55. Translated by Tara Hottman.

In this article, featured in the journal of the Verein der Plakatfreunde [Society for Poster Art], Herbert Tannenbaum (1892–1958) offers a critical reflection on an undertheorized aspect of cinematic space: film posters, which—particularly in the hands of graphic artist Josef Fenneker—had become an artistic form in their own right by 1920. In the following excerpt, he traces the parallel historical development of cinema and print advertising, indicating the latter’s points of overlap with both film aesthetics and sites of exhibition. A pioneer of German film theory, Tannenbaum had written a thirty-sixpage treatise, Kino und Theater (1912), seeking to define cinema’s aesthetic principles by way of contrast to the stage. See also Tannenbaum’s text in chapter 6, no. 84.

The cinematograph was shown for the first time in 1896 by Oskar Messter as a novel variety routine at the Apollo Theater in Berlin. Shortly afterward it began its delightful career in show booths. At trade shows and fairs, it began to coax its way into the hearts of the people. Only in 1905—fifteen years ago—did Messter build the first permanent movie theater in Germany on Unter den Linden in Berlin.1 From then on, however, things proceeded at a frantic pace. This pace, familiar only to those who have viewed film production carefully and up close, endowed everything in the cinema with that nervous haste that never allows an issue to be thought through to the end or to be shaped according to its essence. This statement applies also and especially to advertisements. Still today, in most cases, poster painters and advertising artists are brought in just before the fi lm’s release, and they can watch the film only fleetingly before delivering their design in a period of only one or a few days. And so it goes in a big film factory every day. Foreigners— especially the French—are ahead of us in these matters, or at least they were before the war. Today the gap has narrowed such that we have met each other at a certain halfway point. Those who strive to educate the eyes of the masses can in some ways be grateful to film and the cinema. The cinema is above all—and this is far more important than its literary and dramatic character—an optical instrument. Its means of expression are geared exclusively toward the spectator’s eyes; that which film cannot make visible is off limits. Thus it makes its important contribution to teaching people how to see, an ability that is known to be less widespread than we would often assume. Over the course of several years, the necessity of having to register visual and optical processes very quickly provides people’s sense of sight with an education that it would otherwise never receive, and which certainly paves the way for every other possibility of affecting the eyes. Viewing a living image on screen is in fact an essentially different process than the visual perception of the real world. In some respects, the film image represents a transformation on account of its mere technology. On the one hand, the three-dimensionality of objects is abolished in the cinema. They appear two-dimensionally projected on top of one another. The perspective is clearly shifted into a difference of proportions so that everything appearing at a depth becomes smaller depending on its distance. However, the most significant way in which the film image deviates from reality is to be found in the black-and-white nature of photography, which is the principle of style for the cinema and which automatically

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

169

lends the cinema a distant relationship to graphic design as such. All of these transformations provide models for the possible effects of the applied and fine arts. In accordance with its inner nature, the film image bears a strong affinity with the poster. Like the poster, film condenses all actions and things by means of a certain exaggeration and by intensifying the forms of appearance, in a concentrated and often-comical manner, into a potent, monumental, and primal formula. The cinema and the poster have to attract the attention of people’s eyes in a flash and imprint their intentions clearly and definitely upon people’s minds by means of a deliberate formal coarseness. Thus it would—one might conclude—not be difficult to create film posters that are true to the nature of cinema. Lately cinema advertising has been assuming more extended forms. In the past, theater owners perceived it as a major expense to send their little carts through the city streets equipped with posters and signs. Today, it is standard to redesign the vestibule of the movie theater in the style and environment of the hit feature film, such that on the occasion of a Carmen film, the main entrance to the theater is made to look like the gate of a bullfighting arena and the ticket-taker waltzes in dressed as a bullfighter in Spanish grandeur. Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha [The maharaja’s favorite wife] accordingly demanded a costly design for the entrance hall to be turned into a harem gate complete with Turkish lattices, lanterns, and veiled women; 2 in this case, the doormen worked wearing the guise of a eunuch. There is no denying that in fulfilling such odd tasks, clever decorators sometimes pull off truly witty constructions. But in most cases, these situations are so hopelessly and irredeemably kitschy that they are not even worthy of discussion or support. Nonetheless, the question remains whether one should make the armchair decision to reject such an undertaking out of hand according to strict principles, or whether we should not instead be happy about the colorfulness that such theatricality sometimes carries into the boring street scene. Notes 1. Tannenbaum’s list of “firsts” would not be considered correct today. 2. Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha was a Danish film that premiered in 1917 and was followed by two sequels, the second of which was a 1920 German film directed by Max Mack.

73 AUGUST WOLF The Spectator in Cinema First published as “Der Zuschauer im Kino,” in Film-Kurier 3, no. 245 (October 20, 1921). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

August Wolf’s text treats spectatorship as an anonymous, dilettantish, and nonchalantly unconscious activity—one that he characterizes in terms of sleepwalking and enchantment (resonating with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s essay of the same year, “The Substitute for Dreams”; see chapter 12, no. 176). “The Spectator in Cinema” was published in Film-Kurier alongside another text by Wolf, “Film as Historian” (see chapter 3, no. 40), which also places an emphasis on an aesthetics of chance and improvisation. In “Leaving the Movie Theater” (1975), Roland Barthes would similarly liken film spectatorship to states of hypnosis, idle reverie, and a “bliss of discretion.”1

170

Transformations of Experience

Simple opportunity leads one into the cinema. A little decision and one is in the space; one sits down and no one cares who has come. No pretentious guides lead the patron to his seat. One immediately fits into the mass. Whatever one’s name is, whoever one is: once one sits, one is—no one. How pleasant! There are no dialogues about problematics during the breaks. The rage of meaning under the pressure of appearances would be injurious to the form. One doesn’t do that! Just as one opens a book at whatever point and then reads— that’s how one goes to the cinema. Not with the overheated desire to be instructed or to be seen. No, an innocent nobody modestly takes his seat. “Who is seated next to you?” “Je m’en f——” goes the expression that the Frenchman has at his disposal. In the theater, one often finds an abundance of people who are richer than what seems right. Here in the cinema, one knows that it is only a dumb sum of coincidences that managed to hinder one’s own wealth. The sum of coincidences can be larger or also smaller. This truth is wonderfully reassuring. At some point, you’ll also have your turn, says the cinema open-heartedly. And it may say this, since the compelling aspect of it is the great pleasure in improvisation. The wonderful interruption that occurs in a continuity of the extempore. For it is not fate with its human subject that is interesting, but rather the way in which it punctuates itself. That rich people reconvene with rich people is not the compelling aspect, but rather the coincidence that allows them to encounter each other. It is instructive for the spectator to have life served to him in this way, in extract. He reaches the receptive attitude of the dilettante. From the improvisation that a fi lm presents, he sees that human pursuits have a real living power only when one lets oneself be surprised. The spectator takes things in as an amateur—and he feels that what he is watching is something that does not demand pathos, but rather aims to be coextensive with his entire personhood. He enters into the magic of the strong spiritual-intellectual stimulus, which is only fertile in him as a dilettante, as one who enjoys his capacities but knows next to nothing about their full activity. He enjoys the show entirely unconsciously, fully free, like a branch that sprouts blossoms. And indeed this activity of the spectator is valuable because it is nonchalant. The spectator is thus like a sleepwalker: he wanders with great security over abysses, climbs adroitly over fences, roofs, and towers. If one were to call him and explain, he would inevitably plummet into sobriety. Thus, in his enchantment, he sees the human countenance that Ovid made into the mirror image of the stars. Or he feels the paradisiacal moment in an image that is unremarkable in itself, like a horse attached to a tree; a woman who goes by with a child; the gateway of an unknown house, enshrouded in foliage . . . All this can become the occasion for a strong sentiment. This chaining together of a thousand weightless images can suddenly afford a perspective on the present of continuous occurrence. Note 1. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 349.

74 KURT PINTHUS Ufa Palace First published as “Ufapalast,” in Das Tage-Buch 40 (October 3, 1925), 1504–5. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

171

A contributor to many newspapers and journals, Kurt Pinthus (1886–1975) was a key literary chronicler of the expressionist era and also a keen observer of the emergence of cinema as a cultural force, as evidenced in several selections throughout this volume. In the following text, he issues a critique of Berlin’s Ufa-Palast am Zoo, which opened in 1919 and was significantly expanded in 1925. The site of many film premieres, the Ufa-Palast was an exemplar of the American-style picture palace that synthesized film screenings with music and vaudeville performances—a practice famously criticized the following year in Siegfried Kracauer’s “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces.” Das Tage-Buch was a weekly political-literary journal that appeared from 1920 to 1933.

The Ufa Palace in Berlin, now Europe’s largest movie theater with three thousand seats, was redone in red and gold, and it sports thick, soft purple on the floors and walls. In spite of its gargantuan size, it is more comfortable than a good number of intimate theaters. The establishment’s seventy-five-piece orchestra creates a sensation, as do the vast, undulating golden curtains, which, lit by dozens of spotlights, continuously shimmer in fantastic colors. Following an American model, this movie theater will, in addition to fi lms, offer musical acts, dance numbers, songs, and stage shows in quick succession. In other words, it will provide a mix of vaudeville, revue, and concerts. We are therefore forced to ask whether the public wants this full menu of offerings and, secondly, how well the combination works in the end. The answer to the first question depends on whom you ask. For my part, I go to the movie theater to watch movies. If I wanted to hear music, I would go to a concert; if I wanted to watch vaudeville, I would seek out an establishment where I know I will be treated to unexpected, precisely orchestrated, first-class numbers. But I go to the movie theater to relax. I go to avoid being annoyed by human voices and bored by the sluggish tempo of daily life and the theater. I watch movies to experience the rapid motion of human activity, the quick succession of images, cheerful and sad emotions created through cinematic means. As for the second question, when I hear music in the movie theater, I want it to be suited to the essence of film; it should match the quick tempo and rapid transitions. So in this Ufa theater, I expect a tantalizing jazz symphony to match the symphony of bursting colors on the gold curtains—especially since Ernö Rapée, who up until now has worked at the Capitol Theatre in New York, is said to be an excellent jazz conductor.1 But instead, I am forced to listen to the same Tannhäuser overture that is played in every single beer garden. And it is played in such a way that toward the end, the orchestra and listeners are practically knocked to the ground by the brash fortissimo issuing from the trombones. I am forced to listen to two ladies in early-nineteenth-century dress singing a schmaltzy song accompanied by a plodding ballet-pantomime in an outmoded, kitschy style. I am forced to watch Deutsches Studentenleben in der Fremde [German student life abroad] for nearly half an hour, in which twelve costumed background actors mimic living a pleasurable life by drinking from empty liqueur glasses and belting out songs that were popular ages ago, all while a collection of poor imitations of revue dancers hop about the stage. That is, instead of being relaxed and delighted by a good film, I am forced to sit for an hour through an exceptionally poor attempt at entertainment, one that would have me fleeing a provincial vaudeville hall. And I am forced to endure all of this simply because the films that I came to see have been shoved in between all of this nonsense. So which films are these? The first is an animated film, Die Walrossjagd,2 which is full of animals moving in the most comical way amid their icy habitat. The film’s musical

172

Transformations of Experience

illustration allowed the conductor to demonstrate to us just what he can accomplish when he is allowed to do precisely what he wants. Next came an Ufa newsreel. And finally the main film, Charley’s Aunt,3 an indifferently shot, coarsely and unimpressively staged film with an excessive amount of poorly rendered intertitles. These inspired more audience laughter than the film itself, as these genteel Oxford lords, students, and young ladies all speak in an idiom that you can hear on the corners of Friedrichstrasse in the midnight hours. Had the lead actor not been born of the same mother as Charlie Chaplin,4 absolutely no one would be lining up to see this film. I have no desire to say much more about it. More important is the question of what the future holds for smaller movie theaters and provincial establishments that will undoubtedly want and need to follow this example of squeezing mediocre films full of nonsense in between vaudeville acts that are even more mediocre. If the biggest, most profitable, and most luxurious movie theater in all of Berlin puts on this type of show for six thousand visitors daily, can you imagine what dreadful things hundreds of thousands of viewers will be subjected to in these other theaters? After all of the trouble and effort to bring a degree of culture to cinema, it is now poised to tip straight into an abyss of inartistic barbarousness. Notes 1. Ernö Rapée (1891–1945) was a Hungarian American conductor who headed the Radio City Symphony Orchestra and also composed music for silent films. In the mid-1920s, he led the eighty-fivepiece orchestra at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo and served as guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. 2. A likely reference to The Walrus Hunters (1923), an American animated short by Paul Terry for Fables Studios. 3. Charley’s Aunt (Scott Sidney, 1925) was an American film adaptation of Brandon Thomas’s popular British stage farce from 1892. 4. The reference is to Syd Chaplin, half brother of Charlie Chaplin.

75 KARL DEMETER The Sociological Foundations of the Cinema Industry First published as “Die soziologischen Grundlagen des Kinowesens,” in Deutsche Rundschau 52 (July 1926), 57–62; here 59–61. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Like Emilie Altenloh’s study earlier in this chapter (no. 68), Karl Demeter’s text adopts a sociological approach to the film industry. Drawing from leading German sociologists and philosophers of the early twentieth century, Demeter studies the distribution of cinemas throughout Germany, highlighting the institution’s imbrication with the country’s “economic geography” and the spirit of capitalism more broadly. A historian and counsel at the German Reichsarchiv, Demeter (1889–1976) is perhaps best known for his 1930 book on the historical-sociological foundations of the German Officer Corps, Das deutsche Offizierkorps in seinen historisch-soziologischen Grundlagen.

The data contained in the latest census for population and industry offer very surprising and significant information concerning the proportionate distribution of cinemas among the various regions of the German empire. It appears, namely, that southern Germany contains significantly fewer movie theaters than the north, and this not only in absolute terms but also relative to population. In other words, in the south we see a significantly lower frequency of trips to the cinema and thus a less pronounced demand for movies. In

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

173

southern Germany—that is, in the region comprising Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hesse—one finds one cinema for every 21,000 inhabitants, while the regions of middle and northern Germany—the rest of the empire—average one cinema for every 17,000. Of course, there are significant differences between individual regions within the north. This can easily be explained by external factors, but I have little need to go into such factors here as they do not significantly alter the overall picture or cast doubt on our conclusions. The census figures take on a more specific significance when we consider the economic and social structures of the north and south. In agriculture and industry, southern Germany is primarily dominated by small-scale and mid-scale enterprise, while the middle and northern regions are dominated by large-scale enterprise. In its character and inner dynamic, large-scale industry is, to a much greater extent than the other two types, a product of modern capitalism, and this for geographical, historical, and probably ethnological reasons. Seen in this context, the German cinematic geography—if I may use this expression—appears to offer a precise parallel to German economic geography in every detail. In other words, the expansion and the frequency of cinemas in any given region are dependent upon the expansion of capitalist production processes. If we compare these conditions in Germany with the United States of America—the premier land of high capitalism and the country with the highest frequency of cinemas on earth—we find our observations confirmed: the cinema industry is causally linked to modern capitalism. And this also sheds a significant light on the social circles mentioned above, to which the overwhelming majority of cinema patrons belongs. For precisely these social groups can be seen as the direct or indirect result of all those complicated forces that gave rise to the capitalist economic system and a specifically capitalist economic mentality. The research of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Werner Sombart, and Max Scheler offers important insights into the nature of the basic spiritual forces driving capitalism. According to their work, these forces resulted from numerous historical—namely, religious-historical—developments. Above all, however, they originated in an a priori form of thought or outlook on life, an outlook that determined concrete historical developments. This outlook is that of rationalism; that is, a basic attitude of the spirit that considers all life in terms of a rational, practical, and worldly goal and strives to arrange things so as to reach its ends. From this outlook results the tendency to accord special value to everything quantifiable, visible, graspable, and knowable to the detriment of imperceptible, illusive, or transcendent qualities. Here lie the origins of materialist intellectualism. And this process necessarily leads to a withering of the pure and personal will as it relates to all processes and experiences incompatible with that intellectual, material, and worldimmanent goal. This impoverishment and narrowing of the will in the homo economicus entails a more or less significant reduction of the normal spiritual capacity for concentration in relation to all actions and thoughts lying outside those economic activities now understood as a calling. Here, we begin to understand why the cinema, although invented only a few years ago, has enjoyed a steadily increasing popularity from its inception up to the present day; offering something the printed word cannot provide, the cinema comes to the aid of a psychological and intellectual weakness resulting from the spirit of the times. The act of observing an image, like that of reading, occurs by means of the eye and serves to arouse and combine ideas, impressions, and thoughts. But while the word represents only a more or less abstract expression of an idea, the image embodies this idea itself in concreto. Or to be more exact, only the moving image does. After all, normal photography—the simple picture or the so-called slide—represents only a moment of a movement or a process; and the observer of this (momentary) image is called upon (and tends voluntarily) to provide, insomuch as his imagination permits, the previous and subsequent movement-complexes in his mind. This again requires a complicated power of

174

Transformations of Experience

will. However, the viewer has no need for this will power when he observes a movementcomplex or an image of such a complex, the movement of which cinematographic technology serves to simulate. Thus both the reading (and hearing) of words and word groups (sentences, etc.) and, to a lesser extent, the observation of still pictures demand a coordinated and active intellectual activity. The will must not only be capable of receiving but also remain in a steady state of concentrated action, in order—after a visual (or acoustic) perception of words or images—to transform the content of these ideational expressions indirectly into real idea-complexes. On the other hand, the observation and inner reception of a moving image is only a passive process, because the visual perception of the moving image directly elicits the corresponding connection of ideas in the intellect of the observer—that is, assuming the capacity for such reception is present at all. Watching moving pictures thus renders unnecessary the active concentration of the will, the kind of concentration required to complete the circuitous intellectual route, to transform visual impressions of letters (or acoustical impressions) into thoughts, or to supplement a moment in order to arrive at a real intellectual idea. The moving image thus caters to the basic principle of all rational thought and rationalistic action: the search to achieve the greatest results with the least possible expenditure. Here, the human organism’s striving for the most economic use of its energies pays off. No wonder, then, that the homo economicus characterizing our capitalist age and capitalist countries, concerned as he is with a rational economy, looks to fi lm for the satisfaction of his spiritual needs. No wonder he makes all the more use of film, the less his education, profession, or self-training has accustomed him to independent thought and intellectual concentration.

76 RUDOLF HARMS The Movie Theater as Gathering Place First published as “Das Lichtspielhaus als Sammelraum,” in Rudolf Harms, Philosophie des Films: Seine ästhetischen und metaphysischen Grundlagen (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1926), 57–64; here 57, 61–62, 64. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In this chapter from his influential book Philosophie des Films (based on his dissertation, which was completed in 1922), Rudolf Harms (1901–1984) sketches the historical transformation and standardization of exhibition sites with regard to issues of aesthetic framing and presentation. The following excerpt reveals the legacy of aesthetic idealism, which Harms had studied under philosopher Johannes Volkelt. The influence of Kant can be also traced in other early film-theoretical books, perhaps most notably in The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916) by the German American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg.

As a collective art, film gravitates directly toward sites of mass attendance. Spaces that are suited to this purpose can accommodate a frequently large, but ultimately limited, number of visitors. In order to create an object that can be seen as well as possible by all audience members, the individual film image must be enlarged to an enormous extent. This enormous enlargement is achieved via projection through the room. The visualization of the resulting light complexes thus requires a room that is darkened as evenly as possible, or at least

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

175

a theoretically unlimited, darkened white wall, in order to clearly emphasize the detailed contrasts of light and shadow in the image. [. . .] The movie theater has its origins in markets and fairs. Makeshift booths, rows of wooden benches, a white towel, and a hand-cranked projector constituted the entire inventory of these “film theaters.” It was unnecessary to darken the room all that much, as the screenings generally took place in the evenings. The films that were shown were neither new nor particularly protected. Even today, some remainder of these movie theaters turns up at fairs and markets; the films are usually so water-damaged that one can make out very little, but in the early days, people were not so spoiled. A music box or horn gramophone provided “musical illustration,” and an “announcer” the entertainment. Who has forgotten the countless little movie theaters around 1910, with their bad, muggy air, shoddy films, and shabby screening facilities? Since then, we have seen a significant turnaround. The accommodations, the projectors, the music: everything has increasingly adjusted to accommodate aesthetic requirements. Only one thing stays the same, even in the new cinema: anyone can enter or leave the theater at any time. Individuals are at liberty to arrive in the middle of a performance or at its beginning or its end. This is doubtlessly an advantage over the theater, which assembles a rather pathetic crowd, decked out in festive attire, at a specific time for a particular aesthetic indulgence. One can enter the cinema more or less in passing, without any foreknowledge (unlike the opera) and without any considerations, unlike the live theater. All pomp and circumstance is absent. One film flows into the next. There is no applause, and no intermission during stage preparation artificially separates the individual acts, which today are even presented as a coherent entity one after the other. Emilie Altenloh, however, suggests that modern cinema—becoming in this way more like the theater—is moving toward a determined starting time and the presentation of single pieces.1 Heretofore, such films have only constituted an exception as special performances. It is questionable whether this kind of screening will be the right one in the long term, given film’s pronounced and characteristic tendencies toward movement and change. [. . .] As a mass art, film needs a collective space. This is created by the darkened screening room of the movie theater. The goal and purpose of these rooms is ostensibly the assembly of a possibly quite large, but limited, crowd of people, for shared aesthetic and artistic enjoyment. The movie theater’s task consists in helping to make sure that “sharpened attention” as well as “engaged behavior” can be directed exclusively toward the artistic object. This targets both the exclusion of the lower senses (sensations of pressure, touch, smell), as well as the exclusion of anything that could distract viewers from fully surrendering to the artwork. Note 1. See Altenloh’s text earlier in this chapter (no. 68).

77 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER The Cinema on Münzstraße First published as “Kino in der Münzstraße,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (April 2, 1932). Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

176

Transformations of Experience While Siegfried Kracauer’s “Cult of Distraction” (1926) observed the gentrification of screening venues in Berlin, the following essay written six years later indicates that this was an uneven and incomplete process, with working-class cinemas maintaining the same raw, unrefined qualities that Alfred Döblin had emphasized in his text earlier in this chapter (no. 63). Writing in the midst of an economic depression, Kracauer also highlights an irony: the cinema now served a similar function for the unemployed masses and for the leisure class, “satisfying the need for entertainment among those people who don’t know what to do with their time.” This concern with the class dynamics of cinema in pre-Nazi Germany would arguably find its most famous expression in From Caligari to Hitler (1947), where Kracauer sharply critiqued the false middle-class consciousness of a proletarianized nation. In “The Curious Realist” (1964), written on the occasion of Kracauer’s seventy-fifth birthday, Theodor W. Adorno would trace the film theorist’s sociological and mass-psychological interest in cinema back to his Weimar essays, suggesting that Kracauer often displaced his own spectatorial pleasure onto others: “He himself had something of the moviegoer’s naïve delight in viewing; he found an aspect of his own mode of response even in the little shopgirls who amused him.”1

On Münzstraße, behind Alexanderplatz, there are several movie theaters with daytime hours, all of which are already open at eleven in the morning. 2 Münzstraße is so full of pedestrians at this hour that one has to really push one’s way through to get anywhere. The crowd, composed of workers, women, petit bourgeois types, and especially young lads, is not in any hurry. As it slowly shoves along, one senses the weight of unemployment bearing down upon it. The languid river is bounded on one side by grocers’ carts and on the other by street vendors, shops, and restaurants. But by no means does the food on display in the restaurants’ windows seem to create as many illusions as the movie theaters’ screens do. They are akin to beautiful shorelines at which the public accumulates. Perhaps spiritual hunger really surpasses that of the body. Looking at these movie theaters, I am reminded of the Paramount Theatre in Paris,3 located near the Opera and likewise in operation during the day. A grandiose palace bathed in light, which shows nothing but new titles interspersed with colorful ensemble scenes. Although the Paramount should not, in fact, be mentioned in the same breath as the establishments around Alexanderplatz, it does share one quality with them: satisfying the need for entertainment among those people who don’t know what to do with their time. The difference is that the groups who frequent the former have enough money to enjoy themselves already in the morning, whereas the audience on Münzstraße indulges in a forced idleness. One notices it straightaway. The young lads loitering in front of the theater entrances and critically eyeing the photos all look sullen. For them, the pastime [Zeitvertreib] that presents itself here is less a form of pleasure than a remedy that dispels [vertreibt] the specters of evil time [Zeit]. They use it like a medicine that one swallows in the event of illness. Their complexion is poor, and their gaze is tarnished by the awareness of their uselessness. At times, a couple hoping to disappear in the dark will linger in front of the images. Or a girl will consider whether there is nothing better she could be doing at the moment. The risk is indeed not small, since the jobless pay a full 50 pfennigs upon showing their ID, and box seats—or what passes for box seats here—cost a full mark. Following the example of several people before me, I decided to go inside, despite the good weather. As in those forgotten times when films were still silent and more beautiful, one has to pass by the lower part of the screen in order to make one’s way towards

Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition

177

the back of the auditorium, which is an immensely long tube. It emits a smell that evidently took generations of effort to produce, and it teems with people. I don’t see them, but I sense that they have conglomerated in clumps. The images on the screen are already a bit water-damaged, and the sound is so unclear that one hardly understands a syllable. Whispered sweet nothings sound like nagging, and simple words spoken by men morph into alarm signals. They are playing an older sound film with Hans Albers,4 who seems to be the general favorite on Münzstraße, since he appears in just about all of the cinemas. Distinctive for this audience are the parts of the film where they laugh. A particular cheer erupts during a short scene in which Albers blithely displays his physical strength. He jumps towards the lanky Rühmann in the bathtub and plunges him under the water several times. It is the unemployed who laugh at this raw comedy, people who have been stranded and from whom every practical joke elicits gratitude. Excluded from the work process, they gradually lose their ability to discriminate. One cannot blame them for even applauding the illustrious career that their beloved Albers is making in film. The words “To be continued” appear onscreen, and the auditorium brightens. As I had correctly assumed, most of the rows are densely packed. Jackets and thin coats whisper to one another; an old man is sleeping. Later, when the noise up front begins again, his slumber comes to an end. In a small alcove on the right, there is a kind of buffet, which brands this space a waiting room. It has lost all its color and resembles the halls of employment agencies or public baths to a tee. If you assume that the cashier, who peddles peppermints, wafers, and chocolate marshmallows in a greasy apron, is superfluous, think again. His goods are in greater demand here than in the fi ner theaters, which are too fine, mind you, to have proper breaks. Dessert probably serves sometimes as a substitute for lunch. Albers continues the car game right where he left off, speeding toward the summit of the happy end in a roundabout way. I don’t wait for him to get there but leave the stable instead, passing in front of the screen again, on which he races by in massive form. The sun is shining, but what do these people care about the sun? In front of the entrance to the cinema, a woman in fake fur is standing and chewing. Silently she chews, looking neither to the right nor the left, and waits. She is middle-aged, an ordinary woman who has nothing to do and thus simply stands still somewhere on the side of the road. If no one comes and takes her along into the dark cinema, she will surely chew at that very spot well into the night, and the sun will slink away empty-handed. Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer,” trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New German Critique 54 (Autumn 1991), 159–177; here 168. 2. Otto Pritzkow had opened Berlin’s first stationary cinema, the Abnormitäten- und Biographentheater, on Münzstraße on November 1, 1899; it remained in business until 1959. Other cinemas on Münzstraße included the Biograph-Theater (1906–43) and Münztheater (1910–64). 3. Paramount Pictures Corporation had acquired the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris in 1927 and turned it into the Paramount Opéra, which today is called the Gaumont Opéra. 4. An actor and singer, Albers became one of the Germany film industry’s preeminent leading men in the early 1930s. The reference here is to Hanns Schwarz’s Bomben auf Monte Carlo (Monte Carlo Madness, 1931), which costarred Heinz Rühmann, another popular German actor, who also appeared with Albers in later films. Kracauer had reviewed Bomben auf Monte Carlo in the Frank furter Zeitung on September 10, 1931. In From Caligari to Hitler, he would write: “From 1930 to 1933, the actor Hans Albers played the heroes of films in which typically bourgeois daydreams found outright fulfillment; his exploits gladdened the hearts of worker audiences.” Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8–9.

SIX

AN ART FOR THE TIMES

78 EGON FRIEDELL Prologue before the Film First published as “Prolog vor dem Film,” in Blätter des Deutschen Theaters 2, no. 32 (1912–13), 508–12. Translated by Don Reneau.

Long before Walter Benjamin considered the status of the artwork in the age of its technological reproducibility, debates raged in the German-speaking world about the fate of art in the modern industrial era, as signifi ed by writings such as Friedrich Naumann’s Die Kunst im Zeitalter der Maschine (Art in the age of the machine, 1904). A medium based on machine technology, film played a central role in these debates, especially between 1907 and 1914. Old stage theaters were converted into movie theaters, and new film palaces were built. The format changed from single to multiple reels, leading to full feature-length film dramas (see Pinthus, no. 81) that in turn required scriptwriters and professional actors. What was the future of literature and theater? The entire cultural scene was upended, not just in Germany but throughout Europe and the United States. However, it seems that the shock of the new registered more in a country with a classical theater tradition that suddenly felt expendable. Cinema’s attempts at gentrification via the so-called Autorenfilm nonetheless triggered a countermovement that valorized the medium’s roots in kitsch and cheap thrills (see Lubitsch and Lang, nos. 89 and 90). The following text, given as a tongue-in-cheek introduction to a film screening and published in a theater journal, characterizes film as “a very precise and characteristic expression of our time”—an age defined in terms of compression, speed, and fragmentation. Egon Friedell (1878–1938), a Viennese theater critic, cabaret performer, and cultural philosopher, ascribes “unforeseeable possibilities” to this new art for the times.

I have to excuse myself for appearing before you in three dimensions, for it seems that the third dimension is slowly falling out of fashion in the theater. And because, as Oscar Wilde has already pointed out, it is not art that imitates life, but life that takes its cue from art,1 so might we, perhaps, gradually lose the third dimension in life. Be that as it may, we still have the third dimension for now, and perhaps even something more. In any case, probably no one among you will want to deny that I possess three dimensions. I am supposed to deliver something like an opening speech. This practice has become common in Berlin. Whenever someone opens a new cinema, he calls upon a literary person to prove that cinema has something to do with culture. It is, naturally, a very thankless task, and I believe no one will contradict me if I propose the following definition: a lecture is something that makes everyone happy by coming to an end. 178

An Art for the Times

179

I am naturally supposed to speak for the cinema. This is not difficult, for the facts themselves speak for the cinema. Thought, as everyone will concede, no longer stands any chance of removing it from the physiognomy of our current existence. There is just as little chance of this happening with the cinema as with those other disreputable novelties responsible for giving our modern public life its specific signature—the railroad, the telephone, the bus, the gramophone, and the subway. I know that there exists a whole group of people who see in all these things just so many means of depriving our existence of all intellectual culture—and who, as a consequence, condemn everything about our present times. But what good is such a lament? No capable person ever rejects his time; his time is his medium, precisely the medium to which he conforms inside and out, and in which he must work and live. This is his task, and he must carry it out, for it is not his place to seek out another. He comes to terms with this fact; or better yet, he doesn’t even think about it. Complaining about one’s era is really a bit impudent and foolish, for it does not admit of change; it is a matter, once and for all, of the driving forces of our time. The poet who dreams of lost cultures will never amount to much. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Ibsen described their immediate present, and they were poets precisely for that reason. We treasure them today only because they lived resolutely in their time and considered it the best possible time, for the simple reason that it was the only one they had. Counterendeavors, like those pursued by the adherents of French classicism or the German Enlightenment, always appear a little ridiculous. Such people were dilettantes in the worst sense, believing that one could suddenly aspire to thinking and living like the dead Greeks—like dead Greeks, moreover, who looked entirely different when they were alive. For, in the meantime, the regrettable fact has come to light that the old Greeks were not at all ancient. It is nothing but a waste of time to mourn the passing of historical phantoms such as “Athens,” “Florence,” or “Weimar.” These cultures were great, as I said, precisely because they arose from the immediate present of their day. Today, they are dead and serve only as themes for essays. That is why Berlin, for example, deserves the highest appreciation, because it has understood so correctly its task as the capital of the German Reich: the task of being the center of a modern civilization. Berlin is a wonderful, modern hall of machines, a gigantic electric motor, which accomplishes a profusion of mechanical achievements with unbelievable precision, energy, and speed. True, this machine has not yet, for the moment, acquired a soul. Perhaps Berlin has nothing more than the life of a cinematographic theater, an “homme-machine”2 designed with marked virtuosity. But that will do for now. Berlin is currently going through the growing pains of a coming culture, a culture we do not yet know and which is still elaborating itself. And the various examples of Berlin’s tastelessness are at least modern examples of tastelessness, and they remain superior to the most tasteful lack of modernity, because they have potential for development. The disreputable cinema, it seems to me, also contains such possibilities for development. It is, when one looks a little closer, a very precise and characteristic expression of our time. First of all, the cinema is brief and rapid, almost as if its presentations were written in code, and it stops for nothing. It has a compact, precise, and military-like quality about it. These characteristics correspond very well to our epoch, which is one of extracts. Today, we dislike nothing more than idyllic repose or an epic lingering over precisely those objects that once counted as poetic. We are no longer able to relax cozily among such things. Our entire civilization embodies the principle “le minimum d’effort et le maximum d’effet.”3 Already in school we begin our training in the art of extraction. We absorb extracts of philology, extracts of the natural sciences, extracts of world history—never the science itself, only the extract. We no longer travel in coaches, but in speeding trains, capturing only hurried snatches of the landscape as we pass. Also typical

180

Transformations of Experience

is the way that postcards have come to dominate our written correspondence, for this fact illustrates the idea that such a small card offers sufficient space for almost every message. Next, and closely related to the qualities just outlined, the cinema has about it something sketch-like, abrupt, incomplete, and fragmentary; from the perspective of modern taste, these qualities give it an eminent artistic advantage. All arts are gradually coming to recognize the beauty of the fragment, and ultimately, art is nothing but a process of clever (and at times brilliant) exclusion and composition. An artist who excludes or conceals nothing would be the most boring person in the world; indeed, he would be no artist at all. As Voltaire stated, “Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire.”4 Just consider what possibilities the cinema would offer to an ingenious and spirited dramatist who could exploit the lifeless environment surrounding his human characters—what till now has been rather disparagingly termed decoration. I do not mean this simply in the superficial sense that the cinema suffers fewer technical impediments than the theater and that the film writer has in principle the whole surface of the earth as a stage. I mean it in the other sense: that such a dramatist would necessarily learn to integrate the nonverbal elements of the external setting into his plot as influential factors, allowing them to intervene as active forces in the fate of the characters. They would then not merely stand in as scenery, which one could just as well leave aside, but rather would amount to the opposite of trimmings; one might even have the impression that the people have become the scenery and the decorations. Think of Richard Wagner or Maeterlinck; the main character in The Death of Tintagiles is really a door.5 In Zola, as well, we see an attempt to make novelistic heroes, as it were, of dead things, as one can see simply by reading the titles of some of his works. This consideration leads us to the chief criticism customarily raised against the cinema: that it lacks words and is therefore capable of portraying only very crude and primitive things. But I believe that today, we are no longer inclined to cede such absolute hegemony to the word.6 One might say that for us today, words have something excessively clear and for that reason strangely indiscriminate about them. Gradually, the word is losing some of its credit. We are gradually seeing something like a retrogression of spoken language. To the extent that humanity becomes increasingly intellectualized, everything becomes more internalized. We speak less, not because we have lost the capacity for good speech but because speaking has become less important to us. We live less noisily. Just as Homer’s Zeus causes all of Olympus to quake by moving his eyelids, so it is with presentday mortals; a quiver of the eyelashes, a dropping of the lids, and an entire world moves. Here, too, the process has already begun. Recall Ibsen’s subterranean dialogue or Maeterlinck’s technique of silence. The people in these plays exist to a certain extent only in life’s shadows, an effect each of these writers creates in a different way. Ibsen shows the shadows cast over characters; Maeterlinck shows the shadows cast over the soul by events yet to come. But neither past nor future ever appears on the stage. One could also easily imagine Wallenstein—were he given shape in the modern poet’s mold—delivering his entire great monologue in silence. It would suffice to have him simply walk across the stage, absorbed in his own profound meditation. He need not pronounce a single iamb; the iambs bother us and we already know what he has to say. The most beautiful and profound verses fail to approach, in their expression, what the simplest onlooker in the balcony senses in a silent and unarticulated way. Today, a person’s gaze, gestures, or his whole physical bearing can occasionally say more than human speech. Silence must not be confused with muteness. Remaining silent is not equivalent to being mute, but merely another—and perhaps more energetic—form of communication. Normal life offers examples of this every day. Should a

An Art for the Times

181

person greet us on the street with the words “Oh! I have the honor of wishing you a most respectful good evening,” he would fail to give the impression of feeling any particular respect for us. If he wished to give this impression, he would confine himself to a silent tip of the hat. If you have ever, just once, truly fallen in love—an experience I would wish on all of you—then you probably made yourself understood more with a look than with words. By offering less to the senses, one offers more to the imagination. The fantasies of the most sober or limited viewer are still a hundred times more gripping and mysterious than all of the world’s printed literature. The true writer is the one who leaves the most latitude to the imagination. The most significant works of world literature are also those most manifold in their meanings. They awaken a different understanding in each new reader. A hundred interpretations are possible, all of them right. The true writer sees his highest ambition not in creating his works himself but in bringing as many others as possible to their own acts of creation. For he knows that the true creator of every artwork can be only the public. These statements are all terrible exaggerations, of course. But why not exaggerate? I believe one should adopt such an exaggeratedly well-disposed attitude toward all things; that would, perhaps, offer the best advantage to ourselves and to the things alike. Ultimately, every thing is a symbol referring beyond itself toward unforeseeable possibilities. But, just to avoid any residual difference of opinion here between us, I would like to emphasize one point in conclusion. I am not even against the current, undoubtedly inartistic form of the cinema, for it fulfills the same role as our average theater—that is, the theater that attracts audiences. The cinema simply fulfills this role much more completely and ideally. What, after all, does the public want from a play? A play is a handy object of consumption, which allows people to relax in a certain way for a few hours. Extremely few people experience poetry and philosophy as inescapable necessities. But for the modern city dweller, the theater fulfills a need just like black coffee or cigars. Art is a luxury item, theater a utility. Theater is an automat; one drops coins in a slot at the top, and false emotion, false merriment, and false fright come out at the bottom. A respectable theatrical entrepreneur does not, therefore, offer his public art. If he does offer it art, he commits an outright act of fraud. Whether the cinema is good or bad, it is in any case a thousand times preferable to a stage theater, and I must hold to this view unrelentingly—that is, unless one of our many legitimate theaters, doubtless poised once again to bring us the new Berlin season, should give me the honorable task of delivering an introductory lecture at its premiere. Notes 1. In Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” (1889), the character of Vivian asserts, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 22. 2. Friedell’s use of the French term is a likely allusion to the famous treatise L’homme machine (Man a Machine, 1748) by the materialist philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who denied the existence of an autonomous human soul and—extending Descartes’s argument about animals—reduced man to an automaton. 3. Friedell here draws from the Viennese poet and writer Peter Altenberg (1859–1919), who wrote in a self-described “telegram style” and whose sketches were known as “extracts of life.” Altenberg had used the French phrase “le minimum d’effort et le maximum d’effet” in Pròdromos (1906) and in the sketch “Yvette Guilbert” (1911). Friedell had written a tribute to Altenberg for his fiftieth birthday (“Peter Altenberg: Zu seinem fünfzigsten Geburtstag,” in Bilderbögen des kleinen Lebens, 1909), parts of which he repurposed in the paragraph here. On Altenberg, see also the text by Strobl in chapter 1 of this volume (no. 7).

182

Transformations of Experience

4. “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.” The quote comes from Voltaire’s “De la nature de l’homme” in Discours en vers sur l’homme. 5. La Mort de Tintagiles (1894) is a drama for marionettes by the Belgian symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. 6. This thought echoes the debates about the so-called Sprachkrise (crisis of language) as articulated in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1902 “Letter of Lord Chandos.” In the epilogue to volume 3 (1931) of his magnum opus, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, Friedell would revisit this claim in light of the transition to sound, lamenting: “As long as the cinematograph was silent, it had extra-filmic possibilities: namely, spiritual ones. But sound film has unmasked it, and the fact is patent to all eyes and ears that we are dealing with a brutish dead machine.” Egon Friedell, A Cultural History of the Modern Age, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), 475 (translation modified).

79 ANONYMOUS The Autorenfilm and Its Assessment First published as “Der Autorenfilm und seine Bewertung,” in Der Kinematograph 326 (March 26, 1913). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The rivalry between cinema and the theatrical arts jokingly thematized in the previous text (Friedell, no. 78) turned into an open battle when German film companies began to lure away (or simply “buy”) well-known novelists, playwrights, and stage actors, provoking the resistance of theater organizations. Following the short-lived French Film d’art movement (1908–11), known for its adaptations of classical novels and plays, the German Autorenfilm (authors’ film) also centered around major figures from literature and theater. Well-known writers such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur Schnitzler and revered actors such as Albert Bassermann and Paul Wegener were hired to show the medium’s possibilities beyond mere entertainment and to appeal to the educated middle class that had shunned cinema’s plebeian pleasures. Although the commotion about the Autorenfilm was limited to 1912–13, the public attention it garnered had long-lasting effects: it was through the involvement of highly paid writers and actors that film came into the purview of theater critics and began to be reviewed as a new art form in newspapers (see Pinthus, no. 81). What role, if any, literature and theater should play in the future of this ‘’art for the times” would be fiercely debated for years to come. See also Forch in chapter 1, no. 12, note 1.

The German Autorenfilm, whose appearance was long overdue, has ushered in a new era in German fi lm art. After striving for years, the German fi lm industry has fi nally succeeded in fi nding collaborators in circles that may not have harbored animosity toward film drama and film acting but which, conforming to the general sentiment, found it—or rather, must have found it—unfair to make their intellectual fruits available for cinematographic representation and thereby for the great masses of film theaters. The backwardness in German cinema that people used to complain about so frequently can be blamed in large part on the fact that German fi lm producers were prevented from fi nding appropriate screenwriters. In contrast to Germany, foreign countries have for many years had the undeniable advantage of being able to count recognized authors among their storyline suppliers.1 Similarly, foreign film companies have long been able to come up with films in which the most famous and respected actors of the stage could send their victory parade around the world with the help of movie screens. In

An Art for the Times

183

Germany, it took much longer for the famous figures of theater to discover the pleasures of filmmaking. But good things come to those who wait. Having overcome their initial animosity toward participating in fi lm, prominent names from the German stage are turning to their new task with the same seriousness and dignity that they habitually bring to their obligations on the theatrical stage. And unprejudiced novelists and playwrights have found themselves ready to allow filmic adaptations of the works, inasmuch as these are suitable for the cinematograph’s admittedly limited representational capacities. [. . .] It is simply an undeniable fact that cinemas and their offerings enjoy unlimited popularity with audiences of every social class. The masses come to them for distraction and instruction. For the man of the street, whose hard struggle for existence leaves him almost no free time and who therefore lacks the opportunity for intellectual pursuits that are easily available to those of higher station, the cinema—with its combination of newsreels and geographic, ethnographic, and scientific images—can be regarded as an institute of popular education. He usually cannot spare the time required for reading halls, museums, libraries, lectures, and other events for public education. He must cut his coat according to his cloth, and the cinematographic theater, with its rich programming and colorful variety, will accommodate him so completely that he generally returns home utterly satisfied. The cinema, which requires no ostentatious and expensive buildings, has followed the popular masses into their neighborhoods, making their visit easier and more comfortable than any previous enterprise. And nobody seriously claims anymore that a visit to the cinema has no intellectual benefit for the spectator. Between the dramas, which are simply the lifeblood of the cinema, there are always a few nuggets interspersed that delight the heart and mind. In one arena, however, the diversity of cinema has completely failed up to now, and that is the arena of literature. Through so-called Autorenfi lms, the German cinema audience will now have an opportunity to get to know some of the most important and characteristic works of our writers. [. . .] The Autorenfilm by no means intends to replace literary arts; it simply intends to use the film language that mass audiences have come to know and understand to get at those circles that have, up to now, shown no interest in the work and creativity of our intellectual heroes. Film will build a bridge for playwrights and authors, so that they can use its ideas and figures to reach an audience where they could never have expected to be understood and valued under current circumstances. The general public can be compared to a babbling child that sees what is going on around it but can neither grasp the meaning nor describe its impressions. In order to enable any kind of understanding, this child’s educators must cater to its undeveloped expressive forms, must take up the often odd word formations of the nascent human vocabulary and use them whenever they want to win their child’s affection. The international gestures of film language are understood everywhere, and skillful, comprehensible film direction has the potential to make the author’s meaning understood even by those people who cannot approach literary artworks with the desired reverence. Cinema still has undreamt-of potential for development. The acquisition of famous authors to participate in this development should certainly be greeted as a joyous step. Note 1. Beginning in 1908, the French companies Film d’art and the Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (SCAGL), both distributed by Pathé-Frères, hired well-known authors and reputable actors and adapted historical dramas or literary classics into screenplays. Examples include André Calmettes’s L’assassinat du duc de Guise (1908) and Albert Capellani’s L’arlésienne (1908).

184

Transformations of Experience

80 ULRICH RAUSCHER The Cinema Ballad First published as “Die Kino-Ballade,” in Der Kunstwart und Kulturwart 26, no. 13 (April 1913), 1–6; here 4–6. Translated by Sara Hall.

Whereas many authors of the early 1910s measured cinema against the theater, Ulrich Rauscher here suggests that film may be more properly likened to the popular ballad. Rauscher (1884–1930) was a novelist, translator, and correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung who frequently wrote about film. His essay may be seen as a pushback against those who dismissed cinema out of hand, not recognizing its promise and potential. To him, the future of film lay less in high art than in reviving the art of popular storytelling for those who hanker for exciting alternatives to the “gray streets of the poorest districts.” Incidentally, this view was echoed at the time by film theater owners, who publicly denounced the “literary turn” of the Autorenfilm as bad for business.

I posit this quasi-mathematical formula: everything that would be suitable for the ballad is suitable for fi lm! The tempo of the ballad, its apparent disjointedness (which in due course proves to be a higher and more logically consistent order of events), its brisk intimation, its movement forwards and backwards—all of that belongs to film as well. Material for the cinema should be chosen appropriately and, I am convinced, should be sought from the poet and the writer. Today’s cinematic work suffers because it originates from writers who do not want to think, or, to a much larger degree, from film directors who cannot think. The films are illogical, lacking an integral plot, and usually even more tasteless than our terrible melodramas [Rührstücke]. But then along comes the illogical nonsense of the opponents of the “film drama”; because the latter is so bad, they argue, serious writers should not lower themselves to its level! Such a misunderstanding confuses the means with the ends. Because the state of film is so bad, and because film does enrich the realm of artistic possibilities, we should look into the matter and guide film toward its destined purpose, its perfection. We cannot, however, expect things from film that it cannot do. A psychiatrist, believing to proclaim the death of the cinematic epic, stated: “A psychology without language is possible for a highly cultivated person only to a limited degree. If the filmmaker intends to express the mental events within man, then he must, in order to make himself understood, limit himself to the most elementary forms of expression—through facial expressions, gestures, and movements. He must be coarse and exaggerate.”1 This theory proves false in the face of classical pantomime or the dancing of Pavlova. 2 Style is the decisive factor—it is the means for communicating without resorting to coarseness. But our psychiatrist continues: “Even if people of all types and forms of culture find pleasure and entertainment in humorous and dramatic films, it is still only the relatively elementary events of human life that are expressed through the relative dearth of expressive means.” If we translate the “relative dearth of expressive means” to mean “the means of expression unique to film,” then this is all quite correct and applies directly to film, as well as to the ballad, which has always concerned itself with the relatively elementary events of human life. Here lies the error of the cinema reformers: they would like to violate film. Psychologically, they argue, film does not offer the same thing as drama and is thus inferior. On the contrary, film could become a savior in a time of need. It could, through the cooperation of the right people, revive the fi ne old art of storytelling [Fabulierkunst], an art that we have almost lost thanks to an overvaluation of the psychological. We need a Dumas of

An Art for the Times

185

film: someone with a gift for radiantly honoring reality, someone who can narrate—with suspense, entertainment, and imagination—and someone who livens up this beautiful earth with adventures instead of rummaging through people’s living bodies in search of pangs of discontent. The disdain our literati hold for fresh and entertaining narration has been transferred onto film, whose only gift is just such narration. Our scholars are afraid to find pleasure in a cheerful or serious, suspenseful, well-spun course of events. And so they chide the cinema in their snobby arrogance, chide it not only as it exists today, but also as it could be. They do not know that talents such as Dumas, Dickens (with certain limitations), Hauff, and Hackländer could find in the cinema an instrument guaranteeing pure and pleasurable effects.3 Nor do they know that the best of our contemporary popular writers could create more respectable things on the projection screen than on paper, for on the screen they are transported away from their slangy language, their failed attempts at psychology, and their guillotine-like art of characterization. In the realm of fi lm they would have only imagination and the invention of events as directives. I do fear one disadvantage of the cinema for the audience; because it narrates too comfortably, because it takes upon itself the process of making sense of the events, it will make the audience’s imagination lazier, whereas our literati would be able to strengthen the imagination. This would be an unavoidable parallel to the laziness of intellect already bred by a similar force: the newspaper. Now, however, the cinema is just as the word Kino makes it seem: ridiculously bad. Until our authors have learned to write for it, the state authorities wring their hands about the cinema, and the cinema people wring theirs about the state authorities, the censors. A bill is being prepared that would make movie theater managers dependent on state licensing so as to clean up the ranks of the gentlemen who manage the movie theaters and to keep minors under sixteen away from the dangerous programs. In addition, the censors are at work on a truly urban campaign to prevent the worst and to make themselves popular with the responsible parties. I am all for licensing, and this first of all for purely economic reasons, since it would keep at bay all the failed entrepreneurs who go into the cinema business as a last resort (most only to fail there as well). The ban on minors is also in order. But then we should hold adult programs only to the principles of the Criminal Code and the general police regulations. To prohibit fi lms according to some mechanical paradigm, to prohibit anything remotely reminiscent of a crime or misdemeanor accomplishes nothing. The Berlin censors already abandoned this path when they gave the Lindau film Der Andere approval for “respectable” movie theaters (but for no others).4 I have seen with my own eyes how theaters in the suburbs can distort with provocation and rebellion many films that West Berliners can watch calmly without the possibility of endangering their souls. In “Kintopps” that live off of the last penny of every single patron, where the fodder for the eyes must replace fodder for the stomach, where all spectators sit in between the windy, cold street of the night and the festivities of a decoratively lit banking house, everything looks different; the voice of the movie lecturer sounds like that of an apostle and basks in the sensation of social injustice. But what is there to do? Suffering and misfortune would also have to be eliminated, so that cinema patrons do not have to view everything with the eyes of the suffering and misfortunate, before which the world transforms into bitterness and blood. The racetracks in the Tiergarten would have to be removed, as well as the shiny, polished, black carriages with their bright and flashy contents. The same goes for the grand hotels, whose vestibules shine onto the pavements like throne rooms. The cinema is a brighter, warmer world for all the disenfranchised; as bad as it is today, it glows like a work of culture in the gray streets of the poorest districts. It will be

186

Transformations of Experience

up to poets to project their ballads onto its white screen with enough brightness, happiness, and inspiration to sate the intellectually and physically hungry. Notes 1. The psychiatrist and neurologist being quoted is Robert Gaupp, whose essays and lectures of the period contained iterations of many such statements. See also Gaupp’s text in chapter 7 (no. 94). 2. A Russian ballerina and one of the principal dancers in Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) was famous above all for her performance in The Dying Swan (1905). 3. This list of popular writers of the nineteenth century includes Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens as well as the German writers Wilhelm Hauff and Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer. 4. Max Mack’s 1913 film Der Andere (The Other), a doppelgänger story in the tradition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, premiered in Berlin on February 13, 1913. Paul Lindau wrote the screenplay based on his 1893 play of the same name.

81 KURT PINTHUS Quo Vadis, Cinema? On the Opening of the Königspavillon-Theater First published as “Quo vadis—Kino? Zur Eröffnung des Königspavillon-Theaters,” in Leipziger Tageblatt (April 25, 1913). Translated by Don Reneau.

The grand opening of Leipzig’s first movie palace, the Königspavillon-Lichtspiele (1913– 35), here provides Kurt Pinthus with an occasion to reflect on cinema’s increasing pretense to respectability and on the differences between theater and film. The cinema’s opening featured Enrico Guazzoni’s 1912 epic, Quo Vadis?, a two-hour film version of the 1895 historical novel of the same name by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1905. Although wary of literary adaptations, Pinthus discerns the distinct artistic potential of cinema in the film’s “rapidly alternating, masterfully directed images”—visual effects that would be impossible on the stage. See also the text by Pinthus later in this chapter (no. 86), as well as his writings in chapters 5, 10, and 12 of this volume (nos. 74, 144, and 177).

Spreading the jam on your breakfast roll, you open an envelope containing the following invitation, printed on fine handmade paper: “You are most cordially invited to be our honored guest at the inaugural premiere of the Königspavillon-Theater, Promenadenstrasse 8, Thursday, April 24, 1913, 8 p.m.” . . . The program promises a few musical pieces and a prologue, to be followed by “the most powerful cinematic drama of all times, Quo Vadis?” The admission ticket includes a written request to appear in evening dress. So the cinema, the former wild undergrowth of suburbs and stuffy little halls, now claims to have become respectable. Just as for the opening of a real theater or for a Parisian exclusive preview, the film will at first play for a select audience. As you dress for the film that evening, you think to yourself, the cinema is making every effort to imitate the theater, but it fails to recognize that one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. The cinema’s means and its potentials differ from those of the theater; cinema presents only action, effects, and visible phenomena, while the theater aspires to convey subtle psychology. On the stage, words are more important than visible events. The cinema must do without words, and consequently without everything that words reveal. The genuine admirers of the cinema (and I confess to being one) therefore insist on drawing clear boundaries between the cinema and the art of the theater. The cinema will no doubt

An Art for the Times

187

develop an art of its own, but one that will have nothing in common with the art of the theater other than the visible. (In a forthcoming book I am editing about the cinema, we will attempt to distinguish theater and cinema; in addition, a few actual photoplays [Kinostücke] composed by writers will provide concrete illustrations of our views.)1 Now you arrive at the new Königspavillon-Theater. As the automobiles and carriages outside pull up into the dazzling circle of light cast by the arc lamps, in the violet foyer, you struggle to leave your hat and coat at the besieged checkroom. You observe the theater with its one thousand seats, squeeze your way through the financiers in tails, the pretty girls, the opulent women, and the bearded businessmen, and see a room of white and gold, so brightly flooded with light that one could discern a black thread drifting through the air. You take a seat in the balcony loge, look now at the audience, now at the colorful curtain, still closed, listen to the music, and smile at the well-meant, badly rhymed prologue— which asserts precisely the opposite to what I just said about the distinction between theater and cinema. Herr Wilbenhain, 2 despite his good Saxon dialect and his appearance familiar to most people from the comic roles he plays, stands dressed in tails and endeavors to pronounce the verses festively before disappearing behind the flowered curtain. Now the film begins, cobbled to fit the screen from the famous novel by Sienkiewicz, Quo vadis?, which we all read with such excitement fifteen years ago. The pictures flicker by rapidly. Scenes are never developed; you barely have time to take in the scenery before a new title springs onto the screen, along with new scenery to illustrate the title. Without the title cards, no one would understand what is going on. And this proves that a novel should not be adapted for the cinema. It is not the plot that is so interesting but the scenery and the stimulating events. Here the adapter sensed things correctly, for he chose precisely those scenes that could not be represented on stage. While the fate of noble Vinicius and his beloved slave Ligia does not especially warm us, we stare, full of desire and emotion, at the images and the opulent culture of the Roman Empire. We love the epicure Petronius, the arbiter elegantiarum (the title has it as alegantiarium, a ridiculous mistake that would earn a schoolchild a D in Latin); we feast our eyes on the orgiastic banquets; the brazen Emperor Nero stands before us, brutish and declaiming verse; and the Christians gather in the furtive secrecy of the catacombs. Then, with growing excitement, we see the three great tricks. First, there is the burning of Rome. Buildings collapse, sparks fly, thousands of people flee, and, racing through all this fire and destruction, Vinicius searches for his Ligia as Nero stands above on the terrace singing a hymn to the city he set ablaze. Second, we see the games in the arena. Four-horse chariots race; gladiators fight, the emperor gives the merciless sign, thumbs down, and the loser receives the deathblow. Then twenty lions emerge from their underground cages to drive the Christians across the arena like a herd of animals and tear them to pieces. We watch all this in delightful terror. Suddenly, a bull leaps into the arena with the beautiful Christian, Ligia, tied to his back. But the gigantic slave Ursus wrestles the monster to the ground. From Nero’s side Vinicius leaps into the arena. Displaying his scars of battle, deafened by the applause from the arena, he pleads for mercy for his beloved. And then, shocked, we see how the noble Roman Petronius (even today everyone should read his tale The Dinner of Trimalchio) and his dear Eunice die at the command of the emperor Nero. While a happy banquet effervesces around them, they slit their wrists and sink down slowly, one falling onto the other, to their deaths. Flowers rain upon them from above. We see all this in rapidly alternating, masterfully directed images. This film shows precisely the potential of the cinema as well as its limits. The scenery, the images, and the

188

Transformations of Experience

action full of effects (and as far as possible, wordless) —these are the sorts of elements that the cinema should use to amuse, instruct, and shock its audience. For this, it probably was not even necessary to take Sienkiewicz’s somewhat musty novel as a basis. Many of these images were beautiful, turbulent, stimulating, and bewildering. The audience did indeed applaud after every act, as if in a real theater. And the impressionistic music by Maestro Nouguès of Paris lulled everyone into that kind of gently stirring mood that distracts from the muteness of the cinematic pictures.3 For contemplative people, the presentation delivered not only an opportunity for enthrallment but also one for reflection. It is now time that the cinema recognize the potential it has to offer. It can make the impossible possible; but what is possible for the theater will remain impossible for the cinema. In this film, Peter comes upon Christ and asks: “Quo vadis domine?” (“Lord, whither goest Thou?”). At the same time, admirers of the cinema were asking of themselves and of this film: “Quo vadis—cinema?” Notes 1. Pinthus refers here to Das Kinobuch (1914), the introduction of which appears later in this chapter (no. 86). 2. Although he spells the name differently, Pinthus is likely referring to Bernhard Wildenhain (1873–1957), a German actor and longstanding member of the Leipziger Schauspielhaus ensemble. 3. A few years prior to the film, the French composer Jean Nouguès (1875–1932) had written an opera based on Sienkiewicz’s novel. The opera, also entitled Quo vadis?, premiered in Nice in 1909 and went on to tour Europe and the United States.

82 ANONYMOUS The Student of Prague First published as “Der Student von Prag,” in Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung, no. 35 (August 30, 1913), 1–2. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Stellan Rye’s The Student of Prague (1913) was considered a model Autorenfilm, with a script by author Hanns Heinz Ewers and the esteemed stage actor Paul Wegener in the lead role. In this review, an anonymous critic celebrates the artistic qualities of Rye’s film and identifi es its various nineteenth-century predecessors, including Goethe, Adelbert von Chamisso, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Oscar Wilde. The critic laments, however, that the inclusion of a slapstick film at the premiere undermined the desired shift away from the Kientopp (about which Ewers had written in 1907; see chapter 1, no. 1). Notably, The Student of Prague was the only Autorenfilm to become a critical and popular success both in Germany and abroad. See also the text by Wegener later in this chapter, no. 88.

As is known, all good things come in threes. After Bassermann and Reicher,1 Paul Wegener has now introduced himself to us in film at the Mozart-Lichtspiele on Nollendorfplatz. It was a full-fledged premiere with all the trappings: an arrival by automobile, evening wear, cries from the public (which went unheeded), applause, and that particular nervous mood that is familiar enough from opening nights at the Lessing Theater and the Deutsches Theater. Organizers also distributed a full-fledged, somewhat old-

An Art for the Times

189

fashioned theater program. From it, we learned that The Student of Prague is a fantastical drama in four acts by Hanns Heinz Ewers, directed by its screenwriter, with music by Prof. Josef Weiss; that it was shot in Hradcˇany, in the Belvedere Castle in Prague, and in the Fürstenberg Palace and Lobkowicz; and that the scenery was modeled on designs by the painter Klaus Richter! Now that is all one could hope for. Many renowned writers of our time would be happy to be treated with such care and devotion onstage, to see their figures brought to life by actors like Wegener, Grete Berger, and John Gottowt. It is a breath of fresh air— now the cinema is “up to date.”2 Ewers is well known, as are Wegener and the rest of the cast and crew. All are artists who can lay claim to attention and respect. For this reason alone, the new film has something to do with art. But I am satisfied to report that it has more to do with art than just that. For it is a poetic work [Dichterwerk] that fervently attempts to overcome the weaknesses of film, to soften its hard edges, to replace the repellent need for inane explanations with a coherent plot. [. . .] Of course, this Student of Prague is a dramatized nightmare, and very literary. Very literary. Its illustrious godfathers are Goethe, Chamisso, Amadeus Hoffmann, and Oscar Wilde. Goethe had to hand over his Mephistopheles (oh, how Paul Wegener would shine in that role!); Chamisso, his Schlemihl; Hoffmann, his Dr. Miracle; 3 Wilde, his Dorian Gray. Their blood flows tastefully and eerily through the veins of this fantastical drama. Finally, the whole thing is shrouded in the immortal beauty of dead Prague. The costumes from the 1820s lend it a romantic, old-fashioned air, and even the great memory of Madame Récamier comes to life.4 With exquisite art, all this is pictorially arranged into an exciting drama. There are magical views of old Prague; there are images that make our eyes widen in horror: as when the mysterious Dr. Scapinelli releases the reflection of the student Balduin from the mirror for one hundred thousand gold guilders; when this reflection pursues the hapless student everywhere he goes, smirking like Mephistopheles at his every misfortune; when Balduin and his beloved meet at the secluded Jewish cemetery; and fi nally when our hero, driven to madness, sees his uncanny doppelgänger, but strikes himself and falls down dead! The candles flicker on the table, and Dr. Scapinelli tears the promissory note to pieces over the corpse. The horror is palpable. The Mozart Cinema’s management saw fit to destroy the film’s impression, which was intensified by Josef Weiss’s music, with some childishness by the famous Max Linder.5 When a film is of such high artistic quality, it should be respected. But of course, we were only in a Kientopp! Notes 1. Albert Bassermann and Emanuel Reicher were both famous stage actors who had begun to act in films in 1913. Bassermann’s Der Andere (dir. Max Mack) is generally known as the first Autorenfilm; it premiered in Berlin’s Mozartsaal on February 13, 1913. Emanuel Reicher starred in Joe May’s Heimat und Fremde, which had its press premiere in August 1913 and opened the following month. 2. This phrase appears in English in the original. 3. The allusions are to Chamisso’s novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814), the title character of which sells his shadow, and to the character Dr. Miracle from Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1881), based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s writings. 4. Juliette Récamier (known as Madame Récamier) led one of the most prominent French literary and political salons in the early nineteenth century. 5. The “childishness” refers to one of the hundreds of short popular slapstick routines between 1907 and 1914 that featured Max Linder, the internationally known French movie star, who influenced Chaplin.

190

Transformations of Experience

83 HERMANN HÄFKER The Call for Art First published as “Der Ruf nach Kunst,” in Hermann Häfker, Kino und Kunst (Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1913), 5–11; here 5–8, 10–11. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Arguably the most important work of cinema reform in the prewar period, Hermann Häfker’s seventy-one-page book Kino und Kunst (Cinema and art)—the first chapter of which is excerpted below—sought to raise the new medium to the level of art that appeals to all humanity. In language strongly recalling Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), Häfker describes the sensory overload of urban modernity, which has challenged the traditional status and function of art. Furthermore, noting film’s mass nature and reproducibility on an unprecedented scale, Häfker advances ideas that would be famously developed by Walter Benjamin, who—despite significant differences—was also invested in cinema’s potentially salubrious effect on the masses. See further articles by Häfker in chapters 2 and 8 (nos. 19, 112, and 113).

The huge movement that has been taken up by a thousand voices, the call for “aesthetic culture,” for “art everywhere,” arises from the unique distress of an era unlike any that came before it. Formerly, the arts—music, painting, sculpture, poetry, and architecture—sat perched upon thrones in their temples of exalted dignity. The reverberations of beauty that they created fell sparsely and with mild brilliance on everyday life, its basic objects and intellectual expressions. Scholars argued over the highest beauty and true style; churches, lords, and kingdoms were the administrators of “taste.” Wherever there was art, there were great ideas, great will, great ability, and concentrated life. Works of art flooded beholders with great sentiment, deeply moving and yet removed from everyday passions. The sight of art was a celebration because it was as uncommon as a holiday. Now, those days are gone forever. Visual and sculptural impressions, word and sound, color and line, once the emblems of that festive art, pour down like a hailstorm on the nerves of modern man—especially, but not exclusively, in large cities. When he wakes up, he is greeted with breakfast and a thick book: the “newspaper.” A sheer mass of words is spoken to us, and mental influences of many kinds punish our nerves, taking full advantage of the tools of literature. From our household goods to our wallpaper, the pictorial and sculptural fantasies of many people, indeed of many greater eras, speak to us. A walk down the street leads us past advertising pillars, whose walls are full of images and discourse. To win over more souls, shop windows deploy every possible strategy, which their manufacturers have borrowed from the most refined works of art. Hundreds of glossy “illustrated” magazines and newspapers await us in cafes—and even in the public library. Bands play along. In the evening, urban streets become a fireworks show, whose sudden and blinding magnificence holds our attention under its spell for a long time. One can truly say that whoever is still capable of perceiving these things (it seems to me that people who grow up in large cities actually develop a kind of protective skin, but travelers who come in from the outside are the victims), or rather, as I would say, whoever takes these things seriously, whoever naïvely wants to treat them as that which they fully claim to be—as arts—will need precious formative years in order to find his way through at all: in order to make it through, from the first rush of enthusiasm through awakening internal resistance to the necessary callousness. For everything that works here with artistic means does not produce a pure mood but rather an intoxicated one, if it does not serve

An Art for the Times

191

elevated and pure things, and if it does not originate from an elevated and pure spirit. It is not only the constant laceration of the senses produced by all of this tickling pleasure— it is also all “expression.” “Expression” of a real world and an attitude that lies behind it. The attitude that seeks to express itself through all of this, the ideas that all of this seeks to suggest are not rare, not humanely elevated and genuine. From the simple promotion and suggestion of more or less dubious needs to pointless games with expressive forms from bygone eras, this is all common banality. Common banality disguised in exciting, festive costumes. The very invention underlying most of this sort of thing is neither rare nor genuine, but of a mass nature. That is one characteristic. And now, with the least amount of human effort possible, this mass invention—that is the second characteristic—is being automatically, chemically, mechanically reproduced. This is not like the woodblock engraver’s plate, reproduced slowly and painstakingly a few hundred times— but rather thousands and hundreds of thousands of times, effortlessly, quickly, and cheaply. This is how a single idea of “expressing” something banal with artistic means (visual, musical, poetic) will not defile just one street corner by the next day but rather shouts at us from the walls, shops, window displays and lighting systems of all cities and many towns—not just in Germany but all over Europe and frequently all around the world. And every day brings something new. Never before in all of history has every single person, willingly or not, had to endure so many insistent impressions—hammering on his senses, heart, and thought with the effective and often skillfully employed tools of the arts—as he who leaves the office or the shop at noon today and takes a thousand steps to find his lunch. [. . .] In its simple form as a snapshot, photography has certainly brought about more good than harm. But then our sense of invention came up with a use that suddenly lent it an uncanny and devastating power over human minds and human culture. It became cinematography. In itself, cinematography is nothing but a methodical demonstration of thousands of snapshots one after another, enabled by a marvelous mechanism. Only this photography did not simply imitate the light and shadow of an inanimate image, but rather the three-dimensionality and movement of living reality. Thus cinematography emerged all at once as a rival not only to painting but also to theater, to a certain extent even to sculpture, and in connection with the gramophone, even opera and elocution. It combined the concentrated charms of these soul-stirring arts with something of the dry stylization of puppet theater, and it added the most extreme triteness of sensational carnival amusements. Cinematography made perhaps its most powerful addition to the automatically produced and reproduced art-like impressions that assail the man on the street, magically attracting him. This was the most powerful in part because it is the most art-like of all, claiming that its gestures are borrowed from a whole series of arts that are themselves among the most impressive. It thereby truly “competed” with theaters, which we can see from the fact that it attracted spectators who were looking for “art” and for whom the art of the theater, at least, was too inconvenient to access and . . . too expensive. The impressions that it offered, however, were almost without exception the opposite of artistic: they were not “pure” but rather relied on whipping up the kinds of base instincts that also excite dogs on the street curb: sexual feelings, fear, greed, vanity, tickled laughter, and sentimentality that is cheap, effortless, excessive, and enthusiastically mawkish. And the “greatness” that claimed to speak through the cinema to the audience members, whose “expression” this art became, was only—or almost only—“profit” writ large! [. . .] To elevate cinematography to the status of art, to practice it as an art, would mean first immersing ourselves in its essence and conditions as honestly and impartially as possible and getting to know its limits as well as its functions and possibilities. The next task

192

Transformations of Experience

would be to bring these existing possibilities to life while staying true to the dictate of genuineness, such that the fi nished fi lm, like any other art, becomes the most vivid “expression” of a human will, of the human sensibility, joy, and sorrow that stand behind it. Filled [erfüllt] with this drive toward abundance [Fülle], the film artist will not dedicate his work to worthlessness or banality; rather, he will want to include the best and most substantial material, however possible. If we imagine cinema thus cleansed of shallowness, trash, tastelessness, and insubstantial titillation—and most importantly of all waste and dissipation of resources, of all excess—and remember the social organization it relies on and to which it is bound, our hearts will skip a beat. Then every week, all over the world in a thousand far-flung sites of cheerful, easily accessible entertainment, an abundance of pure, strong, mental, and spiritual nourishment would penetrate every social class; social classes and peoples of the world would, to a certain extent, become folded into a single cultural humanity with the same sensibilities, thoughts, and outlooks, the same knowledge and balanced education. Cinema could do more to this end than the printed word, because—in contrast to the word—it is bound by its economic conditions to a very limited and centralized production and to a few excellent distribution organizations, which have only a little room to proliferate. And because, due to its aforementioned immediate clarity, its sensually thrilling lifelikeness, and its freedom from presuppositions, it has a less common but more unforgettable effect on people, particularly the less educated.

84 HERBERT TANNENBAUM Problems of the Film Drama First published as “Probleme des Kinodramas,” in Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie 3, no. 3–4 (1913–14), 60–63. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Seeking to distinguish cinema from the stage as an “expressive form that has its own unique style,” Herbert Tannenbaum here revises claims from his earlier film-theoretical writings. Whereas his treatise Kino und Theater (1912) had positioned the narrative as the central aspect of cinematic drama, the following article places plot, acting, and visual composition on the same plane (also anticipating Béla Balázs and Jean Epstein in his theorization of objects onscreen). Furthermore, while Tannenbaum’s essay “Kunst im Kino” (1912) had welcomed the Autorenfilm as a great step toward cinematic art, this text from a year later dismissed the literary films popular at the time, instead seeking to delineate a specific aesthetics of the film drama, or what he calls “the drama of pure visuality.” See also the article by Tannenbaum in chapter 5, no. 72.

In matters of arts and culture, rarely has a battle been so bitterly fought as the one currently raging over the value of cinema. After five years of the movie theater’s rapid but haphazard development, during which time no serious or energetic attempt was made to articulate the laws and potentials of cinema in writing or otherwise, it has suddenly dawned on humanity today like a memory whose symptoms assume the usual forms of polls, conventions, and countless newspaper and magazine articles. However, even through all these efforts, the manifold aesthetic problems of cinema were neither theoretically nor practically solved; instead, a great series of misunderstandings and concep-

An Art for the Times

193

tual confusions have arisen, which make it difficult to see things in a fundamental way and which prevent us from truly enjoying the multifaceted performance on the cinema stage. Cinema’s real problem is the film drama, the drama without words, the drama of pure visuality. The film drama has already established the most important quality that gives the cinema its distinctive position and that sharply delineates its area of operation from that of the theater. The absence of words robs the fi lm drama of the potential to show differentiated human characters or to handle human problems dialectically, things that interest us in the theater. Thus, the world of cinema becomes uniquely primitive: its people lack any semblance of intellectual burdens, they are uninhibited, purely instinctual human beings; the various modalities of love, hate, hunger, and desire for power are the immutable spiritual fundamentals, which—affected by any given constellation of purely external occurrences—react by driving a given person to certain actions, actions that in turn cause more or less meaningful changes to things and relations in the external world. In this way, a rapid, uninterrupted chain of events is set into motion, whereby no distinctive human individuality interests us (or could interest us) in any way, but in which three other things can become valuable and impressive: the flow of events (in a word, the plot), the facial expressions of the actors, and the purely optical appearance of the image onscreen—that is, the scenic composition, in which plot and facial expressions occur. Through the lack of any spiritual depth, film characters completely lose their earthly grounding: they become peculiar, instinctually living, moving phantoms; they become uncanny, fantastic. In order to recognize all this, one need only watch a film without musical accompaniment. Certainly, music has a curious and close relationship with the moving picture, which shall not be explained in any detail here. It is as though the unilateral influence upon the sense of vision so overloaded the latter that it created an intense need to engage our hearing. Music absorbs practically all sounds that accompany the events occurring on film in reality. Music weaves these noises into a unified whole and uses its tools to shape a sonorous work of art, which, for its part, forms the soil from which the silent shadow world of the film grows. It is thus in no way advisable to contest music’s important place in the cinema. Through its connection to the film drama, an artwork can become a cinematic opera, which might show more stylistic purity than the opera. The essential shadowiness of human beings in the cinema creates total uniformity between them and all things in the visible world. Based on inner meaning, evaluated solely as exciting moments, there is no difference between the man Bumke,1 the dog that follows him, the dairy maid that he bowls over, the flour trough that he falls into, and the tree he finally climbs. In animated films—those remarkable, original creations that have no analogue in any area of human expressive culture—objects are even stronger than people. They make people completely dispensable. On the screen, they lead a life of no less intensity than that of the people in the cinema. We need only recall picture shows of this kind, such as the “automatic apartment move”2 that occurs without any human help. The scene is a fully furnished apartment. All at once, huge boxes waddle through the door, come to a stop, and open themselves. Paintings slip immediately from the walls, books fly off the shelves, tablecloths fold themselves, and all these objects pack themselves into the boxes. Then the furniture lines up in rank and file, marches out of the room, down the stairs, up the stairs into the new apartment. There, the operation reverses itself: the boxes unpack themselves and the furniture sets itself in place; only a small table cannot come to rest, because all the other furniture constantly displaces it, until it too finally finds a spot.

194

Transformations of Experience

The world of cinema thus establishes itself as one that exists entirely beyond our life, light as air (psychologically and visually) and two-dimensional, a world that has absolutely nothing to do with the anthropocentric, intellectual world of the theater but is in its own way completely balanced, unified, and homogeneous. In this idiosyncrasy, this relativity, we recognize a separate cinema-specific style. Now it is simply a matter of working through cinematic drama in a way appropriate to the demands of this cinematic style, of doing it justice down to the last details, in order to create works of meaningful, artistic expressive capacity. In a few isolated cases, we already see films in our cinemas that come very close to this goal. But the majority of contemporary films still fall short; people sit across from each other, steadfastly talking, talking, talking rather than doing— shooting, riding, jumping. And so we must wait, in faithful anticipation, for the Shakespeare of cinema, who will perhaps only come into being once a generation has grown up with the cinema. The unique talent he must bring to the world, which he will have to learn through practice in order to gain technical knowledge, is invention: an inexhaustible ability to dream up original stories, stories born from the spirit and technology of the cinema. That this gift has nothing to do with a talent for writing is already certain, and it will become more obvious once it has been established that today’s popular “literary” film (excepting coincidences) is an absurdity. Alongside the film director, the film actor is also a productive artist, inasmuch as acting, though merely imitative in its vocalization, is creative in its embodiment. Certainly, the film actor has far more room to shape his role individually than the stage actor, who is essentially chained to the playwright and the latter’s will through the given text. Thus in film performance (unless a screenwriter is directing his own work), there is a certain dichotomy to the production, which seems to contradict the subjectively uniform artistic process necessary to the creation of a work of art. But here too, the writer can—and should—use the written scenario to express his intentions so clearly and comprehensively (with the film director acting as a skilled middleman) that the film actor is able to perform according to the screenwriter’s individual vision, such that the final work appears as the expression of a unified artistic will. Cinema demands (even if Albert Bassermann disagrees)3 an absolutely unique acting style, which is fundamentally different from stage acting. The film actor’s only instrument is his body. He must proclaim his intentions through the body alone. Most importantly, given the flat appearance of all objects in the cinematic image, the film actor must always position himself in relief against the scenery, so that all his movements are clear and flow in a totally unbroken rhythm. But then the moving picture demands a very specific type of facially expressive talent, like the one possessed today, perhaps exclusively, by the famous actress Asta Nielsen, although even her skill has significantly decreased in recent years. Her gestures never arouse our suspicion that we are dealing with traditional and consensual symbols used to announce intentions or interior conditions (as, for example, we understand a nodding head to mean affirmation and a shaking head to mean a negative reply, whereas for Chinese people the opposite is true). Rather, in Nielsen’s acting, gestures und facial expressions seem to be the consistent, internally determined effluence of emotional impulses. Her body simply does what it must do, reacting to all affects. Thus in Asta Nielsen’s physical art, we experience unmediated affect. Herein lies the true essence of specifically cinematic acting, for which today there are hardly any other examples to be found. (Perhaps the path to such acting can be found only in individual acts of Russian ballet and in the experiments of the Jaques-Dalcroze School,4 although in Hellerau it is a question not of typical affects in the physical arts but rather of the realization of musical-rhythmic values.) Stage actors tend not to have this gift of facial expression, so they fail in front of the camera as long as they subscribe to the (gen-

An Art for the Times

195

erally held) belief that cinema demands nothing more than an excessive exaggeration of the gestures that punctuate the spoken word onstage and in everyday life. Moreover, on today’s stages, a remarkably anti-expressive culture reigns, a lack that is left over from the days of naturalism, where all gestures were suppressed in favor of a unilateral attention to words, so that they could not be interpreted as unnatural exaggeration. In this case, even the flourishing of pantomime was of no use to the cinema. For there exist significant differences between pantomime and cinema (as between dance and cinema), distinctions that are always overlooked in favor of the moments of silence shared by both expressive genres. Pantomime is a more dance-like form of emotional impulse, and its facial expression is of a predominantly symbolic character. This difference becomes obvious once we imagine pantomime actors moving their lips as though they were speaking. It has already been designated as a lack of style when film actors perform the mouth movements of speech even though no words are audible. It can be argued, however, that the mouth movements serve solely as an expressive means, much like eyebrow raising, eye rolling, or hand gestures, for example. Admittedly, speech movements might be perceived as inorganic and lacking in style if an actor wants the audience to be able to read words on his lips. The final expressive possibility that cinema offers, in addition to plot and acting, is the visual, scenic design of the film, which is capable of transmitting purely optical experiences. Picture shows, at least today, still lack color. All attempts to remedy this flaw (as it is wont to be called) through artificial coloring of filmstrips have only produced tasteless, garish results. It is thus necessary to create an appealing distribution of space through the use of light and dark contrast and to use appropriate arrangements of real elements to achieve a harmonious alignment. Because photographic technology places people and things next to each other on a unified plane, it is first and foremost necessary to lend the scenic frame a certain monumentality. For a minutely detailed background, in which furniture, potted palms, figures, and figurines come together in a confused, characterless mass of lines, can never create an effective contrast with the actor. His person and his gestures will simply be swallowed up, and the image will remain totally ineffective. Here, the necessity of maintaining a fixed camera distance in the frame is a tangible deficit. It robs the cinematic image of many effective possibilities that photography enjoys. A sensible director, however, will know to avoid monotonous arrangements, which can easily arise from this principle. From the preceding remarks, it is evident that the cinema is an expressive form that has its own unique style in every sense, a style that imposes narrow but well-defi ned guidelines on the existence of film drama. Film dramas that hold to this style and work toward completeness within these boundaries can justifiably be called works of art. Thus nothing stands in the way of the development of cinematic art. If we try to put this new art in constellation with the other arts, to measure it against them, we can make no distinction between higher and lower art, for there is only high art. However, we can certainly assign comparative values to the different arts’ essential abilities to make an important and meaningful impression on man. Under these terms, if we were to compare a literary drama to a cinematic drama, we would doubtless have to put the literary drama before the film drama. For the literary drama knows our suffering and our problems; it leads us intensively through them and beyond them; it unsettles and redeems us. Film drama leads us out of ourselves into an exhilarating world, which knows nothing of us and our pain. As long as we sit before the cinema screen, we forget our grievances and live happy moments in a realm without motives or consequences. But when we leave the theater, everything that was in us is still as it was; we have not been redeemed.

196

Transformations of Experience

After all that, we no longer wish to forego the magnificent instrument of the cinematograph. It is able to deliver its blessings to the educated as well as the uneducated, who tend to be scared away by the problematics of literary dramas. And particularly this latter type of person, the “little man” (as they say), regains for the first time—since the Middle Ages—the ability to transcend the drudgery of everyday life by watching fictional plays. If we take responsibility for extending this benefit to every member of the populace, whether he lives in the smallest village or the largest city, then we are truly acting humanely. Notes 1. On Bumke, see Lautensack in chapter 3, no. 36. 2. Tannenbaum appears to be referring here to Émile Cohl’s 1910 animated short Mobilier fidèle (The automatic moving company). Hans Richter would also feature a similar effect in his Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts before breakfast, 1928). 3. On Bassermann, see the anonymous review of The Student of Prague earlier in this chapter (no. 82). 4. The Swiss composer and music pedagogue Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) is known for developing eurhythmics, a means of teaching music through physical movement.

85 WILL SCHELLER The New Illusion First published as “Die neue Illusion,” in Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie 3, no. 9–10 (1913–14), 227–29. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A journalist, writer, and frequent contributor to Bild und Film, Will Scheller here argues that cinema is uniquely suited to the needs of modern man, providing a means of passive relaxation and distraction, and he identifi es it as a new art form for the twentieth century—one that will “require its own branch within aesthetics.” Scheller’s discussion of cinematic psychology should be seen as an implicit critique of Konrad Lange, who had argued that cinema was a mere reproduction of reality lacking in artistic value in his 1912 book Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmittel (The cinematograph as a medium of popular entertainment; see Lange’s text in chapter 7, no. 95). Reappropriating many of Lange’s key aesthetic categories, including illusionism, abstraction, and style, Scheller here seeks to highlight the new medium’s ever-greater “artistic character.”

Every art object, no matter what its form, ultimately has the same psychological goal: to produce an illusion for the person enjoying it. It seeks to divert his interest temporarily away from that materiality, so unproductive for inner life, that makes up his everyday existence and onto something outside of himself—something whose material irreality he does not doubt although it has the power and intention to unsettle him to the very core of his being, thereby raising his consciousness to a higher level. This aspect of artistic appreciation has had various manifestations in different eras, for it is a law of civilization that every epoch has its own hardships and must, accordingly, seek an appropriate means to achieve or retain balance. And given that the general circumstances of humanity are constantly changing, seemingly hallowed forms of spiritual enjoyment can gradually lose their self-evident effectiveness as they age, thus making way for new forms that an era has created for itself in order to keep universal needs from becoming perverted.

An Art for the Times

197

Of course, to consider this, we must take a long view of time, for the birth of a new method of artistic representation takes more than a few days; indeed, it takes decades or more to crystallize completely in its highest form. Nevertheless, problematic as it may be, cultural observers can take a position with regard to an emerging form that has more future than past; and they can sometimes determine, without help from theoretical speculation, basing their analysis solely upon practical, experiential evaluation, whether a new form of heightened life through aesthetic illusion has any significance. If it does, provided that they speak earnestly and without bias, they can say whether this form is entitled to its contemporary existence in the cultural landscape. Now the twentieth century has, through a combination of visual and narrative effects, created a new art form, which offers humane pacification for the smoldering desire of urban man—the epitome of modern humanity—who is overwrought by his increased workload: an opportunity for the subtlest and most primitive recuperation. This recovery functions by totally distracting man from himself, by showing him—beginning with its most splendid presentations—scenes of something general, a situation or a destiny, that portray his everyday life in an immaterial, that is, artistic, universally human light, so that he walks away from them with a lively sense of stimulation—which is the most even the greatest work of art can do. The twentieth century created cinema, and with it the so-called—and misnamed—dramatic film, whose effects, foundations, characteristics, and consequences we must now address. First, we must point out this art form’s most striking attribute: for contemporary people of all stripes, rushed and swept away by the speed of the present epoch, harried by the general conditions of existence, film, or Flimmerspiel [flicker play]—as it has now come to be called—satisfies the need for pacification, for the easily obtainable relaxation of their mistreated senses, and above all for the pleasure of looking. And the movies do this in a way that exceeds the capabilities of every other representational form, whether written, visual, or physical. For the talk of decreasing cinema attendance is a ridiculous, or perhaps malicious, fabrication. On the contrary, the facts manifested in and around a few recent productions such as Hanns Heinz Ewers’s The Student of Prague, Arthur Kahane’s Die Insel der Seligen [The isle of the blessed], Felix Salten’s Der Shylock von Krakau [The Shylock of Kraków], or the Italian work Die Herrin des Nils [Anthony and Cleopatra]1 — namely, the facts that on the one hand, film direction is passing more and more into artistically skilled hands, and on the other, the film audience is increasingly sophisticated— these facts prove that everything is looking up for cinematographic representation; indeed, we could say that it is almost past its preliminary stages. And what’s more, there are now people who find it self-evident that one should be attuned to this new art form; precisely this unselfconsciousness on the part of viewers is an extremely important sign of the ascendance of film art. Now that we have named the external characteristics of cinema’s situation, we can go further into the crux of the matter, which we have already hinted at: cinematic psychology. As described at the outset, film corresponds to people’s general social desire for illusion, but why are people so delighted by the movies? How is it that they are so deeply moved by these living images that they swarm into cinemas as though they were temples where some panacea for all of life’s problems could be found? We should mention again that it is not exceptional, but typical, for modern man to live in completely different circumstances from the generations before him. Like them, however, he has an instinctual desire to get away from material things from time to time— indeed, this desire is particularly passionate in modern man—but he no longer has the time or the strength of nerves to engage with abstract stimuli like literature, theater, or

198

Transformations of Experience

fine art. He is too harried and overwrought for leisurely contemplation. Thus, the new illusion offered by film must appear as an ideal solution: here he can see life without the confusing decoration of words; here, plots are visible and proceed according to the unsettling or exhilarating, often truly educational logic of immediate necessity; his imagination, which is bound in chains forged by the conditions of his existence, can run riot, even if only passively—but it has long forgotten how to be active. This is the long-desired, powerful illusion, which transcends the small concerns of daily life and enters the realm of greater strains of existence [Daseinsspannungen]; this is a pathos that is not dependent upon conceptual interpretations, but rather emerges unambiguously from the ethical passion of events themselves. To modern man, the pleasures offered by novels and plays seem too provisory; he is no longer capable of the efforts they require. Is it any wonder, then, that he gratefully embraces an art form that unconditionally offers him that for which novels and plays require something in return? For this is the axis around which the major differences turn: film offers spectators what the narrative poet demands from his readers: namely, the complete setting of the epic, which the reader’s imagination must make up as it goes along. On the other hand, film forgoes what the dramatic poet requires: namely, intellectual participation in the dialogue, for in film, dialogue is generally replaced by facial expressions, which are usually even more eloquent—a characteristic related to the greater primitivism upon which film art is premised. People will predictably argue that this is all well and good, but it is simply not art. It is art, however, because film takes the spectator outside of himself and shows him life from a meaningful point of view; of course, we are talking about only the best film creations, which are still a minority at the moment. Due to its construction, film is an aesthetic whole, consisting of a narratively coherent series of moving images, which completely express a poetic—that is to say, a universal human—idea, whose completeness is a result first and foremost of its artistic power, as produced by the actors. The participation that writers of the word necessarily demand from the indulgent audience has been abolished by the completed images and replaced by the permanent charm that the images themselves exude. This charm is based less in the object than in the way in which it is formed. Observation has taught us that a film’s effectiveness depends on how purely its actors are able to embody the ideas laid before them. Asta Nielsen’s great power over viewers does not come from her occasional engagement in erotic refinements but from the fact that she is such a strong personality, such a magnificent artist, gifted with a simply unbelievable ability to transform herself and with the capacity to penetrate to the core of poetic ideas and precisely manifest them, expressing her coming fate with her every movement, no matter how incidental it seems. This performance is no longer dependent on learned intellectual understanding, because its immediate impact comes from the visible rhythm of its epic motive, whereby all its poetic power is concentrated on a single sensory effect, as opposed to the theater, which engages multiple senses, usually to varying degrees. In film, the inconspicuous, comforting music lulls the spectator’s sense of hearing while living pictures fully absorb his attention. What is happening within him? He is not a reader, as he would have to be for stories, and also not a listener, as he would have to be for plays; his imagination senses no strain, only satisfaction, but this satisfaction does not lead to mindless pleasure. Rather, it directs his inner gaze toward the compelling consistency of the process of life unfolding before him: without imposing any opinions on him, it allows his emotions to participate without inhibition, and as inner forces are directly expressed through an ever more sophisticated art of gesture, he perceives an elevated sense for life and goes home conscious that human existence is not exhausted by the force of habit. But film offers more than just these ethical-realistic impressions, which alone cannot satisfy modern man’s

An Art for the Times

199

needs. Due to its unlimited potential, film can allow the most unexpected fantasies to run wild, as they did so delightfully in The Isle of the Blessed and so disturbingly in the Hoffmannesque The Student of Prague. From the shallowest joke to the deepest seriousness, film shows every attitude toward life, and it does so with an ease that no other form of visual representation can approach with such spiritual intensity. For this is most certainly a matter of spiritual achievements; such a Flimmerspiel is based on creative ideas. Directors and actors exercise spiritual abilities, and the ultimate impression is spiritual, for it not only arouses aesthetic and moral senses but also deepens them to a more or less lively and lasting moment of inner activity. It is pointless to ask whether film is capable of achieving the highest level of artistic value. On the one hand, about such a popular and widely effective form of representation, this almost seems to be a snobbish, sneering question; on the other hand, traditional measures cannot be used to judge such totally new psychological processes, at least not until cinematic psychology has been studied with sufficient factual clarity. Finally, we must emphasize that if style is born of necessity, film is, through the evident cultivation of its own laws, developing a creative [gestalterischen] character that will require its own branch within aesthetics. Indeed, the progress of civilization does not ask whether old terms will suffice for the new things it is bringing with it; through their very existence, such phenomena demand equality among other cultural forms, and they have always known how to assert this demand to the extent that they have any power. All evidence suggests that the cinematograph is one of those phenomena that will emerge victorious from its struggles. Note 1. On The Student of Prague, see the anonymous review earlier in this chapter (no. 82). Die Insel der Seligen, subtitled “Ein heiteres Flimmerspiel,” was directed by Max Reinhardt with a screenplay by Arthur Kahane; it premiered in Berlin on October 3, 1913. Felix Salten wrote the script for Der Shylock von Krakau, which was directed by Carl Wilhelm and starred Rudolph Schildkraut; the film also opened in Berlin in October 1913. Finally, Marcantonio e Cleopatra was a 1913 Italian film directed by Enrico Guazzoni, loosely based on the play by William Shakespeare.

86 KURT PINTHUS The Photoplay: A Serious Introduction for Those Who Think Ahead and Reflect First published as “Das Kinostück: Ernste Einleitung für Vor- und Nachdenkliche,” in Kurt Pinthus, ed., Das Kinobuch (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1914), 1–12; here 1–11. Translated by Don Reneau.

This text served as the introduction to Kurt Pinthus’s Das Kinobuch, a collection of film scenarios drafted by over a dozen young poets and writers of the time, among them Richard A. Bermann (a.k.a. Arnold Höllriegel), Max Brod, Albert Ehrenstein, Walter Hasenclever, Else Lasker-Schüler, František Langer, and Heinrich Lautensack. We have chosen to translate Pinthus’s key term Kinostück as “photoplay,” in keeping with the author’s sharp distinction between adapting a literary or dramatic work into a “film drama” (Kinodrama) and writing a play (Stück) specifically for the cinema (Kino)—one “keyed to its unique capacities.” Elaborating on his earlier essay, “Quo Vadis, Cinema?” (no. 81), Pinthus’s introduction distinguishes film through three means of expression:

200

Transformations of Experience location, movement, and situation. Das Kinobuch found a new generation of readers when it was reprinted fifty years later, in 1963, with a new foreword by Pinthus. The original introduction’s celebration of early cinema aesthetics anticipates Carlo Mierendorff’s “If I Only Had the Cinema!” (see chapter 13, no. 193), as well as Pinthus’s own paean to cinema’s expansion of human experience in chapter 12, no. 177.

I leave it up to the reader to consider whether this cinema book [Kinobuch] is just an entertaining bit of pleasantry or a serious effort to give the cinema, lagging still in a state of some perplexity, new impulses and material. While no one disputes the legitimacy of instructional films, occasionally the possibility of the photoplay is denied. For that reason, a book of photoplays has first to discuss the nature of the photoplay. We must draw a distinction between the film drama [Kinodrama] and the photoplay. Film drama, in which theatrical dramas are filmed or novels dramatized, has to perish. For this is the cinema’s chief mistake: that it begins to undervalue its own essence. Cinema wants to become theater, not recognizing that it has nothing in common with the theater. Cinema will be able to endure and develop only if it truly strives to be cinema—that is, if it keeps its own endless potentialities in mind and gives up its desire to emulate the stage. The boundary between cinema and the stage must be established with the utmost precision. Brief consideration shows that the essence of the stage lies in the unfolding of a fate expressed through the word, while that of the photoplay resides in showing an entertaining milieu enlivened by an obvious plot expressed through movement and gestures. The central essence of the theater is denied the cinema: dialogue, the word. The chief content of the cinema, however, consists precisely in those elements that the noble theater either avoids or only suggests: living nature, an unfamiliar milieu, surprising tricks, and powerfully stirring scenes. The better a theatrical scene, the less cinematic it must be; the more cinematic a scene, the less possible it becomes on the stage. Every element of good theatrical scenes—sharp dialogue, revelation, anticipation, and entanglement—will have a feeble effect in the cinema, simply because the cinema lacks words. An effective conclusion to an act, perhaps the revelation of a terrible fact shocking to actors and listeners alike, produces on film only a silent flapping of the jaw and a few gestures of outrage. Even the explanatory title card remains without effect. One recalls, on the other hand, the film Quo Vadis? It contained the most beautiful, most exciting, most cinematic images: the burning of Rome, the ostentatious life in Nero’s court, and scenes from the arena. (For the theater, the masses in motion and all the catastrophes would have been either impossible to stage or possible only as suggestion.) Filmed stage plays never yield more than a raw excerpt; only innumerable explanatory titles make them comprehensible. It is therefore a violation even to film plays, which are written with theatrical techniques in mind. The film “drama” in itself goes against the nature of the cinema. It will be pointed out, however, that the theater and cinema do have one thing in common: the person, the performer. But they do not even have the actor in common, for every film director will confirm that a good theatrical actor is usually not a good actor for the cinema; should he wish to become one, he must learn his craft anew. Acting for the cinema must be different from acting for the theater: theatrical acting is tied inextricably to the word; that of the cinema has to exist and make itself understood without the word. It must therefore make a quick, coarse, more powerful impression. It is less the stage play than the novel that the photoplay resembles. While in the drama the characters are bound to the stage, in the cinema, as in the novel, the viewer can move with

An Art for the Times

201

the actors and, in constant motion independent of spatial limitations, see the actions carried out. He travels from Posemuckel to America or ascends the Eiffel Tower.1 The cinema’s public is in essence the novel’s reading public. But the making of a novel into a film merely offers illustrations for a story: details of the milieu, elucidations, and episodes. Without the primitive means of title cards, the novel’s plot (like that of the drama) would not be understood. The cinema embarked upon the wrong path, and its decline began at the moment when it forgot its true nature, lost its independence, and set about filming established literary works instead of learning to invent its own plays (not stage plays) keyed to its unique capacities. The cinema would be pitiful, would demonstrate its own sterility, were it not itself able to produce plays after its own fashion. It is therefore necessary, before the essence of the photoplay can be revealed, to recall the nearly forgotten, original essence of the cinema. When someone really wants to see a stage play, he goes to the theater, not to the cinema. So what does a viewer want in the cinema? It is a thirst that drives a person into the cinema: a thirst to broaden the horizons of his knowledge and experience in the simplest and fastest way. School children wish to see the prairies of their Indian books, strange people involved in strange activities, and the luxuriant, uninhabited banks of Asiatic rivers. Modest office clerks and housewives long for the glittering festivities of the elegant people, for the sparkle of distant shores and mountain ranges, where their travels will never take them. The cultivated and the rich take pleasure in learning about the development of the silkworm or in being present at a genuine battle. Hearts pound all around when armies of soldiers, faces hardened in desperation, take to the march, when grenades explode in billows of smoke and the camera persists in its merciless stride across the field of battle, swallowing up the stiffening, mutilated corpses of the warriors senselessly killed. But even the most insignificant, uncomplicated person feels somewhere in himself, unconsciously, what the great Sophocles said two and a half millennia ago: “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.”2 That is why man wants to see his own kind. He wants to see man and his fate in the cinema. He wishes to see not only his own kind, not only the people who surround him but also those who are distant, barely sensed, and unattainable: the human forms into which he longs to change, or those he hates and scorns. And so he desires to see ruling sovereigns, Moors, successful detectives, the worthy, rewarded poor, out-foxed guards, separated lovers, criminals, the sick, heroes, beautiful women, libertines, mothers-in-law, and millionaires. The people of our times, trapped in their never-ending routine of daily work, transform themselves, during their leisure time, into romantics. They wish to see not simply realistic things, but also realistic things raised into a more ideal, more fantastic sphere. The world should be garnished (like a Sunday roast) with adventures and oddities; a more plausible logic should prevail, and things should be shed of their weightiness and causality. All of this they find in the cinema. People can see the rich breezing by in their automobiles everywhere, but only in the cinema can they see how the ambush of this automobile is prepared: how the villains draw a rope across the avenue, how, in the last moment, a more valiant, modest engineer stops the car and finally marries the daughter of the rich man he saves. Everyone travels on the railroad, but who experiences the train racing through unknown, exotic lands? Who watches it flying over mountain and plain, or has seen the child, playing unawares on the tracks, saved, at exactly the right moment, because it chases after a butterfly? Raucous laughter bursts out at the novel sight of people suddenly turned on their heads, of a moving coach whose harness breaks, of a mother-in-law fleeing over the rooftops. That

202

Transformations of Experience

is why people go to the cinema. Desiccated souls love it when the last wild and sweet juices remaining in them come to a boil. Thus serious lovers of art must reconcile themselves to the perhaps painful circumstance that cinemagoers seek novelty, exaggeration, and above all—alongside the purely factual and farcical—that which is termed kitsch. We will have to get used to the fact that kitsch will never be rooted out of the world of man. After decades of efforts to drive kitsch from the theater, it awakens once again in the cinema. The conclusion is clear: had the cinema not appeared, the people would have looked elsewhere for the kitsch driven out of the theater (as they do, in fact, in operettas). Just as, indeed, other arts hunted off the stage found refuge in the variety shows. Perhaps it is even advantageous for a blossoming of serious dramatic art that those who once sought kitsch in the theater are now going to the cinema; no one any longer goes to the theater looking for a trip around the world in eighty days, comedies of errors, or detective dramas, but only to the cinema. The opponents of cinema might consider the following thought. Is it not something grand when small businesspeople and workers, bound day after day to their shops or machines; when old women, worn out and crushed by unfulfilled lives; when rich people and judges, all but suffocated by lives already lived—when all these people are torn from the indifference of their hours by a film? At such moments, they believe (as daily life fades) that angels are bearing their hearts gently up to heaven or devils tugging their souls down into purgatory; before the wind-blown trees and the slowly rolling waves of a broad ocean vista, tears flow forth from their otherwise indifferent or merely curious eyes, and their agitated spirits settle into calm. That is why we younger poets and writers who believe that the elevation of life (and perhaps the enjoyment of art as well) involves stirring people to the depths and arousing the most human of impulses, the sense for the metaphysical—that is why we cannot oppose the cinema (despite the fact that it is an enemy of higher art). It enchants the masses with movement. It stimulates us with events that have never before happened. It broadens one’s horizons. It stirs the heart. And to be stirred means (O Aristotle, Lessing, Schiller, and Nietzsche!) to become nobler and happier . . . When the spectator catches a glimpse of a woman abandoned on a snowy plain and pressed upon by the wolves of night, there arises in him the quiet sense of the human being’s loneliness and impotence in the cosmos. When a troubled viewer bursts loudly into laughter over the farce of a chase scene played at doubled speed, he leaps free of the torments of daily life. And when the lad or lass shudders because in the film the lover, in a terrible act of self-sacrifice, dies for his beloved, there dawn in them noble feelings, which, thank heavens, human nature allows to flourish, like the gentle heather upon the sandy slope. Thus it is that the photoplay, with its unrefined, primitive means, achieves what high art desires (O Aristotle, Lessing, Schiller, and Nietzsche!), arousing the most human impulses, the metaphysical sense, and becoming nobler and happier (without therefore being art). Nor is it probably the fault of humanity that the majority of people since the beginning of time react more quickly to such primitive, unrefined enticements than to the highest of the arts—even in more developed cultures. If people long then to see something else in the cinema beyond factual reportage, how should such photoplays be constituted? They should quench the thirst for knowledge while at the same time satisfying the desire to be stirred or entertained by renditions of human fate. Things that captivate our senses—beautiful and unfamiliar landscapes, society and culture, colorful and strange milieus, farcical situations, unknown institutions and peoples, and awe-inspiring sights—must be enlivened by things that move our

An Art for the Times

203

hearts: human fate and deeds, love stories, betrayal, devotion, intrigue, joyous reflections on the world, upsetting sadness, suspense, adventure, and calm. The photoplay is not (as we have shown) a stage play. The chief means of expression in the theater, words and dialogue, are absent in the cinema. So what are the photoplay’s means of expression? The first is the unlimited choice of locations. The events can take place in paradise, on the snowy fields of the Himalayas, in a broken-down dive, or on the ocean in a hurricane. The location makes the events “interesting,” carries us away from the gray normalcy of the everyday into the color of the world. The simplest event touches our hearts when shown in a foreign alleyway, in the luxuriance of nature, in the bullfight arena of Seville, or in ancient Nineveh. The second of the photoplay’s means of expression is movement. Movement in a twofold sense: as gesture and as speed. The diabolical facial expressions of the criminal, the long-fingered, catlike movements with which the sensual woman approaches the body of a young man grip us, just as we are enchanted through and through by an approaching stampede of leaping horses, a walk above the plummeting waters of Niagara Falls, or an airplane flight over the Alps. And we laugh when, in a chase scene, the people suddenly begin to run faster than we have ever seen people run before, as if they were being run along a conveyor at a furious speed. The photoplay’s third expressive possibility is the situation, the trick. We become excited when we see events linked together as we have never before experienced them. And it is this excitement of the marvelous, the unaccustomed and unheard-of sights that people seek in the cinema (because they happen too rarely in life). That is why people want to tremble in the face of that fuse, ignited by the avenger, that causes the mine to explode into rubble; that is why they want to watch the balancing duo, towering high on a wire stretched between two buildings; that is why they wait for the train to go racing through the world without an engineer or take off suddenly through the air. What unites these three means of expression is man and his fate. It is the man in action and human fate that knit the location, movement, and situation together into the photoplay. The viewer takes the strongest interest in a film when he sees his own kind, someone he loves or hates, in landscapes, in rooms, in dangerous or farcical situations and movements. The adventure of the character on film becomes his own adventure. Thus the photoplay must stimulate the desire for experience, the desire to comprehend the fate of humanity and all earthly events—a desire that exists, repressed, in all human beings. It must both stimulate this desire and attempt to satisfy it . . . Notes 1. Pinthus here uses the term Posemuckel, the German name of two villages (Groß and KleinPosemuckel) in western Poland, referring figuratively to small, provincial, and remote localities. 2. A line spoken by the chorus in Sophocles’s Antigone that Pinthus presents in the original Greek and in German translation; we borrow here the English translation from The Antigone of Sophocles, trans. R. C. Jebb (Boston: Ginn, 1894), 31.

87 MALWINE RENNERT The Onlookers of Life in the Cinema First published as “Die Zaungäste des Lebens im Kino,” Bild und Film: Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie 4, no. 11 (1914–15), 217–18. Translated by Sara Hall.

204

Transformations of Experience Malwine Rennert was one of the first women film critics in Germany, writing passionate columns for the short-lived but influential film journal Bild and Film (1912–1915). She helped inaugurate an aesthetic mode of film criticism and also emphasized the new mass medium’s responsibility to the audience. In this essay, she bemoans the spiritual impoverishment that has befallen the German nation and has even led soldiers to consider war as a relief from the “banality of everyday life.” For her, the as-yetunfulfilled promise of cinema lay in the inner edification of the masses. On the role of film during the war, see chapter 8.

I recently came across the following statement about pleasure in an entertainment magazine: all people strive for pleasure, also in material things. They want not only to eat, but also to indulge in food that tastes good. So it is in the spiritual domain: the hunger is there, the soul wants to indulge—but in what does it indulge in most cases? Sweet poison. These simple words contain a truth at the heart of all the earth’s evils: our dreadful ignorance in the realm of the spiritual. Humanity has come so far over many thousands of years because it knows what is physically beneficial—how mankind should eat, drink, live, and move. Our fiercest ambition is now to put all classes in a position where hygiene is possible. But about the inner world, the soul, we have only the dimmest knowledge and myths; the experiences of the privileged few can’t serve as the general rule. But the spiritual hunger is there— that longing for pleasurable indulgence. Happy were the Greeks who enjoyed existence as a vision of beauty, the first Christians who lived and died in moral rapture, and the men of action of the Middle Ages. Is it not also a pleasure when Orientals huddle together of an evening under a starry sky and smoke and tell stories? How do Europeans experience life now that European culture has been marked by the bourgeoisie? (Let us leave the moral question aside.) He who has ears to hear with and eyes to see with, and who has seen enough peoples that he can make comparisons, will not be able to rid himself of the perception that Europeans are famished and that many reach for poison in their hunger. It came about in the name of freedom—political and commercial freedom—with thunder and crushing blows and settled on souls like a paralyzing net, bringing commercial calculation and the gravity of technology into the inner world. This war is perceived by many soldiers, despite the dangers, drudgery, and privations, as a liberation—liberation from the banality of everyday life; suddenly they sense the wonderful energy that lies in their souls. They are carried away as if on wings. Where earlier they could take only fearful, measured steps, where scornful and smug neighbors jeered and stifled their power, now they can spread their wings and climb to the light. Therein lay the peril: the ruling system paralyzed the will and the spirit, reason presided as absolute ruler, and as for the senses . . . Today there are no more political events, no elections brought about through long speeches and much money; no more outdoor folk festivals where joy and grace emerge. Instead there are stuffy beer halls and dance halls with vulgar dances. For the middle class there are tight circles with predetermined social schedules—so much for dinner, for the wine. One hand washes the other: no one belongs who cannot equally return the favor—everything personal, lovable, and uncalculated is eliminated. Senseless norms are honored like divine laws or accepted as physical necessities. To wit: novels from family magazines reflecting the same life; blinders against everything that doesn’t concern the chosen circle. People, be it in England, France, Germany, Sweden, or Holland, have experienced nothing. Mostly, they have worked very hard, but they have experienced nothing. And they have had no opportunity to break out of the circle. The women could

An Art for the Times

205

at most tend to their moods, or choose the free love of the art world as their principle to live by, only to be destroyed by it. Under this half-petrified bourgeois strata lies the turmoil of the demimonde. The novels and plays of the time reflect bourgeois spiritual poverty. One can say that most have been only onlookers of life; they have sensed that life could be more beautiful and finer, even nobler. They have gone all over the place—anywhere where they had hopes for satisfying their hunger for life; one accepts surrogates and counterfeits when the genuine item is lacking. They filled, and fill, the cinemas, always hoping for life. Can one then demand serious art when people don’t go there for art? The Bedouins who huddle together under the starry skies telling stories to each other would be astonished if an aesthete stepped up to them asking, are you telling artful stories? It inevitably happens, however, that from time to time a poet sits among them, a good storyteller who could hold his own against the critics, and one to whom the listeners would particularly enjoy listening. The elders of the tribe—if they are wise—will keep watch that the stories don’t offend decency, but these stories certainly couldn’t conflict with theories of art. This war is destroying Europe’s well-being. All reserves are being exhausted, and that means we must start from the beginning. It remains to be seen whether those returning home, the core of the people, will be able to put the powerful will and the winged soul to use for peaceful purposes, and whether they will create new and better circumstances. They are no longer onlookers on life; they have experienced it, and we don’t know yet how they will react to the cinema. But in any case, the cinema will continue to exist and the very issue of the cinema will have its bearing on the future, on the welfare of youth and the well-being of the people. While our troops heroically fight and suffer the unspeakable, those at home can and want to work, so that upon their return the troops will find the ground prepared and not full of thorns and thistles. It seems to me that the question of whether a film drama might be possible is of purely aesthetic interest. It is much more important for our time, a time in which we have regressed to a primitive state, to promote presentations additional to scientific and landscape films, whether in the form of plays, or illustrated novels, or historical events, which can be viewed as healthy nourishment for the soul. Otherwise, we will be overwhelmed with trash. The future of our nation is a serious matter, and it makes no sense that we should act less energetically with respect to the inner world than we would with regard to military life, simply in order to please a couple of dozen speculators or even the mob. When we free ourselves from formulas and judge the latest arrival according to its own laws, then we must admit that the cinema has created many beautiful things. How many great actors have we seen in brilliant performances; how many outstanding sets that obtain even greater atmospheric value in conjunction with the plot. It is entirely inconsequential whether the work fell in line with the existing categories of drama, the novel, and other forms as long as it was beautiful. The often-cited Atlantis was no high point;1 it was rather a low point, a complete failure, and may not be taken as a standard. There are a slew of beautiful film creations—French, American, Italian, along with German—that would be worth preserving in a museum; let’s not give up on the cinema entirely. When the life of the individual is enriched, when there aren’t so many onlookers on life anymore, then the flocking to the cinema will desist; the cinema will be forced to change. Besides, might one not wish that some philistines, some pedants, would go to a good movie more often; perhaps then the numbing and drying up of their inner lives could be stemmed somewhat. Moralists and aesthetes fight the trash film—the pedant fights all films, for he is blind and deaf to each and every art.

206

Transformations of Experience

All other inventions of the last decades serve destruction—even the airship, as this war has shown. Yes, since man conquered the air, humanity must hide away in the cellars. Why should we then fight film when it offers so many good and beautiful possibilities for edifying the inner life? We only want to be sure to watch over and protect film so that it doesn’t become a destroyer of inner values, the way cabaret singing has become. Cabaret singing, so it appears, has proliferated so wildly in the midst of war that the daily newspapers must lift their voices in warning. The worst dirt is brought to some military hospitals under the pretense of entertainment. While the horsemen of the apocalypse tear across the earth and the noblest men die, this has become possible in Germany. Note 1. Atlantis was a big-budget film produced by the Danish Nordisk Film Company and directed by August Blom with an international cast. Based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1912 novel Atlantis, the film featured the spectacle of a sinking ocean liner. Atlantis premiered in Germany on December 18, 1913, and gained notoriety for its similarities to the sinking of the Titanic, which occurred on April 15, 1912 (one month after Hauptmann’s novel).

88 PAUL WEGENER On the Artistic Possibilities of the Motion Picture First published as “Von den künstlerischen Möglichkeiten des Wandelbildes,” in Der Kunstwart (Deutscher Wille) 30, no. 7 (January 1917), 13–15. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A member of Max Reinhardt’s ensemble, Paul Wegener (1874–1948) was one of the first established stage actors to turn to cinema, starring in the Autorenfilm The Student of Prague (1913; see the anonymous review earlier in this chapter, no. 82) and also directing Der Golem (The Golem, 1915), Rübezahls Hochzeit (Old Nip’s wedding, 1916), and numerous films in the 1920s and ‘30s. Based on a lecture, “Neue Kinoziele” (New goals for cinema), delivered on April 24, 1916, the following programmatic essay was published in the cultural journal Der Kunstwart (1887–1937), which appeared under the name Deutscher Wille during World War I. Here, Wegener—like Kurt Pinthus (no. 86) above—pleads not to use stage dramas and novels as the bases for film, but rather to let the medium’s technological possibilities inform its choice of subject matter. Distinctive among early commentators for his identification of the camera as “the true poet of the film,” Wegener may be seen as a forerunner to camera theorists of the 1920s. (See texts by Balázs [nos. 222, 227], Freund [no. 229], Holland [no. 230], and Seeber [no. 226] in chapter 15.)

The unmistakable importance of film is still insufficiently clear to the educated public. Again and again, through word and deed, we must point out the responsibility borne by those who feel qualified to casually judge these matters. Far removed from the reigning authorities of the other arts, in the hands of businesspeople—who at first overlooked its enormous sales potential—film has achieved a level of significance that no one could have imagined ten years ago. Billions of marks are invested in motion pictures—in factories, offices, countless theaters, and so forth—all over the globe. A large segment of humanity receives aesthetic, ethical, and cultural impressions from cinema. Never before has an art

An Art for the Times

207

form nourished the imagination of more people, particularly in the lower classes, than film does today. The same circles that fought a commendable, tireless battle against trashy and smutty literature, who in every possible area tried to awaken and guide an appreciation for better formats, have either underestimated the significance of film or recognized it too late. Because the conditions of the motion picture lie between literature, photography, and theater, it was very difficult to set guidelines for truly artistic production. The entirety of early productions consists of imitations of stage dramas and illustrated novels, or, in the best cases, photographic reproductions of more or less good acting. Thus, hybrid forms came into being, which any educated person had to reject. This caused an aversion to film among the leading intellectual elite, which manifested itself in contempt or total disregard for this new branch. Because tastes were dictated by the owners of the cinemas, who had never bothered with aesthetic value, and because it was impossible to gain control by withholding permits, as happens in the theater, production slackened more and more and catered to broad, vulgar, and sensationalist tastes. Gradually, it is beginning to dawn on people that things cannot continue like this, if we do not wish to abet a virtual poisoning of the people [Volksvergiftung] through false values. The sensational dramas and novels that created dishonest representations of aristocrats, men about town, noble workers, demonic harlots, ingenious burglars, and detectives brought back all those aspects of trashy writing that happily seemed to have been defeated, while lending them a reach that was twice as broad and a form that was twice as memorable. These forces are even more dangerous here, where they can be put on vivid visual display. Just as false as the psychology of these films is their setting, with their overloaded castles, servants, false elegance, ostentatious and tasteless salons, and frilly lifestyles, which are tendentious and untrue in every way. These films are greedily and uncritically devoured by the masses; all interested parties feel good as they go about their business. But the dire consequences of nourishing the masses’ imagination with such cheap, ersatz art are unavoidable. Finally, more people are beginning to understand this, and reforms are under way everywhere. Partisan and propaganda films are being made. We want film to be instructional: to show landscapes, images of technical enterprises, depictions of inert materials, and so forth. As pleasing as this trend may be, it cannot satisfy the mass audience’s appetite for fanciful tales. The popular film, which aims at emotional entertainment beyond instruction or violent trends, will continue to be the centerpiece of cinema programs. In this spirit, I have been working for years to write, direct, and act in films that satisfy the legitimate requirements of entertainment and visual pleasure, without leaving behind a regrettable aftertaste. In The Student of Prague, which I made with Ewers, in The Golem,1 and most recently in Rübezahl,2 I have attempted to tackle subjects that intrinsically suit the technical aspects of the motion picture. To begin with, we as filmmakers must forget theater and novels, creating our films instead from cinematic means. The true poet of the film must be the camera. The possibilities to make large things small and small things large, to blend and superimpose photographic images; the possibility of a constantly changing standpoint for the viewer; the endless tricks rendered by splitscreen, reflection, and so forth—in short, the technology of film must become significant for the choice of content. General taste and experience show that given the current advanced state of technology—the giant studios, the extensive scenery workshops, and the lighting instruments—it is not so difficult to create truly beautiful images whose combination can impart exhilarating content of the simplest possible kind. Film is, first and foremost, a visual matter. The film poet must start with an image, think in images, and choose subjects that can be expressed visually. In The Golem, it was the strange stone form that, silently and mystically, unfolded its purely visual existence. In Rübezahl, it is

208

Transformations of Experience

the dominance of mountains, forest, and blithe magical spirits. Of course, a purely onesided approach is also problematic. Skillfully photographed acting will always have a place in film. Sequences that emulate old masters and memorable stories in unusual and beautiful landscapes afford countless possibilities. But 90 percent of what still gets made today—bad imitations of theater and illustrations of trashy novels—must fi nally disappear. In order to give this more elevated taste a chance to establish itself, it will be necessary to secure the participation of the educated public and the educated press. Even now, the major daily newspapers tend not to discuss cinema in their official feuilletons. As a result, scattered through the local sections, critics who do not even want to pass aesthetic judgment praise every new film equally as a masterpiece. The cinemas in large cities already cater to the upper classes with their glamorous decor and relatively high ticket prices. But here, too, a film is played every eight days according to a fixed schedule; aesthetically valuable fi lms are mixed together with works of pure sentimentality, and often with utterly tasteless films. The audience never has a chance to establish its opinion about the film, in contrast to the theater, where a play keeps running as long as it draws a crowd. So the theater owner has no interest in giving preference to a thoughtfully crafted film, which of course takes more time and money to make, over easily made output of average quality. Every normal regulating factor is missing. The taste of the small-time theater owner still reigns, and in turn is imposed on the distributor, and through him, on the studio. Change will come about only once the press and the public announce their preference for more artistically valuable films to the industry. As long as cinemagoers visit theaters only to mindlessly kill an idle hour with no regard to how they are entertained, as long as the press continues to ignore serious filmmaking, the actual “branch” will hardly have a reason to break with the present business principle of “production by the meter.” Only when the public comes to properly appreciate the inner significance of the motion picture will the value and level of film increase. Notes 1. Original note (translated): “Wegener’s The Golem appeared before the book by Meyrink.” This note is attributed to “K.-L.” and refers to Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem, which was first published in serial form in 1913–14 and in book form in 1915. 2. The first of Wegener’s three Golem films, Der Golem, now considered lost, premiered on January 14, 1915. His fairy tale film Rübezahls Hochzeit (Old Nip’s wedding) premiered on October 1, 1916.

89 ERNST LUBITSCH We Lack Film Poetry First published as “Uns fehlen Filmdichtungen,” in Das Tage-Buch 1, no. 35 (September 11, 1920), 1145– 46. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

By 1920, Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) had directed or acted in more than fifty shorts and feature films, almost all of them produced by Paul Davidson’s Projektions-AG (PAGU), the first production company that also owned theaters and devoted itself to feature-length films. Lubitsch’s international breakthrough came with Madame Dubarry, which premiered at the new Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on September 18, 1919, and in New York in December of the following year. Echoing Kurt Pinthus’s introduction to Das Kinobuch (no. 86), Lubitsch

An Art for the Times

209

here argues that kitsch is inevitable in cinema and in popular culture more generally, and he deemphasizes the “call for art” issued by many early German film theorists and commentators. Furthermore, much as Paul Wegener had focused on film as “a visual matter,” Lubitsch invokes a “film poetry” (Filmdichtung) that would be composed of images rather than words. See also Lubitsch’s text on film’s internationality in chapter 11 (no. 132) and the texts by Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau on their ideal screenplay in chapter 15 (no. 223).

In our era, film is still in its fledgling stage. Cinema’s conquests will proliferate with enormous speed and take on as-yet-unimaginable dimensions. This is an unshakeable fact, and all opponents of cinema should accept it and stop wasting their energy. What do these people even want from cinema? They want art from cinema; if film is not art, they believe that it has no right to exist. This opinion is not limited to crusty, old children’sbook illustrators and their consorts—even serious artists and writers adopt this point of view. And so I would like to ask the following question: Must film be art in order to prove its right to exist? The answer is no. It is very nice and also a good goal to wish in one’s heart of hearts that fi lm, or at least a part of film production, may one day reach artistic heights. But we cannot and need not demand that of film production generally. Film’s closest relative is theater, which I will thus use for the sake of comparison. Surely no one can seriously argue that theaters on the whole are sanctuaries for high art these days. Only very few stages concern themselves with art; some are busy with light and shallow entertainment, but most deal in kitsch. The silliest burlesques and operettas, which are no better than the worst cinematic kitsch, are the clincher. This genre has been around for centuries, and its popularity with the masses is proof of its legitimacy. Why should we force art on people who split their sides laughing over a smack on the backside? Is the salvation of the man on the street more endangered if he sits in the cinema instead of the theater to laugh at the same gaucherie? Are the housemaid’s morals more shocked if she cries over an abandoned bride in a film instead of at the end of an operetta’s second act? Kitsch cannot be eradicated! We have granted it to the theater; let film have it as well. In the theater, it delights thousands; in cinema, millions. That alone is proof of its right to exist. It would of course be very sad if there weren’t a few filmmakers who were seriously trying to bring art into film. But people are making such attempts, indeed with an intensity that the uninitiated can hardly imagine. The artistic effort required for a serious film is in no way inferior to the work that goes into a serious theatrical work. Now, was it worth the effort? Without speaking pro domo, I can say yes! Especially recently, some films—even if only a few—have been made with an artistic stamp. They offer no analogy to Raphael’s paintings from a pictorial standpoint, or to Shakespeare’s dramas from a dramatic one. But that would be asking too much in these early years of film. If I had to classify the best fi lm productions currently being made, I would call it good applied art. Now, can film move beyond applied art into the realm of genuine art? I think I can affirm this in good conscience, as well. The actors are ready, as are the directors and designers; the only thing we do not have yet is film poetry [Filmdichtung]. So far, we have only film manuscripts! Most of the authors who still sneer at film are incapable of writing a usable film manuscript, much less film poetry. I think it has never even occurred to most of them that film poetry could exist. Film poetry as I imagine it must not be written in naturalistic or expressionistic sentences, but rather composed in images. What I mean is that the plot must be formed in such a way that each image furthers the story without the insertion of explanatory text. I would like to introduce the following example to illustrate the technical aspects of this dramatic construction:

210

Transformations of Experience

1st image (in a room): A man is world-weary; he throws open the window and wants to hurl himself from it. Suddenly he looks down at the park. 2nd image (park): An atmosphere of early spring. All at once the park is flooded with radiant sunlight; nature is beginning to flourish; the early spring atmosphere transforms into a magnificent feeling of full spring. 3rd image (in a room): The world-weary man has seen the blossoming of nature; nature has given him a new will to live; he lets go of all thoughts of suicide. Needless to say, these three images are banal. However, I would think that someone could string together a series of images, each of high artistic value, and thereby create strong dramatic tension. I imagine that in a film like this, even a photographed room, for example, could express deep ideas. Maybe that is the path to film poetry.

90 FRITZ LANG Kitsch—Sensation—Culture and Film First published as “Kitsch—Sensation—Kultur und Film,” in Edgar Beyfuss and Alex Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin: Carl P. Chryselius’scher Verlag, 1924), 28–31. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Published in 1924 with a dedication by German chancellor Wilhelm Marx, Das Kulturfilmbuch was a compendium of efforts to theorize and establish film as a cultural force. It included articles by representatives of diverse professional sectors (e.g., academia, government, law, science) as well as texts by members of the film industry. In his contribution, Fritz Lang—like other writers in this chapter—sees cinema’s significance less in terms of its artistic value than its status as both product and image of its time. Lang’s defense of mass sensationalism, which he also locates in the tradition of fairy tales, is of interest in relation to his own early screenplays and productions, which often synthesized popular taste with aesthetic ambition. See also Mierendorff in chapter 13, no. 193. Other texts by Lang appear in chapters 3 (no. 41), 4 (no. 59), 15 (nos. 223 and 228), and 17 (no. 261) of this volume.

There’s hardly a subject that I find more useless to debate than the endless controversy over whether a film can be a work of art. I also feel no obligation to contribute anything to solving this problem other than the laconic yet exhaustive phrase: “Create, artist, do not talk!”1 Considering the foolishness that people now advance in the name of art, I would like to offer the following quiet and serene advice to film, which I love and to which my entire self belongs: “Do not allow yourself to be labeled. Stay as you are, a testimony to yourself, your own entity, creature of your century!” But if I am prompted to take a somewhat theoretical stance on film in a public forum, I do not hesitate to declare that I believe film is destined to become a gauge of our culture. We feel authorized to reconstruct the image of long-forgotten epochs from documents handed down to us in architecture, works of art, and writings. Their value, however, is determined only by the subjective attitude of the viewer. In the future, when our chaotic era has long been reduced to a static formula, scholars will find it much easier to bring it

An Art for the Times

211

life once again. They will open a box full of condensed life whenever they play a film. There will be a piece of history from former times. Completely setting aside the fact that no art form could possibly capture a moment in time as comprehensively as film can, it is highly characteristic of our era that it has let film become a coveted common property—and, moreover, our era can be characterized by the kind of films that are preferred. To deny that film has superseded theater in many regards, one would have to have one’s head in the sand. But that does not fully answer the question either, for theater never inspired the same love or mass following as film. On the other hand, it would be a disservice to the film audience to claim that it was made up of housemaids and little shopboys, as was almost exclusively the case until a few years ago. Gone at last is the time when a film script’s possibilities were measured by whether or not “plain Jane” [“Lehmanns Anna”] would like it. Plain Jane was not considered a factor in Caligari, nor in The Golem, not even in the magnificent Schneeschuh films or Die Nibelungen.2 Rather, the individual approach to film developed so energetically that plainJane films have had to flee to the farthest-flung suburbs in order to show themselves at all, because the more centrally located audience boos them as unequivocally as it cheers— or at least respects—cultivated films. I would like to emphasize that I am not one of those people who base the cultural value of a film on its renunciation of popular taste. Very recently, I personally experienced the fact that audience members of any class can be swept away by a so-called artistic film and praise it to the skies, as long as it neither violates the laws of film nor transforms seriousness into tedium. The essence of film—this is something I wish to assert again and again—is convincing and striking only if it corresponds with the essence of the era from which it was born. It matters little what I show in my films, but a contemporary viewer must be able to respond to it intuitively, and indeed at the same speed with which the images pass before his eyes. If this contact remains intact, then the film and the audience understand one another. The question is only how to create this contact most expediently. We can draw informative conclusions from the list of successful films. People whom I love to call “film idiots” criticize film for accommodating the sensationalism of the masses. Ladies and gentlemen, what is film doing differently than the much-vaunted fairy tales, the exalted heroic sagas of all cultures? Time and tradition may have inured us, but if we look closer, what an excess of brutality, barbarism, and wrongdoing we see accumulated in even the sweetest German fairy tales! If the boldest filmmaker dared include even a hundredth of this nastiness in his films, he would never even reach the censorship board. Small children are devoured by wolves, stepmothers poison their stepdaughters time and again, and as punishment they have to dance in red-hot shoes until they drop dead. Or they behead an annoying stepson with a chest top. Or they foist cats and dogs off on young queens in place of their children, place said children into baskets on the nearest river, and do not rest until the unfortunate victims of their malice are on the funeral pyre! By contrast, what is the most amazing sensation, the most gruesome misdeed, that film dares to show! And why do children cling like limpets to fairy tales, and adults almost to an even greater extent, as the unprecedented success of the Diederichs edition of Die Märchen der Weltliteratur has shown?3 Because in fairy tales, the simplest and most ethical human law reigns supreme: good people are rewarded and the evil are punished. Good people become more sympathetic with their suffering; evil people, more hateful with the initial success of their mischief. In sum: the recipe for the despised sensational film. I would like to see a sensational film that tried to reverse the law dictating the fate of good and evil! Persecuted innocence reaps the rewards, just like the villain who is

212

Transformations of Experience

vanquished by the strong and clever hero. Admittedly, real life does not always work this way. But film delivers the satisfaction of complying with the law just as simple-mindedly as any fairy tale. It merely does this in a form appropriate to its era. If, however, someone were to claim that sensational fi lms appeal most strongly to audiences, that would be a distortion of the facts. I would like to name just a few examples that must be counted as successes, and I would consider it disingenuous to leave out my own: Dr. Caligari, Carmen, Madame Dubarry, The Golem, Destiny, Fredericus Rex, the Rhine film,4 the Schneeschuh films, Die Nibelungen, and Nanook.5 And let us not forget The Kid.6 Which of these was a sensational film? Dr. Mabuse was a sensational film and a success. But the reason for its success was not its sensationalism, which to some extent remained modestly in the background. It was successful for its utilization of film as an image of its time, or more accurately, in the appraisal of the film as a document of its time. And that, in my opinion, touches on another, more important factor of film. Naïve sensational films, such as American Wild West films, show us contemporary people in a fairy-tale-like primitivism of sensibility. The film as a document of its time (a genre for which Mabuse was only an earthbound forerunner) shows contemporary man—or rather, must show him—with the kind of excess I attempted to show in Die Nibelungen. Not a man from 1924; rather, the man from 1924. For man, represented as a concept, must be larger than life in his sensibility and actions, even if he is small and shabby. He requires a pedestal of stylization, just as bygone centuries do. We do not erect monuments on flat asphalt. To make them striking, we elevate them over the heads of passersby. Hence, for people who both make and watch films, film assumes two aspects: on the one hand, films are judged against those they most like to watch, and here one can draw very clear conclusions from individuals and crowd alike; on the other hand, there is fi lm itself, which is an image of its time, emerging from our time. I do not just mean contemporary Europe. I mean all cultured nations where people live and make films. Every century has had a language that well-educated people from all countries could understand. Film is Esperanto for the entire world—and a great medium of culture. In order to understand its language, one needs nothing other than two open eyes. Notes 1. The quotation comes from a motto with which Goethe introduces the section entitled “Art” in a collection of his poems that appeared in 1815. Carl Hauptmann uses the same quotation in “Film and Theater,” in chapter 4, no. 49. 2. Lang refers here to Arnold Fanck’s two-part skiing film Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs (The marvel of the snowshoe, 1920/22) and to his own two-part Die Nibelungen from 1924. For Lang’s thoughts on directing that film, see his text in chapter 3, no. 41. 3. Diederichs-Verlag published a forty-volume series of international fairytales, Märchen der Weltliteratur, between 1912 and 1940. 4. The “Rhine film” is Walther Zürn’s 1922 Ufa documentary Der Rhein in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (The Rhine past and present). 5. Robert Flaherty’s documentary Nanook of the North (1922) was shown in Germany under the title Nanuk, der Eskimo. 6. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid premiered in New York on January 21, 1921, and in Berlin on November 9, 1923. It became Chaplin’s best-known film in Germany and the archetypal work for American cinema in the Weimar Republic.

SECTION TWO •

•

•

FILM CULTURE AND POLITICS

SEVEN

MORAL PANIC AND REFORM

91 GEORG KLEIBÖMER Cinematograph and Schoolchildren First published as “Kinematograph und Schuljugend,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 124 (May 12, 1909). Translated by Michael Cowan.

As the previous chapter demonstrated, it did not take long for the new “plebeian” medium to breach the barriers of high culture and to threaten the moral and artistic standards of the educated elite. Ready to defend traditional arts and society, so-called cinema reformers sought to bring cinema under control through harsh criticism and calls for censorship. Cinema’s potential to replace legitimate theater and, with it, the old bourgeois order caused panic among both conservatives and liberals, the latter fearing mass culture as an instrument of manipulation and ideology. The debates centered on a number of flashpoints: sexuality, gender, crime, public health, the rise of the masses, and the danger of illusion. The easily distracted, unruly, and delusional “homo cinematicus” (no. 103) was seen as a threat to political stability, provoking discussions about the role of the state in managing the new medium. It bears noting that morality and film censorship were also hotly debated in the United States at this time, leading to the creation of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures in 1909. The following programmatic article by Georg Kleibömer, a school principal who also published novels and wrote about German literature, pedagogy, and contemporary politics, represents an early appeal for a different kind of cinema—sober images from “the domain of ‘living nature’ ” rather than sensationalist fiction—that would serve as a pedagogical tool for younger viewers. Resonating with descriptions of modern sensory experience (see chapter 1), this text advances a narrative of declining moral consciousness in an age of hyperstimulation.

In general, people are less worried today about schoolchildren visiting cinematographic theaters. Not long ago, when motion picture theaters were still shooting up from the ground like mushrooms, there was a general concern around the question of whether children should be allowed into such events. The public took a vibrant interest in this question, because the cinemas showed images that people believed to endanger the morality of children. Such pictures have now disappeared. To what extent the police contributed to this and to what extent it resulted from the better judgment of the cinema owners is of little interest. With this change in content, the question seemed settled for most people—but not for teachers. They believed that these presentations posed a threat to education, and teachers’ associations continued to debate the question passionately. As far as I could tell, no one

215

216

Film Culture and Politics

found a satisfactory answer. Some wished to ban children outright from the cinemas. But the overwhelming majority of concerned teachers took the (surely more correct) viewpoint that we must attempt to make all of our epoch’s technological advances useful for instruction and education. What, then, are the dangers arising for our children when they frequent such theaters? Above all, there is the one great danger brought about by the development of the entire urban lifestyle: that of distraction, confusion, and superficiality in the infant soul. An example should make this clear. One hundred and fifty years ago, a little boy spent his childhood years in Frankfurt am Main, which was not an insignificant city by the standards of its time. Later, he would write about these years as a man who could look back on his entire development. This was Wolfgang Goethe. He tells of two events from his childhood that would determine the course of his entire development: the excitement and confusion brought to Frankfurt by the Seven Years’ War and the earthquake in Lisbon.1 Goethe describes what a decisive influence this single natural event exerted on him. It so strengthened his religious views that, already in his youth, one can speak of his religious thinking and feeling entering a new stage. Now let us compare this example with a similar event from our own time, perhaps the eruption of Mount Pelée (which, for our epoch, is no farther from Germany than Lisbon was from Frankfurt in 1755). 2 Let us ask our children how many of them have heard anything about this catastrophe. Let us search for just one child for whom this single natural event took on an indelible meaning. How is it that we all know this search to be hopeless in advance? Because in our time, all great strokes of fate, wherever they happen to occur on earth, are made instantly available to us; before our mind has had time to absorb one overwhelming occurrence, the first one has already been suppressed by another. Today, the most tragic events only ever graze the surface of the soul. When intellectual and emotional life become so superficial, personalities can no longer grow, and this is the danger threatening the entire generation of our youth; they will possess no center or focus, no standard within themselves by which to judge all the phenomena around them. Rather, they will be torn from one view to the next by every new experience. We can see just how much less this danger threatens people living in calmer environments when we observe a modest man from the country coming to the big city. We generally smile with a feeling of superiority as we watch his astonishment at all the inexplicable and magnificent wonders the city has to offer. But we ought also to feel a sense of envy as we see how all of these new impressions are unable to upset his equilibrium or tear him away from his basic principles. We, on the other hand, are immediately willing to give up all of our viewpoints and opinions about the various values surrounding us as soon as some amazing new invention or surprising new theory impresses itself upon us. However, the formation of a strong and stable personality through education has always been the noblest task of educators, and this goal is not likely to change. Because the big city, with its abundance of impressions, already renders this education very difficult, we must defend ourselves when institutions such as the cinema cultivate this bad side of urban life, especially when they do so in the sensitive domain of the emotions. The moral education of a child should certainly include a few events that introduce certain emotions into his life, and these events should be deeply anchored in the child’s mind. In accordance with the still-tender mind of the child, such feelings should arouse only a certain level of emotion, and above all, they must not occur close in time with opposing sorts of emotions. But what do we find in the cinema? Serious scenes and scenes of jest alternate in rapid succession, for the cinema demands variety. Anyone who has sat through a cinema

Moral Panic and Reform

217

program knows that over the course of hardly half an hour, more or less all of our inner feelings are stimulated—or better yet agitated. And this occurs in the form of an utter confusion of images, which possess a cunning ability—an ability that can only inspire horror in every educator—to impress themselves upon the mind. For example, one film (and I myself witnessed what I am recounting here) shows the so-called drama of a man who resorts to stealing in order to save his child from hunger and then, having found work as a bricklayer, stands atop the construction site prepared to live out his life as an honest person. But suddenly, when a policeman climbs up the construction site to arrest the thief, the latter takes fright and falls from the building to the ground. We see the man lying crushed on the pavement at precisely the moment when his child, no doubt coming to see the father, arrives on the scene. Here, then, is a shock, a horror, which, were it to happen to anyone in real life, would cause so much emotional excitement that one would need weeks to recover. Children, whose imagination surely transforms this representation into true life, experience every bit of this intense emotional excitement with the child on the screen! But the drama continues. The compassionate policeman takes the orphaned child into his house, where the latter finds friendly siblings in the policeman’s children. Then we see the child in winter kneeling in the snow and praying beside his father’s grave. Here, feelings run high even for the adult spectator. I saw many a handkerchief, and I must confess that the film was made with such sophistication that even I could not contain myself. In order to push this emotional stirring to the limit, a solemn prayer was played on a harmonium. On the heels of horror, of shock, then, comes the most extreme feeling of compassion. Children should be spared both of these forms of emotional excitement, unless some merciless stroke of fate subjects them to such emotions early in life. Now onto the next image: a real dose of children’s medicine! Hardly two minutes after those scenes of the most profound and sacred emotion comes the comic story of a child who pours the laxative he should be taking into his father’s cup of coffee. In countless variations, the film now shows how the father begins to feel the medicine’s effects already on his way to work. One could debate about whether or not such scenes even belong to the domain of humor, but this is not what interests me here. Rather, what troubles me is these scenes’ success: the fact that the children are suddenly moved to the most exuberant joy and now begin to laugh themselves to tears. Let us imagine this rapid change of moods transposed into a real-life situation. A child experiences a blow of fate and, at the very next moment, is capable of whole-hearted joy. We would deeply regret the moral decrepitude of such a child. What we should criticize in cinema theaters, then, is the threat this rapid rundown of the entire scale of emotions poses to the truth and profundity of children’s feelings. And this danger is so great that the general public must take it into account, rather than simply watching out for those moments when children get a glimpse of a woman’s nude leg or exposed breast. At the beginning of these observations, I counted myself among those who do not see the solution in a full-scale ban on such events, but rather in making them useful for education. In my opinion, such reform finds its embodiment in the sorts of film presentations offered in the Kosmos-Theater für Belehrung und Unterhaltung [Kosmos Theater for Instruction and Entertainment] in Leipzig.3 The name alone tells us that this is an institute serving public education. In every respect, this theater thoroughly differs from other movie theaters. The walls and windows are not covered with those large and dreadful (dreadful both in the scenes they contain and in their style) posters painted in loud colors, which mock all of our efforts to give our children an aesthetic education. Rather, in display cases in the entrance, one sees tasteful, colorful pictures from other countries together with educational photographs of interesting technological processes.

218

Film Culture and Politics

Entering the theater, one is pleased, first of all, not to find a bare room with whitewashed walls, but rather a homelike space decorated with real taste. In addition, anyone who cares about the morality of our children should be fi lled with joy to see that this theater contains none of those dozens of machines and automatons that, insistent and numerous as they are, burn a hole in children’s pockets. And everyone who cares about our children’s health will be pleased to know that here, spectators’ nerves are not systematically ruined by uninterrupted scandalous music. The only instrument present is a piano, which with the help of a metronomic device has the same pleasant effect as a phonola.4 If all of these features are already worthy of praise, this is especially true of the films themselves. In addition to motion pictures, the program includes a slide lecture that changes every week. I myself saw quality hand-painted slides showing characteristic images of the lowland plains of northwest Germany. These slides enabled the audience to visit the city of Bremerhaven and take a tour of a steamer. They showed the Lüneburg Heath, with all of its natural charms, in the most favorable light, and so forth. This was accompanied by a lecture given in clear, comprehensible language, which provided the necessary explanations for the images. The other “educational” images were all cinematic sequences, including a great many films of different geographical regions. Here, too, the cinematographers demonstrated a very precise understanding of their craft. For example, when shooting an image of the countryside in the Vosges Mountains, they made sure to roll the camera just at the moment when a characteristic team of oxen and typical members of the local population were passing by. The atmospheric and poetic images of nature were so perfectly executed as to give the impression of artworks. And by including the right amount of animation in these images, the cinematographer attained something that the artist can never achieve. How poetic is a picture of a lake surrounded by a forest! And how charming it is when a train glides past between the trees! One can only make out parts of the train, but it leaves a trail of blinding white steam among the trees, whose reflection in the play of the water renders the image even more painterly. An artist could never attain such images, which are possible only for nature— and the cinematographer. In my opinion, this is the domain in which motion pictures can truly become a form of art: the domain of “living nature”! In addition to these geographical views and lyrical scenes of nature, the theater also showed very interesting films of athletic events, scenes from everyday life, and modern transportation. (For example, the shot of a snowplow clearing out a snowed-in stretch of mountain railway made a great impression on the spectators.) Among these stimulating pictures, there were also images designed for entertainment. It was nice to see how much good taste went into choosing the latter. Unfortunately, up to now, cinemas have been guilty of cultivating that so-called American brand of humor taking our epoch by storm, which has very little in common with our German notion of humor. Truly funny pictures, pictures that bring joy to the “heart” and call forth that refreshing laughter of children, are very few and far between. But the Kosmos-Theater had carefully sought out precisely these few images. It was here that I first saw a new sort of game, which consisted of “animating” white stick figures drawn on a black background—just the kind of figures that little Moritz likes to draw. Such a picture was proof to me that there is no shortage of ideas, as long as people make an effort to find funny images that we can present to children as humor with a good conscience. If I have described the achievements of this theater too thoroughly, this was in order to show that it is possible to create a cinema program corresponding to all of our pedagogical demands. It seems to me that we cannot start imposing rules on these theaters until we are able to tell them what they ought to be playing. But now that we

Moral Panic and Reform

219

have made suggestions, we should in all seriousness try to make the theaters carry them out. Will these motion picture theaters then be able to stay in business? In my view, they will have to raise the prices of their shows with the introduction of reform. And what about the children? Will they also welcome reform? There is only one answer to this question: we are not asking for their opinion. As parents and teachers, only we can decide what’s good for our children. Given the choice between a tastefully bound book of high quality and a Wild West tale or Nick Carter covered in dreadfully garish colors,5 I have no doubt which book the majority of children would choose; thus I am no more convinced that, if asked for their opinion, they would prefer a well-chosen and quality cinema show to one with a “wild” program. But who would think of claiming that children should read Wild West tales just because they like them? If children were only once given the chance to see such reform programs, and if these programs were accompanied by explanations to direct their attention to the subject matter, such shows would undoubtedly bring them great joy. We all know how much pleasure we can give children in school simply by showing them a still picture, when we accompany it with sufficient explanations to make it more accessible. But motion picture theaters are not only for children, perhaps not even primarily for children. We ought to compel adults as well to give up the current form of entertainment and be educated by reform programs! However, as much as I wish that cinemas would become a means of public education, that they would play only educational programs even for adults, I am nonetheless of the opinion that every adult must be free to choose for himself. We should thus try to convince adults to voluntarily demand better programs. For our youth, however, we should insist that cinemas play such educational films and nothing else. The proper authority in questions of education is the school, not the police. Notes 1. Goethe’s autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my Life: Poetry and Truth), contains his accounts of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). 2. The eruption of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique occurred in 1902 and caused the death of thirty thousand inhabitants. 3. Founded by the ethnologist and explorer Richard Laube, the Kosmos-Theater was in operation from 1908 to 1911. 4. Similar to the American pianola, the German phonola was an automated mechanical piano which used a roll of perforated paper to operate its keys. Invented at the turn of the twentieth century, it was replaced by the record player and radio. 5. Nick Carter was a fictional private detective popularized through pulp fiction and film serials.

92 FRANZ PFEMFERT Cinema as Educator First published as “Kino als Erzieher,” in Das Blaubuch, no. 23 (1909), 548–50; reprinted in Die Aktion 1, no. 18 (June 19, 1911), 560–3. Translated by Sara Hall.

As this essay illustrates, cinema was targeted not only by conservative cultural critics but also by progressive intellectuals as the symptom of an age characterized by triviality, soullessness, and a lack of individuality. Like Georg Kleibömer (no. 91), Franz Pfemfert (1879–1954) gives voice to a broader panic about cinema’s role as “the most

220

Film Culture and Politics dangerous educator of the people.” While he sees the promise of cinema in science and medicine, he considers its effect on the imagination devastating. His despair over the destructive and even barbaric uses of technology, as well as over the fate of culture in the modern era, has a long tradition in Germany and is echoed in writings by Theodor W. Adorno, including his savage critique of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and his remark in Minima Moralia (1951): “Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.”1 Pfemfert was a German journalist and literary critic who edited Die Aktion (1911–32), a leading forum for leftist politics and expressionist literature and art. See also the texts by Wilhelm Stapel (no. 103) and Aurel Wolfram (no. 106).

We live for the past, and we live off the future. The historians of coming generations will therefore occupy themselves with us and with our century. If our epoch is not to enter posterity as the story of a sick culture, if we want to appear before the critical eye of the historian in clean cultural dress, we must take up the task in a timely manner and do the work of culture. We must struggle tirelessly against every instance of barbarism [Unkultur]. The struggle is hard. One would search in vain through the cultural ruins of the human past for any equivalent of the cheerless desolation of our times. True, one can identify in the history of each and every people identifiable waves with high and low points. Today, however, we appear to have been drawn into the whirlpool of triviality that threatens to pull us under. For decades now, triviality has dominated our situation. Wherever we cast our gaze, we find it entrenched. We find it in art and in crafts, in technology as in architecture. It steals through huts and palaces, and captures the human spirit in its spell. Out of chaos, the resourceful mind creates innovations. But the innovations that our resourceful minds create from the current chaos are immediately pressed into the service of triviality. Our greatest minds (usually unconsciously and against their will) have gone over into the service of barbarism. Indeed, we have come so far that every “epoch-making” discovery or invention immediately inspires one question: how can this be exploited as an impediment to culture? Just consider “the greatest man of the twentieth century”! For millennia, the world of culture has dreamed of “conquering the air.”2 Now this dream is becoming reality. And the first (and most important) question now goes: how could we most advantageously apply this invention to methodical mass murder, to war . . . Technology is currently in a state of creative frenzy. The human spirit has domesticated the forces of nature with unsurpassed magnificence. Electricity, tamed and trained, performs for us the work of slaves. The way to the heights of culture would be open if triviality’s seven-league boots did not stand opposed to every instance of cultural progress. “Edison” is the formula that best captures our time. “Edison” represents the mating of genius and triviality. We are supposed to write the word in giant letters on the hot-air balloon of our overinflated culture. In doing so, we need not even think of the inventor who bears this name. He is only a product of his time. He is certainly the force that strives for good. Perhaps he is also indignant over the banality of our age; perhaps his phonograph is to be viewed only as an ingenious act of revenge conceived by the insulted spirit against our time, as a screeching satire, a soulless scream of indictment against a soulless century. So we need not think of the inventor. Nevertheless, “Edison” is the battle cry of an age that has murdered culture, the war cry of barbarism. Soullessness is the sign of our times. To have a soul means to possess individuality. Our age does not recognize individuality. One only needs to walk through our Berlin, that stone monument to soullessness, to understand this statement. We are “developing.” From the sand deserts of yesterday have

Moral Panic and Reform

221

grown “grand” residential houses. Architecture has had occasion to ply its trade. In this domain, triviality has celebrated genuine orgies. Take a look at the fairground style in Berlin’s new west side! Here the architects have spoken in all languages, creating a Babel of style. There exists no style beyond the reach of their mimicry. And soullessness screams from every window. With a clumsy salto mortale, our construction artists have jumped over all cultural claims. Having seen our “great minds” so frenzied, we could hardly anticipate anything good from the broad masses. Yet disappointment confronts even the most modest of expectations. When we wish to create an image of a people’s culture, we reach for statistics on entertainment. They speak a language clearer than the one that public libraries deliver in their annual reports. Entertainment statistics supply the standard against which a measure of the status of popular education can be drawn. These statistics destroy the hopes of anyone whose sense of personal duty calls him to tend to the altars of the people. Popular amusements serve as a continuous proclamation of the taste of the masses; they always bank on the people’s instincts. Once the preserve of the annual fairs, this is now the job of the cinematograph. Cinema has become the entertainer of the broad strata of the people—their teacher and educator. The cinema is indeed the fitting expression of our day. This bad copy of naked reality, this brutal visual reportage could achieve respect only in a time in which the imagination has been driven into the morgue and onto the tracks of crime. Nick Carter, the cinema, and Berlin apartment houses—the terms of this trivial triad belong together. Given these contemporary phenomena, it is hard to dream of cultural advances. I do not wish to be misunderstood; I, too, see in the invention of the cinematograph a triumph of the human mind. The machine will, once perfected, accomplish great feats for science. Researchers are already working today, with the help of microscopes, to make cinematographic recordings of the developmental stages of various bacilli. 3 The technique of “Kinemacolor” now being displayed constitutes a significant step forward on the way to natural color photography.4 One should not underestimate these developments. But they do not compensate for the damage the cinema has caused and continues to cause as educator of the people. The triumphs do nothing to alter the circumstance that the cinema assists the triumph of triviality and ruins the people’s taste. The cinema was once commended for its primary advantage of rendering magnificent landscapes. Now, in the halls of art frequented by our fellow countrymen, such pictures fail to “draw.” Today, the program’s “attractions” bear titles such as Er ist bei meiner Frau [He is with my wife], Die Qualen der Wilddiebstochter [The agonies of the poacher’s daughter], and Der Mord in der Villa Steinheil [Murder in the Villa Steinheil]. In the orchestra, tears of compassion flow freely whenever it seems that virtue is poised for defeat. How anyone with personal experience of these offerings in our cinema temples can speak of “educational values” is not entirely clear to me. Indeed, even if the cinemas showed good films exclusively, I would still withhold from the people this soulless fare, which darkens the imagination. People have demanded a “refinement of cinematography.” One sees endeavors to raise the “artistic value” of film. But the samples we have seen do not correspond at all to the promises of their creators. People arranged “poetic evenings with cinematic accompaniment.” Detlev von Liliencron paid the price.5 While a reader performed the poet’s ballads, the cinema delivered the illustrations! Perhaps this is only my experience, but I cannot recall these “Poetic Evenings” without a feeling of nausea. It might be better just to show horror films. A bad book can lead the reader’s imagination astray. The cinema destroys the imagination. The cinema is the most dangerous educator of the people.

222

Film Culture and Politics

Nonetheless, they have now brought it into the classroom. On “national” holidays, cinema is presented to the schoolchildren—in order to fortify patriotism. The children see the kaiser riding in a parade (the class sings “Hail to Thee . . . ”).6 They gain a cinematographic acquaintance with the individual offspring of the royal family. Pictures of maneuvers follow. The good Prussian military spirit turns cartwheels for the childish souls . . . “Edison” is the formula of the times. In the school one finds the cinema, and at home sweet home, the phonograph. And evenings, for amusement, the cinema again—at this rate, one has to bless those hours devoted to the detective novel. . . . And, meanwhile, the nation’s elite are working to create a better future for the people. In all areas of human knowledge one sees a forward drive, a search for new paths. Culture’s torchbearers rush on to new heights. But the people remain below, listening to the clatter of the cinema and putting a new waltz on the phonograph . . . Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London/New York: Verso, 2005), 25. 2. The phrase “Eroberung der Luft” (conquering the air) was the title of a handbook for airship travel and aeronautics published in several editions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rudolf Emil Martin also published a book with the same title in 1907. 3. The first microcinematography films included works by F. Martin Duncan (Cheese Mites, 1903) and by Jean Comandon (La cinématographie des microbes, 1909). 4. Invented by Charles Urban and George Albert Smith and patented in 1906, Kinemacolor was the most successful natural color process in the years of early cinema. It was an additive process involving rotating green and red filters. 5. Liliencron (1844–1909) was a German writer and author of lyrical ballads. The reference is to events where a poetry reading was accompanied by the screening of films. 6. “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” (Hail to thee in victor’s crown) was the Prussian anthem and later the anthem of the German Empire after its founding in 1871.

93 ALBERT HELLWIG Trash Films: Their Nature, Their Dangers, and the Fight against Them First published as “Die Schundfilms, ihr Wesen, ihre Gefahren und ihre Bekämpfung,” in Zentralblatt für Volksbildungswesen 11, no. 9 (October 30, 1911), 129–36; here 132–33. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The rapid ascension of film as a source of mass entertainment triggered vehement reactions on the part of the cultural and social establishment. Albert Hellwig, a liberal jurist, criminologist, and prolific journalist, became known for his interventions in the cinema reform movement, popularizing the word Schundfilm (trash film) through his 1911 book Schundfilms. (The plural “s” is probably meant to associate trash film with non-German origins.) In this excerpt from an article of the same year, he argues against all varieties of moral trash in popular cinema, which he juxtaposes with truly instructional and entertaining films. Like many film reformers, Hellwig expresses concern with the dangers of cinema for impressionable viewers, distorting their sense of reality and exerting a “brutalizing moral influence.” See Hellwig’s view on censorship later in this chapter, no. 105.

Moral Panic and Reform

223

Moral trash films [Schundfilms]—which I always have in mind when I speak of the trash films as such—can be divided into three main groups: tasteless, criminal, and sexual trash films. Of course, the borders between these three groups are often porous, and the last two are actually only varieties of tasteless or vulgar trash films; nonetheless, it is appropriate to draw attention to these two specific varieties whose practical effects are so important. It will not be necessary to characterize these groups in any more detail; suffice it to say that sexual trash films are apt to damage viewers sexually through obscenities or strong eroticism, while criminal films constitute a filmic counterpart to Nick Carter and Sherlock Holmes stories; under the category of tasteless trash films, we may include, for example, callous films and scenes designed to be humorous but which in reality leave spectators with a repulsive impression. The dangers posed by such trash films are manifold. Their most basic effect, provoked by all of those fantastic representations that pass for genuine copies of real life, can be observed in the blurring of the spectator’s sense of reality. This effect represents a particular danger for youthful spectators, who still lack practical experience. Another general effect almost always provoked by these films is that of rendering their audience more brutish. Here I am not thinking of the lowering of artistic taste—although this certainly is an unfortunate side effect of trash films—but rather of the brutalizing moral influence these films exert. And why should we expect anything different? A child in the midst of developing into an adult can still be steered toward the good as well as the bad, at least within certain limits set by his natural character. If such a child repeatedly exposes himself to the many sorts of crimes and cruel acts shown in cinemas today, will this person’s moral sense not necessarily be blunted? This brutalizing effect offers the general basis from which we can explain the incentive to crime issued by such trash films, especially the criminal ones. Of course, this incentive to crime can also be explained by the suggestive influence that moving pictures mechanically exert, above all over the psyche of children, spurring them almost against their will to imitate the acts they see. Another result of film’s brutalizing effect is that dangerous moral laxity that renders children susceptible to certain moods, makes them the willing victims of moral crimes, and causes young adults to stray; the immoral influence of sexual trash films overpowers moral ideas that otherwise functioned as inhibitory blocks.

94 ROBERT GAUPP The Dangers of the Cinema First published as “Die Gefahren des Kino,” in Süddeutsche Monatshefte 9/2, no. 9 (1911–12), 363–66. Translated by Eric Ames.

This text shows the extent to which cinema had become part of a medical discourse about the pathologies of the individual and social body. A professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Tübingen, Robert Gaupp (1870–1953) gave public lectures and published on the “suggestive power” of cinema, especially over the young and uneducated (here equated within an argument mired in condescending, classist views). He also wrote on mass murder, alcoholism, child psychology, and American Prohibition, and during the war, he became known as a proponent of the harsh treatment of shell-shocked soldiers. In 1912, Gaupp and Konrad Lange coauthored a

224

Film Culture and Politics pamphlet based on their lectures, Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmittel (The cinematograph as a medium of popular entertainment, second edition in 1922), an excerpt of which is the next selection (no. 95).

You ask for an explanation of my observations about the dangers of the cinematograph from the standpoint of a doctor and a psychologist. Recently, I have worked intensely on this question and carried out an in-depth study of the “cinema,” which has become the people’s theater of our time. Like every invention, the cinematograph has its own history of development, from its primitive form to its technical perfection. The bodily harms that the cinema still causes us today are in large part connected with technological deficiencies. The blinding and overexertion of the eyes, as well as the strain on the ear from the uncomfortable rattling noise of the projector, have already become far less noticeable in the modern, elegant cinemas of the metropolis, and one hopes that technology will soon solve this problem entirely. The dangers of the cinematographic theater exist, above all, on an intellectual level. Many of these dangers are linked to the cinematograph as such, inextricable from the representation of more complex forms of movement through living photography; others lie in the content of the presentation and can be avoided with good intentions. Long cinematographic programs cause fatigue and weariness, because the hectic succession of constantly changing images and the stimulation of the eye alone exert an enormous strain on one’s attention. Added to this is that pleasurable excitement frequently produced by the content of the films. Exhaustion manifests itself most clearly in children, who have a much slower rate of comprehension that that of adults, who are able to connect what they see in movies to what they already know. Most educational films are boring to children, because children are incapable of the effort necessary to make sharp observations and to mentally process the quickly changing images on the fly. There are physiological reasons for the fact that humorous fi lms and crass situational comedy appeal above all to young people. For these are totally comprehensible, without causing an undue strain on one’s attention; they do not require an active grasping of all the details, because they represent incidents that already lie close to the child’s circle of thoughts and activities. Mischief is much easier to understand than the presentation of a tobacco harvest or of an iron factory. Owners of cinematographic theaters have long known that crude comic scenes and horror films are the big sellers, not educational films. A glance at film programs bears this out. All “dramas” attempt to bring human thoughts, feelings, and actions into view by means of living pictures. In every higher culture, however, the possibilities for the more sophisticated intellectual expressions are tied to language; psychological characterization without language is only possible in the most limited sense. When the cinematograph wishes to depict intellectual life, it must limit itself, in order to be understood, to the most elemental forms for expressing thoughts: gestures, movements, and facial expressions; it must coarsen and exaggerate. That is one reason why the trivial, the crude, the grotesque, the sentimental, and the horrifying dominate cinematographic “dramas.” Another reason is that the large amount of capital concentrated in the cinematographic industry produces entertaining films in only a few places yet distributes them throughout the entire world; these films have to please Australians as well as Americans, southerners as well as people from the North. In order that all types of people from various cultures enjoy these films, they can only employ relatively feeble means of expression to depict equally elementary and uncomplicated aspects of human life. This concession to the taste of the international public fi nds support in the psychological fact that in the theater, primitives and children alike love strong emotions, sharp contrasts, touching or terrifying moments, silly burlesque scenes, wild eroticism, and fascinating crimes. The drama in cinema shares all of these things with the trash

Moral Panic and Reform

225

novel and the detective novel. But the cinematograph, with its temporal concentration of events, has more damaging and nerve-shattering effects. When reading, we can stop as we like, critique the trash novel, and free ourselves from its hold through reflection. With the cinema, it is another story. The rapid succession of images intensifies the pleasurable tension to an unbearable level; there is no time for contemplation and thus no time to compensate psychologically. For children and sensitive people alike, the horrific subject matter severely shakes the nervous system without giving us the means by which to defend our psyches against these attacks. When reading, very few people have a vivid enough imagination to perceive a three-dimensional version of the story, but cinema places everything before our eyes in physical form, and the milieu proves favorable to a deep suggestive power: the dark space, the monotone humming noise, and the power of the images all put the critical faculties to sleep. In this way, the drama’s content turns into a fateful suggestion, which has its way with the powerless, capitulated psyche of the common man. Comic films lack true humor; they merely offer crude situation comedies. Beatings, marital disputes, images of helpless and idiotic drunkards, and divorce scenes mocking the betrayed spouse tantalize the audience. Trick scenes, whereby technical artistry lends an apparent reality to fantastic events, are generally creepy and stupid, and seldom tasteful. Athletic demonstrations on film are rarely vivid enough to awaken real interest. The cinema offers horrifying examples of historical and political events from earlier times: the terrors of St. Bartholomew’s Eve, the tortures of the Inquisition, and the horrors of Russian justice. Realistic dramas occupy the midpoint of the program: Die weiße Sklavin [The White Slave Trade], Die Vampyrtänzerin [The Vampire Dancer], Die Rache des Indianers [Justice of the Redskin],1 and so forth. The shameless practice of venturing on people’s pleasure with baseness, horror, sentimentality, and sexual excitement is spreading. Distorted images of suffering, poverty, and sickness foster torturous thoughts about the injustice of the world; they rob us of our attention to the law and to state authority. In Germany the police generally stays out of sexual scandals, but lusty eroticism occupies an increasingly prominent place in society, and the cinema, in which children and adolescents find themselves more and more at home, represents a serious threat in this sense as well. Still more dangerous, in my opinion, are the atrocious, real-life representations of criminal life. Even if these crime dramas typically close with a moral ending in which the criminal atones for his crime, it is still a mistake to believe that such performances are therefore harmless. The heroic acts of the bold criminal exert a major influence upon young viewers, one that far outweighs the force of deterrence contained in the moral ending. One cannot judge harshly enough the lack of moral conscience and emotional savagery informing the production and exhibition of these wretched fi lms with their “famous criminals.” Indeed, the experiences of the juvenile courts show that the cinema is ruining our youth in ever-greater numbers. With all thinkable horror, the cinema even places images of suicide before spectators’ eyes. Finally, the danger exists that vivid presentations of horrible stories lead to sexual aberrations in people who are especially susceptible to illness. The idea that the cinematographic presentations are too tasteless to have a deeper effect cannot console us. Nothing would be more mistaken than such an assumption. What appears as insipid and unpleasant to the aesthetically sophisticated taste of educated people, what repulses them as grotesque, can exercise a nerve-shaking influence on children and the uneducated. We neurologists know how often an intense affective experience threatens the nervous health of young people. There can be no doubt that the psychic constitution of an imaginative child, when the latter sits in the dark space of the cinema and follows all the horrors of a film with feverish pulses, is susceptible to a deep and

226

Film Culture and Politics

lasting suggestion. The newspapers notify us of terrifying incidents in which young persons want to imitate in reality the crimes that they see in the cinema. Let me add a word about religious films. Whoever has not experienced them has no idea with what unspeakable abomination cinemas present the passion of Christ. Those divine figures created by Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Dürer, which today can be copied and made available to the public for a reasonable price, are being replaced by the figures of the cinema! Thus the danger exists that the Lumières’ wonderful invention, which enabled us to render the movements and actions of a living being truly and objectively and to record them for those who come after, will be exploited by profit-hungry capitalists for purposes that do serious damage to our people. If the cinematograph itself represents a major technological advance, cinematographic theaters represent a serious danger to taste and propriety. Undeniably, the most reprehensible films have the greatest appeal to the lowest classes of society. But if we share the conviction that the cinema in its current form not only corrupts taste and blurs one’s sense of reality but also endangers the healthy thought and feeling of our people, harming the body and soul of the youth, then we must seek out help wherever we can find it. We will not be able to do so without the help of the state. Whoever trades on raw mass instincts always gets his money’s worth. With our efforts to enlighten the public through speeches and publications, we will but seldom get hold of those in need of enlightenment. Only the state will be able to effect real change. Fortunately, it is increasingly apparent that the state intends to fulfill its responsibility. Note 1. The White Slave Trade (Den hvide Slavehandel) was the title of two different Danish films from 1910, one directed by Alfred Cohn (for Fotorama) and the other by August Blom (for Nordisk), the latter of whom plagiarized the former. Blom also directed the Danish film The Vampire Dancer (Vampyrdanserinden, 1912) for Nordisk. Finally, Justice of the Redskin (La Justice du peau-rouge, 1908) was a French film distributed by Pathé Frères.

95 KONRAD LANGE The Cinematograph from an Ethical and Aesthetic Viewpoint First published as “Der Kinematograph vom ethischen und ästhetischen Standpunkt” in Robert Gaupp and Konrad Lange, Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmittel (Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey, 1912), 12–48; here 47–48. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A revered professor of art history at Tübingen, Konrad Lange (1855–1921) became one of the most prominent (and most senior) representatives of the cinema reform movement, arguing for aesthetic censorship in numerous essays in the 1910s. The following are the closing paragraphs from a lecture he delivered in Tübingen on May 21, 1912. It appeared in a publication series of the Dürerbund, an organization founded by Ferdinand Avenarius in 1902 to promote the aesthetic education of the masses in the context of general cultural reform. Notably, even a critic as conservative as Lange here differentiates between the current uses of cinema—ones driven by individual capitalist interests—and the medium’s promise to provide education and entertainment to the German people. Lange would also publish the books Nationale Kinoreform (National cinema reform, 1918) and Das Kino in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Cinema’s present and future, 1920).

Moral Panic and Reform

227

We cannot reiterate enough that we are not suggesting a general battle against the cinematograph, but rather a critique of its current utilization. The task is to win back for culture the cinematograph—which contains the most beautiful possibilities for development, but has unfortunately fallen into the wrong hands; that is, it has been made into a material profit venture— to transform it from a medium of stultification to one of popular education, to give it the character of a truly good and refined medium of popular entertainment. Anyone who cares about social welfare, artistic education, and the preservation of good, old values—in short, about everything that is best for the people—should work with us toward this end. Of course, we freely admit that the cinematographic reform we aspire to would, at first, cause financial harm to some cinematograph owners and film producers. Today, at least, much capital is invested in trash films, which would be annihilated by the legal excision of this genre. Even among financially disinterested parties, there will be those who, driven by a sense of justice that is typical for us Germans and blinded by well-known slogans about the “free play of forces” [“freien Spiel der Kräfte”], will want to prevent the state from passing laws or police regulations that might fi nancially harm a certain line of business represented among the people, even if that damage is likely to last for only a short time. In response, we must always remind them that three quarters of the film industry is in foreign hands, meaning that a large portion of the money that our little people bring to the cinema is migrating to France, America, England, and Italy. But we have not the slightest interest in filling the pockets of foreign stockholders and great patent owners like Mr. Edison with the hard-earned pennies of our working and middle classes. Aside from business factors, this is also a question of ideals, namely of the spiritual health, the culture, and the ethos of the German people. People should finally appreciate that civilization and culture are not the same thing, that technological inventions in the interest of progress can, under certain circumstances, harm spiritual culture, and that civilization is desirable and justifiable only if it advances cultural interests. And what do we mean by a fair balance of interests? For years, cinema’s interested parties have been allowed, unpunished, to lay waste to the ethical sensibilities and aesthetic education of the people. It is certainly not too much to expect them to make a few sacrifices. And, as for the well-being of the state, the same basic principle has always applied: that individual interests must be subordinated to those of the collective. For the state is not a capitalist institution that must support anything that serves profit and thereby raises its citizens’ taxpaying ability; rather, it is a cultural agent, whose task consists in spiritually uplifting the people. On the one hand, we have the fiscal interests of individuals, who have certainly earned enough by now; and on the other, we have the moral competence and aesthetic health of the entire people. We think it should not be too difficult to decide between them!

96 IKE SPIER The Sexual Danger in the Cinema First published as “Die sexuelle Gefahr im Kino,” in Die neue Generation: Zeitschrift für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform 8, no. 4 (April 14, 1912), 192–98. Translated by Sara Hall.

A physician and sexologist, Ike Spier (b. Isaak Spier) published on sexual behavior and culture, the psychology of prostitution, marriage reform, and the relationship between war and sexuality. Die neue Generation was edited by the German feminist Helene Stöcker, whose Bund für Mutterschutz promoted maternity protection and sexual reform.

228

Film Culture and Politics Taking up other cinema reformers’ concern with film’s moral effects on the masses (and particularly youth), Spier here focuses on the perceived dangers of cinema in the realm of sexuality. This article is one of many that were concerned with regulating cinema’s social “environment,” including health, hygiene, crowd management, behavior, and physical setting, all of which shaped the status, function, and aesthetics of the emergent mass medium.

The appearance of the cinematograph brought an adherent corruption in its wake. Lately, alongside many thrilling, idiotic, and tasteless representations, people prefer a particular type of film which, in a lewd and garrulous overindulgence, shows all sorts of snippets from the milieus of love, libertines, coquettes, and ballrooms in a truly debased and stimulatory manner. I can well understand that in some states the authorities intend to intervene. As little as I sympathize in general with the authorities’ intervention in the freedom of trade, theater, and the like, it seems to me that someone has finally had the right idea here. We must fight this danger, which undermines serious moral principles and, thereby, the moral foundations within man. Naturally, it threatens only the masses of those who cannot think for themselves, such as minors, youth, and suggestible people who are not used to having their own opinion about anything or investigating things by themselves with the scrutiny of critical methodology. Since these large masses make up the broadest lot of our people, the public sexual fare—easily available to everyone and apt to inflict damage in the sexual tract—indicates an enormous sexual danger. Not all cinematographic theaters are designed to appeal to mass instincts or satisfy the dull appetites of large crowds with the desired spicy lure time and again. There are also many proper cinemas that have grasped the actual purpose of this marvelous invention; they understand their mission to lie solely in interesting instruction, in the popularization of science, and in the projection of tasteful images. They have our loud applause and our support. However, the majority of film theaters function via other means. By way of illustration, I simply wish to share some of these film titles in the form of key words: The Child of Sin, The Asphalt Plant, Ballroom Anna, Love in the Big City, Seductions of the Metropolis, The Adulteress, The Fallen Daughter, Love Adventures, The Woman Hunter, et cetera, et cetera.1 Here, allow me also to briefly relate the contents of a lengthy picture sold to film distributors with the greatest to-do. I might add for clarity that the film studios do not work directly with the theaters. The producers of the films sell them to distributors, who then secure the theaters. The notice reads more or less as follows: “Because of its fantastic appeal, all fi lm distributors highly recommend the following fi lm . . .” etcetera, etcetera. The story is then as follows. The Duchess of —— spends the summer days at a sea resort with her daughter. There they meet the Baron of ——, who begins courting the duchess’s daughter. Neither the mother nor the daughter is averse to him. One day the young duchess succumbs to the baron’s advances. She admits it to her mother. Outraged, the mother immediately calls for the Don Juan. In response to the mother’s inquiry about marriage to the young duchess, he smiles cynically, responding that he is already married and disappears with derision—a great misfortune and terrible agony for the family. Then the old duchess remembers the house doctor, an ambitious man who had previously courted the young duchess. He is summoned, and at first hesitates to see the daughter out of pride; yet they manage to buy him off with a great deal of money. He is then married off to the pregnant girl. She despises him because she knows that he is now marrying her for the money. The child she bears widens the divide. The couple lives together without

Moral Panic and Reform

229

contact. One day, the child suddenly becomes critically ill. The stepfather rushes to the scene and, after long efforts, accompanied by the pleading and fondest wishes (as well as the heartfelt distress) of the mother, saves the child. After all of this, the mother is finally united with her husband. The film ends with the triumph of magnanimity and noble sentiments. Isn’t it wonderful? This rivals even with the likes of Rinaldo Rinaldini, Nick Carter, or The Secret of the Black Cloister.2 Only in the cinema can there be so much sexual, sentimental, saccharine, emotional mush. This is one of many examples, and a rather harmless one at that. It is not quite so bad as some of the films shown in the countries where Romance languages are spoken and in other parts of the world where spectators can see sexual acts right on the screen along with all sorts of other visual obscenities—of course, only in certain locales. Still, according to my opinion, the effects of films like the one described above are much worse. Imagine the differences between the audiences present in each case; in the undisguised cinemas with their blatant sexual content (for example in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires), the audience is composed of adults who are often well-traveled and hardened individuals; nothing human is foreign to these people, who can look on with the smile of the initiated as the images roll by. Nothing about these people can be further corrupted. Even women are allowed to watch; and here, as is often the case, one can make the observation that unveiled contents do not excite to the same degree as cleverly cloaked and half-suggested sexuality. By contrast, consider our movie theaters, where the greater part of the audience belongs either to the middle class or—more often still—to the working class, and where the majority of spectators are “young blood.” The world of the nobility parading up there on-screen leads them to believe in a marvelous, desirable, pleasure-fi lled paradise of unclouded enjoyment and total bliss! [. . .] For the moment, however, let us simply turn our attention to the state of affairs. One need only observe the vast number of adolescent boys and girls as they pour out of the pernicious gullets of the cinema, with gleaming eyes and boiling blood, onto the asphalt and arc-lamp atmosphere of the street. Their imagination has absorbed abundant material. Those elegant ladies and gentlemen of society, who have displayed all their love and personal affairs on the screen in a Claurenesque manner, 3 still hover before the eyes of these youth: hot kisses on glowing necks; heated embraces behind the shrubbery in the palm garden of the millionaire’s villa; furtive invitations to infidelity; glances exchanged between the lover and his mistress; billets-doux; gambling tables; dinners; husbands deceived; good girls seduced; reappearing ballroom heroines and great coquettes; outcast women; and Indian bayadères. In short, these films include a copious sampling of sexual variations. How many girls may have fallen prey to seduction after seeing one or more screenings? Perhaps a young lad proudly enjoyed feeling like a Don Juan and actually found the cinema to be a most successful matchmaker. How many young men may have been aroused to the height of excitement and then become an easy victim to prostitution and its dangers! And we hardly need to imagine the number of marital infidelities caused by such cinematographic presentations, the flings committed by husbands and wives in small, narrow circumstances who—suddenly intoxicated by the colorful cinematic plutocracy and society and dissatisfied with their own existence—decided to follow the motto “Corriger la vie” in one or another unpleasant way. It is not necessary to spin this fable out any further, nor to bring any more detail into the picture; it is clear from what I have already shown that if these “Clauren films” I find

230

Film Culture and Politics

so distasteful are allowed to continue asserting their influence, the cinema will gain many more adherents. Such spiritual permutations bring in their wake sexual dangers and a regrettable demoralization—and with this, seduction, children out of wedlock, infections, marital infidelities, prostitution, etcetera, etcetera. Do not retort that this is too gloomy and pessimistic a view. A visit to the average cinematographic theater will confirm everything I have stated here. [. . .] Now war is being declared on the cinema from all sides. Actors are being urged to cease contributing to fi lm productions by theater owners, who see their livelihood threatened. With its Clauren fare, which makes no demands on reason and sensibility, the cinematograph steals the bulk of patrons from the theaters—which certainly cannot be accused today of too-weighty presentations and deep and holy seriousness. The cinema undercuts the desperate efforts of theater directors to promote light and frivolous pieces. These two parties may fight out their own battle; it does not affect our program. But we see the danger of cinema in its evident role as a matchmaker and as a sexually stimulating form of intoxication, and we must make a great effort of resistance in this area. The film advertising papers, which earn countless profits in this industry with their announcements, along with the film producers, distribution firms, and others, trumpet the absolute necessity of moving pictures through thousands of outlets. You will not see me speaking out against this; I do not want to be suspected of simply being a reactionary in matters of techno-civilizational development. I am far from saying anything against cinema in general. However, I do stand opposed to the pernicious outgrowths I have portrayed above, against the unprincipled producers who accommodate brutal instincts and who, out of interest in lining their pockets, have become today’s Claurens of cinematography. And I am certain that every respectable producer and filmmaker will agree with me when, in defense of our national tradition and our moral capital, I call out: “Videant consules!”4 Notes 1. The first three films referred to are Kinder der Sünde (Germany, 1911), Hulda Rasmussen / Dyrekøbt Glimmer (Denmark, 1911, dir. Urban Gad), and Ballhaus-Anna (Germany, 1911, dir. Walter Schmidthässler). The other titles could not be identified. 2. Rinaldo Rinaldini, the Robber Captain (1798) was a classic of German trivial literature by Christian August Vulpius. Nick Carter was the title character of the six-part film Nick Carter, le roi des détectives (1908), which was based on the detective figure known from newspaper serials and dime novels. The Secret of the Black Cloister could not be identified. 3. The German writer Heinrich Clauren (1771–1854) wrote thousands of pages of serial romantic fiction, which was enormously popular but also ridiculed as cheap literature. Wilhelm Hauff famously satirized Clauren’s prolixity and worn-out style in Der Mann im Mond (The man in the moon, 1825). 4. The Latin phrase “Videant consules ne quid detrimenti res publica capiat” (Let the consuls see to it that the State suffers no harm) was used in times of national emergency in the late Roman Republic.

97 P. MAX GREMPE Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid First published as “Gegen die Frauenverblödung im Kino,” in Die Gleichheit: Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen 23, no. 5 (November 27, 1912), 70–72. Translated by Eric Ames.

Moral Panic and Reform

231

The article excerpted below highlights the imbrication of the cinema reform movement with the politics of class and gender, betraying the sexist view that women become more absorbed in visual spectacles than men do—a trope that would be the frequent target of critique in later feminist film theory. The working-class cinema called for here would not materialize in Germany until the late 1920s (see chapter 11 of this volume). Grempe was an engineer and journalist who wrote for Bild und Film and trade publications. Edited by Clara Zetkin, Die Gleichheit (1892–1923) was a socialdemocratic journal devoted to the “interests of working women”; it was also the organ of the international women’s socialist movement for many years.

In the past few years, the cinematographic theater has played a decisive role in the voyeuristic needs of the masses, and particularly of women. Until now, unfortunately, we have given this development much too little attention. Otherwise it would not still be possible to find in numerous films entire sequences that fly in the face of all of our ideas. In keeping with the well-known philistine joke, cinematographic presentations often ridicule any women who stray from the road of thoughtless tradition in order to explore new ideals. Other presentations characterize the struggling, class-conscious proletariat as the troublemakers that members of the Reichsverband and other demagogues like to depict it as, for their own purposes.1 In short, through sentimental and farcical scenes, the film theaters all too often denigrate and mock everything for which the enlightened proletarian woman passionately struggles. The extent to which living pictures are able to agitate and dumb down their audience is evident simply in the large number of cinemas in Germany, which today exceeds three thousand. If one further considers that each film is seen by at least one and a half million people, one can no longer underestimate the magnitude of this danger. It should be added that women make up at least half of all cinemagoers. A glance into even the best cinema reveals that these women and girls belong in large part to the working class and thus stem from our very own area of agitation. With its penetrating mode of presentation, the moving image clearly has an extraordinarily lasting effect on everyone, even on men. Many a viewer has fainted during thrilling scenes. But in light of women’s greater mental excitability and the preponderance of emotions in their lives, living pictures must have a more powerful effect on them than on men. Whoever stops in the cinema to observe attentively the women watching the screen with reverence will come away with the undeniable impression that many of them are irresistibly gripped, indeed shaken deep in their souls. Those who find this claim exaggerated have only to visit a popular theater on a Saturday. The number of visitors is usually highest on this day, and often on Sunday as well. And thus the effect of cinematographic presentations on spectators, and especially on the numerous women viewers, becomes most apparent. The critical observer can best undertake his study if he attends cinema programs that do not stand in sharp contradiction to the essence and ideals of the modern workers’ movement. If we caution against this danger of the cinema, we do so not simply to condemn the film theater out of hand. Today, it has become customary to blame cinemas for everything bad and to prophesy eternal damnation for their owners as well as film manufacturers. However, despite all judgments, cinemas continue to sprout up like mushrooms and the numbers of their devoted patrons are constantly growing. One would do well to take the position that cinema represents a splendid achievement and therefore does not deserve suppression or harassment as long as it serves the purposes of good popular entertainment and true education. We must make the cinema useful for such ends through our movement and for our movement. We must fight against stultifying films. We must place the extraordinarily educational and agitational power of film images in the service

232

Film Culture and Politics

of our movement! If the politically organized and unionized proletariat is systematically moving forward in this direction, they will soon bring the ideas of socialism still closer to the masses. Note 1. The Reichsverband (National Organization against Social Democracy) had been founded in Berlin in 1904. Uniting all parties that promoted nationalism and militarism, it fought the rise of the Social Democratic Party, which won a stunning 34.8 percent of the votes in the last election before the war, on January 12, 1912.

98 ROLAND Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid: A Response First published as “Gegen die Frauenverblödung im Kino,” in Die Gleichheit: Zeitschrift für die Interessen der Arbeiterinnen 23, no. 8 (1912–13), 115–16. Translated by Eric Ames.

This is a reply by an unidentified author to the preceding article by P. Max Grempe (no. 97), which had appeared in a prior issue of the same journal. Differing from “Comrade Grempe,” the author here sees the danger not in films that plainly discredit the worker’s movement but rather in those that appear under the guise of unpolitical entertainment. Roland’s call for cinema to serve as a tool of popular enlightenment recalls the tradition of the social-democratic Volksbühnenbewegung (people’s theater movement) of the 1890s that tried to create a theater for the working class. See also Franz Höllering’s text in chapter 11, no. 163.

There’s no doubt about it. Cinema has quickly achieved an astonishing influence. Millions of men, women, and children from all social classes look to the cinema for recuperation from the day’s exhausting work or a few hours of entertainment, and for distraction. But are they doing the right thing? That is the question. Our comrade Max Grempe rightly protested the fact that films are screened in cinemas that wage battle against the workers’ movement by befouling it or ridiculing it. Those who profit from today’s social order, those who have everything in their power—school, police, pulpit, lecture room, and press—could not ignore the cinema once they recognized its great meaning. They use it in order to influence the masses to their advantage, to rob them of their propensity to struggle and of their holy zeal for emancipation from the bonds of necessity and servitude. Herein lies the danger of the cinema. At the same time, in opposition to Comrade Grempe, I am of the opinion that films displaying this intention openly and unambiguously do not necessarily cause such great damage. Viewing films and dramas of the kind characterized by Comrade Grempe, any worker—man or woman—would intuitively say to himself or herself: “That’s not true; that’s a lie!” Much more dangerous are other films, which appear to be free of political influence, as if they wanted only to entertain. All of these “dramas,” which lure the voyeuristic masses to the cinemas every day and leave them staring, with lust and excitement, at the white screen—these “dramas” do more harm to the healthy spirit of the masses, and thereby to the workers’ movement, than any of those films that openly serve the odious Reichsverband. From these films a wide stream of ugly and cruel things, a stream

Moral Panic and Reform

233

of deception and sensation, flows into the heads and hearts of the working class and, above all, the proletarian youth. Consider the following titles I have noted in some newspapers: The Bride’s Uninterrupted Happiness, The Death Ride, The Secret of the Mill, The Walton Station Switch, Dishonored, A Minute Too Late, Slaves of Beauty, A Mother’s Tragedy, Kiekebusch’s Black Heir, Moritz and the Love Powder.1 Isn’t it obvious that we are dealing with trash here? Don’t these dramas (and these are by no means the worst) in reality have the effect of stultifying and brutalizing? What are spectators supposed to do with divorce scenes of the most repulsive kind, with detective dramas that whip the nerves, with images of terror, and with all the silliness passing for humor? We direct all our energy against trash literature like colportage novels and Nick Carter magazines; but the cinema’s trash has a far more penetrating and dangerous effect since the viewer does not have to imagine the ugly sights but sees everything played out vividly and realistically before his eyes. Enough has already been written about these trash films and their pernicious influence. For Social Democrats like ourselves, the cinema’s most harmful effect has to be that it turns the proletariat away from the political and economic efforts of its class, that it weakens its will never to rest in the struggle for freedom, that it steals time from working men and women, distracting them from their continuing education, and that it lays waste to the minds of our growing working youth. For this reason, we must wage a decisive struggle against the cinema as it stands today, and not merely against individual films. To be sure, the cinema is still developing. It can someday become a wonderful medium in the service of scientific instruction and enlightenment. That much has already been proven by a whole series of films, which are hardly noticeable, it must be said, in the mass of trash out there. Cinema technology has the capacity to spy on animals as they walk their nocturnal paths; it can penetrate into the secret life of the insect world. It can bring us living information of the ways and customs of foreign peoples. It can capture worldhistorical events and phenomena of cultural-historical interest and preserve them in all their vitality for later eras. It can give us a glimpse into the making of all human tools and instruments. To be sure, the cinema has a future. It is different, however, from the one that Comrade Grempe imagines. Comrade Grempe would like to place the cinema in the service of socialist agitation. I don’t know how he intends to go about it. Does he plan to replace the regular dramas with socialist ones? Such dramas would have no more in common with art than the capital-serving horrors and atrocities we criticize, and from which these socialist dramas would distinguish themselves only in intellectual content. The struggling proletariat is rightly determined to reject the frivolous, decadent, “art-for-art” aesthetes. It can, it must honor the trend toward artistic formation; for this is content and idea. But it must not be satisfied with unrefined pseudo-art, even when it attempts to reflect the idea of the proletarian struggle for emancipation. We want the proletariat to reach the heights of art. They should delight in everything noble and beautiful that artists of all eras and nations have produced. They should also reject and criticize all pseudo-art or social sham. Yet film dramas will always remain sorry efforts, even if they include the best actors or are based on works by the most famous poets, and even if they seek to serve the aims of our movement. We can only hope that cinema will increasingly do justice to its true task: to become a means of enlightenment. This is the goal we must strive for. In addition, we must work to awaken within proletariat men and women the hunger for true art. For this reason, we must see to it that people’s theaters are opened everywhere, theaters that will extend to underprivileged people the opportunity to see and hear good plays and operas; we must arrange affordable concerts and lectures; we must open art galleries and collections of paintings at convenient times for the proletariat; and we must assure that

234

Film Culture and Politics

good books constantly make their way into ever-widening circles. The more we foster such efforts, the more men and women we will entice away from the pernicious film trash, thereby offering an antidote to the rampant cinema epidemic at present. This is an urgent task. Note 1. The translations follow the German titles. The films referenced are Den afbrudte Bryllupsnat (Denmark, 1911), Der Todesritt (Germany, 1912), Hvad Møllebranden afslørede (Denmark, 1912, dir. Eduard Schnedler-Sørensen), Die Weiche von Station Walton (USA, 1912, prod. William Selig; original English title unknown), Ehrlos (Germany, 1912; dir. Ernst A. Becker), Le Pont sur l’abîme (France, 1912, dir. Louis Feuillade), Hjærternes Kamp (Denmark, 1912, dir. August Blom), Historien om en Moder (Denmark, 1912, dir. August Blom), Gontran engendre une sombre postérité (France, 1912, dir. Lucien Nonguet), and Rigadin et la poudre d’amour (France, 1912, dir. Georges Monca).

99 NALDO FELKE Cinema’s Damaging Effects on Health First published as “Die Gesundheitsschädlichkeit des Kinos,” in Die Umschau: Wochenschrift über die Fortschritte in Wissenschaft und Technik 17, no. 13 (March 22, 1913), 254–55. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Published in Die Umschau, a weekly journal that reported on advances in science and technology, this essay reports on medical tests performed to measure bodily endurance in viewing filmic images. Naldo Felke’s characterization of the cinema as a form of “optical torture” would find echoes in many subsequent fantasies and discourses about media exposure, from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) to “Pokemon shock” to the dangers of gaming and beyond. Felke later published books on Goethe’s Faust and on Einstein’s theory of relativity.

When I speak of the damage that cinema does to one’s health, I am not simply referring to the fact that a large number of people sit packed together in what are often truly inadequate and unsanitary spaces lacking sufficient air. I am referring to the damage that cinema does to the eyes and the nerves. Its images give off a significantly more intense light than the natural events they reproduce. In addition, the scenes alternate far more rapidly and, since they typically serve to portray exciting and tense situations, exert a much greater strain on the eyes than do events in nature. Experiments undertaken on this topic—wherein academics have recorded the effects of events seen in nature and on film—have allowed us to describe with considerably greater precision what happens during movies. When one spends a significant amount of time in a movie theater, the rapid alternation of images, together with the flickering on the screen, strain the eyes and the nerves to such an extent that frequent visits to these events are sure to have damaging effects. Given these results, I was now interested in the following question: How long can a normal human being withstand such movie shows? For my experiment, I chose an average man of robust constitution and an intellectually active academic, both of whom had strong, healthy eyes. I then found a nervous artist suffering from weak optical nerves. Together, we attended a lengthy cinema show, and the results were astounding. After thirty minutes, their pulses climbed by up to 28.2 percent, while after three hours, they sank by up to 13.3 percent. A fatigue of the eyes (partly

Moral Panic and Reform

235

accompanied by a sparse secretion of tears) set in after two hours and fifteen minutes for the weak-sighted, nervous artist, after two hours and fifty-five minutes for the academic, and after three hours and twenty minutes for the robust man. The nervous subject began to suffer from a headache after three hours, the academic after three hours and fifty minutes, and the robust man after four hours and forty-five minutes. But amazingly, it was the robust man, the one seemingly fit as a fiddle, who broke down first in the end. After hardly more than five hours, the subject grew extremely weary, his eyelids became heavy, and he explained: “I can’t go on. I can’t take it anymore. My head is spinning and my eyes hurt.” The academic withstood the test a little longer than five and a half hours, only then to declare himself utterly too worn out to continue. I detected a light reddish color around the eyelids and a noticeable dilation of the pupils. He was in a state of complete exhaustion. The next morning, his body—and especially the eyes—still showed considerable signs of fatigue; despite a long night’s sleep, he suffered from slight but continuous weariness. The nervous but strong-willed artist, who had already succumbed to tears after two and a half hours and headaches after three, held out for five hours and fifty minutes in all. Then, complaining of a very intense headache and with an exceptionally faint and slow pulse, he rushed into bed as quickly as possible. He later described his state after lying down as follows: His head was throbbing. He felt as if his entire skull were completely hollowed out. For some time after lying down, it seemed to him as if the bed were rising and sinking with him, as if he himself were sinking deeper and deeper. This lasted for hours before he could get to sleep. The great significance of these results becomes clear if we consider the cinema’s popularity today, as well as the fact that spectators—and especially the young—often sit in the cinema for hours on end. True, in this case, the subject of the experiment was an individual with a nervous disposition, but some of these damaging effects will undoubtedly show up in a normal person as well. As experiments teach us, frequent and lasting trips to these bright attractions will inevitably have devastating results. This ought to demonstrate the extreme damage to the eyes and the nerves; for reasons of health, we ought to applaud any and all limitations imposed on the cinema industry. Excessive demands are already being made on our eyes by our ever-expanding culture of “night life”; we really do not need such forms of optical torture as the cinema to reduce the eyes’ capacity even further. Above all, any parents who care about the health of their family should absolutely forbid their young children from making frequent and long visits to the cinema.

100 KARL BRUNNER Today’s Cinematograph: A Public Menace First published in Der Kinematograph von heute—Eine Volksgefahr (Berlin: Verlag des Vaterländischen Schriftenverbandes, 1913), 3–4. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The following excerpt is taken from a thirty-two-page pamphlet that appeared in the publication series of the Vaterländischer Schriftenverband (Writers’ Association of the Fatherland). Karl Brunner was a pedagogue, the chief censorship official in Berlin, and editor of Die Hochwacht (1910–22), a “monthly journal for the abatement of trash and filth in word and image.” Known for his German-nationalist and anti-Semitic views, Brunner

236

Film Culture and Politics was the most active of all the adversaries of cinema, tirelessly giving lectures and writing articles, and he was also the target of critique by contemporaries including Hermann Häfker and O. Th. Stein. In this text, he decries cinema’s enormous influence and popularity within Germany, the proverbial “nation of poets and thinkers,” and he juxtaposes cinema’s “true mission” in the cultural realm with its current sensationalist, commercialized, and debased forms. To illustrate his point, he lists dozens of suggestive film titles—for him “dark stains on the [. . .] canvas of our epoch,” but for us an opportunity to sense the breadth of popular films now lost to posterity.

In the entire history of human culture, no invention has ever attained anything like the powerful and widespread influence that the cinematograph currently exerts over the masses. Because of this, the authorities in matters of public life—who cannot look on with indifference at the various forces influencing the masses—find themselves faced with a completely new set of tasks, whose difficulty and importance we cannot overstate. “Cinematographic art” is still very young. But technological development continues to race forward, spurred on by the rush for glittering gold. Born along by an unprecedented popularity among the masses—a popularity itself resulting from a clever manipulation of mass instincts—the cinematograph has already far, far overshadowed all other forms of spectacle and popular entertainment. In its essence, the cinematograph represents a magnificent and admirable invention of the human intellect. Within the context of our continually expanding and improving system of popular education, it seemed at first to offer a unique and desirable forum for quality entertainment and information. It appeared destined to promote culture in the best sense of the term. If it has now become an enemy of culture, the blame lies squarely with those ingenious businessmen who have reduced the cinematograph to a tool of the worst sensationalism. Ever since the “drama” became the dominant form of cinematography, the cinematograph lost any efficacy it might have had as a forum for the promotion of culture. Thousands rush into this new terrain of limitless possibilities as if into a newly discovered land of gold. They have no notion of this invention’s true mission; they are incapable of placing the cinematograph’s dormant potentials in the service of the public’s true interests. Countless film theaters have been constructed simply in the hope of lining their owners’ pockets by means of an appeal to the masses’ basest instincts. In a relentless series of conquests, this most modern invention of our enterprising, capitalist age has wound millions of people around its finger as if by means of hypnosis. It now commands big business and has even begun to force some of our writers and poets into its service. With no scruples whatsoever, base egoism is now celebrating its triumph over all idealistic worldviews, over the values of taste, decency, morality, legality, and social well-being. Any friend of the people is deeply remorseful to see the form that movie theaters have taken today. His face becomes red with shame when he considers how the cultural struggles of generations could have come to such a result for the majority of our people, when he observes the utter lack of resistance to all this repulsive and base fi lth even within the nation of poets and thinkers. Still, the form taken by movie theaters does not lie beyond the influence of the authorities, whose mistakes up to now only make the terrible state of today’s cinematograph appear all the worse. Under current laws, however, the authorities’ influence is far too weak to eliminate all of the cinematograph’s objectionable shortcomings. Walking through the streets of our cities—and this is true even in small and midsized towns, but especially in big cities—anyone with eyes cannot help but notice the vociferous, often unbearably repulsive advertisements. One sees posters with tasteless,

Moral Panic and Reform

237

often truly frightful images, generally blown up to gigantic proportions and printed in the most garish colors. Then there are the movie titles, inspired by a truly clever penchant for sensation and accompanied by the appropriate commentaries, which attempt to render the dramas even more enticing with labels such as “hit,” “the latest sensation,” “an enormous success,” or “taking the world by storm.” A list of such titles alone suffices to offend our modern sensibility. And those who will one day have to write the cultural history of our time will only be able to describe these testimonies of popular taste as dark stains on the otherwise so brilliant canvas of our epoch. Below is a sampling of some of the most recent titles of this type: Smash Hits Distribution Company:

Crying Out for Happiness The Seedy Street A Slave to Love What Grows in the Asphalt The Ship of Death Souls Led Astray Dance Hall Anna Sinful Love Tainted with Shame The Night of Living Spirits: Sensational Two-Act Drama from the World of Spiritism Wounded Hearts: Moving Story in Three Acts A Struggle in the Dark: Sensational Hit in Two Acts Burning Love, Blazing Hate: Drama in Two Acts Double Rejection: Worldwide Sensation Hit list

The Living Dead Lucky Devil Waves of Destiny Life is a Gamble Complete Listings of Older and More Recent Hits

Deep in the Abyss Lost in the Urban Labyrinth The Dance of the Vampire Woman Broken Chains A Ghost from the Past In the Jaws of Death Fritzchen Teaches his Father a Lesson: Comedy A Woman’s Sufferings Dishonored! Riddles of Life

238

Film Culture and Politics

The Guilty Woman The Female Detective The Bride of Death The Spy in the Prison Crying Out for Happiness The Fatal Experiment Trapped under the Wheels of the Big City The Son of the Count and the Woman from the Circus The Cave of Death Failed Revenge A Modern Marriage Dark Powers Emma’s Secret The Seamstress The Snake’s Bite Deprived of Happiness Burning Desires Shooting Star: Two-Act Drama from the Life of a Singer Queen of the Night: Urban Drama in Two Acts Love’s Poison: Drama from the Life of Variety Artists in Two Acts Human Wreckage The Man with No Conscience The Temptations of Love The Woman without a Heart Dishonorable? The Broken Spring Rose The Bride’s Interrupted Wedding Night (or in conformity with the ruling of the censors: The Bride’s Interrupted Happiness)

101 RICHARD GUTTMANN Cinematic Mankind: Attempt at a Principal Analysis First published as Die Kinomenschheit: Versuch einer prinzipiellen Analyse (Vienna/Leipzig: AnzengruberVerlag, 1916), 30–32. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Published in the middle of the Great War, this brochure by Viennese writer and editor Richard Guttmann theorizes cinema’s power in creating a “cinematic mankind” as part of a broader cultural-pessimistic diagnosis of the current era. Like earlier authors in this chapter, Guttmann attributes to cinema the obscuration of audiences’ sense of reality. For him, “cinematic man” has lost a sense of both spatial relations and “inner personal limitations”

Moral Panic and Reform

239

and has prioritized self-externalization above internalization. We include the final section of the brochure, where he dismisses cinema’s potential for development and calls for the renewal of human inwardness. See also the essay “Homo Cinematicus,” no. 103.

A fairly simple mechanism creates the illusion of live action for the spectator. The speed of playback prevents the pinpointing of a single frame. We see the entirety without needing to grasp its parts. This is quite contrary to seeing in real space, where we remember details first and then slowly re-create the entire event in our memory. Before the moving cinematic surface, no person is capable of figuring out the focal point or directing his attention to specific parts in the field of vision, as we do in reality. We can therefore say that cinema is ruining the eye, because it trains us to see imprecisely. Cinematic man loses his feeling for perspective and space. Incidentally, still photography has already paved the way to decay in this area, and a perspectivally correct photograph is just as absurd as, for instance, synthetically produced ersatz meat. People see; the photographic plate does not. People have feelings and certain embodied perceptions, while the plate has nothing more than a particular chemistry. We could also draw interesting conclusions from this about modern painting and architecture; however, there is no room for such excursions in this essay. The “living” image is not really alive. It only attempts to reproduce life. It is a surrogate of reality. At this point, we also reach the limits of “scientific” cinematography. Filmed experiments will never be able to replace real ones with their logical procedures, supported by clinical dialogue. I would even argue that the scientific fi lm will never be comprehensible to the untrained layperson, because it lacks the progression of individual partial procedures in memory. The very worthy Rudolf Goldscheid has suggested instituting a “cultural cinema” [Kulturkino].1 While this is certainly a nice thought, it is, as we understand from the above lines, an unfeasible one. The person who walks into the movies from the street does not want to be educated. Scientific films can certainly make an oral presentation more entertaining, but they will never be able to anchor a film program on their own. We need only think of the truly excellent film presentations at the Vienna Urania, 2 which are always a financial liability due to lack of audience interest. Educational films will always be a welcome aid to future experts and historians, but they are unimportant to contemporary cinematic mankind. Returning to the cinema, the site of cinematic fiction, we find no indication of any kind of potential for development. The chaos of social adversity and inward poverty manifest in today’s cinematic mankind will probably continue to exist. The war, itself the result of previous peace, will change nothing. Whether a new image of humanity will emerge from coming generations is still unclear. Mankind likely stands at the beginning of an unprecedented racial miscegenation, because the nations most affected by the war will no longer be able to regenerate themselves with their own blood supply. It is also clear that a European peace agreement would not mean an end to the world war and that a confrontation between Mongoloid and Anglo-Saxon capitalism over dominance of the Pacific Ocean is imminent. The human cost of this confrontation will surely be greater than European losses to date. No spiritual path out of this terror has yet been found. No superior ethical potency has risen to the surface; we still lack the liberating slogan that will tear the weapons from mankind’s hands. The cinemas still flicker with erotic childishness and ghostly burlesque distortions of the primitive instinct for power. The masses dream on, and must continue dreaming because in their waking life they are overwhelmed with questions of survival and race. The masses intoxicate themselves because they are too conscious of their misery when sober. The masses allow

240

Film Culture and Politics

machines to think for them because they understand the futility of critical understanding. Cinematic man, who both shares guilt for and suffers from the general misery of the world, has lost his inner personal limitations and externalized himself. To bring him back again remains the great educational issue of the coming centuries. Today, loneliness appears as the bitterest fate. One day, when everyone has arrived at this fate, it will be the only human way. Communication with people will no longer take the form of theatrical mockery, but will take place on the ethereal bridge of forgiving understanding, of a heartfelt thou and thou.3 Inwardness is the great rallying cry of the new humanity. No good deeds, no charity rooted in poisonous vanity! Only the triumph over cinematic mankind through the recognition that we can be good people only if we do not let anything within us wither, if we do not blindly accept any surrogate! Once everyone, without exception, is inwardly active, even external actions will be valid and no sensible person will be able to cry “Hunger!” anymore! Notes 1. Goldscheid was a pioneering Austrian sociologist who was also active on behalf of monism, pacifism, human rights, and sexual reform. He served on the executive board of Vienna’s Urania. 2. On the Viennese Urania society, see Lou Andreas-Salomé in chapter 1, no. 13. 3. The phrase is likely a reference to the so-called “Dui-Du” chorus in Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus (1874), which Strauss also adapted into a waltz under the title “Du und Du.”

102 WALTHER FRIEDMANN Homosexuality and Jewishness: The Latest Method of Agitation against “Aufklärungsfilme” First published as “Homosexualität und Judentum: Die neueste Hetzmethode gegen die ‘Aufklärungsfilme,’ ” in Film-Kurier, no. 33 (July 13, 1919), 1–2. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

This editorial appeared in the daily film paper Film-Kurier in response to the backlash against Austrian-Jewish director Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), which had premiered in Berlin on May 28, 1919, and was banned a year later by the Berlin censorship board. The film, often characterized as the first to explicitly thematize homosexuality, was co-written by Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and starred Conrad Veidt as a gay violinist who is blackmailed under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code. Walther Friedmann was a doctor of law who served as attorney and general secretary of the Vereinigung Deutscher Filmfabrikanten e.V. (Association of German Film Manufacturers) and the Arbeitgeberverband der Deutschen Filmindustrie (Employers’ Federation of the German Film Industry), for which he handled many film censorship cases during the Weimar era. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and subsequently murdered.

The Deutsche Zeitung, arguably the lowest and most abhorrent of the Pan-German daily newspapers in Berlin,1 has made a curious discovery that deserves to be conveyed to broader circles. Among vehement attacks on Aufklärungsfilme,2 the newspaper tells in its Friday evening edition of a tumultuous screening of Different from the Others in the Biophon-Theater-Lichtspiele on Potsdamer Straße. According to the report, the first appearance of the hero of Different from the Others and his pupil, a “true showpiece of the Jewish race,” caused a storm of protest in the house. From all sides resounded boos—people

Moral Panic and Reform

241

jeered, screamed, and whistled. Nonetheless, the projection continued. However, when the scene in the Puppencafé came, where people danced in the most repugnant way, boys dressed in part as girls, the tumult began again. All around one could hear: “Should we Germans let ourselves be contaminated by the Jews?” “How can something like this be presented to us?” “Where is the science here?” The theater tried to continue the film a number of times but the noise was too great. For a while, it looked foreboding, particularly as a “number of Jewish youths” recovered from the initial shock and spoke with wild enthusiasm of enlightenment and science. They really managed to get part of the audience on their side, but the commotion in the theater went on until a large part of the audience left. So much for the Deutsche Zeitung’s account of the actual proceedings of the “scandal,” the accuracy of which we wish to accept in good faith. The paper adds the following questions: “Can one indeed regard this incident as a sign of the times? And shouldn’t the German people gradually wake up and notice where they are heading?” These phrases, which have been taken most thoughtlessly from the habitual lexicon of the Pan-German papers and applied here, could not fit the whole affair any better. But that is only a side note. What is significant about the whole affair is simply the almost unbelievable fact that the blame for homosexuality is now also placed on the Jews. This is, to our knowledge, a new barrel on the barrel organ of anti-Semitism, which has already been heavily played. Until now, one has generally assumed that homosexuality is certainly an extremely regrettable and, for people with normal sensitivities, a repulsive degeneration of the sex drive, which unfortunately occurs in all social classes, independent of nation, race, and denomination. And if one recalls the most famous homosexuals, whom the pitiable victims of Paragraph 175 invariably invoke and whom they proudly call their own (we’ll mention only Frederick the Great, Plato, Oscar Wilde, even Schiller!), one will search in vain for a Jew among them. Also, in the famous Round Table of Prince Eulenburg, 3 which, without exception, was very near to the Pan-German conservative circles, there was, to our knowledge, not a single Jew. Of course it should not be claimed that there are no homosexuals among the Jews. But, until now, it has really not come into anyone’s head to make the Jews appear as particular supporters and proponents of homosexuality. If the ingenious writer for the Deutsche Zeitung had reflected just a bit on this problem, it wouldn’t have escaped him that the large number of children in Jewish families, which has been bemoaned by anti-Semites since time immemorial, the custom of Jews to marry at a very young age, and, finally, the fact that Jewry has survived to this day despite all forms of persecution and oppression provide the most conclusive counterevidence to Jews’ alleged homosexuality. Or does the brilliant informant for the Deutsche Zeitung perhaps mean to say that the Jews have secretly devised a means of reproducing themselves through homosexual means as well? To be sure, these remarks do not serve the purpose of defending Jewry against ludicrous attacks, which seems totally superfluous and also wouldn’t be our task. We are interested in this incident—which, by the way, has been deliberately blown out of proportion—only because the whole rude anti-Semitic clamor is doubtlessly being raised for the sole purpose of campaigning for the reinstatement of film censorship by other means. The author of the article makes no secret of this whatsoever. He indeed concludes his report with the words: “The censor has been lifted, and what happened? As we have learned from another party, requests for a prohibition of these trash films have been submitted to the police headquarters and other relevant authorities, without success. Shouldn’t the people take the law into its own hands?” The main purpose of the exercise is thus—however indirectly—the call for censorship, which, as we emphasized just recently, is now uttered to a particularly great extent by the Pan-German, anti-Semitic

242

Film Culture and Politics

press. Since the decision on the question of the reinstatement of film censorship will be made in Weimar in the coming days, it is perhaps still useful in the last hour to show the Social Democrats and Democrats once again what abhorrent, ludicrous, and dirty company they will enter if they cooperate with people who have the effrontery to use such nasty means in the struggle over film censorship. Notes 1. The Pan-German daily newspapers were organs of the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), an ultranationalist, imperialist, and anti-Semitic organization that dates back to 1891. 2. The Aufklärungsfilm genre thematized taboo subjects, generally sexual in nature. (In German, Aufklärung means both “enlightenment” and “sexual education.”) Though ostensibly educational, Richard Oswald’s Aufklärungsfilme on topics such as prostitution, sadomasochism, and homosexuality during the censorless period from November 1918 to May 1920 were precisely the sorts of risqué, often-sensationalist films feared and rejected by cinema reformers. 3. The Eulenburg Affair (1907–09) exposed the presence of homosexuals in both Kaiser Wilhelm II’s inner circle and the German military. Magnus Hirschfeld, who collaborated with director Richard Oswald on Different from the Others and also appears in the film, provided his testimony about the homosexuality of General Kuno Graf von Moltke.

103 WILHELM STAPEL Homo Cinematicus First published as “Der homo cinematicus,” in Deutsches Volkstum, no. 10 (October 1919), 319–20. Translated by Eric Ames.

A political commentator known for his conservative, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic views, Stapel became editor in chief of the monthly journal Deutsches Volkstum in January 1919. Much as Richard Guttmann invoked a “cinematic mankind” (no. 101), Wilhelm Stapel (1882–1954) postulates the existence of a “new psychic type”: the flighty, distracted “homo cinematicus,” to whom he attributes recent social unrest. (In the American context, Barton W. Currie had famously invoked “nickel madness” a decade prior.) Stapel’s critique was directed less against certain programs than against the very medium of film, which he wanted to extirpate. He is thus one of the few cultural critics in this volume for whom cinema did not hold any promise; he calls for abstinence from film per se for the sake of “our entire culture.” Stapel’s text was cited at length in Konrad Lange’s Das Kino in Gegenwart and Zukunft (Cinema’s present and future) the following year. See also a similar diatribe by Aurel Wolfram (no. 106) in the same journal toward the end of the Weimar era.

The sins of the cinema have been repeated ad nauseam. Everyone knows that, next to alcohol, there is nothing more harmful to the health and morality of the people than the cinema. It is now only necessary, it seems, to translate this knowledge into reality against the dogged resistance of cinema capital. However, the most profound and serious danger of the cinema has been seen only recently by just a few observers—namely, when someone goes to the cinema one, two, or three times a week, he suffers psychic damage from the form of the presentations alone, regardless of their content. The cinema may be quite decent; it may show a program that has no doubt been censored for content. But the sheer fact that the viewer becomes habituated to the flashing, fluttering, and twitching images

Moral Panic and Reform

243

of the flickering screen slowly but surely destroys his psychic and, ultimately, his moral stability. First, one acquires the habit of being jerked from idea to idea in an abrupt and unmediated fashion; one loses all constancy within the chain of ideas, that ability to remain steady, which is the precondition of any thorough judgment. Second, one becomes habituated to the random sequences of images, succumbing to them and following them involuntarily; one no longer misses the logical succession of a continuous thought, that continuity which alone is able to combine individual ideas into what we tend to call a “thought.” The mere recording of pictorial ideas—which have no logically or psychologically necessary relation to one another (as they do in a real drama, story, or scientific argument), but only a coincidental one—amounts to nothing more than a passive self-abandonment and surrender of the soul. Autonomous psychic activity can take place only by thinking, by forming necessary relations. Without this autonomous activity, one can never gain mastery over things; at best, one remains stuck in the murky enjoyment of one’s affects. Thus, cinema leads to psychic atony. Third, in the flow of images swiftly passing by, one acquires the habit of perceiving only the approximation of an impression; one does not gain a clear and conscious understanding of the image down to its details. Thus, the only impressions to remain in one’s mind are the rough, surprising, and sensational ones. Lost is any sense for the intimate, the exact, and the refined. Regulars of the cinema think only in garish, approximate ideas. Any image that catches their inner eye captures their entire attention. They no longer contemplate or rethink it; they no longer attend to its details and foundations. It suffices for the show to be dazzling and affectively charged, and they fall helplessly victim to it. They have turned into catchword people. The consequence of all of this is the following: under the influence of cinema, a new psychic type is emerging among the people. A human type, which only flutteringly “thinks” in rough, general ideas, which allows itself to be ceaselessly carried from impression to impression, which is no longer capable of making clear and convincing judgments. A human type that already did enough damage during the revolution, and that, with every new generation exposed to the psychic attrition caused by the cinema, will grow and make its mark on culture (including political culture). The cinema is constructing a new human type, inferior in both its intellectual and moral capacities: the homo cinematicus. Herein lies the enormous danger of cinema for our entire culture, which is grounded in higher intellectual faculties. From generation to generation, men’s brains and souls continue to be mangled, losing their capacity for nobler culture. And neither censorship nor model cinemas can help; against the cinema (as against the devastations of alcohol) only abstinence can help. There is no salvation, except to stifle the cinema as a mass phenomenon and to replace it with more worthwhile pleasures. Either cinema capital or our culture must go bankrupt. I would rather see cinema capital go broke. With every cinema insolvency, we ought to hold a thanksgiving service.

104 KURT TUCHOLSKY Cinema Censorship First published under the pseudonym Ignaz Wrobel as “Kino-Zensur,” in Die Weltbühne 16, no. 38 (September 16, 1920), 308–10. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

244

Film Culture and Politics Abolished by the Rat der Volksbeauftragten (Council of the People’s Deputies) on November 12, 1918, censorship was reintroduced in Germany with the Reichslichtspielgesetz (Reich Motion Picture Law), which was passed on May 12, 1920. According to this law, every film needed to be approved by a state censorship board (located in Berlin and Munich) prior to its exhibition. Making arguments against “bad films” similar to those advanced by some cinema reformers, Kurt Tucholsky here affirms the need for censorship in the war against vile commercialism. Texts by Tucholsky also appear in chapters 5 (no. 71) and 8 (nos. 122 and 125) of this volume.

No stage of film production has anything to do with art; it is an industry. This is the basis upon which we should judge every governmental interference with production, and the expression “cinema censorship” can easily lead us astray. Whether Paragraphs 184, 184a, 104, 110, 111, 112, 130, 131, and others in the penal code are enough to prevent attempts to misuse cinema for immoral, inflammatory, defamatory, or class-combative ends, has yet to be determined. Here is what the Reichslichtspielgesetz (Reich Motion Picture Law) of May 12, 1920, stipulates in broad terms: Films may be shown publicly only after they have passed the censorship board. Academic films in research institutes are exempt from censorship. Permission for public presentation of a film will be considered upon application. § 1: “Permission will be denied if examination reveals that the presentation of this filmstrip is likely to endanger public order or safety, to offend religious sentiments, to have vulgar or morally corruptive effects, or to endanger the German reputation or German relations with foreign nations. Permission may not be denied on grounds of political, social, religious, ethical, or ideological biases as such. Permission may not be denied for reasons beyond the content of the filmstrip.” The censorship board may cut parts of the film and leave the rest. Censorship is stricter for children under eighteen years of age, who are forbidden to see any film “that gives cause for concern over negative effects on moral, spiritual, or hygienic development, or overexcites the fantasy of young people.” Youth welfare offices or communities can determine stricter guidelines for film censorship in their districts. The local police, alongside the censorship board, regulates film advertisements according to the tenets of this law. Local police offices can independently issue permits for films about current events and scenic films. The censorship boards, whose number will be determined according to need, consist of a civil service chairman and assessors. (The number is not dictated in the law.) Of the assessors, one quarter will be chosen from the film industry, one quarter from among those with experience in other areas of art and literature, and half from among those experienced in the areas of social welfare, public education, or youth services. Members of the censorship boards will be appointed to a term of three years by the Reich Minister of the Interior. Women may also serve. The censorship office may only make a decision when the chairman and at least four other assessors are present. “In cases of filmstrips intended for presentation in youth programs, young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty may be selected by the committee to give their opinion.” In very simple cases, the chairman may give permission without other assessors. The appeal board for the decisions of the censorship office is the Oberprüfungsstelle [Central Censorship Board], which will make a final decision in the presence of five members (one certified official and four assessors). Censorship is subject to fees. Interim regulations will govern the censorship of films that were finished before the enactment of the law. Sanctions include jail sentences of up to two years and fines of up to one hundred thousand marks. Objective court procedure against the films is permitted. So much for the statutory previsions. Incidentally, I do not know what purist assessor thought up the misbegotten term filmstrip [Bildstreifen], but the government should not

Moral Panic and Reform

245

participate in the idiocy of these linguistic pedants, who always create false and ugly words when they want to Germanicize popular foreign words. (The correct term, of course, is Bilderstreifen.) By and large, we must say that the recommendations of the commission (reported by, heaven forbid, Representative D. Mumm)1 have led to a tightening of censorship guidelines rather than their relaxation. In many cases, the representatives—indeed the representatives of all parties—were more narrow-minded than the government, and thus this law came to be. Like all censorship regulations, this first paragraph of the film censorship law is elastic; its wording will mean nothing, and everything will be determined by how it is put into practice. The fact that the words “endanger the German reputation” could make the desired political tendentious films totally impossible is clear to anyone who knows how censorship works in Prussia. Maybe this or that element of the censorship apparatus could be improved—praxis is still the main issue. What, then, do we want? We want to obstruct the spread of bad films. But that is not a statement, just a disguised and subjective value judgment, and this monument of divine beauty they wish to raise for the people will be very crudely hewn. A delicate little dirty joke does not seem as dangerous to me as brazen kitsch, which corrupts the outlook of thousands, for the audience loves to transfer the wrongheaded opinions it receives from the cinema to real life in all the wrong places. Furthermore, a bureaucratic selection of censorship representatives is evil, yet necessary; such a commission of fat cats with watch chains, full beards, and glasses will of course determine a law for hundreds of thousands of people based on what they learned in school by the time they were sixteen. Further, it seems to me that a major problem with Prussian paternalism is that it uses regulations to spare itself any kind of popular education. If there are riots in the cinema because an anti-social strike film displeases the workers, all public institutions would be obliged to explain to the workers that there have been enough polemics in the press, enough boycotts and flyers distributed, and that toppled benches and broken windows are not arguments; if good citizens are in an uproar because their kaiser, their church, or whatever else seems holy to them has been offended, then we can teach them. These hard-line prohibitions accomplish nothing. We are not a nation of little children. Everyone has a right to the public sphere. Too much paternalism is always evil. As long as just about any member of the populace can be transformed by means of appointment from a person into a certified official, it would be better if the authorities concerned themselves less with the “welfare of the youth” and more with concrete things like tuberculosis and syphilis. We can deal with our souls on our own. Professor Brunner of the Preußisches Ministerium für Volkswohlfahrt (Prussian Ministry for Social Welfare) was among the commissioners of the Reich Ministry who gave counsel on the film law. 2 This man is the source of much controversy, and artists that I know criticize his utterly inartistic mindset. But we cannot expect filigree from a field gunner. An opinion from Brunner and the blessed Traugott von Jagow about a poet is unlikely to really speak to me.3 But blindly, at two in the morning, without hesitating for a moment, I would take Brunner’s side in the struggle against his enemies. I see it as my duty to state here that our notorious sensational press, illustrated as well as unillustrated, which argues against tightened censorship in the name of artistic freedom, has under no circumstances the right to do so. If they are not corrupt, muckraking newspapers, they are speculations on the dirtiest and lowest back-alley sensuality. Such publications are so disgusting precisely because they present themselves as moral and bourgeois, rather than being open and forthright like studio shots from Budapest. A Prussian censor is often (always, when it comes to politics) an evil apparition, but against

246

Film Culture and Politics

such filthiness no red pencil is too sharp and no policeman’s fist too hard. This is not a matter of censorship. It is purely an issue of artistic street cleaning. We do not need to talk about the question of cinema censorship for children. It is necessary. The penal code will suffice to address the exploitation of the sex trade by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. This motion picture law is not even so bad. It just seems superfluous to me. Notes 1. German theologian and politician D. Reinhard Mumm helped found the national-conservative Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP; German National People’s Party) in 1918. 2. A text by Brunner appears earlier in this chapter (no. 100). Tucholsky had also dedicated an essay to Brunner: “Verbotene Films,” Die Schaubühne 9/2, no. 40 (October 2, 1913), 949–53. 3. President of the Berlin police from 1909 to 1916, von Jagow was also involved in the short-lived Kapp Putsch against the Weimar government in March 1920.

105 ALBERT HELLWIG The Motion Picture and the State First published as “Lichtspiel und Staat,” in Heinrich Pfeiffer, ed., Das deutsche Lichtbildbuch: Filmprobleme von gestern und heute (Berlin: August Scherl, 1924). Translated by Tara Hottman.

In this text, Albert Hellwig looks back at the cinema reform movement in which he had been actively involved (see his 1911 text on trash films earlier in this chapter, no. 93) and considers the movement’s legacy in light of the 1920 Reichslichtspielgesetz (Reich Motion Picture Law). His text appeared in Das deutsche Lichtbildbuch, a book commissioned by the Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft (DLG or Deulig; German Motion Picture Company) that featured short essays by a wide range of commentators, including Emil Jannings, Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, and Guido Seeber. On the topic of film censorship, see also texts by Siegfried Kracauer, no. 124, and Kurt Tucholsky, nos. 122 and 125, as well as Herbert Jhering, no. 172.

When the motion picture began its victory lap through the cultural world twenty years ago, there were no special provisions in any law or regulation that could provide the seed of a law on motion pictures. As with all technological innovations that were not yet wellknown when existing laws were adopted, they could not be taken into consideration by lawmakers when issuing these regulations, so it was the dangers of film—real or imaginary, avoidable or unavoidable—that attracted the attention of lawmakers in advanced nations and that soon prompted more or less extensive legislation. The flammability of film and the panic that would ensue if a fire were to break out in a motion picture theater provided the motivation for detailed—occasionally perhaps even too far-reaching—building and fire regulations. Soon rules concerning the moral dangers of motion pictures gained a greater sense of urgency, elicited by the various dangers of exposure to trash films, especially for youth but also for adults. This problem has been discussed more exhaustively in Germany than in any other advanced nation, and thus it is understandable that the discussion did not lack exaggerations. Yet such exaggerations were the exception; following the struggle against trash films, most of the guidelines adopted as regulations—and occa-

Moral Panic and Reform

247

sionally also as laws—were entirely justified at their core, if not in every detail. Film censorship, along with similar restrictions on youth attendance at motion picture shows, was on the whole concerned with restricting the freedoms of the individual out of concern for the public. If there were no such limits, then film producers could theoretically do irreparable harm through the production, distribution, and exhibition of corruptive and vulgar films. The unfortunate experiences we were forced to undergo after the revolution— when the censorship regulations under federal state law temporarily expired—made this clear. Through the Motion Picture Law of May 12, 1920, the rules concerning the moral dangers of film are managed in essentially the same way throughout the entire country. The individual states no longer have any censorship authority, which is a good thing. Overall, the censorship bureaus and the Central Censorship Board have mastered their difficult and responsible task of safeguarding the general welfare, while also guarding themselves from petty criticism and complaints not at all justified by the situation. Even if certain details of the Motion Picture Law require improvement, its fundamental components will undoubtedly remain for the foreseeable future. The necessity of film censorship has been demonstrated not only through the experiences during the revolution but also through analogous regulation abroad based on similar experiences. In addition to further developing the Motion Picture Law, the restrictions on children’s attendance, which are still valid under federal state law, must also be standardized and improved. Above all, the state must, to the greatest extent possible, seek to ensure that its regulations have a positive effect in the future, like the one already occurring through the preferential treatment by the review offices and in the entertainment tax code of irreproachable scientific films and similar products.

106 AUREL WOLFRAM Cinema First published as “Kino,” in Deutsches Volkstum 13, no. 8 (August 1931), 647–49. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Writing in Deutsches Volkstum, Wilhelm Stapel and Albrecht Erich Günther’s militantly nationalistic monthly journal, the Austrian conservative Aurel Wolfram here links a sociological critique of cinema to a broader diagnosis of the modern condition. While his essay picks up on many familiar tropes from the cinema reform movement (such as nervous unease and false illusionism), its characterization of the current situation of “spiritual bankruptcy” and “metaphysical rootlessness” also resonates with early writings by thinkers including Georg Lukács (no. 174) and Siegfried Kracauer (nos. 178 and 179 in chapter 12). Wolfram’s views would also be echoed in Adorno’s critique of mass culture in writings such as “On Jazz” (1936).

So much has been written about the cinema from an aesthetic point of view. So many essays have dealt with the topic of art and cinema. But critics have paid much too little attention to the sociological side of the problem. For it simply cannot be denied that the cinema has acquired an enormous influence over the masses; indeed, the cinema has become the quintessential modern mass theater. Even those who hold the cinema in contempt cannot ignore this reality, and they would do better at least to try to understand the

248

Film Culture and Politics

reasons for the cinema’s success, especially considering that such an investigation could teach them a lot about society in general. As for the partisans of the cinema, they are of course convinced of the benevolence of their cause in advance. They even invoke history to support their arguments, claiming that with the invention of the cinema, traditional practices of popular entertainment have regained their rightful place, and from there, the cinema’s promoters predict the realization of their desire for an art that would reach the general population. But like the majority of such comparisons, this one is also faulty. Certainly the roots of drama and theater, like those of the cinema, stretch back to fairs, spectacles, and unrefined pleasures. But the factors determining the character of popular entertainment vary widely according to the social structure of any given epoch. In order to emphasize the contrast, we might ask what counted as popular for a person living in the Middle Ages. Firmly bound by religious ties, suffering from no emotional dissociation, he remained utterly typical in terms of the content of his imagination. His interest was not directed toward singularities and details; he knew nothing of the psychological fraying of the self in the modern sense. Rather, all of life seemed to him to be interwoven with the powers of a supernatural reality. This belief lies at the origin of the allegorizing tendency not only in mystery plays but also in more worldly theatrical presentations. Everything was in some sense an objectification of the metaphysical. Virtues and vices walked onto the stage in person. It was not a question of the qualities of certain individuals but rather of the very embodiments of Generosity, Miserliness, Honesty, Duplicity, and Courage as such. Individualizing representations were simply unknown, just as people placed no value on props and other objects for the stage (see the stages of Shakespeare). Beyond the sparse stock of expressive means, there was hardly anything to differentiate individual roles from one another in their overall characteristics. And still, the theater was no less pleasurable for all that. For the theater revolved not around external appearances but rather around essences. Things are completely different with modern city dwellers. Thoroughly subjectivist, externalized, and shaken loose from all forms of contemplation, the man of the city is constantly being gnawed at by all of his reflexes; he is eternally excited, worried, and on the run, as it were, from himself. “Popular entertainment” . . . ? Blasé, seeing the force of his natural drives diminished, and suffering from a general psychopathological inferiority, the city dweller no longer finds satisfaction in the simple, naïve, and uncomplicated things in life. A constant excess of nervous activity calls forth a constant desire, burning ever more intensely, for new forms of stimulation, excitation, and sensation. And only what meets this need counts for him as popular. Moreover, it is the curse of all individualistic desires that they take opposite directions within the individual himself, that life, now rendered atomistic and crumbling in on itself, necessarily leads to compulsory mechanical distortions. It is true that we have overcome space and time through technology. With today’s automobiles, trains, and airplanes, it is as if there were no more limits set on man. Still, within this limitless universe, man as an individual becomes ever more frail, lost, and insignificant. With every effort to reclaim his autonomy, he finds himself suppressed, reduced to functional material of an overgrown economic apparatus. What seemed to promise him power has resulted in his own powerlessness; the enormous cities he built have become his own prison. Hence the muted instinctual longing for freedom and salvation that inhabits the rationalized factory employee and the office clerk hunched over his desk. They want out of their constrained existence, out of their depressing condition, even though they have no idea how. This is the spiritual aspect of our social misery.

Moral Panic and Reform

249

Thus today’s drive for pleasure, seen from a mass-psychological point of view, results from two factors. First, there is the nervous restlessness of a massively accelerated speed of life, the hurried lifestyle that has become the rhythm of today, and—in reaction to the technological, scientific sobriety and disillusion characterizing modern life—the need for new illusions. In both respects, film corresponds to today’s sensibility like nothing else. The stringing together of details at lightning speed, the addiction to images, that mad hopping, chasing, falling over oneself in the race forward—in short, the cinematic, as if for its own sake, casts its spell, takes people’s breath away, whips the nerves. The camera outdoes reality, creating impossible feats of frenzy and new records. And it acts this way precisely because it is not inhibited by more profound artistic intentions. Even if the story is completely unbelievable, dreamt up, and pasted together, nobody cares. They simply wish to be swept away by its currents. The cinema is an acrobatics of the senses, and this alone brings pleasure, intoxication, and orgiastic exuberance. And now for the other factor behind the current drive for pleasure. Through the means of staging at film’s disposal, it leaves every former reality in the shadows. All imaginable effects burst onto the screen. Appearing as if by magic, they produce a feverish fantasy of pleasure and desire. Burning dreams harbored secretly suddenly appear in an almost tangible reality before the eyes of the dumbfounded audience. Fairy palaces, hanging gardens, and magical lands flit past ghost-like. The spectator remains in a silent stupor, imagining himself as a prince, a lover boy, or a globetrotter, while the tickling sensations of sexuality, crime, and adventure sprinkle over him. The instincts normally repressed in everyday life crawl out and intoxicate themselves on the concentrated rotgut of mimed passion. And let us not forget the most important factor: between tear-jerking scenes and artfully crafted conflicts with a guaranteed happy ending, the audience forgets itself and its pitiful existence at least for a few hours. False illusion is the bait used by big industry in its exploitation of the masses known as film. This is the secret of its success. With their cinematic romanticism, the producers in Hollywood line their pockets; they rake in the money by artificially propelling extravagant prostitutes, smart little lads, and bon vivants into the spotlight. [. . .] In our materialistic world, this false illusion amounts to a substitute for belief, for art, for everything through which man once attempted to establish contact with the irrational basis of existence. Among other things, however, the cinema’s popularity appears to anyone analyzing it more profoundly as a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy, of our utter metaphysical rootlessness.

107 FRITZ OLIMSKY Film Bolshevism First published as “Filmbolschewismus,” in Der Feind im Land: Die Erscheinungsformen des Kulturbolschewismus im heutigen Deutschland (Berlin: Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 1932), 19–24. Translated by Erik Born.

A film critic and journalist for the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, Fritz Olimsky wrote his dissertation on the film industry and its impact on the film press (Tendenzen der Filmwirtschaft und deren Auswirkung auf die Filmpresse, 1931) and also published a book-length report on Soviet Russia (So ist Sowjet-Rußland! Ein Tatsachenbericht, 1932). This essay, which appeared in a 1932 brochure entitled The Enemy in the Country: The

250

Film Culture and Politics Forms of Cultural Bolshevism in Today’s Germany, betrays a strongly reactionary, even racist worldview—especially through Olimsky’s call to defend national identity and “the white race,” as well as in his sharp distinction between “culture” and “barbarism.” The term “cultural Bolshevism” was regularly used within Nazi propaganda to refer to modernist trends in the arts and sciences.

We have had movie theaters in Germany for more than three decades, but they have only played a significant role in our life as a nation for the past two. Now, if we try to draw up something like a cultural balance sheet for the positive and negative aspects of film, we would have to include among its assets those films of a high-cultural caliber that significantly expand our horizons—a not insignificant number. Moviegoers have gotten to know every important country in the world, along with various unimportant ones, from their own experience in the cinema. They have become just as familiar with the land of the Eskimos as with the heart of Africa, India, Australia, and China. They could follow the polar expeditions and the Zeppelin’s flight around the world with their eyes and ears.1 Furthermore, they saw the world of the microcosm magnified to an unimaginable size on the screen, just as they saw lions hunting their prey, people hunting whales, and a thousand other things, the knowledge of which raised the general level of education. Many a good dramatic film also worked in the same direction. For example, we still have not forgotten the magnificent old films from Sweden, which made us familiar with the Nordic nation. Among the cultural assets of film, we would certainly have to count dramatic films like Die Nibelungen, Dr. Arnold Fanck’s mountain films, and many others— most recently, the Yorck film. 2 But, now, how does the liabilities side of the cultural balance sheet look? Upon closer inspection, it presents a frightening picture. Still, we must have the courage to admit what the past two decades have meant in this respect. For the most part, film production lay in the hands of people we would never call the real bearers of culture, and it still lies in their hands. In many cases, they were venturers who came to film production from other professions out of purely speculative considerations because they believed they would have a greater chance of making a fortune in film quickly and relatively easily. However, you cannot make money off the masses if you seek to educate them; you can do so only if you cater to their basest instincts and appeal to their craving for sensations and their addiction to pleasure—in a word, if you drag them down to the lower regions of existence. In recent years, the vast majority of filmmakers on two continents have dedicated themselves to this task so enthusiastically and with such success that we are no longer even aware of the detrimental effect their work has on culture because we take the status quo as self-evident. What exactly happened? Through countless immoral fi lms, the general public, even in the smallest village, has become familiar with the dregs of the city and with the dolledup pseudo-culture that forms the outer surface there. In the history of the world, no other age has propagated the cult of girls with such grandiosity and across all levels of society as in the age of film. While the demimonde was being exalted, the female bearer of bourgeois honor was simultaneously being made fun of, all too often for being stuffy and oldfashioned. Every famous coquette in the history of the world has been memorialized in film—some of them even more than once. Half-culture [Halbkultur], indeed barbarism [Unkultur], and the addiction to entertainment are paraded before the eyes of millions of moviegoers on a daily basis, making these things appear to be normal for people of our time. Add to this all the uncultured accomplishments of urban civilization, which cling to our lives like tinsel, without making us happier or even providing our nation with any

Moral Panic and Reform

251

inner richness. The dramatic film’s intensive barbaric work is the only possible explanation for why this deplorable frivolous culture, which first took hold of the upper proletariat in the cities, has gradually penetrated the most remote village in the course of recent years, like a corrosive poison that eats away at everything around it and wears down the last remains of national identity. There can be no doubt that the enhanced addiction to having fun and the increasing desire for luxuries among the so-called lower classes, as “film culture” calls them, has a corresponding effect on the growing laxity in attitudes to marriage. For we see this frivolous attitude to marriage in films every day, and if we still occasionally hear stories about the marriages of film stars living in Hollywood, then we have a complete picture of authors of that decadent culture already mentioned, which is propagated in the majority of films. No one needs to rack their brains to see the facts: not only that everything that gives a nation its inner value must come to ruin in light of these current trends, but even that the reputation and the current supremacy of the white race is ultimately being undermined. One of the most dramatic moments at the International Film Conference in Paris in 1926 was when the Indian Himansu Rai stood up during the course of the proceedings and proclaimed approximately the following:3 All of us in India, or at least the majority of us, had worshipped you almost as demigods, seen you as the embodiment of the highest perfection, and considered you to be a race of people that is much superior to ours. But then we saw your films, and we realized all at once that you are by no means demigods but that there are just as many scoundrels and dishonorable creatures among you as there are among us. We realized that you are familiar with more vices than we are and that your women are by no means those sublime, untouchable angels that we had always imagined them to be. From your films, we knew all at once that you don’t actually have anything on us apart from your technical accomplishments and your lighter skin. Is that not a shocking testament to the cultural Bolshevism that is being carried out systematically in film? Characteristically, those Bolshevist-Marxist propaganda films—in the true political sense—do not play any role worth mentioning when viewed on the whole; the percentage of these films compared to that of all the films being produced is infinitesimally low. To be sure, there are films like the infamous Battleship Potemkin, but they are the exception: subsequent Soviet-Russian political films have not had any such success. It turned out that Battleship Potemkin only had the one-time charm of being novel and that, apart from that isolated case, most moviegoers have no desire to see any of the other films being made that are exactly like it. In recent years, very few propaganda films have come out of Soviet Russia. Sound films also created a new situation in this context. Nevertheless, we now hear that fi lms are being made in Russia, agitational sound films with German actors—that is, a German version along with the Russian original. Incidentally, it is telling that the businesses in question were not making these film products, which clearly contained the poison of the Bolshevist-Marxist-materialist worldview, for political or propagandist purposes but rather purely out of commercial considerations. Only for the sake of making money did Carl Laemmle of Universal Studios in New York make All Quiet on the Western Front, which he did not intend as a political film. If he had believed that he would be able to make a lot of money with a nationalistic subject, he would certainly have had no reservations about producing such a film. Proof of this attitude, held by most film manufacturers, can be found in the fact that these gentlemen had exalted colorful uniforms and army life in their social films at a time when military films were booming, while they personally disliked militarism. In general, people preferred to “play it by the numbers,” as they say in fi lm industry jargon, and they

252

Film Culture and Politics

avoided expressing any convictions, especially about the pronounced national ethos, in the selection of topics for films. Foreign elements from this or that side of the Atlantic Ocean were making propaganda for a vapid internationalism out of purely economic considerations, so that they could market their products as broadly as possible all over the world. National values meant nothing, internationalism everything. False romanticism and thrilling sensations replaced true sentiments. Convictions of any kind remain undesirable; they just get in the way of business, since not everyone shares them. Hence, films came to focus on a watereddown “international norm” that would not fire anyone up but that no one would take offense to. The countless Americanisms in our contemporary life are the result of such propaganda in American films. Any national identity that we had continues to be leveled systematically—that is to say, slowly eradicated. No censor can prevent this process since the imponderable things under discussion here are not subject to any laws. Censors can only take care of the noticeable outgrowths, whereas the spirit of most film productions, which is adverse to culture, cannot be controlled. If a film like Yorck makes it through the censors now and then, it is only one of the exceptions that confirm the rule. What is most frightening is how we have resigned ourselves to this barbaric state of film. Almost no one gives it any thought anymore, and we are actually complacent with current film products. Rarely does the press take a stance against it, as happened recently in Durchbruch (no. 2, 1932): For months, the European and non-European underworld has been very fashionable in film. In the second sound film ever to be made, you can hear the rattle of machine guns; alcohol smugglers, pimps, bandits, gangsters large and small all parade across the shining silver screen. Murder, manslaughter, street fights, and similar stunts constitute the subject of major sound films. The underworld calls forth film manufacturers and prevents them from going into the red. What’s the use of having good directors and skillful cameramen when those in the underworld film cartel who are tasked with searching through film scripts are forced to deliver only dirt and filth. The entire German film industry fulfills its missions in the realm of culture and demands that the entire nation becomes stupid. To the best of their knowledge without conscience [nach bestem Wissen ohne Gewissen].4 But that is just a lone voice in the wilderness. If we compare the assets and liabilities in our cultural balance sheet for film, then we have to keep in mind, above all, the fact that the culturally superior films mentioned at the beginning of this article reach only a small percentage of moviegoers. By contrast, short Kulturfilms, which have to be shown as part of the previews in many places, still have the greatest distribution, resulting in a slight reduction of the entertainment tax: 10 percent culture, so that the 90 percent barbarism might enjoy a tax break! This also gives a good indication of the relation between fi lms that are culturally valuable and those that are detrimental to culture. The vast majority of films, usually made so subtly that the masses do not perceive them to be corrosive to the nation, belong to the category that, seen from a higher perspective, we have to term “cultural Bolshevism.” Notes 1. The LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin was a German airship that circled the world in 1929. The airship was named after German general and airship pioneer Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838–1917). 2. The historical film Yorck (Gustav Ucicky, 1931) portrayed events from the life of Prussian general Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg.

Moral Panic and Reform

253

3. Himansu Rai was a pioneer of Indian film who collaborated with Franz Osten on various German-Indian coproductions in the 1920s and later cofounded Bombay Talkies; see Lotte Eisner’s review of one of Rai’s films in chapter 2, no. 26. 4. These critical remarks come from an anonymous film review of Emil und die Detektive: “Tonflimmernebengeräusche: Emil und die Manuskriptdetektive,” Der Sturm 21, no. 2 (1932), 56. Olimsky cites from the journal Der Durchbruch, which in 1932 had merged with the venerable expressionist journal Der Sturm (1910–1932).

EIGHT

IMAGE WARS

108 PAUL KLEBINDER The German Kaiser in Film First published in Der Deutsche Kaiser im Film, ed. Paul Klebinder (Berlin: Verlag Paul Klebinder, 1912), 9 (“Zum Geleit: ‘Film: Unsterblichkeit des Augenblicks!’ ”) and 14–17 (“Hermelin und Lichtspielkunst”). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The cinema reformers’ battle over moving images examined in chapter 7 would gain a special urgency during World War I, when film was openly used to arouse national emotions and sway public opinion. While debates about film’s aesthetic possibilities continued (see Paul Wegener’s 1916 text in chapter 6, no. 88), increasing attention was given to the potential of cinema as ammunition in the war of images. The way a nation represented itself to the world through its films became an issue of the highest order. Germany’s largest studio, the Universum Film AG (Ufa), was in fact founded by the government in December 1917 as part of a (belated) propaganda campaign, which believed in the firepower of moving images. The entanglement of state and cinema— the topic of this chapter—was a highly contentious issue that regularly fl ared up in censorship battles. We begin the chapter with texts from Der Deutsche Kaiser im Film, edited by the journalist Paul Klebinder in 1912. Underwritten by international film studios including Edison, Gaumont, and Vitascope, this gloriously illustrated book of essays was to commemorate the twenty-fifth year of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign, which lasted from 1888 to 1918. The lofty tone may also refl ect a desire to gain cultural capital for cinema by associating it with the emperor. The Kaiser had quickly recognized the power of the new mass medium and was eager to pose for the film camera in public. Note that Klebinder emphasizes prosperous peace, diplomacy, and technological progress less than two years before the outbreak of the first global war. (See also the texts by Berthold Viertel, Franz Goerke, and J. Landau in chapter 3, nos. 32, 34, and 35.)

Film: The Immortality of an Instant! A Prologue

A hurried moment, a fleeting second—to keep both eternally, in images of unaltered naturalism and truthfulness, neither softened by the sympathy nor distorted by the envy of a human hand, a human will—perhaps already to be shown tomorrow to our distant contemporaries, but in later years and until the end of days to be shared with our children and our children’s children, able to be brought back to life anytime, anywhere: that is the true enormity, the never-before-seen element and the magic of film art! How obvious was the idea to capture such bygone seconds, such vanished moments, precisely from the endlessly mobile and beneficent daily work of the greatest and most inter254

Image Wars

255

esting living German, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is himself one of film’s most powerful friends and supporters, to sort them and make them available in book form, first and foremost to his great mass of subjects, of course, but also to the countless thousands who admire and honor him all over the world! Now, wherever the German kaiser could be observed by the cinematographer’s camera: as a private man in his family circle; as kaiser, king, and lord in governmental and official dealings; as the greatest benefactor and patron of many sporting events; on voyages and hunts—in all these places, his personage can be seen in our magnificent production in the pithiest and fi nest pages of cinematographic recordings—appropriately enlarged, of course—captured for all time and for the entire world! Ermine and the Art of Motion Pictures

In the grand film of our time, we encounter Wilhelm II as a patron of all culture, of all that aims to serve the greater good, the most interesting personage ever to have been the subject of the cinematograph. But the cinematograph is the most objective historian, for “only the lens [Objektiv] is entirely objective!” And so, with this present publication, the international film industry pays homage to the German emperor. Industrialists from France, England, Italy, and America are brought together by the feelings of gratitude that move their German colleagues. For twenty-five years, Wilhelm II has ruled the German empire—a quarter century in which no day has seen the wheels stand still, and no day has passed without the appearance of some new sign of tremendous progress. During this entire twenty-five-year reign, Germany has continuously marched forward toward a single goal: “Go forth, Germany, into the world!” In these festive days, people everywhere are commemorating the Emperor of Peace, Wilhelm II. His love of peace has enabled the mighty development of the German empire and, for the first time, has given our fatherland the ability to measure itself in peaceful competition against the other cultured nations. Above and beyond partisan strife, the entire German nation pays homage to its emperor, who is and has been its leader on the paths to culture and progress. Nothing has come to be in these twenty-five years to which Wilhelm II would have denied his attention. Impervious to all inhibiting currents and tides, the emperor, a tester and a seeker, has shown active interest in every new invention that might contribute to the general good. For this reason there is one community whose celebration stands out among all those who approach the emperor in obeisance today. It is a community that thanks Wilhelm II for an inestimable gift, a group whose travail he has eased by his appreciation of their toil: the community of inventors! This community has its own language; its works are intended for all of humanity; and it recruits its members from all cultured nations. But at its pinnacle stands one man, Thomas A. Edison, whose unparalleled productivity was also responsible for the fundamental idea behind the present-day cinematograph. To come into being during the reign of Wilhelm II was a blessing for early cinematographic science. Sheltered by the benevolent interest of a monarch who expressed, and continues to express, his every spontaneous impulse, cinema was able to grow to its current enormous dimensions. Today, its lights shine everywhere. We have built theatrical palaces for it. Thousands upon thousands are employed in the film industry, which owes most of its success to the active participation of the emperor. The cinematograph has become an irreplaceable educational tool for millions of Germans. The darkness of every movie house is illuminated by the insights and revelations that cinema holds. It provides the best object lesson in the “great school of life,” and it was cinema as well that brought nations together, transcending what had

256

Film Culture and Politics

previously appeared to be insurmountable differences of outlook and taste among various peoples. Film gives new form to the international exchange of ideas. After all, it is polyglot; it speaks with equal intelligibility to all peoples of this world. This is why the industrialists of the international film sector, those tireless mediators between culture and humanity, commemorate Kaiser Wilhelm’s twenty-fifth crown jubilee, in wholehearted gratitude for his furtherance of their work, which serves the greater good. Whether Englishmen or Frenchmen, Americans or Italians, film industrialists from every country stand in international fellowship with their German colleagues, who today commemorate their illustrious sovereign with love, loyalty, and gratitude. These three virtues connect the images on the following pages, which show the German emperor on film—images that have already been presented to millions of spectators in all cultured lands of the world.

109 HERMANN DUENSCHMANN Cinematograph and Crowd Psychology: A Sociopolitical Study First published as “Kinematograph und Psychologie der Volksmenge: Eine sozialpolitische Studie,” in Konservative Monatsschrift 69, no. 9 (1912), 920–30; here 923–25. Translated by Eric Ames.

Discussing the cinematograph’s suggestive, even hypnotic power over mass audiences, Hermann Duenschmann, a German medical scientist, draws from Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Psychologie des foules), which was translated into German as Psychologie der Massen in 1908, with a second edition appearing in 1912. The same year, Carl Jung also published his study Psychology of the Unconscious, laying the groundwork for his theory of the collective unconscious. Crowd psychology would notably go on to inform many theories of propaganda and advertising, as in the text by Karl Nikolaus in chapter 16 (no. 246). Duenschmann’s critique of Germany’s failure to instill national sentiments in audiences would soon find echoes in relation to World War I. Despite a belated effort to mobilize photography and film in the image wars (see the text on state and cinema, no. 116, later in this chapter), many observers attributed Germany’s military defeat to a lack of sufficient propaganda efforts.

If we now investigate crowd psychology in greater depth, we encounter one of the most important sociological facts. Whenever human beings come together to form a crowd— be it in “reality” in a so-called people’s assembly or only virtually as voters, be it in parliament or in the theater—the conscious personality disappears under certain psychological influences, subordinating itself to a kind of collective mass soul. This phenomenon is explained by the fact—which modern psychology (that is, psychiatry) was the first to bring to light—that our conscious mental activity makes up only a small part of unconscious and cerebral—that is to say, organic—life. Our conscious actions depend to a great extent upon this unconscious substratum, which probably stems chiefly from hereditary influences.1 Thus, behind the acknowledged motivations of our actions, there lie secret causes, completely unconscious to us. Yet it is precisely in these unconscious elements of mental and moral being that individuals belonging to the same people or the same race

Image Wars

257

resemble one another, while they differ from one another through the conscious part of mental life. It is an easily observable fact that, as soon as human beings assemble themselves in a crowd, the conscious part of an individual’s mental capacities retreats behind the homogenous, unconscious, intellectual, and moral-racial characteristics common to all. Human beings assembled in a crowd thereby show certain qualities that characterize the crowd as such; these cannot be elaborated here. What specifically interests us is the fact that all feelings and actions in the crowd are contagious to the highest degree; furthermore, as a member of the crowd, the human being shows an extraordinarily high degree of suggestibility, which individuals evince only in a state of hypnosis. Just as the hypnotized subject sees his waking consciousness paralyzed and becomes the hypnotist’s slave in all of his actions, so too can the individual member of a crowd totally lose control over his actions under certain conditions. How, then, can one have an effect upon the masses? The crowd practices neither reflection nor strict logical argumentation. Yet it possesses a very lively power of imagination. Moreover, strong impressions, very active personalities, and unexpected occurrences are all capable of stirring up the fiercest emotions in the crowd. The crowd thinks only in images; it lets itself be influenced only by images with a suggestive effect upon its power of imagination. Such images can, for example, accompany certain magic words and stereotypical formulas, which every speaker knows and which differ according to race and century. Although the written word can exert a suggestive influence over a larger number of human beings simultaneously, the spoken word is generally superior to it in this regard. The most powerful means of suggestion, however, is the example. If one wants to rouse the crowd to perform an act, it will always be best to show it to them. These remarks, which every reader can easily supplement with examples from his own experience, now make tangibly clear exactly why pantomime can exert such an extraordinarily fascinating and suggestive effect on the crowd’s imagination. One can further see that, in this sense, the cinematic image cannot be differentiated from the pantomime (“mimodrama”) itself to the extent that it reproduces artistic productions. Indeed, it seems clear that both pantomime and cinema, ceteris paribus, may possibly surpass the theatrical drama in suggestive power, for the image of an action arouses the crowd’s imagination more intensely and more quickly than the spoken word. Thus we see that in a qualitative sense—that is, in its ability to exert a suggestive influence over the crowd’s imagination—the cinema is not only equal to the theater but often even surpasses it. At the same time, it is infinitely superior to the theater in a quantitative sense simply because it allows, through the possibility of mechanical reproduction, for a nearly unlimited increase in the number of recipients it reaches. One need only show certain films simultaneously or back to back in urban theaters, as it actually happens in France; in this way, one can exert an immediate suggestive influence over the masses (for example, in important matters of foreign politics), an influence that articles, speeches, operas, and plays cannot accomplish with similar force, scope, and speed. In fact, the cinema’s effects are all the more certain insofar as the conscious part of this experimental crowd psychology, this mass suggestion, remains largely in the dark. No one will be so naïve as to demand proof that, for example, in France—the country with the most advanced cinema industry by far—the suggestive effect practiced by countless cinemas is actually “controlled,” consciously and intentionally, from a single central location. Only one thing is certain: the more familiar one becomes with France’s political goals at any given moment, whether they be pronounced publicly in the newspapers or pursued quietly behind the scenes, the more one will be astounded at how closely these

258

Film Culture and Politics

same goals match the general tendencies that the cinemas attempt to promote in their audiences through suggestive effects; the only prerequisite here is that one does not succumb to this same suggestive effect oneself, but rather retains the intellectual independence necessary for critique, which generally requires belonging to another race or another people. We have so far attempted to elaborate the psychological and sociological factors that make the cinema so well-suited to exert a—to put it crudely—demagogic influence over the masses, and it is no coincidence that this new “artistic endeavor” has quickly reached its highest perfection precisely in the country where modern democracy appears in its most radical form—in France, where the government is actually often carried out not from the local ministries but rather from the chambers of parliament, with their purely “polygonal” influence. So how do things stand with us in Germany? Above, we already observed that there is so far no mimodramatic film, and we showed what sorts of films exist in its place. Even when the action is supposed to take place in Germany, the family life depicted on the screen makes a particularly strange impression. Attending the cinema, there is so little to see by way of German customs and family life that one often has the impression of taking a short trip abroad. Should we continue to subject broad masses of the public to the suggestive effects of such overtly tendentious, foreign shows? We fi nd it difficult to understand how anyone could be so blind to the dangers to which we would thereby expose our people. Note 1. Original footnote (translated): Modern psychiatry has various terms to characterize this unconscious substratum: psychic automatism, unconscious inner life, primitive psyche, etc. It corresponds to what Prof. Grasset symbolically characterizes as “Polygon.” (Cf. J. Grasset, Le psychisme intérieur).

110 DER KINEMATOGRAPH War and Cinema First published as “Krieg und Kino,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 397 (August 5, 1914). Translated by Tara Hottman.

This editorial appeared just one week after the outbreak of the First World War; Austria-Hungary had declared war against Serbia on July 28, 1914, and Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, and Britain had all become involved in the conflict by August 4. Noting a dramatic increase in the number of cinemagoers, the article presents the movies as an “accurate refl ection of the people’s moods” during a period of tumult and uncertainty. Before the advent of news broadcasting, makeshift slides were interspersed during film screenings to keep the audience informed about the latest developments. Another article in the same issue of Der Kinematograph called for overcoming internal differences under the old Prussian military slogan, “Mit Gott für König und Vaterland!” (With God for king and fatherland).

By the time these remarks appear in print, the situation should be settled, insofar as we should know to what extent the threat of a world war has grown. In the meantime, the general unrest that has seized audiences due to the uncertainty of these approaching events

Image Wars

259

manifested itself in a sharp increase in cinema attendance. At least this is true in Berlin. The audience waits impatiently for definitive news. The streets are densely populated until the late hours of the night, and for many the open theaters are a most welcome opportunity to spend a few hours at the movies in order to soothe their anxiety, restlessness, and excitement with the help of these glimmering pictures. Almost no other performance can cater to the disposition of the human psyche in the same way as the colorful changing images on the screen: the transition from the serious to the cheerful, from the didactic to the entertaining, from landscapes to military scenes. In these tumultuous days, as one sensational piece of news chases the next, here one of hope, there one triggering increased unrest, the seemingly haphazard and random sequence of flickering images is the accurate reflection of the people’s moods. Just as conversations in these feverish days jump from important to insignificant topics, thereby expressing the uncertainty and the indeterminacy of the situation, so, too, the projectionist cranks out a motley collection of apparitions provided by the film industry for the audience in the cinema. Cinemagoers who were marveling at the wonders of the film world during the evening hours of last Saturday were suddenly interrupted during their peaceful observation by an ad hoc slide that indicated, in the curtest telegram style, that Serbia had rejected Austria’s ultimatum and the Austrian invasion was imminent. Absolute silence followed this announcement, and the minds of most guests must have gravitated toward the question, what now? Still, optimism won out, and they continued to hope for a resolution to the conflict, though the news of the next few hours and days must have disabused even the most ardent optimist of this hope.

111 ANONYMOUS The Cinematograph as Shooting Gallery First published as “Der Kinematograph als Schießstand,” in Die Umschau: Wochenschrift über die Fortschritte in Wissenschaft und Technik 18, no. 32 (August 8, 1914), 648–51. Translated by Tara Hottman.

At the beginning of the war, the popular science journal Die Umschau published an article about a new invention that could be employed as both a fairground attraction and a shooting gallery. Moving images projected on a paper screen simulated situations in which a previously filmed moving object could be targeted and hit. Given the impending Serbian campaign of World War I, it is remarkable that the moving objects included not only animals and airplanes but also “Serbian troops.” Beginning in the 1960s, the American armed forces would also fund the development of shooter video games for the sake of military training.

At the Bugra in Leipzig an innovation as original as it is interesting was the main attraction for shooting-sport enthusiasts: the “living target.”1 The fact that this invention not only represents a source of entertainment but is also of significance for the training of soldiers in the use of firearms is evidenced by the lively interest that the military administration is showing towards this innovation. Already in May of this year the first cinematographic shooting gallery was inaugurated at the military training area in Döberitz in the presence of the kaiser. The living target displays living pictures, which are recorded like any other cinematography. For the first time the marksman is presented with the opportunity to practice

260

Film Culture and Politics

shooting wild animals, aircraft, cars, horsemen, motorboats, and the like as they speed past. If we step up to the shooting gallery, we will see at around 10 meters away a cinematogram [Kinematogramm]; for example, Serbian troops appearing on a mountaintop and carefully climbing down the slope using all possible cover. Or a buffalo thundering by, ducks flying up, a plane tearing through the air. A shot is now fired, the bullet punctures the projection screen, the image stands still for a moment, and in the place hit by the bullet a spot of light appears; the marksman can now immediately see whether he hit the mark or shot off target. At the end of a short rest period, the hole disappears from the projection screen and the image is set in motion again for the next shot. The equipment consists, like all cinematographs, of the film projector and the projection screen, which here is the target. [. . .] The mechanism [. . .] consists of an iron frame behind which two reels of paper are unrolled. The cinematographic image is projected onto the first paper screen, behind which is a second paper screen that is intensely illuminated from behind. The bullet perforates both layers of paper, and from behind a bright light shines through the hole left by the shot; this is the spot of light that shows where the bullet struck. Now the rear roll of paper is unwound a little further. The spot of light disappears again and the scene can proceed. If the paper screen in front is too riddled with holes, then it is also unwound until it comes to a position where the paper is unscathed. [. . .] The value of the invention consists in the fact that the marksman is compelled to choose a point at which to aim very quickly and that he sees, immediately after pulling the trigger, the impact of the bullet, so that afterwards he can improve his aim. Through this process the “living target” affords a far greater chance to practice than, for example, shooting at the traditional clay pigeons or thrown disks because with this new method, you can observe each impact, even when the target was not hit. The idea of using a cinematographic projection screen as a shooting target had been pursued for some time by various foreign firms. The accurate, self-activating functioning of all of the equipment met with major difficulties. The greatest difficulty was immediately halting the cinematographic mechanism after the shot was released. The apparatus must not, under any circumstances, advance any part of an image. Unfortunately, the inventors are not giving away how they were able to achieve this immediate standstill. Note 1. Bugra is an abbreviation for Internationale Ausstellung für Buchgewerbe und Graphik (International Exhibition for the Book Industry and Graphic Arts), which took place in Leipzig from May to October 1914. Twenty-three countries were represented at the exhibition, and it was attended by over two million visitors. After the war broke out, the pavilions of enemy nations Belgium, England, France, Japan, and Russia were closed.

112 HERMANN HÄFKER Cinema and the Educated Class: A Foreword Written in September 1914 and published as “Ein Vorwort,” in Der Kino und die Gebildeten: Wege zur Hebung des Kinowesens (Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1915), 3–4; here 3. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Image Wars

261

The onset of the war delayed the publication of Hermann Häfker’s Cinema and the Educated Class: Ways to Elevate Cinema, his third book on cinema after Kino und Kunst (Cinema and Art, 1913; see chapter 6, no. 83, of this volume) and Kino und Erdkunde (Cinema and Geography, 1914, see chapter 2, no. 19). One of the most ardent cinema reformers at the time, Häfker added this foreword to his finished book in September 1914 to give spontaneous expression to his belief in the transformative power of the war. Partaking in the rhetorical hyperbole that gripped almost all intellectuals at the time, Häfker here welcomes the war for its potential to cleanse contemporary German culture of what he considered its commercially driven fluff and smut. Insofar as the war imposed a stop to business as usual, it was the ultimate cinema reformer—an idea that Häfker advocated in numerous texts at the time (including the pamphlet, no. 113, following this text). In From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Siegfried Kracauer would quote this foreword by Häfker, castigating the early film theorist as “he who praised war as the salvation from the evils of peace.”1

The war. The following had already been written when the dams of peace burst and the crushing, smothering floods of war surged over our cultural world. At first we were afraid, and then we broke into a unified cheer: War, our liberator! War, our savior! Now that you have been unleashed, monster, smash and destroy that which is rotten; leave whatever can keep a foothold in your wake! Rescue and deliver us from the nonsense, from the waters dirtied by all that is useless and filthy around us; cleanse our culture of the refuse that is weighing us down! It had hardly begun when already it proved its strength. This writing is the last document of a struggle carried out by a few against a stronghold that, by human standards, was inexpungeable. Trash cinematography [Schundkinematographie] was based on a commercial organization that spanned the entire world, whose power was so firmly anchored in private capital that it seemed hopeless to try to destroy this organization, or even to turn public opinion against it. Against trash, against “fi lth in word and image”2—why not! But against the holy prerogative of the businessman who is working for the dividends owed to his shareholders? To restrict his right to make money by leeching away the spiritual and intellectual well-being of the people? Most people shied away from that; they had neither the mental clarity nor the moral conviction to rise to the task. Faced with this situation, any efforts to improve the cinema seemed eternally condemned to be a quixotic enterprise. And I seemed to be eternally condemned to use countless words again and again to explain and preach about obvious and simple facts as though I were dealing with one of the most difficult scientific problems. Then the war came, and its first 42 cm missiles annihilated this international business organization. Nothing is left over, at least not in Germany. No more films, no more audiences, cinemas, distributors, film companies—everything is laid waste. The war has made a breach for you, you cinema reformers—will you now step into it and follow the path? Notes 1. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, ed. Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 28. 2. Otto Leixner von Grünberg had authored a programmatic text in 1904, Zum Kampfe gegen den Schmutz in Wort und Bild, and he also founded an organization devoted to the cause. The phrase “filth in word and image” would be commonly invoked in subsequent years, including in debates about cinema.

262

Film Culture and Politics

113 HERMANN HÄFKER The Tasks of Cinematography in This War First published as Die Aufgaben der Kinematographie in diesem Kriege, vol. 128, Dürerbund-Flugschrift zur Ausdruckskultur (Munich: Callwey, 1914), here 9–12, 14–15. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Published in October 1914, this pamphlet is far more measured in tone than Hermann Häfker’s passionate outburst from the month before (see no. 112). Characterizing cinematography as a form of “spiritual education” during the war, Häfker calls for nonfictional, authentic images of the battlefront, as well as the use of cinema as a forum for illustrated lectures. Häfker also would publish a four-part article “Der Krieg und die Kinematographie” (War and cinematography) in Der Kunstwart between December 1914 and June 1915. The most prolific agent for cinema reform during the war years, Häfker himself was called to battle in late 1916, at the age of 43, and served as a soldier for two years. Later resisting the rise of Hitler, Häfker died as a political prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1939.

Most theaters, if they haven’t simply closed down, are trying to go a different route. They wish to rise to the occasion of these times and attempt to do so, to the extent possible, by showing only patriotic or military pictures. This is certainly a good idea in theory. But here we must at once point out the fact that we lack the most important element in the above plan—namely, films that would offer those at home a glimpse of the greatness, truth, and horror of this history in the making. We await such films, which could justify the existence of cinematography as a means of spiritual education. But for a variety of reasons, the German military authorities have thus far prohibited filming in the theaters of war. Were such films to appear, the cinema would be liberated to pursue its true calling, and one could raise no objections on the grounds of taste and morality as long as the images were chosen appropriately. The movie theaters would then fill up. But we will have to pursue this thought another time; for now, such films are not available. It is true that two German companies have received permission to make films behind the front on German territory, but these well-known pictures of the places “where it happened” in no way promise to recuperate the incredible sums of money they cost to make. Moreover, anyone can film such subjects as army processions and prison camps at home. We should, however, be making films on the Austrian battlefields. Only the future will tell whether such films were worth the trouble to make. For the time being, then, cinemas have access to very few fi lms showing the reality of current events, and these films hardly satisfy the most superficial curiosity. Thus it is only natural when cinemas—searching for images that correspond to the “mood” of the times—fall back on older films containing any sort of battle sequences, such as those depicting the 1870 wars of liberation. We need not spend much time discussing these shows, since they will soon disappear on their own. As well-intentioned as they generally are, their fate is already sealed by the lack of interest on the part of filmgoers. Nor does it change anything to point out that the audience’s lack of interest results from having seen these films before. If the films themselves had any value, if their spiritual level corresponded to the convictions that ennoble even the most superficial of viewers, then people would want to see them more than once, just as people still enjoy seeing older dramas on the stage. But it is precisely that unique quality of film dramas, that peculiar mix of staged gestures and natural backgrounds, that makes them impossible to show in times of crisis. At a time when real bullets are ripping open the bodies of men we know, when

Image Wars

263

heroic and death-defying deeds have become a daily occurrence, it is extremely offensive to see actors caked in makeup “playing” their roles with wooden swords. The ubiquitous added ingredients of sentimentality and exaggeration only make things worse. The viewer fi nds himself breathlessly hurled from one nerve-rattling scene to the next; he feels the drive to action as his emotions are continuously whipped up into a frenzy, but this drive is at once dampened by his awareness that all of this is nothing more than a childish game. Indeed, not only cinemas but also many theaters, feuilletons, and other forums are making a basic mistake when they believe that, in order to stay “with the times,” they must add even further to the public’s excitement and “enthusiasm” with such fictional productions. The last thing we need at home is such an increase in nervousness. On the contrary, we need a clear head, an understanding of current events, and our own forms of stimulation, diversion, and calm. By working toward these goals, the cinema could claim a much worthier place in society, one that would outlast these times of war. But in order for this transformation to take place, cinema owners would have to accept a thought that would have seemed impossible to them earlier but that is becoming much more plausible in the present circumstances. The shameful reputation in which the cinema has wallowed up to now is largely a result of the prejudice according to which cinema’s only natural calling is to show films. Today, many people have begun to reflect on the situation and cannot understand how it was possible to convince millions of spectators that such a violation of taste, intellect, and nerves constituted an indispensable form of . . . fun, entertainment, and relaxation! In reality, it contradicts every instinct of human nature to allow oneself to be bombarded—for hours on end and in the accompaniment of uninterrupted musical din—by such idiotic forms of nervous excitement and incomprehensible images lacking all commentary. Were anyone to ask us what we really desire, every one of us would surely answer: “I wish to sit down comfortably for an hour or so before pictures of this or that beautiful or interesting object, shown in a pleasant format and accompanied by explanations.” By its nature, cinematography does not represent an independent medium but rather only one variety of the arts of projection in general, and the latter constitute nothing but a means of supplementing words in their power to entertain, educate, and instruct. It is necessary for us to put cinematography back in its proper place, where—between slides, lectures, and other alternating forms—it will play a role much more modest in scope, but one that will be all the greater in value and success. With their path carefully prepared by commentary and slides and sometimes accompanied by music used to create a certain atmosphere or to make the meaning of the images clearer (as in dances), motion pictures, executed correctly, will constitute a highpoint of future projection theaters. This transformation—from movie theaters to projection and lecture theaters—will have to take place first of all in the minds of cinema owners. They must break completely with the idea of the cinema as a forum designed solely for the nonstop projection of films. This poses no technical problems, since nearly all movie theaters are already equipped to do slide shows and lectures. If the movie theaters carry out this transformation, they will be saving themselves not only for the duration of the present crisis but also for the time beyond it. These theaters in no way need mass trash films for their continued existence. Considering the remarkable expansion of our adult education programs in recent years; considering the unforeseeable tasks that will befall these programs with the return to peace; considering the great and lofty role that slide lectures have already begun to play, a role that will only expand considerably and exert an even more powerful influence with the proper organization—considering all of these factors, it is evident that the need for superior lecture theaters with expert staff will surpass the number of good cinemas

264

Film Culture and Politics

currently available. For this reason, those cinema owners who make their spaces, equipment, and personnel available for lectures can expect a secure and honorable income. They will no longer suffer either from the regulations of the authorities or from the pressure of public opinion. What has become a disreputable career will be transformed into a respectable one. The war, moreover, offers us an opportunity to put these ideas to the test. It would be a complete misunderstanding of human nature to believe that these times call only for pathos and excitement or that we should scorn every effort to cultivate intellectual activities and to recover our zest for life. We Germans have less reason than anyone to be distraught or depressed. While maintaining utter calm, we can and should further develop our own spiritual strength and mobility; we should educate ourselves to become worthy citizens of the new epoch, devoid of platitudes that this war will help to bring about. If lecture theaters can move us toward this goal in the sense outlined above, then let us welcome them. Of course, this cannot succeed if an unchecked “lecture” market comes to replace the unchecked film market of today. Competent people—and only competent people—must take the lead here. It is essential that we perfect and consolidate a system for lending and circulating lectures, that is, images accompanied by the texts of competent experts. For the time being, one particular object will have such an exclusive hold on the public’s attention that everything not related to it will receive little attention and little money. But this one object, the war, offers an endless array of new material such as no other object can. Every cinema theater should try to hire the appropriate individuals—for example, teachers, writers, or former soldiers—to offer daily lectures in which, with the aid of maps, they would illustrate the state of our efforts in the various theaters of war and explain those things we are all dying to know: things we must know, but that only an authority on the subject can explain. Here we would have many opportunities to employ slides—and sometimes even films—in order to illustrate regions, countries, peoples, soldiers, ships or anything else that current events have thrust into our field of vision. We can also include the so-called cinematic newsreels and images of current events, whose value will be appreciated as long as they show less “agitating” subjects. Of course, such presentations would attain their highest value only with the permission to include authentic images from the theaters of war. [. . .] Could we expect any undesirable spiritual effects from such events? Without a doubt, the pictures shown, while not giving away any military secrets, would offer samples from the war as it appears in reality. Here, battle scenes would play only a partial role—and this first of all for the simple reason that filming in real battles is very difficult and only rarely successful. Not only is the modern battlefield so spread out that no cinematic camera could ever survey it completely, but it also has the principal characteristic of offering nothing, or at most very little, “to see.” Individual skirmishes pop up unexpectedly, and it is usually so dangerous to fi lm them at the close range required by cinematic cameras that such images would be few and far between. Perhaps here and there, one would see a skirmish of cavalrymen, the explosions of artillery shells, and the like. In the case of sea battles, a brave cinematographer might have more luck and even capture on film the stirring drama of “movement as such”—the authentic artistic domain of cinematography. But we simply wish to consider the question of whether it would be acceptable and tasteful to reproduce these horrifying realities in a motion picture for those at home. “Our war is not just a show!” people will rightly object. Our soldiers certainly did not go into battle simply in order to provide curious idlers with new forms of sensation. On the other hand, we allow and even promote the public’s access to literary representations of war. We also send painters out with our armies and navies in

Image Wars

265

order to depict our deeds and experiences in a vivid form for others and to rescue them from oblivion. Moreover, we have long since lost the taste for pompous celebration, empty patriotic cheers, and boastful displays of guns. True and powerful images of battle— images contained in the writings of Liliencron, Tolstoy, and Bertha von Suttner, or in the paintings of Repin and Vereshchagin1—have brought home the seriousness of the situation and have taught us to exercise our courage in those areas where we need it: in our ability to keep a cool head and guard our resolve before sights that put our nerves to the test, not to indulge in careless patriotic fantasies. Now there has arisen a herald of the deeds and events of our times, one that no previous generation knew: an artistic and technical reproduction that excludes the distorting power of the imagination and offers incorruptible documents of truth. This incredible thought—that viewers distant from us in time and space will be able to see the reproductions of real deeds again and again, that we now possess the means to create documents of unalterable truth and unwavering authenticity—this thought, which generations before us would never have dared even to dream of, brought the most advanced spirits of all peoples into a transport of enthusiasm and hope as the first viable cinematographic films were shown. However, for nearly a decade, the misuse of cinematography for profit has shamefully disappointed these hopes. But now that the possibility for such a misuse has been destroyed; now that the mighty opportunity has arisen to restore cinematography’s true goal, which is to record the most incredible world-historical events, to teach the human race to look clearly and fearlessly at the realities that are the destinies of the earth’s peoples—should we now shrink back before this task? Should we once more let slip this great opportunity to lift cinematography up to its most lofty goals and to drive a wedge through the abuse that has lasted so long? We would of course have to proceed cautiously at first. Like water sprayed on fire, authentic cinematic images of the war would put a damper on the platitudes, on the indistinctness of feeling and thought in which many—especially among those who remained at home—still wallow today. In the company of the educated, who at first avoided cinemas, moviegoers would themselves have to be trained for an education by authentic cinematography, an education to which they would gradually grow accustomed. The cinema is an educator in clear thinking and feeling as opposed to empty platitudes. Images such as the ones we have in mind would have to be introduced through careful commentary and the mental preparation of spectators. Moderation according to the size of crowds would be more imperative here than anywhere else. In my study Kino und Kunst [Cinema and art],2 I have demonstrated in detail how to present pictures in a pleasurable and spiritually instructive way rather than as a form of intoxication. In their true role as tremendously powerful illustrations of the spiritually dominant word, authentic images of war would thus serve to solidify a real and lasting enthusiasm for our lofty goals, which will not fizzle out in imaginary emotions but rather, fearless and ready for sacrifice, stare reality in the face; in this way, cinemas would become places of devotion to the war effort. Such theaters would not be the place for empty patriotic cheers. The iron will of destiny would speak its calm language and awaken an invincible heroism, invincible because it already knows the obstacles against which it will be called into action. Behind the battles being waged on the fronts and at sea, let us mobilize and train our spirits here at home. Notes 1. The writers are German poet and novelist Detlev von Liliencron, Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Austrian novelist and pacifist Bertha von Suttner, and the painters are the Russians Ilya Repin and Vasily Vereshchagin. 2. On Häfker’s Kino und Kunst, see chapter 6, no. 83, of this volume.

266

Film Culture and Politics

114 EDGAR KÖLTSCH The Benefits of War for the Cinema First published as “Die Vorteile durch den Krieg für das Kinotheater,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 407 (October 14, 1914). Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi.

Resonating with Hermann Häfker’s call for sober documentary images of the battlefront (no. 113), Edgar Költsch’s text argues that film’s proximity to reality—previously a point of criticism—now provided the source of its popularity during the war. Whereas cinema had been negatively compared to the theater time and again in early film theory, the latter art form suddenly seemed the more trivial and disreputable under new circumstances. The author must have seen early newsreel footage from the Western front, which was hard to find in commercial theaters in 1914.

Although at first glance it may appear otherwise, the cinema belongs among those industries that have remained untarnished by—indeed, have benefited from—the war. Albeit the wartime market has experienced a serious shock: with a single stroke, all foreign productions have been rendered valueless. The bottom has dropped out beneath the feet of those agencies and representatives that have busied themselves with the launch and distribution of Pathé Frères and other foreign companies. But this misfortune is, of course, only temporary. The same men, the same businesses need only offer their experience and connections to the service of domestic contractors, and their personal losses will soon be set right. That the German industry itself has experienced no major losses but has, quite to the contrary, been confronted by an auspicious boom demands little proof. The break from French and English imports has opened up so much space that even smaller businesses have ample room to negotiate freely. Despite the current lack of male personnel and the corresponding inability to create many kinds of new productions, there are still sufficient first-class actors in this country who can be drawn into performing new dramas. Such actors can be received at a more intimate level, their primary value lies not in the mass representation of soldiers, robbers or exotic foreigners, but rather in the quality of their expressive ability. [. . .] Particularly now, at a time when such enormous events are unfolding, when everything is a matter of world history and bitter reality, people find it absurd to allow themselves to be distracted by footlights, by stage makeup and by the affected gestures of prima donnas. Theatrical performances seem childish, false, escapist. Even the work of classic dramatists, the extravagance of costly decor, and the allure of the elite—most forces fail to fill the houses. The theater has lost its magic. We do not want dream, but reality. The cinema offers this. Here are the images from Belgium, the smoking rubble of razed villages, the ruins of Fort Lousin, the cheerful ceremonials of German musicians in Brussels. The dark floor is packed with spectators: they hold their breath; they abandon themselves to their excitement. They wonder, fearing for their loved ones in the field. Here is truth. The cinematic image conjures it up in cities across Germany, and in viewing it, each individual takes part in the triumph of German weapons, in the toil of the German men. One thing remains to be noted: piqued curiosities are not satisfied here. This pleasure has nothing to do with sensation, lasciviousness, or superficial gratification. Rather, the cinema demands participation. It is a joy that we experience; it is a real and participatory empathy in the vastness of this destructive fate. The cinema has become

Image Wars

267

like a temple. Previously it was regarded as only an exhibition booth; today people partake there of emotion, sympathy, and the will to endure. The gifts that the cinema provides reveal the monstrous behind the mystique of the establishment. Even lighthearted comedies and silly ruses speak now to those heavy hearts; all can observe it with a new strength heretofore absent. Those qualities that have been criticized in cinema—that it stands too close to reality, that it is too realistic and not poetic enough—are now precisely what provides for its popularity. We want reality, reality without emotionalism. What we want is not to escape our time but rather to fully enjoy it in its technical achievement, its physical and numerical reliability, and its complete, sober accessibility. Neither variety shows, spoken theater, cabaret, nor even vocal concerts and marionette performances can strike the tone and meet the requirements of our time. Only cinema offers the degree of distraction one seeks, the degree of illusion one tolerates. Without the need for film theater owners to exaggerate the cause of patriotism, without providing the direct representation of combat positions, the cinema is nevertheless the only place where the expectations of the public are unanimously fulfilled. If film theater owners want to provide an additional service out of consideration for the current state of the economy and reduce their admittance prices a bit, it can and will be of no consequence to their income. And the cinema will establish itself so firmly in the hearts of the nation that even future times of peace will not be able to dislodge it.

115 KARL KRAUS Made in Germany First published as “Made in Germany,” in Die Fackel 18, no. 437–42 (October 31, 1916), 24–29; here 24–26. Translated by Paul Reitter.

A legendary prose stylist, Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was best known as the pugnacious sole editor of the literary and political journal Die Fackel from 1899 to 1936, where he penned satirical and often savage takedowns of newspapers and their use of empty phrases. Walter Benjamin admired his method of unmasking and denouncing the corrupt journalism of his time by simply quoting it. (Benjamin, who wrote an essay on Kraus in 1931, famously employed the art of citation in The Arcades Project.) Kraus was also a poet and dramatist who wrote the fi ve-act tragedy Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1922) about the First World War. There are numerous references to cinema in that play, which also includes parts of the following essay in the form of a dialogue. We excerpt here the original text, in which Kraus dismantles newspaper reports about a British propaganda film and a German stage play, criticizing the cynical instrumentalization of battlefields and dying soldiers as objects of visual consumption and propaganda.

Lying in my file cabinet are five thousand documents, each one of which, on its own, could make posterity aware of the scandal of originating from this world. But each new day takes precedence in doing wrong, and of all the news, it’s the latest news that’s best; and, in turn, of the latest news, the best comes from the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten. The central characteristic of thinking, which, no doubt, elicits more astonishment than

268

Film Culture and Politics

hatred from the surrounding countries in Europe, finds its plainest expression here. A reader has tempted me with various clippings, even if his desire to lead me to sources shows no concern for my duty “to reveal to the century the outline of its form” while being only “an abbreviated chronicle of the age.” But nowhere else does the disposition that keeps from the right hand that the left hand has been throwing bombs and, instead, writes that the enemy has been doing it—nowhere else does this disposition present itself so winningly. One knows that showing film footage of battles has become part of the bread and butter of German cinema owners. However, technical scoundrels in London are now doing the same thing, only with greater skill, and showing footage of the Somme offensive;1 and because of this, they are writing in Leipzig: “The filmed battles, the filmed majesty of dying and of death. We already knew that British society is ignorant and uneducated. The present case reveals, however, the extent of the callousness to which envy and mendacity lead.” That’s what they are writing in Leipzig. Because envy is, however, an excellent motive for the repertoire of film, the Kölnische Zeitung (field edition) has weighed in as well. This paper is likewise too modest to know anything about German battle films beyond what stands in the advertisements, and it has been encouraging readers to waste no time introducing the callousness and ignorance of the British into Germany: Wouldn’t it be desirable to show such true-to-life images of the most recent events to Germans on the home front, as well? There can be no shortage of opportunities to capture suitable images. The actions of our soldiers, if presented in images, would provide material for more than one film, and the people, who are sometimes affected more deeply by pictures than by words, would surely take great interest in such screenings, even if we didn’t indulge in prettifications for the purpose of national selfmythologizing, which the French and English seem to need. Of course. It’s a plan. 2 To be sure, we’ve been doing it for a long time, but we forget that, partly in order to accuse our enemies, who’ve also been doing it, of callousness and partly to prove that we can do it even better. Except that the German uhlan who sends me the clipping from the front includes along with it these words of his own: “Now the death of a poor trench soldier really has a purpose; it can compete with all of Reinhardt’s trash for the applause of Germany’s cinema riffraff.”3 Leipzig, however, which attributes to England’s envy the wretchedness that Cologne envies in the English, has published a critique of Hias,4 which became famous due to the genius and personality of its author. Amidst the noise of discharging firearms, and with battle cries, Hias, a war drama in three acts, made its way across the boards of the Berliner Theater yesterday evening. The program concealed the name of its author, but a soldier is supposed to have written it, and soldiers (officers and members of the Berlin and Bavarian reserve units, some of whom, no doubt, had acting experience) performed in it. Aristocratic women volunteered for the female roles. The play, which is no better than many others of the same ilk, provided an occasion for dramatizing camp life and bloody battle scenes with astonishing naturalism. The genuine soldiers acted on stage as though they were really on the front. In those places where military events defy the technical capabilities of the stage, film jumped in; and the projector displayed (in the final act) a series of combat images that were skillfully inserted into the drama’s scenes. The impact was intensified by the sound of machinegun fire and hand grenades, and by the screaming and groaning of fallen soldiers. To be sure, Leipzig also remarks, in order to avoid fully arousing suspicion that it is a little Londonesque: “The bloody performance, which was annoying without its being

Image Wars

269

ennobled through art, and thereby carried to the heights of the history-making events of the present. There is not even a trace of poetic inspiration in the play.” An injustice to Hias. If not exactly through art, it is ennobled through the participation of female aristocrats and “thereby carried to the heights of the history-making events of the present.” Genuine soldiers acted on stage as though they were really on the front, and for two and a half marks, one can hear the screaming and moaning of fallen soldiers, which is much more rewarding than seeing the majesty of death captured on film in London, which remains mute. One could reproach the British for the envy that must afflict them because of this. Notes 1. This references the British documentary film The Battle of the Somme, which premiered in London on August 10, 1916, in the midst of the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 18, 1916) in which over one million men were killed or wounded. Meant as propaganda for the British war effort, the film was reportedly seen by millions of British moviegoers and became the measure of all war documentaries. The German High Command regarded the film’s mingling of real and fake battlefield scenes as “typical” British deception and war propaganda. 2. There would indeed soon be a German version, the short documentary Bei unseren Helden an der Somme (With our heroes at the Somme, 1917), which was modeled after the British film but caused less of a stir. It presents a positive view of the German army but ends with an astonishing image of a battlefield that dissolves into a cemetery. 3. Max Reinhardt’s forays into film included Sumurun (1910), Das Mirakel (The miracle, 1912), Die Insel der Seligen (Isle of the blessed, 1913), and Eine venezianische Nacht (A Venetian night, 1914). 4. Heinrich Gilardone’s play Der Hias: Ein feldgraues Spiel in drei Aufzügen (Hias: A field-gray play in three acts) was performed over one thousand times across Germany and Austria by anonymous veterans, playing themselves as common soldiers in field-gray uniforms. (Even the play’s author was originally unknown.) Developed in cooperation with the Red Cross, this communal play thematized the plight of an officer (Hias) who is injured and falls into French imprisonment. The play used film projection and sound effects to represent “realistic” scenes from the battlefield on stage. Fritz Lang appeared in a Viennese production in 1918. Kraus published additional essays on Der Hias, in August 1916 (“Der Übermensch”) and in January 1917 (“Der Hias”), and included a discussion of Hias in his own play The Last Days of Mankind (act 4, scene 27).

116 ANONYMOUS State and Cinema First published as “Staat und Kino,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 514 (November 1, 1916). Translated by Tara Hottman.

Theorizing the relationship between cinema and the state, this article considers how the government might bring film within its sphere of influence, as it had done previously with the railway system. The author argues that while the institution of cinema currently “regulates and governs a space free of the state,” the state can bring film under its control through censorship practices. On January 30, 1917, shortly after this article was published, the Supreme Army Command would oversee the founding of the Bild- und Filmamt (or Bufa; Office of Photography and Film), a 450-person bureau for propaganda that supported the war effort by supplying images from the front lines to the press and film distribution companies (both at home and abroad), producing its own films, and programming films at the nine hundred screening venues for soldiers. (On efforts to nationalize film, see also the article by Erich Ludendorff later in this chapter, no. 119.)

270

Film Culture and Politics

The two actually belong together. To our contemporaries, it may often seem as if the opposition between the state and cinema were omnipresent. It also cannot be denied that the state wasn’t exactly waiting around for the birth of cinema in order to be a good father to it, the kind who would remove all obstacles to the development of his child, at least during the early years, and who would later also show at least some understanding for adolescent cockiness. State and cinema belong together, but they are not yet in tune with one another. The time must—and will—come in which the state sees cinema as an institution that is both important for its own aims and easy for it to handle; an institution, perhaps not of the state, but one that belongs to the public and the economy, to the entire community it encompasses. Cinema must—and will—find in the state the most useful patron and the most reliable support, and the state will come to appreciate the cinema’s means of expression, which it can make useful for its own purposes. Such a glimpse into the future of cinema may not surprise those who understand that there exists a certain inner affinity between cinema and the state. Anyone with eyes can see that, in this world war, it is unquestionably obvious that the state lives off of the personal freedom of its citizens, that the taxes we pay only aid the state in consuming more of our freedoms. The state dictates your rights and your duties, when and for what you must risk your life, how much bread its subject may eat, what he can and cannot sell. The state sets prices and dictates the conditions under which trade can occur. In short, in the state we find a power that rules over us, a power to which, much more than we even realize, we have all adapted—an organized power, the most powerful living organism. Cinema also relies on a similarly powerful, living organism. The individual theater owner, too, is dependent on an organization. If the state signifies the aggregation, unification, and organization of the powers of a people and a country, then cinema represents the aggregation, unification, and organization of the powers of a profession and a cultural realm; it is the organization of commercially operated public entertainment insofar as it makes use of the movie theater. Within the great all-encompassing organism of the state, a smaller one has established itself—not a state within a state, but an institution that regulates and governs a space free of the state and that so far has not been seized by the state. Cinema has to a certain extent done the state’s work for it, in the same way that the railroads paved the way for the state by regulating and governing traffic, so that when the railroads were nationalized, the state was able to take over the institution as if it had been made with this eventual nationalization in mind. There’s no doubt that the state’s interest in the regulation of transportation, the railroad, the postal system, the telegraph, and the telephone is something very different from its interest in the regulation of public entertainment through moving pictures. This sort of development does not proceed in the same way in every domain. The press is also an organization that does the state’s work for it, and yet no one would think to nationalize the press. While the state transforms into government institutions certain organisms that establish themselves in it, it finds another way of exercising its power and pursuing its aims through different organisms. Simply put, this other way is censorship, and it refers to external, coerced subservience in lieu of a takeover. It is incorrect to assume that the state uses censorship to fight only the usual abuses. While these may have given the impetus that moved the authorities to censor, the deeper meaning for the state itself—this is the intended purpose of the exercise—is to influence and render subservient. A press that does not endanger the state protects it; every silence, even those enforced through censorship, is worth its weight in gold. The state would not want do without the press, and the time is near when it will also value cinema—precisely for the reason that it is so easily censored. The state can cer-

Image Wars

271

tainly bring cinema under its control without owning it, but this is not the case with the theater. Every single theater performance is original and thus preemptive censorship is impossible. Censorship must—and will—bring the state and cinema closer. We will see what tremendous value cinema has and to what extent it lies in the state’s interest to see such a large sphere with influence on the public like that of commercial cinematic entertainment and education unified in a clear-cut manner, organized, and approved by the state. Herein lies the application of cinema that is of most interest to the state.

117 JOHANNES GAULKE Art and Cinema in War First published as “Kunst und Kino im Kriege,” in Die Gegenwart: Zeitschrift für Literatur, Wirtschaftsleben und Kunst 45 (1916), 618–20. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In this text, Johannes Gaulke refl ects on how changing modes of combat affect the relationship between war and representation, anticipating Friedrich Kittler’s claim in Optical Media that “modern wars are no longer visually reproducible.”1 If the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71 had appeared as an artwork, with theatrical flourishes and a heroic setting, the Great War—characterized by a new topology and an episodic rhythm—seemed to lack pathos, romance, and grand gestures. Unlike Edgar Költsch (no. 114), who had praised cinematic realism as ideal during a time of war, Gaulke here argues that film—presenting “a miserable shadow of the truth”—is inadequate for modern mechanized war, which instead requires the words of a poet or historian. A well-known dramatist, sculptor, and art and cultural critic, Gaulke had repeatedly faulted cinema for its lack of words in earlier articles, but nonetheless had written the screenplay for Die Löwenbraut (The lion’s bride, 1914). As early as 1901, he had published an article in Die Gegenwart (1872–1931) criticizing the “Byzantinism” of Anton von Werner’s art, which he again discusses in detail here.

Anton von Werner’s world-famous Sedan panorama, 2 which counted among Berlin’s “attractions” in the seventies and eighties, was dismissed as an outmoded art object long before the world war began. Artistic bankruptcy was quickly followed by the financial kind, and after a short-lived blossoming, when it enchanted everyone the world over, the panorama was so completely ruined that there is no longer even a popular memory of this artistic sensation and “attraction.” The creator of this much-admired circular painting at Alexanderplatz also sank into oblivion during his own lifetime. On January 4, 1915, four months after the world war began, the painter of the German army’s deeds in 1870–71 died a quiet man, hardly noticed even by the opponents of his art. No one expected him to make any more art, because he lived in a time that was invested in other sensations. Still, in spite of the systematic diminishment of his art, Werner remains a noteworthy figure from the era of the wars for German unity. He created an artistic monument to his era that is more valuable than the “art” of the world war cranked out on film cameras. Werner’s art was attuned to pathos. The Franco-Prussian War offered an illustrious model. On both sides, the battle was fought under the leadership of tested and proven commanders, who were at the center of contemporary events. The war unfolded like an elegantly planned and thoroughly considered game of chess; in its own way, it too was a work of art. It did not want for grand theatrical effects, which must have attracted

272

Film Culture and Politics

historical painters. The capturing of an emperor and his entire army, the downfall of one empire and the foundation of another, the arrival of the victorious German army in Paris, and many other moments lent this war a heroically tinged backdrop. In today’s wars, pathos has entirely faded. In both east and west, armies engage in a sober, bustling struggle over every foot of ground, a never-ending slaughter where no battle comes to an end. The war, which has displaced all value judgments, also shows a new image in its exterior scenery. In earlier days, battle fury raged on the field for one day, or in exceptional cases two or three. The fates of peoples and states were decided in massive armed engagement. The battle played out like a large-scale stage production, driven by a steadily advancing plot, implemented through many appealing interludes. Modern static warfare has completely displaced this typical picture of battle, which has disintegrated into countless individual images spread over hundreds of kilometers along the front. It has become combat without rest or quiet, a battle that can only be compared to the struggle of the elements. It is a constant exertion of all forces, with no relaxation. Romance has been discarded, and the grand gesture has disappeared. The total picture has no foreground or background: it is mired in the episodic. The conductor of it all, who strikes such a commanding pose in Werner’s battle images, remains invisible. The celebrated commander’s knoll, around which the battle once raged but which—remarkably— remained untouched by bullets or missiles, has disappeared. In mechanized warfare, the first priority for both troops and leader is to take cover. Somewhere, far away from the front, or underground, covered by shellproof backstops, the highest commander sits and delivers his orders by telephone. This war is not visually representable: no painter can give us a comprehensive impression of what happens in the night and fog, under the earth, and above the clouds. Many artists have ventured out to capture this tremendous theater of slaughter on canvas, but they have all returned with a certain sense of disillusionment. The battlefield appears deserted; the only perceivable movement is in the air, where little white clouds indicate the dangerous projectile that will land somewhere and churn up the earth all around. Gone are the people in the old-school battle paintings, who fell on their enemies in goose step, defying death; the trenches have swallowed them. The cinematograph is even less capable of capturing an overall impression of this war in moving images. Many tried to dismiss Werner’s Sedan panorama as an artistic impossibility. Some parts of it may well be impossible, but seen in its entirety, it is still an artistic vision, a large-scale epic that powerfully inspired the imagination. This allegation, which is also an advantage, cannot be applied to cinema. In cinema everything is real, a mirror image of nature; but, in an apparent contradiction, the cinema has very little to say about the things it shows us. Cinematic images are colorless and flat; they offer no perspective, only foreground, bits and pieces, episodic moments; they cannot help us to imagine the gruesome beauty of pyrotechnics that crackle forth from a thousand iron maws. In spite of all its grasping at reality, the cinema remains nothing but a miserable shadow of the truth, which leads us to misguided ideas about things. Cinematographic sequences can serve as valuable study material for artists, just as all “art” made with a film camera has only secondary value as an educational aid and a resource for scientific research. A pseudo-art has come into being, which has a worse effect than any dime-store romance or gothic novel. An extremely instructive observational method for any imaginable discipline, cinematic recordings become truly poisonous to the people when they are used in the service of unscrupulous enterprise. The “Weekly Newsreels from the Theater of War” that are served up to the public with embarrassing punctuality in all fi lm theaters demonstrate this forcefully. They are, almost without exception, surrogates, imposters, that have been nonchalantly

Image Wars

273

“staged” by directors far away from the crossfire. The only remarkable thing about these “stagings” is the marksmanship of the camera operator, who seems to be immune to all enemy fire. But when cinema begins to function “dramatically,” when it projects the war or an episode from the war as a dramatic sequence in five acts and dozens of images onto a white wall for amazed contemporaries, it must be categorically condemned as a corruption of art in the worst way. Like every cinematic drama, the war drama, with its mix of sentimentality and sensationalism, is made up of a series of individual scenes, which acquire their sense and coherency from appropriate titles. It is an art for deaf-mutes. But to do away with language in drama, indeed to dispense with all elements that come to us through our sense of hearing, would be to negate all laws of development and to upend all basic aesthetic rules. No matter how artistically a situation is composed, it usually tells us very little about the interior experiences of the people involved. The word is the only way for humans to understand each other, in life and in art, but it is also the only way to depict an event of world-historical significance like this war. The best graphic or photographic recordings have only illustrative value; they allow us to obtain an impression or sense a mood but never to grasp an entire complex of occurrences. Therefore, neither historical painting in Werner’s tradition nor a new art of the film camera can succeed in depicting the World War. Only a poet of outstanding significance and a history writer with grand style would be capable of shaping the innumerable individual episodes—all the mundane details of this trench-mole war and the countless personal dramas involved—into a powerful work of art. Notes 1. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 184. 2. Installed at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in 1883 and measuring over 1,700 square meters, Anton von Werner’s panorama depicted the Battle of Sedan of September 1, 1870, which was decisive for Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The opening ceremony was attended by Kaiser Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck, among others. In 1908, the panorama was removed from Alexanderplatz to make room for a department store and was transferred to the private collection of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

118 GUSTAV STRESEMANN Film Propaganda for German Affairs Abroad First published as “Die Filmpropaganda für die deutsche Sache im Auslande,” in Der Film 2, no. 14 (April 7, 1917), 30, 37–38; here 30, 38. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In 1917, Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) became chairman of the National Liberal Party (later succeeded by the German People’s Party), and he would serve as German chancellor in 1923 and subsequently as minister of foreign affairs until his death in 1929. In this article, he notes England’s and France’s effective use of film propaganda to spread anti-German sentiment not only as part of the Great War but also in preparation for “the coming economic war.” Like Hermann Duenschmann five years earlier (see no. 109), Stresemann insists on the “suggestive power of the image” in shaping popular views of a nation. Published just one day after the United States

274

Film Culture and Politics declared war on Germany, Stresemann’s article appeared with the following editorial notice: “The outstanding parliamentarian and party leader, Reichstag deputy Dr. Stresemann, who has always shown a lively interest in fi lm and cinema, addresses one of the most important tasks of the present in the very interesting remarks that follow.”

If astonished Germans often ask themselves today why Germany enjoys so little sympathy around the world, how it could have happened that this Germany, which for fortyfour years has constantly embraced peaceful politics and tried to uphold peace throughout the world, acquired such a unified phalanx of enemies all over the globe, and, as the last few days have shown, even reaching to the Far East1—then they are overlooking, among other things, the extraordinarily effective film propaganda that our enemies, contrary to us, have spread all over the world. In contrast to Germany, where we valued cinema more as a means of pleasure and amusement and spent more energy fighting it than supporting it, our enemies—namely, England and France—were quick to recognize film as one of the most powerful means of advertising of our time. The seeds that England and France sowed in their distribution of anti-German sentiment all over the world have now sprouted. For years, England and France have followed a plan to influence foreign powers in their favor, and they have sharply increased these efforts during the world war. Thousands upon thousands of kilometers of the Entente’s fi lms have been unleashed on the neutral powers, films that were intended to spread anti-German sentiment and incite the still-neutral states to enter the World War on the side of the Entente powers. Given the character of our enemies, we do not even need to check to know that these films have not always shown the pure truth. The filmic lie and the lying film join the lies of Reuter-Havas-Stefani, 2 the published and telegraphed lies. With the aid of these contrived films, the neutral powers were supplied with a caricature of our good troops; they sought to propagate a belief in the atrocities of German soldiers through films that were not made by the hand of an artist and that were directed solely by a hatred of Germany. What didn’t the Entente propagate in these films! All of the all-too-familiar, so-often and so-effectively refuted lies about Leuven, Reims, and elsewhere experienced a sorry rebirth here in film.3 In the most egregious manner, our enemies have placed a cultural factor like cinematography in the service of their outrageous interest in inciting hatred. Unfortunately, we must admit that their dedicated efforts were not completely unsuccessful. The suggestive power of the image, especially the cinematic image, has managed to make such lies, no matter how horrendous they appear, or in fact precisely because they are so horrendous, easy to believe. [. . .] How they are already using film propaganda to prepare the ground for the coming economic war is demonstrated by the fact that, for example, a French cinema owner left for South America months ago, in order to show French films all over Brazil, Argentina, and the other leading South American countries. This, too, has a dual intention. On the one hand, these films are supposed to stoke uproar against Germany and turn hate into a grounds for refusing future imports of German goods; on the other hand, it attempts, via the representation of French industry, to depict France positively as the suitable, superior production site for the import of goods. [. . .] The Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft [German Motion Picture Company] is not a business enterprise; 4 rather, it was created by German industrial and agricultural organizations, by German spa and tourist coalitions, in order to demonstrate what Germany has to offer: scenic beauty, the wonderful diligence of its cities, the tremendous achievements of its industry. All profits that are achieved within the Deutsche Lichtbild-

Image Wars

275

Gesellschaft e.V. beyond a moderate rate of return should always only be used again for the completion of their own features. German film should set out into the world and become propaganda for the new Germany! Notes 1. Stresemann here references the looming Battle of Arras, April 9 to May 16, 1917, when troops from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, and New Zealand attacked German forces on the Western Front. 2. Reuter, Havas, and Stefani were the three major news agencies at the time, based in England, France, and Italy, respectively. 3. Stresemann alludes to the so-called atrocity stories that appeared as soon as the German army marched into Belgium on August 4. 4. Founded by Alfred Hugenberg and Ludwig Klitzsch in November 1916, the Deutsche LichtbildGesellschaft (DLG or Deulig, for short) was an umbrella organization with the stated mission of using film to promote Germany’s culture, economy, and tourism both at home and abroad, thereby counteracting the country’s negative image during the Great War. Pursuing the interests of the German business community, the company produced hundreds of documentary, educational, and industrial films beginning in 1917. Increasing competition between the DLG and Bufa (Bild- und Filmamt, or Office of Photography and Film), however, would result in the founding of Ufa. (See also the following text, no. 119, by Erich Ludendorff.)

119 ERICH LUDENDORFF The Ludendorff Letter Written on July 4, 1917, this letter is reprinted as “Der Ludendorff-Brief,” in Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Töteberg, eds., Das Ufa-Buch (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1992), 34. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

This document, an unpublished letter by General Erich Ludendorff to the Royal Ministry of War, is often called the “birth certificate” of the Universum-Film AG (Ufa), which was officially founded on December 18, 1917. The text demonstrates a keen awareness of the propagandistic power of photographic media as well as hope that a consolidation and mobilization of film production would influence the course of the war in favor of Germany. Revealing the extent to which cinema could be militarized, Ludendorff (1865–1937) characterizes the film industry as a “potent weapon of war.” After leading Germany’s war effort as quartermaster general between 1916 and 1918, Ludendorff was later active as a nationalist, völkisch, and militaristic ideologue. In The Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor W. Adorno would recount Max Horkheimer’s remark that well before Heidegger’s existential philosophy, Ludendorff had been much more efficient at “plac[ing] men before death.”1

Chief of the Army General Staff General Headquarters, 4 July 1917 M.J. No. 20861 P. To the Royal Ministry of War, Berlin The war has demonstrated the extraordinary power of photography and fi lm as instruments of reconnaissance and manipulation. Unfortunately, our enemies have capitalized on their advantage in this area to our great detriment. As the war goes on, film will not lose its great importance as a tool of political and military propaganda. Precisely

276

Film Culture and Politics

for this reason, a positive outcome of this war absolutely requires that film’s effects be employed most forcefully anywhere where German influence is still possible. Thus, we must investigate: 1. how to achieve this influence, and 2. which methods to employ. 1. Efforts to strengthen German advertising in film must focus on: (a) increasing the film supply in neutral territories, and (b) standardizing the German film industry, in order to create a consistent approach for a methodic and insistent impact on the masses in the interest of the state. Concerning point (a): An addition to the film industries of enemy peoples, the Nordische Gesellschaft (Nordic Company) enjoys a particular influence in the neutral territories. 2 This organization has numerous first-rate film houses in Scandinavia, Germany, and Switzerland. The Nordic Company could thus pose a serious threat to German propaganda, should it appear hostile to Germany. Moreover, the Nordic Company currently has the ability to bring films to Russia. This influence, if it embraces a pro-German standpoint, is of nearly immeasurable worth for Germany, especially given the easily manipulatable sentiment among the Russian people. We should also consider that Scandinavia will likely be the setting for future peace negotiations. It is now especially important that German propaganda make a serious effort to enlighten audiences and eliminate any notions that might get in the way of the peace treaty. Thus, our war duties indisputably require an immediate attempt to seek direct influence on the Nordic Company. The simplest and best means to accomplish this is bribery; most of the Nordic Company can be bought. If that fails, we will have to try another kind of affiliation, exploiting the Nordic Company’s interest in the German film market. This sort of arrangement will be possible only if we can unify German film production to the extent that it can confront the Nordic industry as a cohesive contracting power. Concerning point (b): Aside from pursuing a contractual relationship with the Nordic Company, there are other reasons for shaping the German film industry into a unified whole. The longer the war goes on, the more necessary it will become to introduce a methodical domestic propaganda campaign. To date, film has had only an occasional influence on the general mood of the people. This is due to some groups’ attempts to utilize film for their own special interests. Thus heavy industry has established the Deutsche Lichtspiel-Gesellschaft [German Motion Picture Company], and the Alldeutschen [members of the Pan-German League] have established the Gesellschaft für künstlerische Lichtspiele “Deutsche Kunst” [“German Art” Society for Artistic Motion Pictures], developments that will necessarily lead to a fragmentation of filmic propaganda efforts. Furthermore, we must also consider the activity of the Ausschuß für Lichtspielreform [Committee for Motion Picture Reform] in Stettin,3 which has already established a documentary society. Each of these groups is trying to seize the film industry through large contracts, thereby endangering the completion of film projects by the Bild- und Filmamt [Office of Photography and Film]. In this respect, it is urgent that the German film industry be unified, so as not to lose a potent weapon of war to fragmentation. Concerning point 2: Which methods shall we employ? Since only an absolute majority is actually required to influence a company, it is not necessary to purchase all holdings in every case. But no one must know that the state is the buyer. All financial transactions must go through a skillful, influential, experienced, reliable, and—above all else—absolutely loyal private hands (banking house). The negotiators must have no idea who the agent’s

Image Wars

277

real client is. A 55% share of the Nordic Company in Copenhagen would cost approximately twenty million marks; 55% of the German film studios, approximately eight million. Among German studios, the following are particularly suitable for acquisition: 1. Deutsche Bioskop-Gesellschaft 2. Messter-Film, Inc. 3. Eiko Film, Inc. 4. Projektions AG-Union 5. Deutsche Mutoskop and Biograph, Inc. 6. Nationalfilm GmbH and others. If we consider the sums that foreign powers spend on film propaganda, the aforementioned request seems quite modest. We need only recall that over the course of the last three months, the Entente approved extraordinarily high sums, over 100 million marks, for propaganda purposes, of which most is being spent on film advertising. I see the realization of the above plans as imperative for the war effort, and request that they be executed through the Bild- und Filmamt. I would be grateful to be appropriately informed of what happens there in response to this letter. I would like to add that these are propaganda-related expenses. Signed: Ludendorff Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 1973), 113. 2. The Nordische Filmgesellschaft was the German distribution branch of Nordisk Film, a company established in 1906 in Denmark. Ufa would buy the Nordische Filmgesellschaft along with Nordisk’s German production studio, its cinemas, and the exclusive rights to its films within Central Europe for ten million marks. 3. The Deutscher Ausschuß für Lichtspielreform was founded in April 1917, after a conference in Berlin’s Urania society. The reform committee was chaired by Erwin Ackerknecht of Stettin and Karl Brunner of Berlin. (On Brunner, see chapter 7, no. 100.)

120 JOSEPH MAX JACOBI The Triumph of Film First published as “Der Triumph des Films,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 563 (October 10, 1917). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

President of the Schutzverband der Filmfabrikanten Deutschlands (Association for the Protection of German Film Manufacturers), Joseph Max Jacobi makes a plea to theater owners to support the seventh German war bond by screening a propaganda film made by his association. (Between 1914 and 1918, Germany introduced nine war bonds, which financed almost 60 percent of the country’s war costs. The seventh war bond was issued in September 1917.) Like the previous texts in this chapter, Jacobi’s appeal also seeks to redefine the medium of film as a powerful weapon in the battle of public opinion on an international and mass scale. War bonds were a frequent subject of short propaganda-advertising films during World War I, including several films by Julius Pinschewer (see chapter 16, no. 237).

278

Film Culture and Politics

We Germans are a people of action! We do not speak much; we work. When war broke out, we took action and gladly did our duty! We assembled the best armies and attacked with the heaviest weaponry. We rationed our supplies and secured the national economy. The battlefield trembled under our blows; Hindenburg checkmated our enemies. Deprivation followed upon austerity, and we outdid ourselves—and the rest of the world—in perseverance. We fought the gravest battle, visor open only to the visible enemy. We thereby overlooked the invisible one, which knows no close combat: we overlooked film as a weapon in the battle of peoples. We did not know that enemies would use film to hurl sharp and poisonous arrows against us. We remained unshakable in our belief in good faith, in the victorious power of truth! We met our opponents’ campaign of defamation with the consciousness of our inner peace and strength. We did so—had to do so—because incendiary tactics are alien to the German character. And we thereby made such an egregious mistake! We should have learned from our enemies without following them down that path. Given the extent to which they promoted themselves throughout the world while disparaging our abilities, we should have begun much sooner to compete with our geopolitical and economic opponents. We needed, with the help of comprehensive film propaganda, to spread a truly factual elucidation of Germany’s strength and economic power, German diligence, and German culture. It might have converted some of the envious, made open helpers out of neutral states, perhaps even turned some enemies into friends! Today film is, as Reichstag member Dr. Naumann so eloquently said to me, the international language.1 With this language, one gets through to an audience; it is the only way to reach the hearts of the people! This, along with its mass effect, is the enormous value of film. We were late to recognize this in the German fatherland, but that made us all the more thorough in the end. The organization of all film-related businesses, the reform of cinema in terms of the selection and execution of productions, the emphasis on educational and enlightening objectives, along with the advertising work of those (mostly official) institutions created during the war—all of this eloquently demonstrates the government’s conviction that film is a propaganda tool of unprecedented efficacy. We association members have every reason to be happy about this outlook and to provide the technical, financial, and intellectual resources of our industry for tasks that will be a constant support for our further development and our work toward our goal. There should be films explaining every part of the national economy, which will educate the masses of fi lmgoers about the real state of our power as a people. And manufacturers, like distributors and theater owners, should work together to make the implementation of this promotional work as expedient as possible. Film is already the most powerful propaganda tool for Germany’s financial sector. In this area of the national economy, the national bank deserves credit for having been the first to recognize the importance of film for the execution of domestic duties during wartime. Each war bond occasioned promotional films whose accuracy we can only admire. The new propaganda film made by the Schutzverband der Filmfabrikanten Deutschlands to promote the seventh war bond probably comes closest to the interests of the people’s psyche, and it can thus serve the fatherland by making an essential contribution to the loan’s success, enabled by the film’s fruitful mass effect.

Image Wars

279

The triumph of this film lies in the idea that gave rise to it, the abandonment of the principle that good things will happen of their own accord. In his essay “The Psychology of Advertising,” Professor Leopold von Wiese writes, “All valuable efforts can easily succumb to the mistake of insisting that the world cannot pass them by.”2 What an enormous success that we have now adopted this point of view! In the propaganda fi lm of the Schutzverband, the great men of fi nance, commerce, and politics descend from the pedestals of their (frequently undesired) unapproachable isolation to appear in the film and address nearly fi fteen million people. They are driven by the knowledge that their gaze and their words will demonstrate to the German people their will and their ability to persevere, with the people and through the people. Just as all of Germany is preparing to help the seventh war bond achieve as much success as all previous bonds, German cinemas should do their part to support this enterprise, which will guarantee the free development and happy future of our fatherland. German cinemas, it is time to build the tools the state needs to protect us! German theater owners, show the propaganda film by the Schutzverband der Filmfabrikanten Deutschlands in the last week of the war bond! Play it and be certain that the state authorities fully recognize the value of the film and, with it, the value of your existence! Notes 1. The liberal politician Friedrich Naumann was a member of the Reichstag from 1907 to 1912 and 1913 to 1918. 2. German sociologist and economist Leopold von Wiese’s article “Psychologie der Reklame” was published in the Festschrift zur Feier des 50jährigen Bestehens der Annoncenexpedition Rudolf Mosse (1917). Reklame (advertising) and Propaganda were closely related fields in the early twentieth century, and the two German terms were often used interchangeably.

121 RUDOLF GENENNCHER Film as a Means of Agitation First published as “Der Film als Agitationsmittel,” in Der Kinematograph 12, no. 628 (January 15, 1919). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A prolific critic and journalist for the oldest film trade paper, Der Kinematograph, in the 1910s, Rudolf Genenncher advocated lifting Germany’s quota on imported films after World War I. In this text, he decries the political appropriation of film as a “violation of art,” endorsing instead its use as a form of cultural propaganda in the struggle for peace, international diplomacy, and general human welfare. Whereas Joseph Max Jacobi (no. 120) had identified film’s global reach as the source of its propagandistic power, Genenncher presents the very internationalism of film (as of all art forms) as cause for its nonpartisanship. In upholding this bourgeois, universalist conception of art, Genenncher entered broader and ongoing debates on the relation between aesthetics and politics, as evidenced by the so-called Tendenzkunst-Debatte (a.k.a. “Sperber-Debatte”) waged among social democrats between 1910 and 1912. (For more on the debate over tendentious art, see also the texts by Schmitz and Benjamin in chapter 11, nos. 160 and 161.) Genenncher’s intervention was published on the same day as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated in Berlin, marking an end to the short-lived Spartacist uprising that had begun on January 4, 1919.

280

Film Culture and Politics

Our entire public life is currently dominated by agitation for political parties, worldviews, social programs, and so on. Agitation has never shunned any means of reaching its goals. No wonder, then, if it has been stretching out its tentacles toward film for a long time. However, there are various reasons why film has previously been used only sparingly for agitational purposes. Every instance of agitation is a weapon, and every weapon, in turn, needs both a combatant to wield it and an opponent to feel its effects. That film in itself is particularly well suited to be an intellectual weapon needs no explanation. But fi lm is—or at least it should be—a child of that great mother, art, and art is international. Any attempt to use film for political purposes, or for any other purpose, constitutes to some extent a misuse or violation of art. All the same, any group wishing to use film for the purpose of agitation will ignore this ideal stumbling block just as easily as manufacturers, who regrettably give priority to the commercial aspect of business over the artistic side, today more than ever. A different, more concrete fact greatly impairs the uninhibited use of cinematography in the interest of agitation. Namely, however well film might be suited for this purpose, the movie theater is poorly suited for it. Here, too, there have been screenings of militant tendentious films (e.g., films combating alcohol), but these were exceptions, and they pursued ends whose value people already agreed on, with very few exceptions. But cinema can never ever become a playground for the passions of political parties. The audience is composed of all kinds of political orientations, and audience members can rightly demand that people refrain from challenging their convictions in the place where they only want to find amusement and intellectual stimulation. An attempt to produce propaganda for any political party in the cinema would provoke outrage from those of other political persuasions and perhaps even result in wild uproars and riots. No, the cinema must remain just as neutral in politics as do other sites dedicated to the cultivation of art and entertainment, such as theaters, concert halls, and art galleries. Is it even worth trying, then, to use film for the purposes of agitation on a larger scale? The answer to this question will be yes and no, depending on whether one approaches it from an artistic or social angle. Obviously, the tendencies of film would have to be separated from those of art. If large factories were to turn their attention to propaganda films, the artistic efforts of authors, directors, and actors would be substantially constrained. And yet, in light of the film industry’s currently poor financial situation, having the leaders of political parties devote more attention to film agitation would be a welcome change. Admittedly, they would still have no influence on the business of theater owners. The commissions that film producers would receive, on the other hand, would bring about a substantial increase in their incomes and lead to greater stability in their business operations. That film has still not assumed any great significance in the election campaigns for the Nationalversammlung [National Assembly] may well be due primarily to the incomparably short period of time political parties have for campaigning and agitation. In the coming elections for the German parliament, however, film too will have a role to play as a means of agitation, provided that the interested manufacturers can agree on the costs of production with the controlling personalities of individual parties. Incidentally, if one party is the first to use film for purposes of agitation, then all the other parties will be forced to follow suit if they do not wish to fall behind. They will encounter hardly any difficulties with the censors, as long as agitation does not overstep the bounds of truth and decency—by then, censorship in its former guise will hopefully be eliminated. In the near future, then, we will have invitations to election meetings with slide lectures. If, as I mentioned above, the movie theater cannot serve as a space for political agitation, then it can still be made suitable for a different branch of agitation: cultural propa-

Image Wars

281

ganda. It goes without saying that now, after the end of the most terrible and devastating war of all times, any propaganda based on worldviews needs to advocate forcefully for a better, healthier, and deeper culture. Here, cinema can also assume the place that it is due, since all of humankind agrees on the larger aim, and all that remains is to point out the right path. Precisely today, propaganda films against war, films calling for the establishment of a League of Nations, and films for an increase in welfare and intellectual culture will find a grateful and interested audience. A few works of this kind are already in preparation, and others will follow. Here film’s persuasive power will be put to the test, and in so doing, it will open up a field in which it can contribute to the realization of human ideals.

122 KURT TUCHOLSKY War Films First published as “Kriegsfilme” under the pseudonym Ignaz Wrobel in Die Weltbühne 5 (February 1, 1927), 195. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Kurt Tucholsky wrote for the weekly magazine Die Weltbühne under various pseudonyms, tirelessly targeting the reactionary forces of the Weimar Republic. Himself a former conscripted soldier, Tucholsky was especially critical of all forms of militarism. In 1919, he published the article series Militaria and also helped found the Friedensbund der Kriegsteilnehmer (Peace League of War Veterans). In this essay from 1927, he addresses the memory of the Great War, arguing that the films preserved in the Reich Archive, if rendered publicly accessible, would show the true face of war. (See also the article “The Film Archive of the Great General Staff” in chapter 3, no. 37.)

During the war, many military operations were filmed by the General Staff, sometimes even risking the lives of the camera operators in short-range combat. Where are these films? They were shown during war—admittedly, only to the “inner circle,” so that the people in the bread lines wouldn’t be deterred from persevering. Now, after the war, some fi lms have been turned over to a Vaterländische Film-Gesellschaft GmbH [National Film Company, LLC], which has in turn given them to the Verein für Deutschtum [League for Germanness]. The latter showed them to its people, once again in closed screenings—and now these screenings have been stopped. This is a shame. The film office of the Reichsarchiv [Reich Archive], where so many former officers work who have never seen an archive in their lives, is preserving these films—“their public presentation, however, has been forbidden by the order of the Reich Minister of the Interior for reasons pertaining to both domestic and foreign policy.” This is a terrible shame. For the entire cowardice and dishonesty of the military is in these films: they dare not show these brutal scenes, so that no one who was not there can learn what war is really like. They do not have the courage to show a film of close combat with rattling, twitching, shredded stumps, so that no one can say “That is war!” Religion must be preserved for the people. Only the blind man is holy, and the image at Sais was veiled.1 Among the unforgivable errors of the November Traitors, 2 who—alas!—unfortunately betrayed nothing and no one, is that they left behind large amounts of military

282

Film Culture and Politics

material. The few attempts that were made to seize personal letters, imperial dispatches, and the files of the military cabinet were immediately stifled by authorities like Ebert and Heine.3 “Ebert,” says one man who witnessed it, “worked like a civil servant from day one.” He also thought like one. And thus, everything stayed in the hands of the butchers. The Reichsarchiv tirelessly prints one publication after another for the war—and not a single one against it. Just try it! Bring out your slaughterhouse films! Show the women, the children, and all those who were not there how people died—how it looks: a hero’s death, how it looks: the field of honor! Dare to show it! You do not dare. You know well, just as I do, just as we all know, that in peaceful times, when the newspapers have not fogged our brains with the gas of patriotic lies, a cry would roar through Germany, through the world. Never again? No: Ugh! Disgusting! Notes 1. The reference is to the poem “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais” (The veiled image at Sais), a 1795 ballad by Friedrich Schiller, in which a young man longs to see the truth behind the veil of a statue, only to suffer from having his desire fulfilled. 2. “November Traitors” (Novemberverräter) was a term used in the reactionary media to describe participants in the socialist November Revolution of 1918 as well as Weimar political leaders who were associated with the civil conflict. 3. Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, was the president of Germany from 1919 to 1925; Wolfgang Heine was one of the leaders of the Social Democrats and Prussian minister of the interior from 1919 to 1920.

123 FILM-KURIER Film in the New Germany: Ten Years in the Service of the National Community First published as “Der Film im neuen Deutschland! Zehn Jahre im Dienste der Volksgemeinschaft,” in FilmKurier 10, no. 268 (November 9, 1928), 1. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the Weimar Republic, this front-page editorial statement celebrates the role of film in the new democratic state in improving the country’s reputation abroad and providing art, education, and entertainment for the German people. Although the word Volksgemeinschaft (implying an ethnically based definition of the German people) is now associated with National Socialist ideology, it was first popularized during World War I and was used across the political spectrum during the Weimar years. The liberal Film-Kurier, a daily trade paper, was founded by Alfred Weiner and first appeared on May 30, 1919. In 1933, most of the editorial staff, including Weiner, Lotte Eisner, and Willy Haas, were forced into emigration—a turn of events already suggested below in the article’s reference (in 1928!) to “decaying parliamentarianism” and a loss of idealism within the Republic.

November Day—A Day of Remembrance

November 9, 1918—a day for the masses, a day for the worker, collapse and reconstruction in one, the end and the beginning between sunrise and sunset. The tenth anniversary of that

Image Wars

283

historical day, this 9th of November will be committed to the memory of the entire German people. Germany’s youth, the younger generation—even if they are not particularly predisposed to celebrations and feel little affinity in their hearts for such romanticism—will not understand the shameful distortion of the revolutionary act that, without much ado, removed a few dozen noble families from their positions of power. In those November days of 1918, nothing could protect the monarchist Reich, which had dissolved into a repulsive collection of regional states. And yet the younger generation will realize that the regionalism has remained, that in the new Germany we are still “ruled” according to the old cliché, and that a decaying parliamentarianism and well-paid party officials have gradually removed from the Republic all idealism for the Republic. The greatest enemies of the Republic were often “professional” republicans. On this day of remembrance, such grave appraisals can be found in all notable considerations of November Day in the German press. Film, Movie Theaters, and National Community [Volksgemeinschaft]

Ten years of the People’s State [Volksstaat]—on this day of remembrance, film and cinema must also regard themselves as part of the entire people [Volksganze] and demand just recognition of their past achievements in service of entertainment and education for the people. Over the past decade, the movie theater has always proved a friend to the national masses [Volksmassen], to whom it opened its doors even in the harshest winter, with putsches by day and frost by night. The cinema can be truly valued and understood only by the people, by those from the working-class neighborhoods and housing developments of the needy, by the middle class, white-collar employees, and manual laborers. It makes no difference whether the cinemas’ neon signs, with their inviting advertisements, drew the masses from big cities or small towns, from villages or medium-sized cities. Ten years in the service of entertaining the people! Enjoying little support, often scorned, movie theaters and film have provided, beyond cheap entertainment, artistic and educational programs and countless valuable stimulations for the masses. The artistic narrative film, the cultural-educational film, and the newsreel with its illustrations of the world cannot be removed from contemporary educational life. Thus the fi lm industry has earned the support of the new state. Film Propaganda for Freedom and Work

In the history of postwar Germany, there should absolutely be a chapter called “How the German Film Campaigned for German Recognition Abroad.” Because of German film, there was an appreciably more peaceful atmosphere in France after the war, as the first German films showed how well the “Huns and Barbarians” could produce artistic film work. In America, too, film appeared as a pioneer of German art. In the future, when German film work is debated, it will not be possible to dismiss these facts or deny them. Within the German national community and economy, the so-called film state is, by virtue of its connection to the masses, prevented at the outset from agitating against the times, against the forward-looking currents of the present. If today’s government would remove the oppressive burdens of censorship and extraordinary taxes from German film, the industry would doubtlessly experience a perceptible improvement of its product and greater daring with regard to experiments.

284

Film Culture and Politics

The masses’ tastes must be developed and guided. By demanding ever-increasing recognition in the second decade of the Republic, fi lm and movie theaters will be able to do their part to achieve a better future and a brighter present through comprehensive efforts for mass edification [Massenbildung] and popular education. The anonymous Volk will not allow its entertainment—whether the latter is called a Kintopp or a movie palace—to be falsified or spoiled. The spiritual-artistic powers in the film industry are responsible for making sure that taking pleasure in the cinema has an inner justification.

124 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER All Quiet on the Western Front: On the Remarque Sound Film First published as “Im Westen nichts Neues: Zum Remarque-Tonfilm” in Frankfurter Zeitung (December 7, 1930). Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi.

Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s international bestseller Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) and produced by Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios, All Quiet on the Western Front was first screened in the United States in April 1930 and went on to garner two Oscars, including Best Picture. Approved for release by Berlin’s Filmprüfstelle (Film Censorship Office) on November 21, 1930, the German version, which was dubbed and voluntarily shortened by a full hour, premiered in Berlin’s Mozartsaal on December 4, only to be banned by the Oberprüfstelle (Central Censorship Board) a week later, on December 11, in response to massive demonstrations by Nazi mobs that threatened public safety. Initially seized by the “spirit of 1914,” Siegfried Kracauer himself had volunteered for military service and had published an early essay, “Vom Erleben des Kriegs” (On the experience of war, 1915), presenting war as a form of redemption from isolation and self-refl ection. His novel Ginster (1928) was one of many books and films from the late Weimar years that addressed World War I, alongside Remarque’s novel and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Westfront 1918 (1930). In this article, Kracauer questions the genre of the antiwar film that shows realistic combat action but fails to expose the war’s “root causes and true consequences.”

The Remarque sound film from America, which has been shown almost everywhere abroad, already created ripples among the German public before the Berlin premiere, even evoking a difference of opinion between two of the high administrative bodies: the Auswärtiges Amt [Federal Foreign Office] and the Reichswehrministerium [Ministry of the Reichswehr]. Whereas one, upon questioning from the Film Censorship Office, expressed no objections to the film, the other claimed that the film posed a threat to the reputation of the German army and, with it, the general reputation of Germany.1 An interpellation by the German National People’s Party circulated in the Prussian Landtag [State Parliament], wishing to preemptively prevent the alleged calamity, declared outright that the film “ridicules our German youth and represents them in an effeminate manner. This tendency results in a disparagement of their willingness to sacrifice their lives for love of the Fatherland.”2 Fortunately, the Filmprüfstelle nevertheless approved the film, which played before an emotional audience in the Mozartsaal. By its own means, the film refutes the absurd allegations made against it by a misconceived patriotism and by the needs of party politics.

Image Wars

285

The German release (a shortened version of the American one) neither diminishes the reputation of the old army nor ridicules the young German soldiers. But I can well understand that its screening is unpleasant for some people.3 For, even so, the film does not make the war palatable. It does this less through its images of horror than through its stringent evidence that heroism could not stand firm outside in the trenches. Heroism was thoroughly compromised. If the film has one merit, it is this: revealing the hollowness of the disgusting, idealistic nonsense with which the schoolteacher moved his students into the prescribed frenzy of enthusiasm. They set out as war volunteers and quickly realized that the reality of battle, hunger, and death differs from the bogus illusions that they had been led to believe in the hinterland. The heroism leaves them, the ideas that they had obediently believed now appear to them as ideologies, and a meaning is no longer to be grasped. If they nonetheless continue, it is out of self-defense and out of a herd instinct that enjoins the individual from dissociation. Is the war defiled by this methodically executed demystification? It appears that the film wished to stir up sentiment against the war, but in reality it penetrates just as little as Remarque’s book beyond sentiment to the core of the matter. The film’s dialogue of course contains a few remarks with which the audience at the premiere loudly and approvingly concurred. In one exchange, a character says that two nations simply cannot affront one another, and another suggests that in the future, only the warmongers, the rulers and generals, should go to war. Yet what do such noncommittal empty phrases ultimately imply against the fact of the war? Rather than questioning its origins or getting at it with political and social arguments, both film and book remain bogged down in petit-bourgeois outbursts of discontent that cannot lend sufficient support to the images of horror. One of the young volunteers, Paul, is summoned during his furlough by the schoolteacher to appear before the class and kindle their enthusiasm through a short speech. He refuses to reinforce the teacher’s heroic drivel, desperately asserting his inability to speak. This silence is characteristic of the highly questionable neutrality of the film (and also, of course, of the novel). It is inimical to insight. It raises the war into a mythical fate, which it is not, and leaves it with a sense of inevitability that it lacks. I fear that the film will not restrain the bellicose among our youth from embarking on new heroic deeds. And I reckon that the Reichswehrministerium has no reason at all to be so concerned. This is not to say that the film leaves one feeling undisturbed. One is no less impacted by it than by Westfront 1918, the well-known war film directed by Pabst. Both works accord in their overall tenor, but the German one underlines more than the American the monotony of years in the trenches and takes, perhaps, a more emphatic stance against the insanity of war. On the other hand, the Remarque film presents the individual figures with incomparable distinctness, without thereby neglecting the broader course of events. Its central theme, the disillusionment of a small group of soldiers, is captured in a memorable scene. The young men stand in the military hospital around the bed of their comrade, and one of them plainly forgets the dying soldier out of voracity for his boots. Since he always has blisters on his feet, he simply takes the boots in view of the death. This is done without sentiment, and this rings true. The film, under the direction of Lewis Milestone, was made with great equipment, admirable technical skill, and faithful realism. The outmoded thunder of battle is differentiated into a complex cacophony of the most disparate hellish noises, and all images of war from earlier times pale in comparison to the scenes of close combat that here close in on the viewer. The episodes proliferate a bit too abundantly, but among these embellishments is a beautiful one that sprouts like a small, sorrowful blossom. It is the one in which Paul pays a visit to the French woman: one does not see the two but only hears

286

Film Culture and Politics

them in the bedchamber, which is presented in touching, unvarnished poverty, as they discuss their fleeting time together and the misfortune of war. Unfortunately, the postsynchronized German dialogue is often poorly aligned with the movements of the Americans’ mouths. (If sound film is to retain the internationality of silent film, one must either shift the emphasis from the dialogue back to the images and also to the noises, or shoot each film from the outset in every major language. The attempt to portray American speakers as German ones is absurd.) What I wrote concerning the limited contemporary significance of Westfront 1918 is also applicable to the Remarque film: “A generation has already come of age,” as my report at the time stated, “that no longer knows those years from its own experience, but still must see, time and again, events to which it did not itself bear witness. That such observation should serve as a deterrent is unlikely, but the generation should at least know how things were. This is a matter of knowledge, not of its attendant purpose.”4 Visual instruction is no doubt useful, but it seems to me that more useful still would be films that not only show us the horrors of war but also lay bare its root causes and true consequences. Notes 1. The Federal Foreign Office shifted its stance in the appeals case, advocating a ban on the film after allegedly receiving reports from abroad that it would be detrimental to Germany’s reputation. 2. Following this interpellation, the German National People’s Party and the National Socialist Party would introduce a motion of no confidence in the Prussian Landtag against Prussian prime minister Otto Braun and Prussian interior minister Carl Severing on December 19, 1930, arguing that they had defended the film. This motion was ultimately rejected. 3. In the politically tense atmosphere of December 1930, following the electoral gains of the Nazi Party in September and the worsening economic crisis, it was undoubtedly “unpleasant for some people” to see Germany’s traumatic defeat through the eyes of Hollywood. Goebbels, who forced the ban with his intolerant and physical “politics of the street,” considered the outcome a triumph for the Nazi Party. 4. Kracauer here quotes from his review of Westfront 1918 in the Frank furter Zeitung, May 27, 1930.

125 KURT TUCHOLSKY Against the Ban on the Remarque Film First published as “Gegen das Remarque-Filmverbot,” in Die Menschenrechte 4, no. 3 (March 20, 1931). Translated by Tara Hottman.

After All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in December 1930, the fight over the film continued. Opposing the successful campaign against the film led by Joseph Goebbels, public figures including Herbert Jhering, Käthe Kollwitz, Heinrich Mann, Carl von Ossietzky, and Carl Zuckmayer campaigned for its re-release. The Reichstag declared the ban of the film unfounded on March 6, 1931, and the film was subsequently approved for limited audiences on June 8 and then for general audiences in a furtherabridged version on September 2. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, both Remarque’s novel and the American film version were banned. Kurt Tucholsky’s text was published in Die Menschenrechte, a journal of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (German League for Human Rights), which had been founded in 1914. Later that year, on August 4, 1931, Tucholsky would publish an article, “Der bewachte Kriegsschauplatz,” in Die Weltbühne with the sentence “Soldiers are murderers,” leading to the indictment of Carl von Ossietzky, the journal’s editor, for alleged “defamation of the Reichswehr.”

Image Wars

287

The Nordic bard Goebbels has repeatedly suggested in his rallies that the Remarque film is a “business.” It is indeed a business—in contrast to the Fridericus products, which, under Gebühr, seem to be unduly [über Gebühr] ideal emanations of Baldur.1 Films are products of an industry that is hindered by a form of censorship that operates in the interests of the ruling class. Nevertheless, there are good and bad films. The Nationaille has led a dishonest protest against this film. 2 It is unfortunate that a pacifist like Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster spread confusion throughout the ranks of pacifism when he said: “The scenario depicts a tendentious selection on behalf of a kind of sentimental, even tearful, pacifism, in which the horrors of war do not come from the depths of moral human nature but instead from the nervous system, the stomach, and the need for sleep.”3 From the nervous system! Only from the nervous system? We have often defended Foerster. In this case, we can only wish that the head of a small Catholic moral authority be put in the position of having to protest against the war only because of his nervous system—for example after an approximately forty-eight-hour-long barrage. Even compared to the noblest militarism, the lowest pacifism is a thousand times more correct! We would shun no means of fighting the Moloch that is the insanity of war and the insanity of the state. The deaths of ten million were senseless—they died for nothing. The grieving mother, the grieving wife, advertising professionals gearing up for the next war must read some sort of belated meaning into the slaughter that even the pope referred to as “dishonorable”—as far as the survivors are concerned, they need this consolation (it is so difficult to continue living without it): Honor to those in mourning. War is dishonor! We have no use for card tricks intended to convince us of a supposed meaning behind this madness. And that is why we support every single film that demonstrates to mankind what war is like even in its base forms, precisely in its very basest forms. Mussolini shows his people only the flags and nothing more; Remarque shows us the flags and the rest: the tattered and the faltering, the bleeding and those shot to pieces. Whoever wishes to be inspired by that may do so. The rest of us cry out against global shame: Down with war! Notes 1. Tucholsky ironically alludes to Baldur, the god from Germanic mythology. He also plays on the name of Otto Gebühr, who starred as Frederick the Great in the nationalist and highly popular series of Fridericus Rex films. In German, the phrase über Gebühr means “unduly” or “excessively.” 2. The word Nationaille is Tucholsky’s satirical amalgamation of the words National and Kanaille (scoundrels, lowlifes, or mob). 3. Foerster was a German philosopher and pedagogue known for his pacifism and critical views of National Socialism. His statement on the film was published in the Allgemeine Rundschau (no. 2), January 10, 1931, and reprinted in the Kölnische Volkszeitung (morning edition), January 17, 1931.

NINE

THE SPECTER OF HOLLYWOOD

126 CLAIRE GOLL American Cinema First published as “Amerikanisches Kino,” in Die neue Schaubühne: Monatshefte für Bühne, Drama und Film 2, no. 6 (June 1920), 164–65. Translated by Don Reneau.

World War I not only initiated the United States’ ascension to a world power but also brought Hollywood to a position of lasting global hegemony. Whereas French and Italian productions had dominated prewar international cinema, American films would become firmly established in foreign markets during the war years, lending worldwide recognition to various stars (Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks) and directors (D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, Cecil B. DeMille). Having prohibited the import of all but Danish films in the spring of 1916, Germany would lift this ban on January 1, 1921, giving way to a decade in which the country was haunted by the specter of Hollywood’s cultural and economic domination. The documents in this chapter show the widespread ambivalence vis-à-vis American cinema, which was both admired for its kinetic energy (especially in slapstick films) and reviled for its crass commercialism. “Hollywood” helped German cinema define itself as a possible alternative. The first text comes from German-born writer and journalist Claire Goll (1890– 1977), who had moved with her husband, the writer Yvan Goll, to Paris in 1919 and was thus able to view American films still banned across the Rhine. She juxtaposes the sentimentality of the literary and theatrical adaptations made in Europe with the dynamic, medium-specific qualities of American cinema. Known for her cultural criticism and literary writings, Goll also published a collection of poems entitled Lyrische Films in 1922. (See also Yvan Goll’s text in chapter 2, no. 20.)

Europe has still not understood that cinema is not related to the theater. While gothic serials of anachronistic historical films are churned out in Berlin, the sentimentalities of Bernstein and Bataille are photographed and pornographed for the movie theaters in Paris.1 In Berlin, Balzac, Strindberg, Dostoevsky are filmed, gelatinized; in Paris, Zola’s Travail is now measured in meters of film! 2 Here: Morel, der Meister der Kette [Morel, Master of Chains]; there: The Master Mystery.3 Bad, dull-witted sensations: detectives, revolvers, masks. Here: Kohlhiesels Töchter [Kohlhiesel’s daughters] for humor or a genuine Bavarian feel for the Alps; there, the insipid comic antics of Rigadin.4 The actresses express psychological depth by changing their clothes, and the actors by lighting cigarettes and mouthing words! While the old world endures this kitsch, the healthy will of America has created the true film. In the first place, good American films avoid any hint of literary suggestions. 288

The Specter of Hollywood

289

What happens—or more precisely, races by—on the screen can no longer be called action. It is a new dynamic, a breathless rhythm, action in a nonliterary sense. Nor is it conceived and played in a glass-sided studio, but rather in the open air. Americans call film a “moving picture,”5 and not by chance do Parisians compare the images [Lichtbilder] from across the ocean with Manet, Cézanne, and others. Advanced mechanics and technology—above all, a foundation on the largest scale (in Los Angeles, for example, they have built an entire cinematic village, with saloons, ranches, and so on)—have created true works of wonder. The great screen stars of America work exclusively for film, never for the theater. They write the plays themselves and do almost entirely without words, replacing them with concentrated movement and pantomime. The three American actors most famous and most celebrated throughout the world are Douglas Fairbanks (Doug), Charlie Chaplin (Charlot), and Sessue Hayakawa (the Japanese). The genius among them is Charlot, the Molière of this century.6 In the mask of a clown, completely renouncing concerns of personal appearance (who among our actors would give up even the nice crease in his trousers!), he has in the course of five years rendered virtually every human weakness on the screen. His eccentric, mathematically construed movements of both body and soul always contain a comic effect that is tragic at the same time. For the profound and empathetic laugh, not confined to superficiality, is born of melancholy and grief. The irresistibility of Charlot lies not only in his explosive musical rhythm but above all in his face, which shows twenty nuances per second. Every evening the souls of the Parisian artists make their exodus to America, to Charlot, whose shadow on the screen radiates more life than the bodies of all the actors in the city on the Seine. For Charlot, as for most Americans, no physical feat is impossible. He is an acrobat, an athlete, and a juggler—a virtuosity that increases the effect of his films even more. Only Douglas Fairbanks—who seems to risk his life in every film—surpasses Charlot’s physicality.7 He performs the most superhuman deeds effortlessly: he springs from a speeding express train atop a horse, leaps from one racing car into another, climbs up a steep church or a skyscraper, or hops from one rooftop over the street onto another. But these examples only illustrate the content of his films. (Here they would constitute the film itself, which would be called Der Todessprung, by Fern Andra.) 8 Fairbanks mockingly imitates the ethical-social sentimentality of the five-act photoplay. He represents the American principle: take nothing seriously and construe nothing too narrowly. Like a jaguar, he lurks in a chair at the club, always ready to spring into and out of the so-called action, into a joke or unusual situation. The American cinema has already accustomed its audience to amazing things. Tanks run into houses; three cars chase each other or into the ocean; two thousand meters in the air, a man leaps gymnastically from one airplane to another and descends with a parachute over the ocean or New York, not knowing if and where he will land. But Douglas Fairbanks breaks the record. He is the expression of a die-hard energy, of the throbbing heart of life in a world not yet gone stale. Wholly spiritual is the great Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa.9 He knows no trivial little feelings, but only primal sensation. One fi nds no trace here of an art sullied by civilization. When he portrays sorrow, his pain is of ancient grandeur. When he plays the lover, his smile has the grace and aroma of lotus and cherry blossoms. As the avenger, his body explodes in exotic wildness. Whoever sees him knows everything about Japan, everything of the beauty of the mystical East. These three men have raised film in every respect to the level of the marvelous. Europe will have to learn from them for the future.

290

Film Culture and Politics

Notes 1. Goll references the popular French playwrights Henri Bernstein (1876–1953) and Henry Bataille (1872–1922). 2. Émile Zola’s novel Travail (1901) was adapted into a seven-part film series in 1920. 3. The two-part German film series Morel, der Meister der Kette (a.k.a. Glanz und Elend der Kurtisanen, 1920), directed by Conrad Wiene and Louis Ralph, was based on Balzac’s four-part novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838–47). The fifteen-episode American serial The Master Mystery (1919, dir. Harry Grossman and Burton King) starred Harry Houdini. 4. Ernst Lubitsch wrote and directed Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920). Rigadin was the subject of a popular series of French comic shorts. Charles Prince starred as Rigadin in over two hundred silent comedies between 1910 and 1920. 5. The phrase appears in English in the original. 6. Due to the four-year ban of American films between 1916 and end of 1920, the German reception of Chaplin films was delayed and his early anarchic and socially critical slapsticks like The Tramp (1915) were released in the early 1920s alongside his later, more sentimental features like The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925) or The Circus (1928). Kracauer watched a program of early Chaplin films still in 1930 (see his review in chapter 12, no. 183). 7. By 1920, Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939) had made more than two dozen films and had become, next to Chaplin, the most popular actor in Hollywood. His most famous costume films The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, and The Thief of Bagdad were still to come. 8. Der Todessprung (The death leap, a.k.a. Um Krone und Peitsche) was a 1919 German film directed by Georg Bluen and Fern Andra. 9. Sessue Hayakawa (1889–1973) was a prolific Japanese actor who starred in close to fifty films in Hollywood before 1920. His role in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) contributed to his status as an early male screen idol in advance of Rudolph Valentino.

127 ERICH POMMER The Significance of Conglomerates in the Film Industry First published as “Bedeutung der Konzerne in der Filmindustrie,” in Das Tagebuch 35 (September 11, 1920), 1139–41. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Despite Germany’s devastating defeat in the war, the country’s film industry significantly expanded and gained in strength in the mid to late 1910s, emerging second only to that of the United States in scale and power. Noting the fledgling film industry’s wartime growth, Erich Pommer here supports German conglomerates in the “conquest of the world market” and in the prevention of foreign takeover, revealing a combination of imperial ambition and protective anxiety during a period of intense transnational competition. Pommer (1889–1966) was one of the founders of the Decla-FilmGesellschaft, which produced, among others, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) before it merged with Deutsche Bioskop in 1920 and with Ufa in 1921. See also his text at the end of this chapter (no. 142).

Nothing is more precious than youth, and nothing justifies greater or more beautiful hope. The German film industry is still young, very young indeed, and the aforementioned words are therefore even more appropriate to describe it. To be sure, German film already existed before the war, but the few companies that concerned themselves with film production before the year 1914 could, as a whole, hardly claim the status of an independent industry. The relatively few German films that existed may have found an outlet far beyond Germany’s borders, but the prices they fetched and

The Specter of Hollywood

291

their sales did not correspond to their true value and therefore could not influence the world market. It was the war that first compelled Germany, then isolated on all sides, to work seriously toward expanding an industry then still in its infancy. Inevitably, the first films of the “factories,” which were now springing up like mushrooms, resembled the wartime ersatz products already familiar in all areas of trade and commerce. Then, within a span of barely five years, our tireless work, in particular our mental immersion in the business of film, led to a boom in German production. Although the film industry benefited from the war, its rapid blossoming necessarily developed very one-sided politics as a result, which had to be oriented entirely toward domestic audiences and the few neutral states that we could reach. On the other hand, this circumstance yielded a divergence of individual interests, such that the forwardlooking, engaged industry—the established one, in contrast to the aforementioned opportunistic manufacturers—risked being torn apart in its nascent stage by lack of comprehension, shortsightedness, and self-interest, thus recognizing the danger of a false, narrow-minded politics only too late. However, the upward surge of production figures,1 as well as the cinema audience’s increased demand for opulent set design and decor over the course of all these years, had necessitated the investment of enormous capital in film; private capital was thus strained and committed to such an extent that it could no longer single-handedly bear the burdens that were bound to develop for the entire industry as it prepared to conquer the world market. But more than just capital was involved; far more important was the question of permanent employment for all the manual and intellectual laborers who had found their daily bread in the film industry. Consideration had to be given to those industries and workers who, on account of the blossoming of the film industry, could offer employment and sustenance to hundreds of thousands who would have been unemployed otherwise. It thus became a national obligation to ensure the continued existence of such a promising industry. One need only think of the paper industry. It is a well-known saying that film lives on advertising, but advertising means newspapers, paper, print, ink, and also applied art. We could name many such industries that are growing and strengthening due to film. Competition with foreign films and the conquest of the world market needed, and still need, to be prepared. But who would be the predestined leaders in such a struggle? Not those whose petty individual interests were focused exclusively on their own moneybags, but rather those who, even in prewar years, were in constant contact with the film industry, both domestic and foreign, and who had knowledge of the world market. These men and the respective companies they headed thus had to join forces, at a minimum by forming syndicates, in order to secure German film production through elimination of mutual competition; in this way, they were able, initially, to procure sales in the domestic market but then also to use their combined powers to establish German film abroad. Hardly one person in a hundred can appreciate the pioneering work demanded simply to advertise such an industry abroad—in countries that, having emerged victorious from the international struggle, acted like dictators and imposed a trade ban on us for years to come, which we must now battle with the weapons of practicality and persuasion. It calls for enormous preparations, tremendous sacrifices, often the kind of personal courage that sets aside momentary and private interests and engages on behalf of the general public; it further calls for precise knowledge of the countries, their traditions, their taste, their business practices, and their trade politics; it calls for tremendous assets to be determined and invested by strong individuals, and which will yield interest to the community only years later. But individual private assets will not suffice for this, and thus German

292

Film Culture and Politics

conglomerates naturally had to be created through the association of farsighted large companies that could approach foreign trusts and demand their respect. Just as we were approaching the foreign market, England, France, Italy, and America went about trying to recapture the German film market. After all, foreign powers know from the years before 1914 that the entire Central European market is determined by German taste and German programs. These powers would have had an easy time recapturing and influencing German markets; had theater owners rejected their films, they could have taken control of the most valuable German theaters with a single master stroke at a moment when German currency levels were egregiously low—that is, if it hadn’t been for the German conglomerates. But not only that—foreign interests would have been positioned to enact whatever pricing policies they wanted, which would have filled their pockets and made us even poorer. Without the agglomeration of German capital, foreign countries would have been able to govern the entire film industry at will; they would have been able to flood us with their products and make competition impossible. It is only due to the farsighted politics of German companies that they are now in a position to regulate all these issues and to exert a not-inconsiderable pressure on foreign countries, which, in contrast to a completely different situation in the prewar years, are now forced to pay attention to Germany—something they would certainly never have thought of doing without the existence of the conglomerates. If the German film industry still consisted of several small individual companies, England, America, France, and Italy could, by virtue of their trust, simply wipe away these molecular bits and pieces in German economic life with a magnanimous wave of their hand, at best buying up the more valuable ones, but taking control of them in any case. Anybody who is connected to the industry knows well enough that there is already no shortage of attempts to do just that. One side effect of the German predilection for trade associations is that we tend to play with real concepts as though they were slogans rather than approaching them objectively; therefore, one often has the impression that, for a large part of our industry, factors such as import, export, customs, boycotts, and the like only have the power of slogans, when they are actually much, much more. Indeed, it would be desirable for shortsighted people to become conscious that successful economic policy cannot be made from the standpoint of an individual but can be conducted only from the point of view of general interest; that in representing their own interests, the conglomerates automatically also advocate for the interests of weaker individuals; and that such small- and mid-sized companies can advance only if towed along behind the generally valid policies of the conglomerates. In a struggle, it is always the big and the strong who must take the lead; we see this everywhere in business and politics. Note 1. Between 1918 and 1920, the number of film theaters in Germany grew from 2,299 to 3,422; the annual number of German feature films increased from 340 to 510.

128 VALENTIN The Significance of Film for International Understanding First published under the name “Professor Dr. Valentin” as “Die Bedeutung des Films für die Völkerverständigung,” in Film-Kurier 3, no. 1 (January 1, 1921). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The Specter of Hollywood

293

Like the previous text by Erich Pommer (no. 127), this essay refl ects on the status of the domestic film industry in the wake of the Great War, when Germany had not only engaged in a propaganda war (see chapter 8) but had also isolated itself by prohibiting the import of most foreign films. Although that ban had allowed domestic film production to fl ourish, it also, as Valentin suggests, stunted the promise of cinema in cultivating international sympathy and understanding. Published one day after the ban was lifted, this essay by an unidentified author suggests that cinema might reconnect Germany with the world at large and reestablish sympathy in both directions, especially through films depicting local customs and traditions.

During my army days, I experienced how meaningful film can be. To be sure, the little cinemas in the field [Feldkinos] between the second and third lines did not have a great program and obviously had to deal with limited space. But there was something wonderful about suddenly being torn away from military life and grabbed by images from a strange, distant civilian world, presented to us in all their radiance and speed. Long before the war, I had lived in Italy and France, and I nearly felt enchanted when, though sitting in Flanders, I suddenly saw images of streets in Naples or the landscape of Provence, images so vivid, colorful, and lifelike that it was impossible to shake off their impact. The famed greengrocers of the south stood right before me; you could almost hear them shouting, and that girl from Arles with the unforgettable headdress! Film will be an indispensable tool in this new era, when peoples have to reacquaint themselves with each other after such severe alienation. I can imagine that film could systematically introduce Germans to foreign life, foreign work, and foreign customs in yet new ways. The literary authorities now taking an interest in fi lm will easily come up with apt ideas for furnishing foreign worlds with the kinds of events that will enable them to capture these worlds on the screen. Why have we still not seen a story about an American department store? It would have helped German audiences to understand American customs and businesses. Why has no one yet managed to show a story set on an English or Japanese steamship in East Asia, which would make visible the life on such a ship from the boiler room to the mess hall and bar? From a general cultural and political standpoint, I would find it very promising if foreign spheres of work and life could be obtained in this way for wide distribution through film. If German laborers, farmers, or white-collar workers could see their social and economic peers at work, and if they could observe how, despite all the charming diversity, the most important customs and necessities are similar, they would finally be able to develop a certain sympathy for all things foreign and no longer succumb so easily to provincial and nationalistic prejudices. Other potentially useful themes that occur to me include Parisian cabinetmakers’ workshops—this industry is known for having a decisive impact on the entire civilized world—or the journey of coffee from Brazil to the kitchen table in Germany with all the different stages of production and transport; the journey of tea would be similar. In the same way, it must be possible to show typical German workshops in fi lms exported abroad. If German toys are once again poised to conquer the market, foreign audiences will be interested to know where and how these toys are produced. To that end, they would have to study the toy-making towns in the Thuringian Forest and the Ore Mountains. The same goes for the clock industry in the Black Forest. Such examples could be extended significantly, especially with regard to the realm of universal culture. We need to reawaken sympathy abroad for German style and the German reputation, sympathy that was once plentiful. I can imagine that films showing German national costumes, local customs, and traditional ways of life could be very successful in America and the English colonies. Throughout the world, people yearn deeply for primitive and

294

Film Culture and Politics

original ways of life. Precisely in highly civilized countries, in cosmopolitan cities where technology mechanizes and overpowers everything, the prospects are great for winning over audiences with profoundly traditional subjects and give them a glimpse of these. For example, the Johannisfest is still celebrated in a traditional manner in many parts of Germany. The old customs are still practiced at weddings, baptisms, and funerals in Upper Bavaria, in Tyrol, in Silesia, and on the Rhine. This could have enormous appeal if they were skillfully presented. Leaving aside the economic value that a systematic preservation of these cultures could have, it could awaken the understanding for Germany, for the love of authenticity and greatness that has always existed in Germany, far overseas. To be sure, it is a difficult task to reform the very shape and expression of politics. But the vast majority of peoples have always come to politics from life itself, from business, culture, and artistic creation, and they tend—naïvely, of course—to judge foreign nations by these standards as well. We know that the sympathy enjoyed by France all over the world is largely based on the fact that Paris presides over ladies’ fashion and the international theater business. We Germans also have the potential to achieve international significance in specific areas of culture and industry. I believe that the film industry is one of these areas, and that it can therefore contribute considerably to the great goal of international understanding.

129 JOE MAY The Style of the Export Film First published as “Der Stil des Exportfilms,” in Film-Kurier, no. 166 (August 4, 1922). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In the early Weimar years, the Austrian-born director Joe May (1880–1954) became known for big-budget historical epics and adventure serials, including the three-and-ahalf-hour Veritas vincit (1919), the eight-part Die Herrin der Welt (Mistress of the World, 1919–20), and the two-part Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1921). The latter film was funded by the short-lived Europäische Film Allianz (EFA; European Film Alliance), a German American company founded by Famous Players–Lasky on April 17, 1921. (See also the text by Georg Jacoby later in this chapter, no. 131.) Much as Valentin (no. 128) invoked the possibility of international sympathy through films depicting foreign customs, May here characterizes the ideal “export film” as one that combines particularistic external scenery with universal psychological content. He thereby suggests a dialectic of local and global forces in the production of an universally recognized German cinema.

Is there really a particular style that we can designate as the “style of the export film”? Novices and amateurs in fi lm production receive kindhearted advice from all sides: “They won’t understand that in America!” “This could be embarrassing to a Scandinavian!” “That will not relate to the French mentality!” “It would be impossible to show something like this in London!” It could make a person anxious and afraid were one to follow all these well-meaning friends’ advice: the result would be such a colorless, conventional, boring film that even in Berlin we would have to be ashamed of it . . .

The Specter of Hollywood

295

No, this is not the way! Americans have no shame about showing their lifestyle, their daily habits, their small sorrows, and their pleasures on film, just as they live and experience them as Americans; the French do the same, as do the Swedes. Should we alone be ashamed to show things as we see them? Why? Nonetheless, there is an important distinction to be made. When it comes to external scenery, people often take extraordinary interest in national idiosyncrasies such as folk costumes, a people’s particular way of celebrating their festivals, ceremonies for life’s festive occasions, and the customs and comforts of social life. But the situation is quite different if we consider the central questions of film, the basic psychological content of the drama. Here, however, one must always come back to universal human feelings and passions while doing everything possible to avoid a particularistic approach. A hero’s unfamiliar emotional life cannot grab or enthrall foreign nationals; they confront him apathetically, at best taking a kind of cold interest in him. But such a cold interest will not suffice for a film drama to really make an impact on a foreign audience. But are not these universal human feelings and passions precisely the deepest and truest of all? Are they not deeper and, despite their inscrutability, clearer and purer than the thousand little affects of a particular group, of which we never know whether they are truly innate or whether they have been superficially forced onto people by their milieu, politics, economic situation, and other elements of mass suggestion? Did our classic authors not work with these general human feelings, and only with them? I would like to invoke my great and admirable colleague [D. W.] Griffith. On the occasion of his trip to London, he, too, continuously emphasized the great beauty of those emotions common to all peoples in film. But emotions common to all peoples are not just those that politicians call “international”; all pure, simple, deeply human stirrings of the soul are common. Lovers will always understand lovers; jealous husbands, jealous husbands; he who suffers the torments of conscience will never fail to recognize his similarly tortured brother. This is true even if this one is European and that one, if you like, Chinese or South Indian. The truly primal affects speak the same language—in every nation. This way of seeing and depicting people is, in my opinion, the only method to make a film “international.” And like the path to truth more generally, the path to this international “export” style is most honorable. The film spectator will and must learn from such films how to recognize even distant and strange people from other continents whom he sees on the screen as beings similar to himself and respect them accordingly; he will no longer see them as mean, aggressive beasts of inferior race who must be struck dead in order to cleanse the world of them—as the hate-mongers who surround him would so gladly convince him to do.

130 HANS SIEMSEN German Cinema First published as “Deutsches Kino,” in Alfred Flechtheim, Wilhelm Graf Kielmansegg, and Hermann von Wedderkop, eds., Der Querschnitt durch 1922: Marginalien der Galerie Flechtheim (Berlin: Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, 1922), 193. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

296

Film Culture and Politics Among the major trends in postwar German cinema was the historical spectacle—a genre previously associated with Italy (e.g., Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria, 1914) and the United States (D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, 1916) but later shaped by films such as Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920). In this satirical text, Hans Siemsen critiques domestic film productions for their outmoded, pompous style, weighty historical subjects, and the skewed image of Germany that they convey to the world. Siemsen (1891–1969) was a prominent writer and film and theater critic who also advised the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim. Der Querschnitt (1921–36) began publication in yearbook form and became one of the Weimar Republic’s most celebrated cultural journals.

What does the rest of the world know about Germany? Before the war, they would sometimes read one of Wilhelm II’s amusing speeches or the shorthand reports of the Eulenburg Trial in the morning over breakfast.1 Then the war came and they learned what the Northcliffe Press printed about Germany.2 (It wasn’t exactly put there to arouse sympathy.) And what about now, after the war? Now they read German memoirs: Ludendorff’s memoir, Tirpitz’s memoir, 3 the third volume of Bismarck, the kaiser, and the crown prince; now and again, they read the news that another Republican has been shot down. Our German existence must seem strange to them! Nevertheless! It might not be so bad. Because where we have Ludendorff, they have Léon Daudet,4 and where we have well-organized assassinations, they have Ireland.5 Things would appear at least halfway comparable, if it weren’t for . . . if it weren’t for German films! The image of Germany that the average American gets from his newspaper must certainly be very peculiar, but it might not be that much more peculiar than the image of America that the average German pieces together. But the picture of Germany provided by German film—Holy Father! I’m not talking about the weekly newsreels. If that gets abroad, they must think public life in Germany consists of burials and memorial unveilings. I mean the image that German feature films project overseas. At best, the average American must think that everybody in Germany runs around like Anne Boleyn and Dr. Caligari. But that is still preferable to having him believe all Germans behave and look like Bruno Kastner, Leo Peukert, or Dr. Mabuse.6 For years, Germany was closed off from the rest of the world. (One could almost say that it still is.) Nowhere are the terrible consequences more obvious than in the cinema. Just compare Leo Peukert with Charlie Chaplin, Bruno Kastner with Douglas Fairbanks, Mia May with Mary Pickford—and you have the difference, not between German and American film, but between Germany and the rest of the world. Sure, there are better people in German fi lm than Peukert and Kastner. Asta Nielsen, Emil Jannings, Alfred Abel, and Paul Wegener—these are people who can already be seen all over the world. But the spirit they’re forced to represent—the spirit, the sensibility, the method, and the style of the German film—cannot allow itself to be seen. The style of German film? It is the style of the bygone empire: a puffed-up pomposity. From Das Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh) to Fridericus Rex, a single Siegesallee.7 Once upon a time, Moritz von Schwind went to see Karl von Piloty. (It could also have been Carl Spitzweg.) 8 Piloty was painting another of his pompous scenes, some historical colossus, and Schwind (or Spitzweg) merrily asked: “Well, Your Excellency, what kind of misfortune are you painting this time?” Today, in German film studios, one could ask, “What kind of misfortune are you fi lming this time?” Unless there is a beheading, accession to the throne, princely betrothal, or awful slaughter, they won’t do

The Specter of Hollywood

297

it. The German film is a mixture of historical seminar and decor-pantomime, a museum come to life, an operating curiosity cabinet. From the loincloth of the Pharaoh’s slave to Mme. Pompadour’s pompadour, it is all there. Every kind of costume! Every sort of makeup! Just no people. Cement, concrete, and papier-mâché. False pyramids, false palaces, false hair and teeth, false faces, and false gestures. A Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church renovated by Poelzig 9 —that is the “modern” German film. And the height of feeling, the artistic summit, is provided by the thrice-holy Mass scene, that shameful compensation for the precious kaiser parade. Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church—that is the external structure of the German film. Kaiser parade—that is its content. And through all this, Charlot, a good-natured and wise vagabond, totters past all of life’s embarrassing abysses—funny, moving, and nothing other than a human being. Utterly without pomposity, without cement, without cultural or other history. Quite simple and commonplace. The German spirit shall heal the world?10 May God protect us! Notes 1. On the Eulenburg affair of 1907–09, see Walther Friedmann’s article in chapter 7, no. 102, note 3. 2. The British press magnate Alfred Harmsworth, First Viscount Northcliffe, exerted an enormous influence on public opinion in England through his newspapers, including The Times and The Daily Mail. Appointed British director of propaganda during World War I, he led a relentless propaganda campaign against Germany. 3. Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930) was a German grand admiral and state secretary of the Imperial Naval Office from 1897 until 1916. His memoir, Erinnerungen, was published in 1919. 4. A French writer, journalist, and ardent monarchist, Daudet (1867–1942) was a leading member of the far-right political group Action française, founded in 1898, and also wrote anti-German essays during World War I. 5. A reference to the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), a guerilla war between the Irish Republican Army and the British government in Ireland. 6. Bruno Kastner and Leo Peukert, popular German film actors, are paired with the demonic master criminal Dr. Mabuse, a fictional figure in Fritz Lang’s two-part film of the same name. 7. A grand boulevard in Berlin commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895 and completed in 1901. 8. Piloty (1826–1886) was known for his monumental paintings of historical subjects. By contrast, Moritz von Schwind (1804–1871) and Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885) were late-Romantic painters more known for their folksiness and their representation of everyday small-town life. 9. In 1919, Hans Poelzig (1896–1936) had remodeled Berlin’s Großes Schauspielhaus, turning it into a prototype of expressionist architecture. Poelzig also designed the set of Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). 10. Siemsen cites the concluding lines of Emanuel Geibel’s poem Deutschlands Beruf (1861): “Und es mag am deutschen Wesen / Einmal noch die Welt genesen.”

131 GEORG JACOBY Film-America and Us First published as “Film-Amerika und wir,” in Berliner Zeitung, no. 322, supplement Film-B.Z. (December 3, 1922). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A prolific director of entertainment films for nearly half a century, Georg Jacoby (1882– 1964) offers insight into the dealings between German directors and American producers at the Berlin-based Europäische Film Allianz (EFA), which had been founded

298

Film Culture and Politics in April 1921. His article draws a broad comparison between artistic, high-minded Germans and materialist Americans—a familiar stereotype from 1920s Germany, where the United States was often linked with unfettered capitalism. Jacoby wrote this article shortly after completing production of So sind die Männer (The Little Napoleon, 1923) for EFA, which dissolved in November 1922 on account of mismanagement and rising inflation. Despite the failed venture, Jacoby suggests that the Germans might still learn from the American model of business. (See also Joe May’s text in this chapter, no. 129.)

Due to the catastrophic collapse of the mark, it is impossible for the Americans at EFA to do business based on reciprocity; that is, the plan to leave German and European film profits in Germany and put the money toward new productions has been foiled by the devaluation of the mark. The earning potential, which must have been considerable, particularly with regard to the dollar contracts that have already been amicably dissolved, has proved disappointing. These dollar contracts may be the cornerstone of the whole business. We must also acknowledge that it was not the productive forces in EFA, who were hired with dollar contracts, who put unbearable strain on films but much rather the unproductive forces who were on EFA’s management team. This strain was unsustainable for the entire enterprise. Thus, in spite of their relative cheapness, all films ultimately became too expensive. Furthermore, even an excellent German film, indeed the very best one, does not need to yield the same profit as a mediocre American movie. This issue, which is rooted in the mentality of German producers and American audiences alike, has already been much discussed, but not yet enough to demonstrate to the German film industry the path it must take if it wants its productions to be as successful financially as they are artistically. It was very beneficial for directors to deal directly with American businesspeople. Sometimes it was almost gruesome to see the cold, but also remarkable, clarity with which these American businesspeople tore apart ideas that they found financially unviable. Germans, who always have something of the ideologue in them and tend to lose themselves in reverie, were hardened by these cold calculators of filmic effect. Thus, the Americans with whom EFA directors and artists came into contact can rightfully be considered prototypical of the American business acumen. Over there, all people are like this. We Germans tear our hair out and work our fingers to the bone writing about whether film is a pure art or an artistically inhibited handicraft. Americans do not see film as a work of art. I believe they do not even see it as a handicraft. Like all of life’s other aspects and creations, they see film as nothing more than . . . a new advertising opportunity. The Germans who worked with the Americans at EFA gradually became aware of this American mentality. However, it does not necessarily follow that we should slavishly imitate the Americans. We also do not want to attempt to do things with our insufficient resources that the Americans can do better. We should, therefore, go our own separate ways; but when possible, we must try to allow for the American mentality if we want to have success in the land of dollars.

132 ERNST LUBITSCH Film Internationality First published as “Film-Internationalität,” in Heinrich Pfeiffer, ed., Das deutsche Lichtbild-Buch: Filmprobleme von gestern und heute (Berlin: August Scherl, 1924), 13–14. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The Specter of Hollywood

299

Ernst Lubitsch wrote this essay in Hollywood, where he had moved in December 1922. There is a backstory to his emigration that sheds light on this text—and on the specter of Hollywood in the Weimar Republic. Flush with the major success of Madame Dubarry (1919) in Europe and the United States, Lubitsch decided to switch from Ufa to EFA (European Film Alliance), sensing the advantages of an American-owned production company in helping German films reach the U.S. market. (See the previous texts by Joe May, no. 129, and Georg Jacoby, no. 131.) The best-known German director at the time, Lubitsch was lured to Hollywood by a contract to direct a film with Mary Pickford for United Artists (Rosita, 1923). He subsequently worked with Warner Brothers on The Marriage Circle, which premiered in 1924—the same year this article was published. In it, he shares his insights from making films in both industries and advances his conception of film as a “popular art” with the potential to transcend national and linguistic boundaries. See also his text in chapter 6, no. 89.

If I today set out to write down ideas that I already formulated years ago, this is because these ideas have now gained in authority by virtue of my experience working in Germany and America, the world’s leading countries in the struggle for dominance in fi lm production. Supremacy on the world film market: this is a catchphrase that neither represents nor grasps the situation as it really stands. Superiority of German or American films: this is a pointless contest, as if one wished to decide whether Shakespeare or Goethe were the greater thinker. Film is an art, more precisely a popular art; it is open to intellectuals and the masses alike; it results from creative activity; and it can be called successful only when it receives international applause and worldwide recognition. A film is good when the movie theaters in New York are just as sold out as those in Barcelona or Frankfurt. This is the basic principle from which all filmmaking and all advancement of motion pictures must begin. If I may believe the press and the distribution companies, my biggest films succeeded enormously in precisely this sense, and they succeeded without any specific efforts to create an international style; they succeeded because—and I say this without arrogance—I do not make German or American films, but rather Lubitsch films; because in each case, I attempted to present, embedded in an effective visual decor, a human story in a human way; because I could rely on actors who were capable of clearly expressing love, hate, passion, and rage in the sense I had in mind, so that everyone—regardless of linguistic and political borders—could understand. Every good film is by nature international; every good film observes a few minor guidelines, even if these have nothing to do with the plot of the film itself. These minor guidelines include the avoidance of highlighting one’s own specific national particularities unless absolutely necessary. Of course, this principle should not be understood as a call to focus on the morals and customs of other countries where this does not follow naturally from the plot. Certainly, Spanish people in films should behave like Spanish people, Americans like Americans, and Germans like Germans, but no film has ever failed internationally because the form of the collar worn by an extra was incongruent. Filmmakers should take such factors into consideration, but they should neither overestimate nor underestimate them. Whoever continues to strive toward the loftiest heights, whoever creates with his works ever clearer and purer expressions of his own artistic nature will find the path to international success and fame; in so doing, he will gain the world’s respect not only for himself but also for his country and his people. But this cultural and political side effect

300

Film Culture and Politics

must remain just that: a side effect. At the moment at which we subsume the artistic film under politics, we rob ourselves of all artistic opportunities. One cannot achieve international success through sentimentality but only through artistic achievement. German film will gain world significance only when its creators become true artists, film artists, men who have the most innate feeling for film in their fingertips and who can create images no less apt to provoke fear and pity than the classical works of the German theater. In the end, then, the internationality of film is a truly national matter. For the successful reel of film, movie houses all over the world stand waiting with wide-open doors. No politics can stop the triumphal march of a perfect work of film art. It will gain acceptance no less than the successful creations of other artistic genres. For this reason, film’s internationality is not an economic matter but an artistic one, even if politico-economic stupidities undeniably make the work of artists difficult or nearly impossible at times.

133 GEORG OTTO STINDT Is Film National or International? First published as “Ist der Film national oder international?,” in Georg Otto Stindt, Das Lichtspiel als Kunstform: Die Philosophie des Films, Regie, Dramaturgie und Schauspieltechnik (Bremerhaven: Atlantis-Verlag, 1924), 31–32. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Georg Otto Stindt’s Das Lichtspiel als Kunstform (The motion picture as art form) was one of several major philosophical treatises in the early to mid 1920s that sought to determine film’s artistic value, alongside Walter Bloem’s Die Seele des Lichtspiels (1922; translated as The Soul of the Moving Picture, 1924), Otto Foulon’s Die Kunst des Lichtspiels (1924), Rudolf Harms’s Philosophie des Films (1926; see chapter 5, no. 76), and Rudolf Kurtz’s Expressionismus und Film (1926; see chapter 13, no. 197). Stindt’s book contains a section distinguishing film’s internationalism in the artistic realm (based on its language of silent gestures) from the issue of global economic competition. Like Ernst Lubitsch in the prior text (no. 132), Stindt defines a successful film as one that bears universal appeal.

Human bipeds are merely tolerated on the surface of the earth, but they behave so presumptuously, as if the whole universe should be lying at their feet. Film as a language contains two main ideas: namely, the moving picture as an artistic means of expression and the film as a commodity. Thus the hybrid problem consists in two central questions, which lie in different areas. Every good motion picture is necessarily international, because it is a world citizen and because it speaks a universal language: the originary form of communication through gestures. Everywhere they go, its rhythm and its pantomime express joy and pain, love and hate, deceit and openness, rapture and despair, greed and austerity, humility and indignation, bliss and suffering. Doubtlessly and unambiguously, film says what it has to say to all citizens of the world and brings them together in the feeling that people from all zones and parts of the earth,

The Specter of Hollywood

301

nearly without exception, are blessed and threatened, amused and annoyed, uplifted and oppressed by the same attractions and incitements. A consummate motion picture works as well in London as it does in Valparaiso, Rome, Calcutta, or Melbourne—it must work, because gestures, as the only expression of human feeling, have remained simple, because they are not yet spoiled in the same way as speech, which has been rendered half-formed and monstrous by the haste and hurry of everyday life. That gestures could retain their original value only demonstrates once again the iron law of the balance of forces, which has also been so influential for the formal guidelines of film. Thus, as a work of art, the consummate film must be international, must find international success and understanding. Whether German film is better than Swedish or American, for example—to decide that would be to carry coals to Newcastle [Eulen nach Athen tragen]. If the German film has helped give consummate expression to German culture and German aspirations, it has completed its artistic task. If Swedish film has done the same for Sweden, it has also achieved its task. Whether it is better or more sustainable can be determined only by its effect on nonGerman or non-Swedish souls. Box office figures have nothing to do with it; they answer only the question of advertising.

134 AXEL EGGEBRECHT The Twilight of Film? First published as “Filmdämmerung?,” in Die Weltbühne 22, no. 6 (February 9, 1926), 227–30. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Originally competitive with Hollywood during the postwar years of high inflation, the German film industry nonetheless emerged from economic stabilization in the mid1920s in a highly precarious position. Its losing battle was arguably settled on December 30, 1925, when a nearly insolvent Ufa signed a contract with MGM, Paramount, and Universal. According to that deal, Ufa would receive a credit of four million US dollars; a new, jointly owned distribution company (later called Parufamet) would release twenty films per year from MGM and Paramount, and ten from Ufa and Universal. Characterizing this deal as an “American victory march,” Axel Eggebrecht here offers a sociological explanation for the global hegemony of Hollywood cinema and characterizes film as one of the “last creations” of a declining bourgeois era. Eggebrecht (1899–1991) wrote for Die Weltbühne, Berliner Tageblatt, and Die literarische Welt in the mid-1920s and also authored many screenplays from the late 1920s to the late 1960s.

A few weeks ago, film celebrated its thirtieth birthday. At present, it has clearly entered its adolescence. Its economic structure is susceptible to powerful symptoms of puberty, which cannot but influence its character as an artistic means of expression before long. Although the film industry, hungering for tradition, is eagerly pursuing a recherche de la paternité, this can only lead to the conclusion that an invention like that of moving

302

Film Culture and Politics

pictures does not occur as a one-time action but happens internationally at various levels of perfection. Film’s initial training as a means of representation and a requirement of urban humanity happened in France and Italy. It was not until the war that the German and American film industries rapidly grew up. America understood the entire scope of its economic activity and immediately flooded the countries of the former Entente forces with films. This invasion, carried out in large part after the war, led to an almost total victory. France’s small production and Italy’s pitiful leftovers now stand as ruins in the middle of the American flood. England is an American film colony. The only stable, albeit increasingly threatened, island left was the German industry. On December 30, 1925, this Heligoland developed a mighty rift,1 which will perhaps lead inexorably to film’s demise. Germany’s film industry is a typical wartime industry. It owes its rapid growth to isolation. Its successes were thus often illusory and, for the most part, limited to the domestic market. In particular, the low cost of production during inflation led to an illusory boom over which a larger public went into raptures the same way it did over columns of devaluation figures. After stabilization, we suddenly found ourselves faced with a terrifying surge of superior American power, for which the work in Germany up to that point simply hadn’t paid off. But then the large New York conglomerates installed themselves in Berlin, established offices, participated, and incorporated part of the German industry itself into their camp. German production, roused from its silent—or rather, actually quite loud—peace, proclaimed a German-led, pan-European film industry as a counterstrike and made a few formidable attempts to implement it. But this imperialism also ended in tears: we spent more resources than we had, and ultimately the Americans will also be able to reap the benefits of this German expansion when it annexes German headquarters. Since December 30, 1925, this has almost come to pass. Siegfried has returned home from his campaigns of conquest to become a clerk for the Yankees. 2 Every other interpretation of Ufa’s deal with the Americans is nothing but an attempt at whitewashing. The resignation on January 22 of Erich Pommer, the leader of the German film expansion, confirms this. The most important point in this deal is the stipulation that the largest two American conglomerates collectively contribute 50 percent to Ufa’s prestige production. This cooperative production—which is supposed to be made under the consultation of American stars and directors—is being traded for American fi lms. And not German fi lms for American films. Hence, the ratio is by no means 50/50, but rather at least 75/25. But given America’s utter dominance, it will surely soon be 90/10 against Germany, or even a tenth of a hundredth of the global American film . . . This nearly complete American victory march can be explained not only by the superior heavy industrial structure of the American performance industry (while here, high finance has always more or less regarded the “film man” as an unreliable partner). This success also has a deeper basis: it is sociological. The American triumph is not purely commercial but rather a definitive victory of American film content, not to mention technology. To be sure, American success will soon reach its limits in this area. We are approaching a crisis that, within a few years, will be recognizable as a general twilight of film, film fatigue. Film is one of the last creations of the bourgeois era, which is, incidentally, increasingly neglectful of film’s means of representation. As such, film necessarily developed to its highest level of perfection in the country where it was supported by virtually uninterrupted upper-bourgeois lifestyles. Neither Germany—with its feudal remnants and its inhibitions caused by deep questions and philosophy of bad conscience—nor France with

The Specter of Hollywood

303

its aesthetic traditions, nor Italy with the cardboard fascism of its Caesar films could seriously compete with America’s brutal primitivism for long. Only in America did they dare to limit themselves to a “flat” enough approach to the exterior of people, nature, and animals. While we were ultimately satisfied by the negative recognition that film is fundamentally different from theater, in America they developed fi lm works that were naïve, unburdened, and constructed exclusively on optical principles. They had no need to discard all of psychological drama, to convert things “into pictures”; rather, they used purely visual expression, even where the latter “made no sense” in normal life. Chaplin was possible only because they had no traditions and because this representational form of the industrial machine age was able to project from unlimited resources, both material and ideological. Only here did film discover that profound connection between its creative power and the industrial foundations of that life to which it gave form and which made film itself into a cohesive, expansive artistic industry, a representation industry. The triumph of American fi lm is assured by the Americans’ eroticization of the world, with which it goes hand in hand. The American woman, who has long been the object through which American ideology develops its needs and desires, has become just as much of an article for export as film is. The Americans force their own type onto the world with the help of the moving image. As America asserts itself as the chosen people of the bourgeois world, its model of womanhood is becoming exemplary.3 Every evening, its stars arouse millions of men and awaken the burning interest of millions of women. These mockingly superior, perverse women are the Messalinas of the declining bourgeois era. Murray, Swanson, Nazimova, and Moore4 occupy the erotic fantasy of a world whose youthful ideal was Gretchen. Next to such women, what can the woman of the European bourgeoisie, which has been repeatedly broken and shaken, hope to achieve? How can the speedy mice of Paris measure up to these cats? How can Germany’s literary diva or ready-made protégée compare to these dangerous, trained, and flawless creatures? The soapy, colorized Italians to these vamps? This is the state of things today, tomorrow, and probably for a few more years. What essentials will remain from German film has yet to be determined. It is foolish to deny that in a few individual efforts, German cinema has reached the pinnacle of all film production to date. Madame Dubarry, Die Flamme [The flame], Der Absturz [Downfall], and Erdgeist [Earth spirit] truly belong to the often-shaky “milestones of development.”5 But Nielsen has stepped aside, and Lubitsch has taken the road on which the entire German film industry will now follow.6 For the rest, these American global films are beginning to stagnate. In its perfection as a work of optical art, Broken Blossoms from 1916 has hardly been aesthetically outstripped by The White Sister from 1924–25.7 The fact that German minds are merging with American film might yet inspire a few nuanced changes. But as Lubitsch’s example shows, even that should not get our hopes up. It will not produce technological advances of revolutionary, progressive significance. The artistic files on the color film will hopefully soon be closed. Similarly, after a bit of experimentation, the sound film will remain limited to cultural tasks and news reporting. But the magnificent coherence of film as a purely optical design medium will become a bit boring, like all ideological products of this entire bourgeois world that has lasted all too long. We cannot expect revolutions from an instrument of representation if it has slept through the life it is supposed to represent. And nobody knows yet whether a coming society has already discovered a significantly more adequate format in television. For the time being, we can at least be satisfied if the average global film does not look like a hapless literal adaptation of the opera Der Rosenkavalier but rather, like the

304

Film Culture and Politics

sentimental, flat, but optically irreproachable, sometimes overwhelmingly perfect The Dark Angel.8 And we can expect that, at least, from the American global film. Notes 1. Heligoland, a small archipelago off the German coastline in the North Sea, served as a naval base during World War I. 2. This alludes to the commercially unsuccessful American release of Fritz Lang’s Siegfried in August 1925 (a year after its German premiere). Lang had traveled to New York to introduce it. 3. This claim follows the argument in Fritz Giese, Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem Rhythmus und Lebensgefühl (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1925). See Giese’s text in chapter 12, no. 181. 4. The author refers here to American silent film actresses Mae Murray, Gloria Swanson, Alla Nazimova, and Colleen Moore. 5. Madame Dubarry (1919) and Die Flamme (1923) were directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starred Pola Negri. Der Absturz (Ludwig Wolff, 1923) and Erdgeist (Leopold Jessner, 1923) starred Asta Nielsen. 6. Ernst Lubitsch had left for Hollywood in 1922. (See his essay on cinema’s internationalism, no. 132) 7. Both Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919) and The White Sister (Henry King, 1923) were melodramas starring Lillian Gish. Eggebrecht misidentifies the dates of both films. 8. Der Rosenkavalier (Robert Wiene, 1925) was based on Richard Strauss’s opera and generally panned; The Dark Angel (George Fitzmaurice, 1925) is an American melodrama set against the backdrop of the Great War.

135 ANONYMOUS The Restructuring of Ufa First published as “Die Sanierung der Ufa,” in Frankfurter Zeitung 230 (March 27, 1927). Translated by Tara Hottman.

Bearing disappointing and even dire consequences for Ufa, the Parufamet deal also prompted a nationalist reaction against American economic hegemony (see Eggebrecht, no. 134, for more about Parufamet). The most notable figure in this movement was Alfred Hugenberg, a right-wing politician, industrialist, and press mogul who bought Ufa in late March 1927—a move that helped free the studio from American control but also broadened Hugenberg’s own economic and political power. Although the expected rightward turn did not immediately occur (except in his newsreel division), the studio’s output would provoke vociferous critiques by Siegfried Kracauer (see no. 156) and others, as well as efforts to create a countercinema for proletarian-revolutionary purposes (see chapter 11, nos. 163–165). The brief op-ed here indicates the early concerns about Hugenberg’s influence over the mass medium of film.

The restructuring of Ufa that was achieved today, which we reported about at length in our business section, deserves widespread public attention. The arrangement that was agreed upon shows that the Hugenberg group has succeeded in infiltrating Ufa. Much still remains to be resolved with regard to the investors as well as the future composition of the company’s administration. That the Hugenberg group will have in its possession only fifteen million of the forty-five million in current share capital (thus, only a third) naturally does not demonstrate the degree of influence that this group with its strong political ambitions means to seize. It is hard to imagine that the Hugenberg group could have undertaken such a commitment without a predominantly political interest; for pure

The Specter of Hollywood

305

business interest has hardly ever been crucial for Hugenberg and his followers. It is much more likely that the Hugenberg group, with its wide network of media ventures, exerts a large influence on public opinion and political decision-making and will also try to establish its influence within Ufa. If we keep in mind the range of influence of Ufa, the largest film company, and consider the extent to which its production and distribution encompasses the broad masses, then we can gauge what kind of propaganda apparatus the Hugenberg group, which already exerts a decisive influence over Deulig,1 is getting hold of and could use for political purposes. Note 1. Deulig is the syllabic abbreviation for the Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft, which was founded by Hugenberg and Ludwig Klitzsch in November 1916 and was integrated into Hugenberg’s media empire in 1927. See also the text by Gustav Stresemann in chapter 8, no. 118.

136 CARL LAEMMLE Film Germany and Film America First published as “Filmdeutschland und Filmamerika,” in Illustrierte Film-Zeitung, no. 42 (November 1, 1928), 1. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Born in Laupheim, Germany, Carl Laemmle (1867–1939) emigrated to the United States in 1884 and was one of the founders of the Universal Motion Picture Manufacturing Company (now Universal Studios) in 1912, producing more than four hundred films in his life, among them All Quiet on the Western Front (1930; see chapter 8, nos. 124, 125). As a successful studio head and a frequent visitor to Germany, Laemmle became an unofficial spokesperson for the American film industry in his native country. The following article appeared just months after Laemmle founded Deutsche Universal (previously Matador), which produced and distributed films until the end of the Weimar Republic. Laemmle’s conception of film as an “internationally collective art” would be betrayed by later political developments in Germany, which forced Deutsche Universal to move to Budapest and Vienna.

All over the world, film has posed a series of intellectual and material problems. The most modern means of creative expression for contemporary artists, as well as an economic commodity, film has laid bare cultural differences previously known only to researchers and a small community of highly educated world travelers. The world’s leading film industries—Germany and America—appeared from the outset as antithetical to each other, both economically and spiritually. Beyond specific cases, this gentle collision meant nothing more than the slogan “Here Europe! There America!” And the collision was good. It quickly made us conscious of the need for mutual understanding, but that wasn’t the essential thing. It led to the clear formulation of fi lm’s most significant ability and duty: to be an educational tool for nations. Long before public discussion began, I felt a clear responsibility to initiate a balanced approach. Thus, I chose subjects that would play well in Germany and consulted Europeans—especially German artists—on collaborative projects. Today, this approach has become the norm for all great American film producers.

306

Film Culture and Politics

Is it necessary to outline the revolutionary artistic impact that German collaboration has had on American film? As Gunnar Tolnæs once aptly noted, film is a “collective art.”1 I would like to expand upon this idea: it is an internationally collective art. Unlike all the other arts, it excludes from the outset any purely subjective efforts. A myriad of diverse artistic elements must flow together in order to create the whole. And experience teaches us that the more colorful the crew is, both in nationality and in character, the more unified the finished work will be. Let me offer a concrete example: the film The Man Who Laughs.2 The film is based on a classic French text adapted by a German director, Paul Leni; it features one American and one German star—Mary Philbin and Conrad Veidt—in the leading roles. This is the only way that film can continue to evolve. And European-American film collaboration must keep growing closer and closer. For all these reasons, I have been paying special attention to our German production. I have entrusted its direction to Paul Kohner, a European native who has seven years of experience working in American film studios.3 I gave him the following guideline: to combine European culture and literature with American film technique. I see the mutual understanding of German and American film as the greatest task for a leading film executive. Once it has been fully perfected—and I hope that this will happen in the foreseeable future—the entire European-American film problem, of which the German-American film question is just the crystallization, will be solved. If it wants to live up to the highest calling of the cinema, the international film industry must be nothing other than what all artists must be in the end: bearers of human ideas that must not founder. Foremost among these are collaboration and mutual understanding between the New and Old Worlds. Notes 1. Gunnar Tolnæs was a Norwegian actor who starred in Danish and German films during the silent era. 2. Based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, The Man Who Laughs (1928) was directed by Paul Leni (see chapter 15, no. 224) and produced by Laemmle’s Universal Pictures. 3. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Paul Kohner came to Hollywood in 1920. Laemmle appointed him head of Universal’s European division in 1928.

137 BILLIE WILDER The First One Back from Hollywood: Welcome, Conny! First published as “Der erste Heimkehrer aus Hollywood: Willkommen Conny!—Er spielt Theater in Berlin— Auch Murnau kommt,” in Tempo, no. 50 (February 28, 1929), 5–6. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

One of the most iconic stars of Weimar cinema, Conrad Veidt acted in over seventy-five films in Germany before moving to Hollywood in 1926. After making four films there, including The Beloved Rogue (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928), he returned to Berlin in 1929. With the rise of Hitler in 1933, he would go into exile in London and then move back to Hollywood in 1940, famously playing Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942). The Austrian-born Wilder (1906–2002), who changed the spelling of his nickname to Billy when he came to the United States, worked on screenplays for German films, including People on Sunday (1930) and Emil and the Detectives (1931), before emigrating to Paris and later Hollywood. He also wrote for Tempo (1928–33), a daily, American-style tabloid from which the present text is taken.

The Specter of Hollywood

307

Dear Conny Veidt, We are happy to have you back among us. And as we witnessed your arrival in Cuxhaven, the noblesse with which you returned to European soil truly captivated us. When it was time to greet Max Schmeling,1 who is currently even more prominent than you, you were the most excited of all, not the “famous actor,” no—you were the first of us to shout, “Hurrah!” as you helped lift Max onto the shoulders of the uproarious crowd awaiting him in Hamburg. You spent three years in America. They know your name, just as they know Fairbanks. When you recently dared to enter a cinema in New York, where—for weeks— The Student of Prague has been playing, the room thundered with applause for half an hour. 2 Your Caligari has been on New York’s playing schedule for six years. They want to see you in America. In spite of all this, you have returned. You sold your Moorish house in Hollywood. No more contracts bind you. In Hamburg, at the Atlantic Hotel, you absolutely insisted that you would stay in Europe for only six months: just enough time to get a bit of fresh air, to see snow, and—Lord in heaven!—act on the German stage. And then back again, that’s what you said. Dear Conny, we do not believe you. We believe, or rather we hope, that you will be the first to return home to Germany . . . that perhaps you have spoiled your appetite with all that Hollywood milk and honey; that you would like to eat bread again, poor European bread? Three days before your departure, Universal wanted to renew your contract: you refused, because Laemmle did not agree to give you contractual assurance that you would have a hand in choosing your material. You, the European, he said, understand nothing about material! With that, it was all over. Since your first days in Hollywood, you have struggled against the mentality of film producers, who suggested fantastically idiotic subjects. Admittedly, your last films are successes; The Man Who Laughs ranks in the year’s top ten films over there, and The Last Performance, whose final courtroom scene you performed in German and English, is said to have a great future.3 But isn’t it true that you had to take breaks for weeks and even months because they had no idea what to do with you, the very epitome of the non-American? And that hurt you deeply. So deeply that I can hardly believe you will be shooting in America again in the foreseeable future. “Emil Jannings,” an influential American film man said to me, “is much more the type that suits us. He has—as funny as it sounds— more appeal than Veidt. We want men like Bancroft or Beery or Jannings.4 And smiling young men with strong arms, to whom the fans, the little girls from the provinces, will write ten thousand letters a week. And they are also good for the box office, for the bottom line. Veidt brings in only $1,700 a week, whereas John Gilbert brings in $8,000 . . . !” Brings in, brings in—everything “brings in.” You will never be able to earn that much money again: Jannings is now making $6,000 a week from Paramount for four films a year. Additionally, he is frequently “loaned out” to other studios. And so what? In the middle of all his swimming pools, palm gardens, and verandas, he is sometimes so overcome with anger that he could tear up everything. Hanns Kräly of Metro Goldwyn gets $20,000 for a manuscript, of which he would gladly give up $10,000 in order not to have to make any concessions to the film’s producers. And Murnau: William Fox has the pleasure to present him. Sunrise and 4 Devils were commercial flops, and it is questionable whether his current film, Our Daily Bread, will fare any better.5 But Mr. Fox doesn’t mind paying to be considered a “film mogul with high standards and ambitions.” Until Murnau runs away. Jannings will come back in October; Murnau, perhaps even sooner.6 You are surely returning with a personal worth of half a million. So what? Be honest: you will be happy to stay with us even with lower honorariums. We are justified in making this prediction. I was indiscreet enough to fi nd out the following: first, that you

308

Film Culture and Politics

intend to appear in the theater in Berlin—in Duell der Liebe by Hatvany with Konstantin at the Tribüne Theater7—and, second, that you have a contract for two films with English companies, of which one will be Jew Süss, a Feuchtwanger adaptation.8 You will find success, Conny Veidt. Success that will make you happy. But stay! The others will follow. Billie Wilder Notes 1. Max Schmeling, the German heavyweight champion, had gone to New York in 1928 and became a media sensation when he knocked out Joe Monte in Madison Square Garden on November 24, 1928, and Johnny Risko on February 1, 1929. 2. This refers not to The Student of Prague of 1913 but to the remake of 1926 with the same title, directed by Henrik Galeen and starring Veidt in the role of Balduin. 3. Veidt plays a hypnotist and magician in The Last Performance, an expressionist horror film, which Paul Fejos directed for Universal Pictures. It opened on October 13, 1929. 4. Wilder here references American actors George Bancroft and Wallace Beery. 5. Our Daily Bread was the working title of Murnau’s City Girl, which opened in February 1930. 6. Jannings returned in 1929; Murnau entered negotiations with Ufa but did not return, instead beginning work on Tabu (1931). 7. Duell der Liebe was a three-act comedy by Lili Hatvany. Wilder likely means actress Leopoldine Konstantin. 8. The British production Jew Süss, directed by Lothar Mendes and starring Conrad Veidt, premiered in 1934. The film was based on Lion Feuchtwanger’s historical novel Jud Süß (1925).

138 ALEXANDER JASON Film Statistics: Looking Backward and Forward First published as “Filmstatistik: Rückblick und Ausblick,” in Alexander Jason, Handbuch der Filmwirtschaft Jahrgang 1930 (Berlin: Verlag für Presse, Wirtschaft und Politik, 1930), 9. Translated by Tara Hottman.

Inspired by the American method of market research, Alexander Jason argues that the film business should be based on “scientific,” statistical methods, not emotions. This text served as the introduction to a 182-page handbook summarizing the German film industry’s activities since 1923, with statistical data about film productions, filmmakers, production and distribution companies, and theaters. Jason is also the author of the earlier book from 1925 Der Film in Ziffern und Zahlen: Die Statistik der Lichtspielhäuser in Deutschland 1895–1925 (The film in figures and numbers: the statistics of movie theaters in Germany 1895–1925).

In Germany, the market dealings of business ventures are situated on the level of a more emotional commerce, in contrast to America, where the phrase “business in the United States is a science” was coined. The permeation of business by science is, however, becoming increasingly more noticeable in Europe and Germany. The insight that Leonardo put into words is beginning to be adopted even here: “Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass and who can never be certain where he is going.”1 An economy that makes calculations on the basis of the findings imparted to it by science is in a position to implement rationalization—whether it is a matter of normaliza-

The Specter of Hollywood

309

tion, standardization, of increased utilization of machines or the most advantageous exploitation of the workforce—to its fullest extent. However, rationalization cannot stop with the technology and organization of operations and firms; it must be complemented by the rationalization of commercial activity. The possibility that a methodical, scientific foundation can be won for commercial activity is beginning to become accepted although individual enterprises, notably the big firms, turned years ago to systematic market investigation. It is well-known, for example, that firms in the tobacco industry reach for demographic statistics before they expand their operations in order to identify to what degree they may carry out their expansion; and even the individual cigarette merchant has recognized today the sharply emerging correlations that exist, for example, between his sales potential and the population density, and he makes these scientific discoveries useful for his practice. The furniture industry, for example, in its business ventures must adequately keep up to date with the number of marriages to be expected according to the population statistics as well as with the development of residential buildings. From these examples, which could be expanded upon at will, the value of science for practice can be assessed. Therefore, the surveys and analyses that the Statistical Office of the German Empire has made available to the German economy in its publications (Jahrbücher, Vierteljahrsheft, Wirtschaft und Statistik) are of inestimable value for each branch of the economy that understands how to make them practically utilizable. Note 1. The translation of this quote is taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, vol. 1, ed. Jean Paul Richter (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1970), 18.

139 A. K. Done with Hollywood First published as “Schluss mit Hollywood,” in Filmtechnik (January 24, 1931), 1–2. Translated by Tara Hottman.

This article is part of a larger discussion about the impact of sound on the internationalism of film language. Whereas silent film traveled well (intertitles on title cards were easily translated into various languages), spoken dialogue required either dubbing or multiplelanguage versions. The author reaches the conclusion that the transition to sound would spell the end of Hollywood hegemony, allowing for the creation of a “new German cinema.” See other viewpoints on these issues in the subsequent three documents in this chapter (nos. 140, 141, 142).

Around two years ago, at the time when reports and signs of a transition to sound film became more frequent and more serious, a very basic question presented itself for consideration by all involved: what can, should, and will become of the international impact of film, the source of its critical power? They talked—of course—of film’s power of ideas, and thought—of course—of its commercial strength. The silent language of images, capable of being spoken in all tongues, is dying; the filmstrip that entwined all people of

310

Film Culture and Politics

the world is being torn; loud sighs were audible. These sighs, however, were replaced with real concerns: what is to be done now with Hollywood, which has long fancied itself the intellectual center of the world and which has certainly planned ahead accordingly with an organization to protect its own assets? At first things continued to work. Audiences were more interested in the technology than in its implementation, more interested in sound than in film, more interested in the language than in its content. The main attraction was the fact that the projection screen spoke and sang. That it spoke and sang incomprehensibly did not seem to bother anyone. (This is still the case in those countries where cinema equipment is only now being updated.) All it took was superimposed subtitles that ran over the edges of the images to satisfy the curiosity of those who did not understand what they heard. Anyone will watch a film like that once. However, they will watch a film like that only once. Hollywood was forced to make some decisions. This led to the resynchronization of already completed films into German, French, and all other languages. The original dialogue was roughly translated into the new language and made to fit the moving lips onscreen. Tricks were engineered (a new technical art emerged out of this activity), the system was talked up, and they were in the process of justifying it scientifically. A number of American films were made available to us through this form of bricolage. Among them were Wings, The Great Gabbo, The Love Parade, and All Quiet on the Western Front. As long as the fi lms were of the same caliber and had similar subject material and images, we were quick to turn a blind eye and let our ears go deaf instead. However, when we started to become indifferent to the image, if it was not moving quickly enough from one to the next, or when the plot ran out of steam and the director ran out of jokes, then we quickly began to notice that the words were out of sync with the lips onscreen, that the actor was saying something other than what we were hearing, and that the voice we heard was not at all his voice. Annoyed, the audience suddenly realized they were shortchanging themselves, and they left. Or not—senile Europe will do without language as long as the old method is preferred. In the place of foreign-language dialogue, canned music was hastily added to the soundtrack of the celluloid strip. Only a few songs remained in their original language. This insured that even those who did not immediately realize that this film had formerly spoken would notice it from the constant snapping of shadowy figures and the abundance of spoken titles. We were recently introduced to Ramon Novarro under such conditions. Greta Garbo, once a silent swan, became an inaudible quacking duck. Even she was no longer appealing. Nothing was appealing. The German cabaret emcees interspersed in foreign musical-revue films were not appealing. Hollywood had to come up with more extensive licenses for these films, and they referred to them as different versions. Foreign-language version factories were organized in Hollywood and also in Paris. [. . .] The manufacturing of different versions reveals as deep a rift between Europe and Hollywood as has ever before been visible. Films that were shot in Berlin, Paris, or London—regardless of which language or how many different languages they were filmed in—will still breathe the same air, be connected by a common culture, and be able to make each European home to some extent believable. But America interests us only as long as it plays itself. If this exoticism disappears, if it tries to speak our language or to portray itself using our people, then it has the same effect as a masquerade ball. Americans who stutter in European and Europeans who want to show us how to act American are just as strange as Asians in tailcoats. Hollywood knows this already. A series of statements by the industrialists who head up the manufacturing of different film versions betray personal disappointment, techni-

The Specter of Hollywood

311

cal skepticism, and economic resignation. We know—best of all from our own account books—that Hollywood’s domination of the world of film is over. It is certainly over economically, but hopefully also in matters of taste. This is the end of what they called the internationalism of film. The Hollywood Internationale of the film trade required the uniformity of the fi lm game and rendered fi lm content clichéd. If the withdrawal of American industrial power today or tomorrow would—hopefully—result in the forgetting of their technical methods, then the time has come for the European film to prove that its traditions are more European traditions than film traditions. Immediately after the war, when our market did not appear enticing enough for America, there was a German cinema. Today, when America is no longer enticing enough for our market, a new German cinema may develop.

140 ANONYMOUS Film-Europe, a Fact! First published as “Film-Europa, eine Tatsache!,” in Das europäische Atelier, special issue of Film-Kurier (August 15, 1931). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

This manifesto, published in a multilingual issue of Film-Kurier, sees the development of sound film as a new occasion for European cooperation. The term Film-Europe had first emerged in the mid-1920s—especially in German film journals—to evoke a panEuropean cinema that might resist Hollywood’s dominance of local markets. The initiative, which included transnational coproductions and trade agreements, nonetheless suffered from inadequate coordination. The introduction of sound film technology provoked renewed hopes of dismantling Hollywood hegemony. The multinational group Küchenmeister-Tobias-Klangfilm indeed competed with America for the European market until a resolution was reached in the so-called Pariser Tonfilmfrieden (Paris sound film peace treaty) of July 1930.

In the silent fi lm era, the term Film-Europe belonged to the vocabulary of festival speeches, toasts, specialized publications, and conferences.1 The idea of Europe was rarely invoked in writing and speech, since the experiences of its contractual partners were often less than encouraging. The emergence of sound film forced Film-Europe to work together. Leading countries’ audiences refused, with few exceptions, to watch films in anything other than their native language. The relatively small size of some language areas required the simultaneous production of a film in another language. The result was that by last season, Europe was already covered by a network of production deals between producers and distributors from individual countries. The last season’s contracts, which in part yielded very pleasing results, were just the beginning. In the coming years, Film-Europe will be welded together even more firmly. It follows that producers will have to work abroad or take part in works being made abroad. The purpose of this special issue of Film-Kurier is to use words and images to inform producers about the circumstances of production in Europe and about the size, condition, sound facilities, and technical situation of individual studios.

312

Film Culture and Politics

The present material cannot claim to be absolutely complete; local resistance in some countries was too strong for that, despite the deployment of our large team of correspondents. However, we believe that the data we cite in the following pages are as complete as possible for such an edition. The nine most significant countries for European film production are all represented. The production sites available to manufacturers stretch from Stockholm to Rome, from London to Budapest. In connection with the conversion to sound, recent years have seen feverish work on the perfection of studio facilities in all countries. The technical requirements for truly international production have been met in each case. The development of sound studios is a peaceful “arms race” among the peoples of Europe. Each new collective contract is an exchange of experience, culture, capital, and artistic skill. No European film country can seal itself off hermetically from the others; no country is strong enough to do without the others’ help, to refuse a leg up from its neighbors. Nothing helps us get to know another person better than working together toward a common goal. This is true not only for individual lives but also for peoples’ collective lives. A German who walks into the imposing studio complexes in Joinville, Elstree, or Rome will have the same respect for the others’ skill as a foreigner who comes to Neubabelsberg. 2 What enormous advantages have already been gained from this peaceful arms race among nations! We would like the present edition to contribute to mutual understanding among peoples, to the promotion of good film, and to the consolidation of the intellectual community that is called Film-Europe. Notes 1. The debates about Film-Europe are well documented in Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds., “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999). 2. The Joinville studios in Paris were known for their multilanguage productions; Paramount made French-language versions there. The Elstree studios are located in Hertfordshire, England. Neubabelsberg (now Babelsberg) refers to the oldest German film studios, in Potsdam outside Berlin, which started operation in 1912.

141 ANONYMOUS Internationality through the Version System First published as “Internationalität durch Versionensystem,” in Film-Kurier 13, no. 259 (November 4, 1931), 1. Translated by Tara Hottman.

The subtitle of this article about the beginnings of film dubbing declares: “Die Zukunft gehört dem optischen Verfahren: Technik schafft künstliche Filmmenschen” (The future belongs to optical methods: Technology creates artifi cial film people). The article reports about a new system developed within Tobis, the German film company, which mixes the body of one actor with the voice of another, resulting in characters that only exist in film. To this day, Germany remains a leading site of dubbing, with the vast majority of foreign-language films and television shows presented in dubbed (rather than subtitled) versions.

The Specter of Hollywood

313

Recently a new company was formed within the Tobis group, which will likely generate interest in professional circles. The company is called Topoly (Tobis-Polyphon) and was formed to develop a synchronization system. The main asset of the new company is the Gerst-Thunsche method. On various occasions, we have reported on its ability to count syllables and to expand fi lm sequences using time-lapse technology during the copy process. According to the heads of the Tobis group, synchronization is becoming increasingly significant. The more pervasive sound films become, the more difficult it will be, even in smaller countries, to retain control of the market via alternate means, such as producing international sound and music versions or copying subtitles in the local language onto the original version. The situation is even more difficult in large countries. Here, the audience demands that all sound films be in the local language, regardless of the circumstances. Thus we must distinguish between two kinds of fi lm versions: those that were planned to be multiple-language from the start and those that were produced later on account of a film’s success or for some other reason. In the former case, the method of creating an optical version is finding ever-greater usage. This means that the main actors are taught how to speak the lines for the foreignlanguage version, and then the sound of a voice-over artist is easily added to the silent picture with its moving lips. Naturally, it is more difficult with films that were made without taking into account how they might be adapted into different versions. Yet the technical achievements in this case are also astounding. As before, much is expected of the production of different versions in this manner since the international market demands a quantity of films that cannot possibly be supplied by an individual nation’s industry. First comes technology, then a philosophy of art is derived from it: we are already justifying the value of this synthesis of often-divergent optical and acoustic achievements! “The primacy of the technical in the process of making films enables a gain in artistic achievement precisely through combination. The voice of one artist, the body of another: only their collaboration results in the ideal performance. Something completely novel is created. X plus Y results in the new ideal formation Z.” And yet, the synchronization method is by no means implemented only in the German distribution of foreign films or vice versa. The improvement of the system allows the studio to be connected to the outside world, even to places where previously a microphone simply could not function. The Topoly people were particularly proud that even critics failed to notice that the actors in a recent theatrical fi lm were shot without sound and only later added their spoken lines in Berlin. However, they added that it might have been even better if the voice of one of the actors had been replaced with another man’s voice. The sound of his voice did not fit with the images of his body, and his performance suffered as a result. Corriger la nature1—a new resource that opens up vast prospects. Note 1. The phrase alludes to Voltaire’s axiom “Le secret des arts est de corriger la nature” (Poésies mèlées, “À M. de Verrières” [1736]).

314

Film Culture and Politics

142 ERICH POMMER The International Talking Film First published in English, French, and German (“Tonfilm und Internationalität”) in Frank Arnau, ed., Universal Filmlexikon 1932: Europa (Berlin/London: Universal Filmlexikon, 1932), 13–16. The text follows the English original.

Blamed for Ufa’s financial troubles in the mid-1920s, Erich Pommer resigned from the studio in 1926 and left for Hollywood, only to be recruited back to Ufa one year later. He guided the studio in its transition to sound, using multiple-language versions to allow for the export of German productions. The “Erich-Pommer-Produktion der Ufa” was responsible for early German sound films including Melodie des Herzens (Melody of the heart, 1929), The Blue Angel (1930), Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The Three from the Filling Station, 1930), and Der Kongreß tanzt (The Congress Dances, 1931). In the following, he heralds the “international talking film,” which was allowing German cinema to achieve worldwide success in ways that he had envisaged in 1920 (see his text earlier in this chapter, no. 127).

Paradoxical as it may sound, the international talking film is an accomplished fact. During the first year of the new medium neither the experts nor the public believed this to be possible. It was thought that the internationality of silence could not be adequately replaced by the national limitation of language. The spoken word appeared to have become an insurmountable barrier. It was considered that the end of the international film had arrived and, at the same time, the end of the film as the incomparable medium of culture and propaganda that it had been. The talking film could not bear capital investment on a large scale, since its profit-producing possibilities were limited from the outset. It was mainly business considerations and the desire to be first in the field that, for a considerable time, led the Americans to make their productions suitable for European countries by means of dialogue strips. However, it was soon realized that the language difficulty and the problem of internationalism could not be solved in this manner. Those fi lms failed again and again because, apart from their technical inadequacy, it was apparently impossible to make the poor subject matter arising from the American mentality palatable to the European taste. Thus it was necessary to approach the problem from an intellectual angle. At the same time it was realized that the material alone, though it had attained the “intellectual export standard,” could not operate both as the attraction and the interpreter. The great publics of Berlin, Paris, London, and New York were unwilling to give up, with the advent of the new era, the stars to whom they had been accustomed. Producers of all nationalities were already faced with the difficulty of training the silent stars for the talking fi lm. They only succeeded in rare cases. It was necessary to call upon new gifts and to develop them to the standard of prominence. At first the most obvious expedient was resorted to, the theatrical past of famous stars being exploited. In America an attempt was made to render internationally marketable the magnificent voice of Al Jolson. It was thought that its emotional appeal would be understood everywhere. In Germany Emil Jannings’s return from America was put to account. This star of the silent days, who had attained greatness with Reinhardt’s great theatrical tradition, had learned English during the time of his American engagement. The Ufa could therefore very well risk making Emil Jannings, who would be understood on both sides of the Atlantic, their first choice for both versions of The Blue Angel. And while the

The Specter of Hollywood

315

well-known Jolson films very quickly ceased to attract owing to their typically American themes,1 the novelty of the new medium having in the meantime worn off, in Germany they had found the means for the correct mixture, the more so as the limitations of the subject (in this instance, the tragedy of the aging teacher Unrat) were compensated for by the recruitment of a director of the caliber of Josef von Sternberg. As a matter of fact, they succeeded in the attempt to make this essentially German tragedy internationally understood. The Blue Angel was the first German talking film to achieve international success. In the meantime, the development of talking film production continued its irresistible onward march. The groping experiment became a permanent system. The realization that great films could only be produced if a return on the substantial capital expended on them could be secured by the possibility of international exhibition led to the making of several versions as a matter of course. Right from the inception of a film, it is endeavored to take into account all the factors that make for success. The subject matter of the film is the main consideration. The idea itself must be capable of being understood all over the world. In the scenario it is absolutely necessary to take into account those great human emotions that are the same in all countries. Unfortunately, there is no safe recipe, for the slightest turn in the plot will frequently cause different reactions. That is why not all versions of a picture are successful. However, the basic idea is not everything. Far from it. Even the simplest fable, though it may everywhere appeal both to the most primitive and the most differentiated emotions, will not answer; the impelling elements must be thought out exactly down to the most minute detail. The habits, customs, and usages of the various peoples are important matters that must be taken into consideration. Success may be decisively affected by current events, as well as by political changes and changes in the fashion. A picture that was yesterday received with hearty laughter by an entire nation may tomorrow evoke the deepest resentment. The popularity of the star is no safeguard against these dangers. On the contrary, they are a menace to his or her hard-won success. It has been realized that, ultimately, the chief problems of mankind always remain the same and that the only scope for variations is provided by environment and the treatment of the subject. That is why, as far as possible, novel yet nonetheless perennial plots are chosen—love and pain, humor and sentiment, art and nature, science and the primitive, in a word, all the immortal subjects of the poets of all the ages. It was only recently that Ufa has followed up their former international talking film successes—The Blue Angel, Liebeswalzer [Waltz of Love], and The Three from the Filling Station with another, The Congress Dances, 2 which is probably the greatest international film they have hitherto produced. In that film history is merged with modern melody, exciting topicality with compensating romance—a mixture which lends Erik Charell’s first screen production its peculiar charm. The subject justified the employment of unlimited capital, while the making of three versions ensured an unrestricted international market. Apart from the fortunate Lilian Harvey, whose linguistic gifts and popularity present a basis of universal understanding, popular stars of various nationalities were employed in this film, in order to arouse public interest equally in all countries. Nonetheless, to attempt to produce an international film and risk a substantial amount of capital is a daring thing to do. The risk has justified itself, however. The Congress Dances, which was first shown in Berlin at the end of October 1931, has been an unparalleled success throughout the world. The premieres in London, Paris, and Vienna were sensational successes. At the time of writing, the New York premiere is imminent. The paradox of the international talking film has become a reality. The Esperanto of the talking screen has been discovered.

316

Film Culture and Politics

Notes 1. Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, which premiered in New York on October 6, 1927, was not shown in Berlin until November 26, 1929. 2. The Congress Dances is a musical comedy set at the time of the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna. Filmed in German, English, and French, it had its grand premiere in Vienna on September 29, 1931.

TEN

CINEPHILIA AND THE CULT OF STARS

143 HENNY PORTEN The Diva First published as chapter 5 of Wie ich wurde: Selbstbiographie von Henny Porten (Berlin: Volkskraft-Verlag, 1919), 46–50. The title “Die Diva” is taken from the reprint of this chapter in Film und Fernsehen 6 (1987), 57. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

While German debates about film in the 1910s had been driven largely by perceived threats to public order (see chapter 7), the institutionalization of cinema in the postwar period—with its picture palaces, proliferating film journals, and myriad forms of merchandising—laid the groundwork for a new culture of fandom and cinephilia. All of the texts in this chapter address the pleasures of moviegoing, the affective power of film, and its potential social ramifications. As the documents suggest, while the love of movies could attach itself to numerous on-screen elements, from comedy routines to privileged objects such as automobiles, it was bound up above all with the star system. Often identified as the first German film star, Henny Porten (1890–1960) made hundreds of films between 1906 and 1955. In this excerpt from an unauthorized autobiography, Porten’s emphasis on hard work and her critique of the term diva are part of an effort to legitimate film as an art form worthy of serious evaluation. But the text also reveals one of the fundamental dialectics of stardom identified by Richard Dyer and others: the same media that manufacture larger-than-life celebrity also encourage audiences—through columns, letters, and biographies—to constantly inquire into the “real person” behind the persona.

There is something that is of great interest to audiences and that little girls, the same ones who write me letters, dream about in private moments. That is to be “a diva.” I have often heard the word diva, and I still do not know what a diva actually is. As I see it, there are two possibilities: either I work and my work is satisfying, or I am resting, in which case I do, as they say in Bavaria, “truly want my peace an’ quiet!” [wirklich mei Ruah ham!] The term diva is something totally imaginary. It has never yet played a role in my life, and it never will. There is not a single difference between me and any other woman who works. I do my work to my own satisfaction, to fulfill my artistic ambitions. Every other woman has the same intention, whether she be a doctor or anything else. She also works to her own satisfaction, and neither she nor I have the desire to become a “diva” through this work. A “diva” exists only in the conceptual vocabulary of the naïve audience and certain newspaper writers.

317

318

Film Culture and Politics

Incidentally, I would like to say a few more things about journalists. In the earliest days of film, there was not yet any such thing as film criticism. Why would there have been? Back then, film was in its fledgling stage and nothing serious could be written about the things that we saw in it. Today, however, this has changed. An extraordinary number of artists are active in film. Well-known and critically acclaimed painters such as Ludwig Kainer, Ernst Stern, and others create set design and decor for film.1 Writers like Hans Hyan, Felix Philippi, Rudolph Stratz, Hermann Sudermann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Gerhart Hauptmann are or have been engaged with film as a literary product. 2 Stage artists like Alexander Moissi, Theodor Loos, Ernst Deutsch, Eduard von Winterstein, Paul Wegener, Harry Liedtke, 3 and many, many others look to film for a new expressive potential for their art, and audiences marvel at their achievements often and with pleasure. Even though all these artists work intensely on film, even though film is already a magnet that attracts the creative power of a wide variety of artists, journalists do not think it necessary to engage with film as seriously as they do with theater. This lack of understanding for film is a great injustice, which can surely be blamed on the belief that cinematic art is nothing more than a kitschified, inferior theatrical art. In other countries, the press takes a very different stance toward film, and I am convinced that in due time, it will also receive serious critical appreciation in Germany. We should be able to tell how important film is just from the fact that it consists of something far more enduring, far more abiding than a stage performance. If we had a film of Joseph Kainz today,4 what a boon that would be to German actors! What possibilities there would be to learn from the movement and facial expressions of this master of dramatic art. I am utterly convinced that, in years to come, my films as well as those of other artists will have extraordinary historical value for the cultural development of this era. For there is an immense abundance of artistic skill stored in them. In their decor, set design, and costumes, in the actors’ movements and facial expressions, as well as in the story’s diction, they offer an uncompromising look at the state of culture. Should this alone not obligate critics to contribute to film’s refinement through a full appreciation of its artistic achievements? Today, the large German dailies print almost exclusively short remarks on the films currently running. Some summarize the films from an entire week and simply acknowledge their existence. Other newspapers run short critiques, hidden on the last page of the paper. But they do not address film to the same extent and in the same detail as they do theater. Similarly, if an actress is not wellknown from the stage, they look at her with only one half-serious (I would say) critical eye and treat her work extremely superficially. They speak more of “diva gestures” and the like and react to her accomplishments with a frivolous, smug air. I already said at the beginning of this chapter that the concept “diva” is something imaginary, and that there is only one thing: namely, work. In the mouth of the press, however, the word diva becomes an insult; for we expect the press always to demonstrate objectivity, critique, and an understanding of professional performance. I believe that no artist has the right to demand idolization. Only her work should be recognized. If she is no good, by all means, let her be judged. But if she is good, we should admit what we think. Just as I tend to speak my mind honestly and candidly, I would like to be judged by other people with equal honesty and candidness. Nothing is more loathsome and nothing seems more contemptible to me than underhandedness, obstructionism, and slander. Everyone has to make the most complete use of his own value and let what is valuable about him benefit the community. This is the most sacred duty of any person. Just as a doctor uses all his strength and knowledge for his patients, and just as a painter puts the best of his art into his paintings, every dramatic artist,

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

319

whether he works on the stage or in film, wants to give us the essence of his art. But to judge it, to point out new paths to the artist, is the critic’s task. When quiet times have come again to our country, may the German press too begin to bestow acclaim upon fi lm and to give film artists’ achievements the appreciation that film and its artists deserve. Notes 1. Kainer had worked as a set designer at Messter-Film GmbH beginning in 1916, frequently collaborating with a team that included Porten. Stern designed the sets and costumes for German films between the early 1910s and the early 1930s, including Ernst Lubitsch’s Die Bergkatze (The Wildcat, 1921) and Das Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh, 1922). 2. Many of the German-language writers invoked here had links to films in which Porten herself starred: Hyan had written the screenplay for Die große Sünderin (1914); Philippi had written the screenplay for Die Sieger (1918, based on his 1914 novel); Stratz’s Die Faust des Riesen (1910) provided the basis for the two-part film of the same name in 1917; and Hauptmann’s drama Rose Bernd (1903) was adapted into a 1919 film. 3. Of these stage actors who had turned to film in the 1910s, Porten had costarred with Loos in Abseits vom Glück (1916), Christa Hartungen (1917), and Edelsteine (1918); with Deutsch in Irrungen (1919) and Monica Vogelsang (1920); with Winterstein in Märtyrerin der Liebe (1915), Die Claudi vom Geiserhof (1917), and Die Faust des Riesen (1917); and with Liedtke in Eva (1913), Der wankende Glaube (1913), and Irrungen (1919). 4. On Kainz, a famous actor in Austrian and German theater, see the text by Landau in chapter 3 (no. 35) of this volume.

144 KURT PINTHUS Henny Porten for President First published as “Henny Porten als Reichspräsident,” in Das Tage-Buch 2, no. 41 (October 15, 1921), 1243–47. Translated by Sara Hall.

Published three years after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Kurt Pinthus’s call for Henny Porten to become the figurehead of the new federal republic, while ironic in tone, nonetheless emphasizes the immense power of stars to channel public affect. The topic had a particular urgency in Weimar Germany, which found itself deprived of charismatic leaders. (The public disrespect for politicians was captured by a snapshot of the republic’s first president, Friedrich Ebert, in a bathing suit, first published by the Deutsche Tageszeitung on August 9, 1919, and subsequently lampooned many times.) Juxtaposing the abiding, universal love for Porten with the political crises and fractures of the postwar period, Pinthus’s text—which appeared in the liberal weekly journal Das Tage-Buch (1920–33)—also registers the tumult that would plague Weimar democracy for years to come.

The monumental film Die Geierwally, based on the novel by Wilhelmine von Hillern, recently opened at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast.1 Among the spectators at this fi lm premiere were the top rung of theater critics and people from the film industry, the discerning theater audience that had been driven from the stage by the high price of admission and the less-than-spectacular caliber of the performances, as well as politicians, artists, writers, actors, the snobby world of the West Side, and many from the general public. All these people are accustomed to sitting at the theater, calmly and coolly sizing things up and giving moderate applause and a few whistles at the close of the act. Here, however,

320

Film Culture and Politics

the following took place: thanks either to the film’s power of suggestion or to the audience’s passionate love for the actors, every scene and action on the part of the Geierwally was met with cheering, laughter, shouting, sorrow, or noisy applause. This success, this great effect, cannot be explained by the audience’s hunger for athletic prowess or suspenseful events. (After all, many far more spectacular sensations appear in thousands of other films, and these leave the audience cold.) These effects find their true and underlying cause in the unprecedented popularity of the fi lm actress Henny Porten. The large right-hand loge of the packed Ufa-Palast remained empty. After each act, the cheers of the people lured Henny Porten herself out through the velvet portière. She came forth, fully made-up, and bowed with just as much pride as grace. Then a shrill call rang out, “Please! Step forward!” (That meant that Henny Porten should step up to the edge of the loge so that everyone might see her clearly.) At that, the stage was promptly illuminated with a sweep of the spotlight, and from behind the gigantic curtain in front of the white screen stepped Henny Porten, as tiny as a doll. She thanked the audience. At the conclusion of the screening, when I tried to leave the UfaPalast through the broad middle entranceway, I was pulled back, and a frightful voice rang out: “Only Frau Porten is allowed through here!” Two rows of security officers, policemen, and soldiers under the command of a first lieutenant stood like an honor guard, occupying the stairs all the way from the door of the Ufa-Palast to the waiting car. Unwavering, they saw to it that this exit remained clear. All the while, two thousand people had to push their way through the two side exits. Finally, some gentlemen in dinner jackets and top hats came through the middle door and the first lieutenant saluted stiffly—and Henny Porten stepped toward the car with the air of royalty. Meanwhile the several thousand people occupying the sidewalks, street, and lawns on Hardenbergstraße—so thickly that the electric streetcars could not pass—broke out in cheers and applause. Then the crowd gradually disappeared, and the security officers, policemen, and soldiers drove away in a truck that had been waiting for them. What were things like when we still had Kaiser Wilhelm? Fritz Ebert, 2 our valiant president, what cock crows, what mass throngs after you when you climb into your car after an important official event? You thespians, who stands in wait for you? You great leaders of a glorious age, where are you now (thank God!)? You politicians and statesmen, who reads your speeches? Who adores you? How is your popularity demonstrated, other than when you are shot down or cruelly ridiculed by the voice of world history? Gerhart Hauptmann, 3 the sixty-year-old poet of humanity, your fame is but a breeze in the storm of the popularity that whirls around this woman. Is there, has there ever been, a person in the German-speaking world who was so well-known, so beloved to the masses as is this blonde woman? There is no place in Germany where her image and her deeds are not shown a thousand times over. Audiences stream to her in the isolated mountain nest just as they do in the metropolitan cinemas. Even in the most secluded place, where illiterates dwell, unreached by postal delivery and newspapers, she moves the hearts of the dullest audiences at the traveling cinema. How little newspaper reports, illustrated papers, oleographs, and photographs can do for the popularity of a personality in contrast to the promotional power of the moving picture, which incessantly eats its way into consciousness! It brings a declaration to mind—one you might just as well take seriously as ironically. The political parties cannot manage to agree upon a man to recommend to the people as the president of the German Republic (still reverently referred to as the German Empire). After a year of searching, the people themselves cannot find someone commendable or popular enough to be worthy of becoming their highest representative.4 The embarrassment at home is just as great as the bad impression made abroad.

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

321

Henny Porten for President! Here we have a figure more popular in Germany than Old Fritz and the Olympian Goethe ever were or could be. Here we have a figure equally known and loved by members of all parties, by both young and old, by all walks of life. Here we have a figure whose moving image appears before the eyes of hundreds of thousands of Germans each day and each evening, as she performs exemplary actions and takes on the experiences and the garbs of all professions and all classes. Her photograph hangs from the Maas to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt,5 in the bedrooms of as many clerks as farmers. It hangs above the dressing table of the metropolitan teenage girl just as it does above the sewing table of the conventional woman from the provinces. Here we have a beautiful woman whom hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen hold to be the realization of their dreams and longings, who has long silently been considered a queen by Germany’s women. Here we have a beautiful woman who appears to be the symbol of virtue and the epitome of emotion, a woman who seems cheerful and lively in the eyes of a nation of seventy million oppressed individuals who hunger for the future. Here we have a beautiful woman whom the people have erected as the union of Gretchen and Germania, as their very own ideal! Henny Porten for President! How this symbol of the German people’s eagerness for peace would shine out to all the people on earth! A defeated, yet strong nation, sucked dry by foreign and native enemies, one that cannot locate a man worthy to be their representative, will crown itself with its most beautiful, most popular woman! The men of the government, who can find no one in their own circles strong enough to bring together the dissenters, they should pass the mark of supreme power into the soft, manicured hands of this woman honored as the symbol of the people made flesh. How this woman, whose every glorious move has already been preserved in images for many years, would perform her duties! She would carry out her official business with such a noble attitude, striding through the rejoicing populace. No one would dare make fun of this leader. The tone of political polemics would become gentler. Under Henny’s mild watch, the parties would cuss and bully more cautiously. Her power of suggestion would have an uplifting effect on the seventy million people who have been brutalized by war, revolution, and peace. A well-mannered, friendly people with gentle morals will arise. Honestly, if Schiller had not already penned it over one hundred years ago, he would have to step down with Beethoven at his side to sing his beautiful song, “All mankind are brethren ever, / ‘Neath thy mild and gentle reign.”6 Henny Porten for President! The threatening correspondence regarding the Entente would certainly overflow with good will if Briand and Lloyd George knew that the orbs of Henny’s eyes soared over these papers, that her fair mouth would discuss these documents with her ministers.7 And were President Henny to preside in all her blonde opulence, they would have to conduct the cabinet sessions, now so turbulent, with grace and dignity. Could a ministerial candidate dismayed by the burdens of the government dare ignore a file handed to him by the kind and calm gesture of the people’s darling? And would the great industrialists and capitalists not, if Henny Porten’s eyes bade them to, voluntarily, apart from any tax obligation or financial penalty, lay down their millions at the altar of the fatherland (an altar that should be constructed to enormous proportions for exactly this purpose!)? Henny Porten for President! In a country that is collapsing under the hellish burden of its debts, like St. Christopher under his burden from heaven, material and practical justifications also speak for this candidate. The presidency of Henny Porten would not cost the German Reich a

322

Film Culture and Politics

single pfennig! You see, Ufa would happily pay Henny Porten’s salary, as well as her expense accounts, no questions asked. Incidentally, Ufa would undertake no risk by doing so; not only would the salary and expense accounts of the president amount to a mere tenth of her previous film-related fees, but Ufa would have advertising beyond that of any production company in the world. No studio, even in America, could possibly afford to have the highest representative of the land as a movie star! Of course, Henny Porten would have to continue making films, if only for the patriotic, pedagogical reasons named above. We would finally have another Praeceptor Germaniae! And a great part of the German debt could be covered out of the enormous honoraria paid in the valuable currency of foreign lands for the export of Henny Porten films. Thus this wonderful woman would easily remove the heaviest burden ever borne by any nation from the shoulders of its people. She is their idol. This woman, who beyond everything else would be the benefactress and savior of the fatherland, has achieved a godlike stature. Henny Porten for President! Does anyone dare to raise an objection to this suggestion? How? Is it not a woman’s business to govern? I do not want to respond to this objection with observations from the daily life of the average citizen—rather I will do what is always most convincing to Germans: cast a historically oriented eye upon the past. Have nations not always blossomed at precisely those times when a woman served as their leader? Did not England’s first and second golden ages occur under the rule of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria? What kind of culture did Austria display at the time of the beloved mother of their nation, Maria Theresa? Russia, too, was honored and feared by the rest of the world under the depraved rule of Catherine! If these nations flourished under the rule of queens of renowned virtue and beauty, then how our fatherland would blossom under a woman who really possesses virtue and beauty! Henny Porten for President! As far as my own person is concerned, I would like to make the following public proposal and justify it before the German people: should Henny Porten really be elected president, I would like you to consider offering me leadership of the Ministry for Art, Science, and Public Education or perhaps that of a ministry that has become absolutely necessary and should soon be created: the Ministry of Sexuality. In order to demonstrate my suitability for the post, I present to my fellow countrymen the first verse of a new national anthem that I have composed. It is to be sung to the familiar melody of the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” and it has the distinct advantage that it could be belted out with equal enthusiasm and sincerity by all political parties—yes, even by the most monarchistic, swastika-bearing German nationals: Deutschland, you shall go your own way Without gold, without guns. You must usher in a new day, Brand new glory, brand new funds. The clouds above have begun to clear As you guide us to the light: “Fair girl of the people, so dear, You are queen of our nation.”8 Notes 1. Based on Wilhelmine von Hillern’s 1873 novel, Die Geierwally (Wally of the Vultures) was directed by E. A. Dupont and premiered in Berlin on September 12, 1921. Porten played the title character. On the Ufa-Palast, see Kurt Pinthus’s text in chapter 5, no. 74.

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

323

2. Friedrich Ebert, Social Democratic politician, was the first president of Germany, from 1919 to 1925. 3. Hauptmann (1862–1946) had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912 and received the first Adlerschild des Deutschen Reiches (Eagle Shield of the German Empire) from President Friedrich Ebert on his sixtieth birthday in 1922. On Hauptmann, see also the text by his brother, Carl Hauptmann, in chapter 4 (no. 49). 4. Occurring in the immediate aftermath of a putsch and a communist uprising, the Reichstag elections of June 6, 1920, showed increasing support for right-wing parties. The minority government that Ebert subsequently formed fell apart in May 1921. Ebert threatened to resign on multiple occasions during these years, but remained in office until his death in 1925. 5. This phrase (naming four bodies of water) is a quote from the Lied der Deutschen (Song of the Germans): “Von der Maas bis an die Memel, / Von der Etsch bis an den Belt.” The song was declared the German national anthem by President Ebert in 1922. 6. The lines are from Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” also famously set to music in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: “Alle Menschen werden Brüder, / wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.” The English translation is from The Poems of Schiller, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1851), 63. 7. This sentence refers to efforts to restore an Anglo-French entente through talks between Aristide Briand, the prime minister of France, and David Lloyd George, prime minister of the United Kingdom, at a time when the allied countries disagreed on issues such as war reparations. The negotiations eventually failed when Briand fell from power in January 1922. 8. The original here reads: Deutschland ohne Gold und Waffen. Einsam stehst Du in der Welt: Neue Zukunft gilt’s zu schaffen. Neuer Glanz und neues Geld. Doch schon lichtet sich die Wolke Denn Du führst zum Licht uns hin: ’Blondes Mädchen aus dem Volke, Eines Volkes Königin!’

145 ROBERT MUSIL Impressions of a Naïf First published as “Eindrücke eines Naiven,” in Die Muskete (June 14, 1923). Reprinted in Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 1618–20. Translated by Michael Cowan.

One would be hard-pressed to name a film star who could unite the admiration of both popular audiences and intellectuals more fully than Charlie Chaplin. In this article, the Austrian writer and passionate filmgoer Robert Musil (1880–1942) discusses his discovery of Chaplin during a trip to Berlin and refl ects more broadly on his fascination with cinema. Where other writers might have written off slapstick as an “American” phenomenon, Musil locates its origins in a long tradition of popular European stage humor. In 1925, Musil would also review Balázs’s Visible Man (1924) in an essay titled “Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik: Bemerkungen über eine Dramaturgie des Films” (Toward a new aesthetic: Observations on a dramaturgy of film), arguing that silent film could place spectators in an “other condition” beyond the conceptual limits of ordinary experience. On Chaplin, see also chapter 12, nos. 182, 183, and 184.

It was in Berlin. The theaters had not yet opened for the winter season, and the cinemas were buzzing. What should I do? I set aside my existence and went to the movies. If anyone

324

Film Culture and Politics

living between Berlin and Charlottenburg—between understood in the direction leading over Chernyshevskoye, Peking, and New York—had never experienced Chaplin, then it was surely me. I was encouraged by the fact that everything significant had already been said about cinema: for beside the polished intellect of experts, the voice of someone fresh from the backwoods has always been able to hold its own. Chaplin did not surprise me; I was already familiar with his kind. I had seen Chaplin’s father in the operetta back in the generation of my own forefathers. I had seen that fantastical shiny pearl of a physiognomist, thrown, as it were, before the swine, and fidgeting about stupidly with a sigh of resignation. Long before our current knockabouts, I had seen the knockabout roil the souls with his gallows humor. Yes, good comedians already existed, and all of them were acrobats. Perhaps Chaplin is better, but I am struck by what they all share, the common line leading to the rise of cinema. The swift and contorted gait, that flexibility that climbs over wardrobes as if they were footstools, the running-around and being run around, the face slaps, the mix-ups, kicks, somersaults, falls and leaps over rooftops: had this not always been the actor’s lifeblood, in which his fortunes first came to fruition? This is an ancient tradition, stretching back at least to Hanswurst comedies and Venetian masks,1 if it is not the very lifeline of the theater as such. Fleeing the austerity of religious service, into which he had been reluctantly driven by the development of European theater, the actor found refuge in the operetta, and he is now experiencing an explosive liberation in the cinema. I also saw a female Chaplin, an American actress. She seemed hardly noticeable in her skirts, but then she put on an old suit for men. The real catastrophe set in when she got to the collar button. The finger grabs the button from the top, but it refuses to snap shut. The finger grabs it from the bottom; it still refuses to close. The hands descend into the neck from raised elbows, slip upwards from below, twist around the corners, but the button naturally refuses to close—and this continues until the entire little human form is reduced to a bundle of colliding and diverging body parts, writhing about in convulsions of impotent anger; the parts meet one another over, under, in, and beside beds, wardrobes, corners, and chairs, until—yes, until suddenly the button simply closes, and a soft breeze caresses the feverish spectator. In its theatrical precision, all of this might be American, but it was born under a German bush named Wilhelm. 2 I also had the occasion to witness an actor in a summer theater, hence in three dimensions and in the flesh. He gave a satirical rendition of a fistfight. Here too, the actor climbed over tables, wardrobes, backs, and here too, he struck the soft elegiac note characteristic of the comedy of bodily excess. We arrived in the loge just in time for his scene, and we exited again as he threw the last punch. Thus he stood before us, projected out of the emptiness, exactly as if appearing on a magic screen. Still, he remained a pale (albeit pleasant enough) comparison. How to explain this? I do not have much faith in the dramaturgic philosophy of the cinema (which is nonetheless becoming popular today), but rather in its technology. Considered from this angle, the reason likely resides in nothing other than this: This actor gives the same performance five hundred times, but I see him only once. Hence the probability that I see his best performance is one in five hundred. The film director, on the other hand, would film the same action five hundred times if necessary, and in this case the probability of spectators seeing the best moment always amounts to a certainty. This certainty is a source of superiority. I also used to think that I had already experienced violent brawls, but I had never seen fights like the one I saw that time in the cinema. The people in the film went flying, and the tempo reached such a pitch that we spectators also flew through the air. You could no longer decide whether you were the human beast defending himself or one of the bloodhounds that he hurled through the air. What purpose this element that technology stirs up within us might serve is a different question. I do not know. But it is there.

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

325

Another question: what use are words? I once saw a German film based on a sordid, kitschy novel. Such a sequence of events, which provokes nausea when a reader has to imagine it, is swallowed whole when placed before a spectator. After all, people sit for hours in tramways, rooms, and waiting halls looking at much more boring things, and we would long ago have committed suicide if our eyes were not much more patient, inured, and thankful than our ears; our eyes are more easily amused. And from time to time, when a girl says to a man, “Come join me in the water,” when her hair flutters in the wind, her fingers grab onto his sleeves and her eyes cry out, all of this taking place on a windy dune, ridiculously large before the tiny infi nity of the sea lapping the shore below: from time to time, there are impressions that one never forgets. It is perhaps not so bad to be faced with the question as to why we really need words. Someone should try removing from the theater all those words that say nothing more than what the spectator can guess at first glance! The theaters would admittedly lose their best source of revenue: the platitudes.3 Notes 1. Hanswurst was a stock figure in popular improvised comedy in the German-speaking world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eighteenth-century proponents of bourgeois theater such as Johann Christoph Gottsched sought to banish the figure from the stage, though it survived in popular forms such as puppet theater. 2. Musil is referring to the comic poet and illustrator Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908). Busch is also the German word for “bush.” 3. The original text contains an untranslatable wordplay: “Die Theater kämen freilich um ihre bestbezahlten Plätze, die Gemeinplätze.”

146 BÉLA BALÁZS Only Stars! First published as “Nur Stars!,” in Filmtechnik, no. 7 (April 3, 1926), 126. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In contrast to Henny Porten (no. 143), who emphasized the discipline and hard work of the film star, Béla Balázs here sees the star as the result of a more innate—and eminently filmic—capacity for expressive body language. Like Friedrich Sieburg (see chapter 4, no. 52) and Kurt Pinthus (see earlier in this chapter, no. 144), Balázs attributes an immense power to stars to channel the affect and imagination of their publics. Balázs’s description of the star as an “ideal type for contemporary humanity” recalls the work of Max Weber, but it also points to a fixture of the star system, which marketed film stars according to certain social “types” they represented on the screen. The same year that Balázs published his article, the Viennese magazine Mein Film launched a series titled “Welchem Typ entspricht Ihr Aussehen?” (Which type do you resemble?), in which readers were invited to send in photos if they resembled one of the types discussed in the magazine with the chance of winning a film aptitude test. (Henny Porten was described as the “Gretchen-Typ,” while Asta Nielsen was described as a “Lulu-Typ”). It was precisely this reduction of stars to types that, according to Kracauer, Great Garbo resisted (see chapter 4, no. 61). The “type” in film would later be theorized by Ernst Jünger as a signature of mass modernity (see chapter 12, no. 188).

326

Film Culture and Politics

The star system is unpopular. It is uneconomic, antisocial, and what have you. It also seems very unjust that a dozen actors monopolize all of cinematic art. And yet this will not change in film. On the contrary, a time will hopefully come soon when secondary personalities will no longer even be permitted. After all, it is a law of nature that there are only a few geniuses in any given era. And it is a law of film art that only ingenious personalities may be considered as performers. On the stage, the situation is not so inflexible. The speaking actor, no matter how mediocre, cannot make the beauty of the text unrecognizable. Even in an incompetent mouth, Shakespeare’s language will not entirely lose its color. But in film, only the actor’s face speaks. The expressions of his visage are the only text. All lyricism is contained therein. No matter how brilliantly constructed the piece, if the actor’s gestural and facial pantomime expresses banalities, the “text” will become banal. And vice versa. For how little art depends on its subject. How insignificant is the what, and how vital the how. A distinguished gentleman seduces a simple girl, who kills her child out of shame and despair; this could be the subject of a trashy novel. But when Goethe writes it, it becomes Faust. Likewise, film actors are the actual poets of film. They merely create based on determined subjects, but nobody has predetermined their emotional expressiveness. Do not reproach me for failing to mention the importance of the director and the ensemble cast. I am not ignoring them. But where do we see the life and texture of emotions, the movement of passions that are represented in film as in every other work of literature? Where do they become visible? Only in facial expressions. And the ensemble cast is of no help here, and no director can stage the delicate features around a mouth. What use is it to see the saddest events, if the result—namely, the hero’s suffering—does not move me? This can discredit even the most convincing story. Conversely, any fate can be made believable by the suggestive persuasiveness of its experience. In film, everything depends on this suggestive power of personality. Only the truly great are good enough. Only stars! A film must be written on a body, on a meaningful, expressive, and suggestive body. In the theater, it is always the lesser plays that are written for stars. But for the wordless art of the speaking body, everything must be gathered from this body; thus, we must adapt to its expressive capacities, just as all music has to adapt to the spirit of the instruments. We cannot approach film with the ideologies of literature! A good violin sonata, too, is written on the body of the violin. The highest artistic possibilities for film can only be achieved thus: by developing the given, living, and expressive capacities of a personality into a poetic play. I thus dare to go even further and say that such personalities do not have to portray a given film. The film has to portray them! Of course, this does not mean a monopoly for already famous stars! No one is stopping directors from discovering new personalities of similar significance. But let us be clear, the international popularity of certain fi lm stars (to which no popularity ever achieved in the history of culture can compare) is never exclusively a question of pure dramatic ability. There are artists whose creative power is not at all inferior to these world favorites and who can achieve equally or even more perfect artistic heights, but who still do not become the heroes and heroines of the masses. This results from the fact that the popularity of these world stars does not come primarily from their good acting, but rather from the uniqueness of their personality, which represents some ideal type for contemporary humanity. They personify a given basic trend of the popular soul. They embody the people’s dreams or nightmares; they are like Platonic ideals of the people’s own potential. Just as the Greek gods were merely stylized symbols of normal tendencies of the Greek national psyche, our film stars present us with a kind of earthly Olympus for contemporary humanity.

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

327

And the question of why this actor could become a world star rather than that one, who is just as good, can be answered only by the cultural historian, not by the aesthetician. But that is precisely why it is justified to use these types as the basis for fi lm works, the way the commedia dell’arte worked with the perennial types of Pierrot, Pantalone, Harlequin, and others. Of course, that is not to say that other plays should not also be written. And another word on the stars! One of the most important social contributions of film is that it does not know the concept of “provincial art.” Reproducibility abolishes the value attached to rarity. We can illuminate even the most remote and impoverished backwater with the brightest stars of art. We have no need of the mediocre ones. So why should we use them?

147 VICKI BAUM The Automobile in Film First published as “Das Auto im Film,” in Die Dame 53, no. 3 (October 1926), 32, 34, 38. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Objects exerted a unique fascination in the silent era. For Balázs, things on film had no less of a physiognomy than human beings, and for Epstein, the cinema was a profoundly “animistic” art, which endowed things like guns and mirrors with a soul. Similarly, Fritz Lang could argue that things on film “are filled with their own life” (chapter 4, no. 59). Even popular magazines ran frequent articles on typical filmic objects. In this essay from the women’s lifestyle and fashion magazine Die Dame: Illustrierte Mode-Zeitschrift (1911–43), the Austrian writer Vicki Baum (1888–1960) refl ects on the presence of automobiles in the cinema, offering a kind of taxonomy of cars corresponding to various character types, but also discussing films in which cars become the main characters. Baum’s statement that “[a] thoughtful person can have deep insights, all the while laughing until he cries” resonates with much cinephilic film theory of the period, which took seriously the power of a lowly art form to generate profound insights into modernity (see chapter 12). Baum would go on to write the novel Menschen im Hotel (1929), which was adapted to the screen as Grand Hotel (1932).

It is no coincidence that automobiles and film emerged from the world of ideas into reality at around the same time; it is a necessity. The era that requires film must also have cars. Film without the car is a pure impossibility. There is no film that takes place in the twentieth century in which a car does not appear. Appear is the wrong word. The car does not appear; it is not a prop but rather the story itself, drama, impetus, center. The car seduces, kidnaps, flees, pursues, races, crashes; it forces its tempo onto the film—whether it lies in pieces at the bottom of the film studio’s artificial stone canyon by the film’s end, or whether a pair of lovers, finally united in the back seat, seem to drive off the screen and into the auditorium as the closing music begins to play. The hero of the film always owns a car for every situation. He comes down the stairs of his villa, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, a flower in his buttonhole (by the way, it is astonishing how many cigarettes and buttonhole flowers are used in film!); he snaps his gloves, climbs in, and drives away. Simply drives away, without cranking the motor,

328

Film Culture and Politics

for this is curiously unnecessary most of the time in film. Film heroes also never have car trouble, except occasionally in the case of a comedian. And when the comedian lies under his car with twitching legs, or when he climbs out from under it all filthy, film is revealing a bit of the car’s soul, of this repressed soul of the object, which can be let out only in miniature explosions, while the human subject plays the lord and master. Thus it is the comedian who, in film as in life, always appears in tragic situations that the audience can laugh about. His car falls into ditches, gets stuck in swamps, and runs over carts full of fruit and porcelain. His car always arrives too late to dates, and he stands helplessly between two street corners while the girl he is courting hurtles down a third; hurtles in a charming little white-painted car, which she knows how to steer masterfully. Even the villain has his own car—and how could he not? The villain-car is a magnificent vehicle that drives at incredible speeds; the layman, who sits astonished before the accelerated film, would guess 120 to 140 kilometers per hour. However—and thank God for this—the villain’s intriguing and malevolent vehicle always comes half a second too late; it is behind by a nose; it may pass the express train, but it cannot under any circumstances catch the film hero. Sometimes it is fi lled to the running boards with sinister, armed men, who are carrying away unconscious women in ball gowns. When it crashes into the sea, when it rumbles into an abyss, when a bridge collapses underneath it (and something of this kind inevitably occurs), these strong men perish, while the ladies retain their fancy coifs and painted lips, escaping in good health. Now, these are stories and events that would be unthinkable without cars, but in which people still play the most important role. But there are also those exquisite films (most of them come from America) in which the car itself is the hero, the lead actor, and the focus. Alongside the well-proportioned, beautiful, purebred car, we see others: deformed vehicles, tragicomic figures, and risible clowns. There are some that can only drive in curves, always in a circle, around and around; there are lopsided ones, crooked ones, ones that are too tall or too short, ones that are constantly losing their bodywork, ones with uneven wheels. Ones that, despite being in a great hurry, do not move forward (slow motion!), ones that race backwards, and ones that drive into the walls of buildings. Causality falls away, expediency is turned on its head, and the gods of our era are travestied. A thoughtful person can have deep insights, all the while laughing until he cries . . . Yes, and finally there are people in film who do not drive cars. But poverty and misery are written all over them. And if we see a person in a film who wanders to the next corner, has to wait in the pouring rain, and finally squeezes onto a crowded streetcar, we can assume one of only two things: Either he has bankrupted himself of his own accord, and it serves him right! Or—poor but gifted as he is—he will make something of himself, so that at the end of the film he can drive away in his own car, a six-seater with all the bells and whistles, a symbol of success and fulfilled wishes. In film.

148 ANONYMOUS Vienna Is Filming! First published as “Wien filmt!” in Mein Film: Illustrierte Film- und Kinorundschau, no. 40 (1926), 15–16. Translated by Erik Born.

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

329

While cinema has often been seen as part of a history of optical media technologies characterized by automation and the increasing marginalization of the hand, amateur film was always understood as a “hands-on” affair for tinkerers—an aspect emphasized in this article by the focus on the pleasures of cranking the camera for oneself. Such pleasures were integral to the popular film culture of the 1920s, where amateur photography clubs were joined by amateur film clubs. Columns on amateur film, as well as amateur film contests, were regularly featured in magazines such as Mein Film, from which this and two subsequent articles (nos. 150, 151) in the present chapter are taken. The article below was the second part of a two-part series on amateur film in Vienna, motivated by the recent introduction of 9.5mm Pathé Baby cameras from France. Founded in 1926 by Friedrich Porges and discontinued during World War II, Mein Film was revived from 1945 to 1957, making it one of the longest-running Austrian film journals in history.

Now it seems to be coming true after all . . . the blissful dream of all those who want to get into the film business . . . if not exactly the genuine business of big-budget films, then at least its little brother, amateur film. In Paris, I recently found a book called Pour bien tourner.1 At first, I couldn’t make sense of the title, since my book learning said that tourner means “to turn” [drehen]. 2 A good friend of mine explained it to me. The book’s title is an instruction for amateur filmmakers to take good shots, to film well, or perhaps even more precisely, to crank the camera well. In fact, this is what half of Paris is already doing. Amateur fi lmmakers, eagerly looking through the viewfinder and cranking away, can be found everywhere with their little cameras, in every nook and cranny where there is anything interesting and amusing to see, in family circles, on outings, in Deauville, Biarritz, Nice, and Monte Carlo. Paris and France literally seem to have caught the cranking fever. In order for amateur cinematography to become popular worldwide, all that was needed was the right idea. To make amateur photography popular, Kodak once said: “You push the button, we do the rest.”3 Pathé wrote in the newspapers: “Just turn the crank, and you can be your own cameraman.” And now it has begun! Inexpensive and affordable, this new sport has spread across all of France with tremendous speed. In place of the children, young ladies, and young students who could once be seen armed with a Kodak, people soon appeared at every interesting spot with their little three-legged, hand-cranked cameras. Now the cranking fever has also taken over Vienna! The little Pathé cameras can already be found everywhere, and it is not only men who are applying themselves to this beautiful sport; many women are also busying themselves with film. [. . .] In the Volksgarten, we see a pretty lady filming an adorable group of children in front of the Theseus Temple. The famous actress Pirka Rienzi from the Modernes Theater is also an avid amateur filmmaker and is currently working on a film called Wiener Typen [Viennese types]. An extremely funny scene occurred last Sunday during the traditional costume parade in front of City Hall. A larger number of press photographers and cameramen had gathered for the event, anxiously waiting for the procession to march in. With their lenses adjusted and their cameras ready to fire, they were waiting for the front of the parade, and as soon as our head of state Dr. Hainisch reached the festival ground, he was immediately mobbed by all the reporters.4 To the great amazement of the photographers and cameramen gathered there, a young lady broke away from the group of spectators, walked slowly and unabashedly up to the president and filmed him with a spring-driven Pathé Baby camera.5 All the photographers were quite angry that the lady had “spoiled” the frame and prevented them from doing their jobs. In spite of the indignant outcry,

330

Film Culture and Politics

however, the lady refused to be diverted from her task and continued her advance until she stood about one meter from the president. Our president was very amazed to hear that this little camera was a movie camera, and furthermore that it was possible to film “free-hand” while walking. Prominent representatives of Viennese society—artists, doctors, and architects—are already busying themselves with this beautiful sport. At social events, sometimes you no longer hear the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, I will now sing you a song.” Instead, the lady of the house, laughing roguishly, will say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I will now crank out a film for you . . .” There are already many female artists who bring a little movie camera on their summer vacations and who, during the winter at five o’clock tea or during social visits, do not merely tell their friends, “You can hardly imagine how beautiful it was . . .” They just turn on the projector for the astonished audience and let their friends experience it with them on the projection screen. Notes 1. Duclair-Northy, Pour bien tourner: Guide du cinégraphiste amateur (Paris: C. Lemonnier, 1924). 2. Both the French verb tourner and the German verb drehen (to turn) are used in colloquial expressions for filmmaking: tourner un film, einen Film drehen. Both terms derive from the technology of hand-cranked cameras. 3. A famous slogan introduced by Kodak founder George Eastman in 1888. 4. Michael Hainisch was president of Austria from 1920 to 1928. 5. The hand-cranked Pathé Baby was introduced in 1922 for amateur use.

149 WILLY HAAS Why We Love Film First published as “Warum wir den Film lieben,” in Das große Bilderbuch des Films (Berlin: Film-Kurier, 1926), 11–12. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In this article, Willy Haas extols the international appeal of a new “folk art” that bypasses intellectual snobbery and invites all classes to participate in its more “sincere” pleasures. His arguments echo Fritz Lang’s theses on film as a modern form of the fairy tale (see chapter 6, no. 90). Das große Bilderbuch des Films (The great picture book of film) was a yearly book of film photos and essays published by the trade journal Film-Kurier. Born in Prague, Haas (1891–1973) worked as a film critic and screenwriter in Berlin during the Weimar era and also cofounded the journal Die literarische Welt with Ernst Rowohlt in 1925. Haas’s screenwriting credits include Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) and Die Weber (The Weavers, 1927).

Because it is international, but not internationalist. Folk art has always sensed its future in advance, a future historical necessity, and through this sense, taken it as a fact. Politicians were always poor saps next to the tellers of fairy tales and stories. There was a “Greek folk art” even as the Thebans and the Athenians, the Spartans and the Athenians, the Athenians and the Macedonians, the Macedonians and the Spartans loathed each other as “archenemies.” There was an “Italian art” even as Pisa and Florence alternately burned each other to the ground. There was a “German art” while Rhinelanders, Bavarians, and Saxons enthusiastically went to war with Prussia and with each other. Folk art has always seen the future first and endowed it with reality, with color,

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

331

form, anecdotes, human traits, with a characteristic profile and sensuous tangibility—long before sluggish world history began to function. Today, there are people who posit the calculated existence of a mathematical-materialist internationalism. This is not yet very significant—though it is still something. But it means a lot, very much indeed, that today an international folk art is coming to life: namely, film. It will become the folk song, the folk tale of a united human people—even before the latter exists. Just as Dante was the national poet of a united Italy—six hundred years before Italy was a united people. Because it is not yet an art. Because it does not fit with the honor code of a long-dismantled intellectual autocracy, because all extant theories of art, from Aristotle to Cézanne, can be used, if we wish, to prove clearly and defi nitively that film can never be a “high art.” Because film has to become something new—which does not fit into the concept of “art” as it has heretofore existed—if it wishes to become anything at all. Because it does not, cannot (and should not) participate in the detachment of Western art from the people. Because we do not have to lie. Because all people have a clear, direct relationship to film, which is not influenced by mass suggestion. Because no one feels compelled to die of boredom in front of a film and still say afterward that it was “tremendous.” (Which average people say about Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Racine every hour of every day.) Because if a person does not understand a film, he calmly says, “I did not understand that film.” (Which he usually does not say about Kant, Plato, Newton, Schopenhauer, or Einstein.) Because he is not embarrassed at being moved by the tears of a blue-eyed maiden. Because he is open about who he is. That is the first step to becoming more than he now is. Because film must really appeal to people in order to continue to exist. Because the conceit of individuality has not yet erupted here, with its dogma, which is even more unprovable than the dogma of immaculate conception: that something is good only because it is original. Because film must take up and address the simplest, most eternal formulas of human emotion: love and hate, veneration and disgust, sensitivity and defiance. Because it cannot become cold and overly intellectual without going under. Because in film, the human being has a greater impact than the expert. Indeed, because “expertise” is not at all the most important point in film. Because the imponderabilities of human sympathies are the deciding factor, not intellectual admiration. Because here it becomes clear that art is not the most important thing in life. And artistic talent is not the end of world history. Because through fi lm, humanity has declared its allegiance to the following highly commendable ideals: To beautiful women, who wish to please. To strong and gallant men. To adorable and childish children. To the grace of animals. To the splendor of the earth. To the beauty of the inwardly upright person—who may be externally humpbacked, crooked, and ugly (Lon Chaney). To simple good-heartedness (Jannings); against intellectual cunning. To gracefulness (Douglas).1 To innocence (Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford).

332

Film Culture and Politics

To sins of passion (Pola Negri); against sins of degeneracy. To modern hairstyles, modern features, modern makeup, modern bodies, modern legs, modern dress (Gloria Swanson); to changes in erotic allure; against the withering of eroticism. That is to say, for the renewal of pleasure and the propagation of life. But also for the beauty of bygone erotic attractions. Because film dismantles intellectual snobbery. There is a scientific and a philosophical education. But no belletristic one. I am supposed to be more educated than someone else simply because I have allowed more artificial stimulation to affect me? And yet, so many people think they are educated because they have read or heard a large number of novels, poems, or dramas! Film creates more pleasurable circumstances. No one thinks he is educated because he has seen more films than someone else. Because film filters old art. People frequently talk about how film transforms works of art into “kitsch” through adaptation. Whoever talks like this proves that he has no idea what art even is. The transformable elements of a work of art—the ones that can somehow be expressed differently from the way they are expressed in the work itself—are precisely not the art, not the artistic element of the work. A great, truly spiritual work of art is not transformable in any way. It has never occurred to anyone to make a film version of Plato’s Symposium, or of a poem by Goethe or Baudelaire, or of Shakespearean verses. The parts of Hamlet that were adapted to film are not Shakespeare’s genius; what was adapted to film from Faust is not Goethe’s genius. Only noningenious things are totally adaptable to film. (Similarly, a Chaplin film can be neither a play nor a short story.) Film filters: it shows what is singular, unalterable, what can be expressed only in the way that it has been expressed in the work of art; it shows what is artistic in an artwork. It thus creates clearer and more concrete concepts of art than any theory is capable of. And in this regard, film shows us the refreshing recklessness of practice, without any atavistic tendency towards conservation. It will reveal entire genres of art as doubtful. And the pinnacles will shine all the brighter for it. Film is creating a tabula rasa in art. Because anyone of good will can participate. Film is not yet technologically complete. The instrument is far from being completely refined in the manner of a violin or a quill. One does not necessarily need that congenital defect of genius to work on this future poem of humanity. Anyone whose heart is open, anyone who has the will to understand, to research, to engage fully with his entire being, can work toward the emergence of this future poem of humanity, this folk song or folk tale of the entire human race. He will not become Christ—but at least a kind of John the Baptist, who prepares Christ. Because it is as sincere as a dream. Because in it, entire peoples dream aloud and audibly. Because it becomes clear how they imagine heaven on earth. Without all the inhibitions that come from the intellect and from an insincere sublimation of taste. Because we can eavesdrop on this baby, which we call humanity, as it delivers an unobserved, fantastic monologue. Because fi lm unmasks entire nations. You can live in America for a hundred years and not know as much about the secrets of the American mentality as you can get from watching twenty American films. Because there are “villains” and “good guys”—because it lets the simple types “good” and “evil” emerge as embodied persons, and everyone immediately feels that they are fictional and imagined, that reality does not create such unambiguous types, that in real life everything is conditional, that in real life we must not only see but also

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

333

understand that life is not a film, not a flat phenomenon, but rather something with contours. Because here, craftsmanship is still valuable—because precision, diligence, concentration, and fine work are still met with gratitude, even if there is no other value present; this is different from modern literature, where neglect and crudeness are the last tools of untalented authors wishing to create the impression of “untamed genius.” Because film is photography. This above all. Hopefully, through film, all “world histories” will be eliminated. We will no longer have to hear constantly about glorious victories and national tragedies. Rather, we will see how people are torn to shreds by grenades. How it looks when a mother’s son gets half his face and his right leg torn off. How it happens that a father can go to ruin in the filthy streets. How pretty it is when sixteen-year-olds by the battalion die of poison gas. In the next war, hopefully we will have the bright idea to photograph in close-up the face of a soldier dying of a shot to the stomach, just as I saw it; in order to determine from this close-up once and for all if his last thought was of the glory of his fatherland—or, on the contrary, of the insane, screaming, gasping, helpless hate for the masters of his slaughter and their abettors. Then gentlemen like Treitschke, Taine, Macaulay, and all the other ingenious historians of all the other nations can finally be buried. 2 Film is, for the simple reason that this had to happen, the most important invention of the modern era, far more important than the invention of the printing press, which can spread as many lies as truth and spreads lies almost exclusively. Now I should really add another entire chapter on why I hate fi lm. For any truly great love is inseparable from great hatred. That is the way of the world. But film is hated by so many idiots, in such an idiotic way, that any reasonable person must not provide film’s haters with any of his reasons. Thus, I will take mine to the grave. Notes 1. “Douglas” is likely a reference to American actor Douglas Fairbanks. 2. Haas refers to preeminent nineteenth-century historians Heinrich von Treitschke of Germany, Hippolyte Taine of France, and Thomas Babington Macaulay of England.

150 HUGO Film Education First published as “Filmbildung,” in Mein Film: Illustrierte Film- und Kinorundschau, no. 110 (1928), 8. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

As this text reminds us, the emergence of cinephilic magazines such as Mein Film was motivated by questions of legitimization, especially in a context still dominated by the theater, such as Vienna. This article, published under the pseudonym Hugo, argues that it is only a matter of time before actors, directors, and milestones of film history become part of the repertoire of things that every cultured person ought to know. The writer’s repeated invocations of “film friends” (Filmfreunde) and “film opponents” (Filmgegner) takes up common terminology of the time, which would also find expression in Hans Richter’s 1929 book Filmgegner von heute, Filmfreunde von morgen (Film opponents of today, film friends of tomorrow).

334

Film Culture and Politics

Does something like this—aside from expert circles, of course—already exist? Certainly, there are many film enthusiasts, who know almost all of the world’s actors, including their personal information where possible, who can remember hundreds of films, who know exactly “how it was made,” in short, who are immensely educated in film and who can put many experts and film critics to shame with their knowledge and expertise. Thus there are certainly film-educated circles, but unfortunately, we cannot conclude from this that film education has already become an integrated element of general education. Film education has, or perhaps we can already say had, until recently, no appreciation; it enjoyed no esteem, unlike technical, art-historical, or literary education. On the contrary, a film-educated young person had to endure sarcasm and reproof from older people and film enthusiasts due to his profound knowledge. “He goes to the movies too much” was a disapproving remark by parents, or even an extenuating circumstance for young criminals in court. It was not an asset in a young person’s knowledge base if he could name the director of The Ten Commandments, and to know Charlie Chaplin’s birth year was proof of the young film fan’s superficiality, while “nothing bad could ever happen” in the life of the lad who could rattle off the date of the Battle of Morgarten, according to proud parents, uncles, and aunts. We can see the value of this collection of memories sparked by first experiences, sounds, and sights, which we call “education,” in two ways. The normal “general education,” which enables one to keep up with any conversation (and to truly understand nothing), is simply a requirement for a cultured person (read: a society person). It includes extracts of all sciences and areas of knowledge and enables its lucky possessor to converse fluently about Buddhism, California, revue stars, the theory of relativity, theater in ancient Greece, Rembrandtesque shading, and so on. Certainly, this kind of knowledge is satisfying because one does not have to take on too much weight in the brain, so it can work more freely and uninhibitedly. To date, film has been boycotted in every illustrious intellectual circle. It was never cause for shame to admit that you had “no idea” about film—rather the opposite. You need never have heard of Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, or Charlie Chaplin, but could we conceive of an “educated” person who did not know who Max Reinhardt or Josef Kainz was,1 or who had never heard, for example, of Talma’s tragedies?2 Certainly not. Theater has long been its own area of expertise or at least had a place in cultural history. You even have to know “something” about Mistinguett or Baker,3 but film . . . It appears that here, too, a slow metamorphosis is taking place. Certainly, there are still major European newspapers that think it beneath them to publish on film, for whom film is a “quantité negligible” while they dedicate enthusiastic columns to—ah!—a new operetta or a revue. Thus, there are also still loyal subscribers and readers of these newspapers who see film education as indecent and unnecessary, to whom cinema is still an adolescent concern. Surely this ignorance will not, cannot last much longer. Film—even if we momentarily disregard its significance as an independent art form—entertains and interests hundreds of millions of people. Never has a science or a movement taken hold of such masses. It is senseless to deny the eminent significance of film today and to want simply to hush it up. Film education already exists today. It is probably still very shallow in certain circles, limited to a few names and impressions, but it does already exist as a cultural and educational requirement. Who among us friends of film has ever denied that current film is not ideal, not perfect? For exactly this reason, every cultured person should feel compelled to learn about film, so that they can actively participate in the improvement of this art form, which is the most important one for the masses. If they want a “place” and a “voice,” they also have to have knowledge. Not the knowledge of confirmed enthusiasts, of course, which encompasses personal details and is unimportant for film art in itself, the knowledge that

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

335

theater fans also possess and that arises from an understandable enthusiasm, but familiarity with geniuses of acting or directing who are intimately connected with the development of film art, recognition of films that are already “classics” and will go on to become milestones in film history, and knowledge of the ABCs of film technique, which has made possible the miraculous transformation of the most soulless technology into art. Yes, my dear Mr. Film Opponent. You will have trouble resisting it. In case, after some time has passed, you still do not know who invented cinematography, who Emil Jannings or Asta Nielsen is, who directed Die Nibelungen, you will be considered an uneducated fool, just as though you did not know when the Battle of Cannae took place. You will have to know what “Chaplin is working on right now” or “when the first cinema opened.” I’ll grant you this. You will have to make up for years of criminal ignorance if you want to be “up to date.”4 I can already see, honored Mr. Film Opponent, how your brow will sweat as you acquire a film education, how you will beat your chest: “Pater, peccavi.”5 It serves you right! Notes 1. Max Reinhardt was the celebrated, influential stage director and manager of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna. On Josef Kainz, one of the most famous actors in Austrian and German theater, see Landau in chapter 3, no. 35. 2. François-Joseph Talma (1763–1826) was a French actor and founder of the Théâtre de la République. Noted for his unadorned style of performance, Talma helped reshape the theatrical scene in France. 3. Mistinguett (1875–1956) was probably the most famous Parisian singer and actress of her time, competing in popularity only with the American-born dancer, actress, and singer Josephine Baker (1906–1975), who conquered Paris with her Revue Nègre in 1925. 4. English in the original. 5. Latin for “Father, I have sinned” (Luke 15:18).

151 K. W. What Is Film Illusion? First published as “Was ist Filmillusion?” in Mein Film: Illustrierte Film- und Kinorundschau, no. 128 (1928), 7. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Whereas early theorists such as Walter Serner could explain the pleasure of filmgoing by the satisfaction of atavistic drives (see chapter 1, no. 15), this article, published under the initials K. W., argues for a different understanding of pleasure in illusion, perhaps best characterized by Octave Mannoni’s familiar fetishistic formula “I know very well, but all the same . . .” This dualistic model of spectatorship would play an important role in later psychoanalytic theories such as that of Christian Metz. However, while Metz would dramatize the effort to overcome such pleasure—or, in his words, “to disengage the cinema-object from the imaginary and to win it for the symbolic”—the present article celebrates illusion as a fundamental aspect of the cinematic experience.

In professional circles, we often hear the wish that film periodicals would not inform their readers so extensively, in words and pictures, “how it is made.” Knowledge of technical secrets, experts say, will cause the audience to lose all of their illusions.

336

Film Culture and Politics

For example, how are they to believe in the romanticism of old castles or idyllic village streets if they know that the former contain no knightly chambers and the latter house no friendly alehouses, and that behind this pretty spectacle lies nothing more than rough timber walls, poles, and support columns? Or that they are just magnifications of toysized models? Or, according to the most recent information, they are often just cleverly photographed mirror images? . . .1 For example, is not the poetry of a landscape annihilated if audiences read the answer to the question “Who has made you, you beautiful forest?”2 in the letters section of their film journal: the set designer! Can they still empathize with the suffering and freezing of a persecuted innocent woman if they know that the terrible snowstorm in which she is about to die is really salt and baking soda, spewed out by harmless propellers in a studio heated to 30°C? . . . Can they still tremble and fear for the hero of an adventure film if they learn that there are tricks that will relieve him of having to risk his life in seemingly dangerous situations? . . . Can they still be horrified by train accidents and ship fires if they know that the vessels meeting their fate are usually mere models? As illuminating as these arguments seem at first glance, they cannot hold up to closer examination. For deception is one of the fundamental requirements of cinema, which the audience would learn about even without the explanatory role of trade journals and which would destroy their illusions, if these illusions were not indestructible. By deception, we mean the simple fact that in the cinema, there are neither knight’s castles nor village streets made of brick and mortar, neither life-sized nor toy-sized; rather, everything the spectator experiences at the moment of viewing—buildings and landscapes, people and things—is nothing more than flitting light and shadow on a white screen, which disappears in an instant when the beam of light is extinguished. And while the spectator’s heart quickens for the hero or heroine of the action, the objects of his sympathy are strolling under palm trees in Hollywood, whizzing through the streets of faraway cities in shiny cars, or moving about the settings of their professional, social, or private lives. This is so clear and obvious that we all necessarily know it. And yet when we sit in the darkened cinema, we suddenly slip away from brutal reality and dream with the film; we laugh and cry and fear and hope and tremble and rejoice. The depths of our dreams depend only upon the drivers of the dream ship—upon the director, the actors, the cameraman, the set designer, and the orchestra conductor . . . If the sets are done well, we feel at home in them in spite of all our knowledge of their real nature. We froze along with Camilla Horn’s touching “Gretchen” in the salt storm, and we really and truly heard the forest rustling above Paul Richter’s ideal Siegfried.3 We know from our film periodicals that even in spite of tricks, the adventure heroes risk their lives countless times with every new film. How, then, can we be sure that this terrifying scene playing out right now—oof!—isn’t one of the dangerous ones? And although we actually know very well that there is unfortunately only one Henny Porten, one Conrad Veidt, and one Harry Piel, we must remind ourselves over and over again; otherwise we could not believe that the two different people moving about simultaneously up there on the screen are one and the same being . . . Our hearts skip a beat when we see a locomotive racing toward an inevitable collision, and we feel the ice-cold water that rushes into the cabins of the sinking ship climb up to our throats. For film is like love: we know exactly how much or how little is behind it. And yet our illusions will never disappear . . .

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

337

Notes 1. The “mirror images” refer to the so-called Schüfftan process, named after inventor and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan. This special effects process, famously used in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), used a mirror to create the illusion that actors were interacting with huge sets, which were in fact miniatures. See also Schüfftan’s text in chapter 18, no. 269. 2. “Wer hat dich, du schöner Wald” is the first line of a famous romantic poem by Joseph von Eichendorff (“Der Jäger Abschied,” 1810), which was later set to music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1840). 3. The references here are to F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), both adaptations of classic German literary texts.

152 HANS FELD Anita Berber: The Representative of a Generation First published under the name “Haf.” as “Die Repräsentantin einer Generation: Anita Berber,” in FilmKurier (November 11, 1928). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Scandalous on account of her bisexuality, nude dance performances, and drug use, Anita Berber (1899–1928) was a prototype of the “self-destructive star.” She appeared in more than twenty-fi ve films, including Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919) and Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922). Recalling Béla Balázs’s characterization of stars as embodiments of “the people’s dreams or nightmares” (see no. 146), this obituary for Berber—who died of tuberculosis at the age of 29—interprets her passing as the sign of a broader generational shift. Hans Feld (1902–1992) was a German film critic who worked as a freelance writer and later editor of Film-Kurier.

Anita Berber died in a Berlin hospital a few days ago, just a few weeks after we had heard of her indescribable suffering, which signaled the end of a precipitous decline after her brilliant ascent. For all that, Anita Berber was only twenty-nine years old. Seldom has a woman who grew so popular under unusually fortunate circumstances destroyed her life the way that this dancer did, as if possessed and pursued by a demon. It is as though she intentionally crammed an entire human life into a span of ten or twelve years: her rise, her triumphs in Berlin, her triumph in the entire nation. Her transition into mystic perversity. Scandals in Vienna, scandals everywhere. Her partner Sebastian Droste went to America,1 where he wrote the amusing, decadent reports of a con man à tout prix and died in misery a year and a half ago, completely destroyed by the consciousness that he had played the instrument of his own life so poorly. Meanwhile, Anita Berber was pursued ever further. Her descent began: she was no longer taken seriously; people began—this is the worst part—to sneer at her vices. And now, long after the public had lost interest in her, the end. Ten years ago, she was still the incarnation of perversity for our generation. People spoke of her with a shudder, decidedly rejecting this kind of mentality. Eight years later, you could find her in a bar, no longer as sure of herself as she had been. Her vice more for show than believable. No longer current, no longer central. Then we forgot her.

338

Film Culture and Politics

Throughout all of this, she simply fulfilled the destiny of her generation. Today’s thirty-year-olds were the first ones to take up the necessary struggle of young against old in prewar Berlin, shortly before the eruption of armed conflict. They were the first to carry out the conflict between children and their parents; they protested against the senseless principle of authoritarian upbringing. They did so by overcoming the barriers put up between the sexes and—since they lacked sufficient artistic talent—by seeking liberation in the applied arts. In those days, a breath of fresh air came from the circles that sprang up around the Reimann School. 2 In those days, the “girl,”3 the daughter from a good family with a touch of demimonde, appeared on the “street”4 (namely, Tauentzienstraße) with a short skirt and the motto “Thus far and no farther.”5 Few members of this generation have come out on top. To be sure, there was a series of great talents. But most of them did not live up to their promise. Some drifted away, returned to the bourgeoisie. We still recognize them from costume parties, the women of this generation, who flirt, thinking of the time when they were making forays into new erotic territory, and who have gone on to become respectable married ladies. Some, the majority, got stranded. It is remarkable how many people from this circle succumbed to morphine. Perhaps this was a substitute for freedom, which they did not have enough willpower to achieve. However we may see it, one thing is certain: Anita Berber’s generation was the avant-garde. They were the first to breathe fresh air into the bourgeois household. While not yet stable, they were still the first to assert their right to their own lives, to fight for us, their successors. We are the last people who can reproach them for having gone on to make a mess of their own lives, we who, standing on their shoulders, have taken up their struggle and continued it under much more favorable conditions. Notes 1. Droste (b. Willy Knobloch, 1892–1927) was a gay German dancer, poet, and actor who had performed and toured with Berber, with whom he had also published a book, Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of vice, horror, and ecstasy, 1923). He later moved to New York where he collaborated with Francis Bruguière on a photo-still project, The Way, in preparation for an “expressionist” film that was never made. In July 1925, Die Dame published some of these stills. 2. The Reimann School of Art and Design (founded in 1902) was a commercial art school offering cutting-edge courses in fashion design, window display, and graphic arts. 3. English in the original. 4. English in the original. 5. “Tauentzienstraße” alludes to a Berlin street known for its prostitution.

153 MARLENE DIETRICH To an Unknown Woman First published as “Marlene Dietrich an eine Unbekannte,” in Illustrierter Film-Kurier 12, no. 1381 (Berlin: Verlag Alfred Wiener, 1930), n.p. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Premiering at Berlin’s Gloria-Palast on April 1, 1930, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) propelled Dietrich to international fame. After making an appearance at the film’s premiere, Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) left for America the

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

339

same evening, where she signed a contract with Paramount Pictures and subsequently starred in a series of films by Sternberg. Taken from the program that accompanied this early German sound film, the following letter to fans offers an example of the kinds of intimate writing by stars that was popular in film magazines of the time. In discussing the differences between performance in theater and sound film, Dietrich’s text also anticipates Walter Benjamin’s theorization of stage versus screen acting in his Artwork essay.

Most honored friend, You are a stranger to me, more distant than the nightly audience of any stage actor. For you, on the other hand, I seem very close. You get to know only a part of my person and of my acting ability. You see me; I grow familiar to you, even if it is only a copy of my person that gives you the impressions of a human being. Precisely because you get to know me only through my role, because I can convey to you only a very limited part of myself, I would like to tell you a little about myself and about my new sound film. The Blue Angel is my first sound film. I have already acted in a few films. You might also know me from the theater. Perhaps you think: since she has already acted on the stage, making sound films was probably nothing new. However, I must assure you of the opposite. This probably sounds paradoxical. But I have been able to improve my acting by working in sound film, and this for the simple reason that one gets to know oneself better. As a stage actress, one acts, speaks, and moves impulsively. Even if one’s role remains the same every evening in its basic idea and overall structure, one’s inner disposition nonetheless differs from performance to performance. As a consequence, in its theatrical details, one’s performance somehow takes on different nuances every evening, and so the nightly act never becomes a fixed pattern. But in a purely intuitive way, I could also perceive in the audience’s reaction whether my performance on any given night was good or bad. The explanation of this inner connection between actor and audience has always remained a mystery to me. Only after I had finished doing my first preliminary takes in a sound film studio did I understand, on hearing the playback, the enormous difference between work on the stage and in sound film. I noticed right away that I should have spoken differently, more quickly or more pointedly, or that my acting had been too exaggerated. In short, I was a much harsher critic of those sound takes than my director, and the most important thing for me, as I took up sound film, was to learn. I also sat and watched many of the unsuccessful takes of various scenes, driven simply by a desire to observe myself continuously. Perhaps you think that this is the director’s job. You are correct. But while the director can and does demand the most intense performance from us, he still has to rely on the talent and sensitivity of the individual to achieve this maximum of dramatic expression. Certain dramatic effects are infinitely more difficult to obtain in sound film than on the stage. In the theater, scenes develop in a continuum; that is, we play characters according to their inner development. In the sound film, which consists, like the silent film, of a succession of brief shots, we must repeatedly act out only the high points of scenes through words and facial expressions. There is no room—and this is the basic difference between sound film and theater—for any psychological buildup. For you, my honored friend, are interested only in the high point of our performance, not in the process leading up to it. If I have told you all this, it is simply in order to make clear to you that our career as sound film actors is not as easy as you imagine. It makes exactly the same demands of us that life makes of you, but with the significant difference that we actors must give form to other destinies, while you only have to experience your own.

340

Film Culture and Politics

All of this comes to you, honored friend, not from the Lola-Lola of The Blue Angel, but from Your most devoted Marlene Dietrich.

154 MAX BROD AND RUDOLF THOMAS Love on Film First published in Max Brod and Rudolf Thomas, Liebe im Film (Giessen: Kindt & Bucher, 1930), here 20–31. Translated by Michael Cowan.

In this final section of their thirty-one-page booklet, Max Brod and Rudolf Thomas draw heavily on the work of Béla Balázs to praise the erotic pleasures of cinema, especially through the technique of the close-up. They quote at length from the section of Visible Man on Asta Nielsen—a section that Balázs had adapted from his article on Nielsen included in chapter 4 (no. 51). Much like the model of “film illusion” in a previous article (no. 151), the authors’ paean to the pleasures of magnified female body parts here looks forward to the psychoanalytic theory of Laura Mulvey, who drew on Freud to characterize fetishistic scopophilia as a means of assuaging male castration anxiety by isolating an object in close-up and “transforming it into something satisfying in itself.”1 Mulvey associated fetishistic scopophilia with the cult of female stars, and above all with the work of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich.

The close-up is the director’s index finger. If he wishes to say, “Look at what beautiful legs Anny Ondra has,”2 he places the camera so close to the diva that we see only her legs. An elegant and charming smile or a laugh full of zest for life becomes more intense when the face extends over the entire screen. The Russians have gone even further, placing the lens so close to the object that only a part of the face appears in the picture. One cannot express the idleness of a rich landowner more monumentally than by a showing the thick rolls of fat on the back of his neck, along with a few furrows in the skin appearing as deep as Alpine valleys. Here we have a new perspective—man under the microscope— that allows nothing repulsive to remain hidden. In the French film La Glace à trois faces [The three-sided mirror], 3 the camera is mounted right onto the hood of an automobile. It captures the dangers of a race by showing nothing but the driver’s eyes peering out anxiously and his mouth, which, for all its resolute will power, nonetheless twitches with fear. Here, too, film has a revelatory function. The close-up has inaugurated a new epoch in feminine beauty. It is probably not an exaggeration to ascribe the majority of film’s erotic effects to good close-ups; this is more plausible than, for example, attributing eroticism to those indescribably monotone scenes of bars and revues, by which so many filmmakers with no talent for mise-en-scène think they can create the illusion of a whirlwind of high life or indescribably fashionable orgies. Confetti, streamers, the gleam of saxophones, parades of show girls, couples dancing, musicians going wild to accelerated rhythms—we have seen all of this repeated ad nauseam. Similarly, the madness of images alternating at lightning speed represents a deliberate method, and this method has unfortunately become all too transparent. But when

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

341

Brigitte Helm’s beautiful countenance single-handedly overwhelms us with its uncannily sharp, austere profile and its clear eyes, or when we see Greta Garbo’s touchingly distressed, pouting mouth, which, together with her solemn eyes, testifies again and again to the honesty of her emotion—then something natural, a real power, takes control of the divine harmony of these facial traits. Here, magnification—as an eroticism of proximity, eroticism in the complete submission to woman—rules over the moment, just as it might guide an uninhibited dream. Of course, obscene films, like those shown in the disreputable cinema houses in Marseille, know nothing of the demonic effect produced by these enormously enlarged disproportions. They satisfy themselves with the most irritating, primitive techniques. Obscenity always remains behind the times, and this is one factor in the appeal of its musty, stuffy smell. In contrast, the poet Baudelaire anticipated the perverse effect of the close-up when he spoke of the “giantess,” with whom he might have lived in those days “when madcap Nature in her verve / Conceived each day a hatch of monstrous spawn.”4 In these verses, Baudelaire recalls that mysterious feeling of man’s insignificance before nature’s elementary forces, a feeling seeking refuge and normally never voiced, a shamefully hidden desire (which accounts precisely for the effect of the close-up): At leisure to explore her mighty forms; To climb the slopes of her enormous knees, And sometimes, when the summer’s tainted suns Had lain her out across the countryside, To drowse in nonchalance below her breast, Like a calm village in the mountain’s shade. If a simple technical trick—the mere act of bringing the camera up close—has the power to produce a real optical counterpart to the poet’s fantastic imagination, and if it can awaken not wholly unworthy analogies to the feelings that might have driven Baudelaire’s sick nostalgia toward such a vision, then there really is no doubt as to film’s unlimited possibilities. All that is needed are divine ideas in order to capture the infinite in a visual image, just as one translates from one language into another. Of course, the belief that a technological tool is by itself capable of serving the infinite might appear as heresy to orthodox worshippers of intuition. We prefer to think that the fundamental structure and reality of human destiny reveal themselves precisely here, at the frontier between two worlds, in the collision of the sacred and incomprehensible with a skillfully controlled mechanism. (How amazing it is that the two can make contact and influence one another at all!) Of course, the close-up is not the only thing that the camera, as a previously unimagined cosmetic tool, can contribute to feminine beauty. It shows women’s bodies under exceptional lighting; it plays with their muscles; it makes their skin shimmer in the purity of bath water; it renders more profound the light of desire in their eyes; it sings the praises of every last line on their neck, their shoulders and their bare arm; it revels in the splendor of elegant clothing; it charms with its gracious movement and with the rhythm of the image of the whole, an image that withdraws before the eye can make out its individual details. We doubt whether all of this will contribute to a popularization of the ideal of beauty, as enthusiasts believe. It probably has no more to do with the beauty of real people and situations than the extravagant luxury in films has to do with the real art of leading a good life. Film places a false image before the masses and arouses desires. Indeed, the elegant onscreen behavior of a Menjou or a Novarro, 5 were it met with as

342

Film Culture and Politics

such in real life, would probably come across as not a little disturbing. In all of these respects, the theatrical stage, although giving the appearance of being more stylized than film, actually stands closer to life. Film claims to offer an almost perfect, lifelike illusion of reality; but with its arbitrary cuts, its artificially motivated scenarios, and its no less arbitrary effects of lighting, which enclose the performer in a sort of eternal artificial atmosphere, film stands much farther from life than the modest stage of the theater. It is for this reason that one can recall few truly perfect love scenes in films. For love and truth go together (although film’s suitability for the representation of true love could be demonstrated by artworks such as Love, with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, the screen duet of Kortner and Marlene Dietrich,6 or films in which man and landscape form a unity). By contrast, the cinematic artist has full access to the vast domain of eroticism, where what counts is not the total personality but only sensual effects, and here one can easily obtain the most powerful effects. For what is at work here is not the irrational bond between two souls (that is, total concentration); rather, eroticism permits every diffuse mood, every thorn, every spice, everything that awakens the body or the emotions out of the slumber characterizing the average daily life. Eroticism embraces every domain of human life, from the mere bestial to that extremely refined brand of eroticism practiced by Asta Nielsen. Describing the latter, Béla Balázs writes: Asta Nielsen’s eroticism is particularly valuable because it is thoroughly spiritual. It resides above all in the eyes, not in the flesh. Her abstract leanness is a single quivering nerve with a distorted mouth and two burning eyes. She never undresses or shows her thighs like Anita Berber, and yet this dancing vice could take a few lessons from Asta Nielsen. With all her belly dancing, Anita Berber is nothing but a lamb next to a fully dressed Asta Nielsen. For the latter can convey obscene disrobement with a look, and she can flash a smile that the police would have to impound as pornography. This spiritualized eroticism is dangerous and demonic; it can penetrate through any layer of clothing and have far-reaching effects. It is for this reason that Asta Nielsen never appears sexually aroused. She always maintains a childlike quality, her naïveté even appearing plantlike. She is not immoral, but rather represents a dangerous force of nature. She is innocent like a predator. When she feeds on men, she harbors no evil intentions. Asta Nielsen provides us with a huge, comprehensive gestural lexicon of sensual love.7 “Innocent like a predator”: this description also applies to Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, the film that instantly transformed her into a Hollywood star and the most famous German film actress. Her eroticism is not as intellectual as Nielsen’s, but its effects stem no less from her childlike naïveté.8 The way in which she robs Heinrich Mann’s Professor “Unrat” of his rigorous discipline and drives him into debauchery without ever seeming to be aware of what she is doing; the way in which she observes this horror with an innocent expression and a gracious smile, all the while remaining at bottom a good-natured person—this has a more arousing effect than anything previously seen on film. To be sure, Dietrich, or her director Sternberg, knows that this gentleness really enchants men and women only when the voice also seems to come from deeper realms than that of the mouth or the vocal cords. In all of this, sophisticated clothing contributes to the production of the spell: black stockings, white lingerie, and, between the two, a patch of visible skin standing out so faintly that the censor can say nothing—even if the spectator is also left speechless. Although a Jannings film, The Blue Angel nonetheless belongs to Dietrich, who shows for the first time that, while it is not advisable to ruin oneself for the sake of such a vamp, it is most certainly entertaining.

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

343

However, no more than the expression of personal love, which fi lm can so rarely attain, should eroticism, despite the seeming certainty of its success, become too explicit if it is to be effective. Marlene Dietrich understands this all too well. When she sits astride an armchair, the appeal to the senses is wilder and more provocative than the most explicit intimacy. The armchair becomes an unmistakable symbol. No psychoanalytical film could dare to show this. When she lifts her leg only slightly and suggestively, this single movement represents an entire orgy. Dolores del Río uses her body in another fashion: more catlike, more naturally, and certainly less lasciviously.9 When she throws her arms around a man, she almost always turns her back to the audience. The passion with which she abandons herself is visible only in this back. Sometimes, she is completely covered by her partner, so that we see only her hand and a bit of her white arm draped over the man’s arm or back. But this hand and this arm possess a potential for expression exceeding all else. Great directors like the Russians know that a cry cannot be represented in any other way except in a close-up of the open mouth. If the Russians did not film so few love stories, they would have long ago invented the close-up of a hand to express love. But the most beautiful example of this suggestive style is shown by Greta Garbo, who remains so sparing in her erotic gestures because she knows that her entire being radiates with eroticism, which would only suffer from being made too explicit. In one of her films (Wild Orchids),10 lying beside the man who has failed to offer her what she wants, she makes such a passionate gesture of impatience below the bedcovers as to make the spectator jump up in his seat. This lasts only an instant, but that instant gives us a hint of all the passionate embers lying dormant in the female figure on the screen. Other types include the stirring, childlike Lilian Gish, attached for all eternity to the role of the hurt woman; the vivacious Lupe Vélez;11 the graceful and feminine Henny Porten; Pola Negri with her melancholy eyes; Lil Dagover, who captivates audiences with her harmonious movements; the dreamy Germanic tenderness of Schmiterlöw and Solveig;12 and now those new stars, who have been discovered for their “phonogenic” [“mikrogeeignet”] voice and who have also brought a new and unexpected nuance to the screen. They all make their contribution to the stirring up of erotic waves, whose energies flow tirelessly through the atmosphere of our planet. And the contributions of male fi lm stars? Chaplin’s particular brand of nostalgic desire stands in a league of its own. The great dramatic actor Jannings is no real lover. Valentino was one through and through, but he was only handsome, as Menjou is only elegant. Neither of them convinced us that a man can also suffer from love. Men, who are supposed to possess a higher intellect than women, have undoubtedly failed here. They have no qualities other than the masculine. But does mere masculinity appeal to women? Unfortunately, men in film have resigned themselves much more easily to cinematic clichés than women. In their films, they appear “victorious” and unpsychological, with a monocle in one eye, a carnation in their buttonhole, or a smirking grin on their face. And even if a few of them succeed in arousing the enthusiasm of female filmgoers, they will never succeed in pleasing male spectators. For their great feminine colleagues, it is a different story. When the latter possess real beauty or real talent, they appeal not only to men but also to women, and to better women than those who would hail the gestures of a Romeo as “heavenly” or phony acts of violence as “marvelous.” It is a true misfortune for everything going by the name “eroticism in film,” and even “love in film,” that the male actors with the most talent in this respect do not work in film, or that no one has yet written the right scripts for them. Well-dressed puppets with perfect teeth and stupid eyes—surely this cannot be the last word. When one remembers, for example, how Josef Kainz, in the role of Tantris the Fool, collapsed sobbing over Isolde, or how Ernst Deutsch or Hartmann and Aslan surrendered

344

Film Culture and Politics

their souls on stage for a woman, then it seems doubtful that masculine love in film (with the exception of the Chaplinesque version) can measure up.13 Perhaps bodily movements do not suffice for men, who require the help of verbal expression in order to give form to their inner being. If this is the case, then talking pictures could bring about a transformation, as long as they avoid veering off into sound film operettas and producing melodramatic musical kitsch. The first male actor to become a true lover will also be the greatest performer of the new film era. Notes 1. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975), 14. 2. Anny Ondra was a Czech actress, perhaps best known for her lead role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929). 3. La Glace à trois faces (1927) was an experimental film by Jean Epstein. 4. Brod and Thomas quote from an unidentified German translation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Giantess” from Les Fleurs du Mal. The English translation is taken from Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 41. 5. Adolphe Menjou (1890–1963) and Ramón Novarro (1899–1968) were Hollywood actors. 6. Love is Edmund Goulding’s 1927 film based on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The film was released in Germany as Anna Karenina. Fritz Kortner and Marlene Dietrich co-starred in Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (1929) and Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt (1929). 7. This quote is adapted from the final section (“Asta Nielsen, wie sie liebt und wie sie alt wird”) from Balázs’s Der sichtbare Mensch (1924), which was based on Balázs’s earlier article “Die Erotik der Asta Nielsen” (1923) reprinted in chapter 4, no. 51. 8. The reference here is to The Blue Angel (1930). 9. Dolores del Río (1905–1983) was a Mexican actress who starred in Hollywood films during the interwar years. 10. Wild Orchids was a 1929 MGM film directed by Sidney Franklin. 11. Lupe Vélez (1908–1944) was a Mexican actress who appeared in many Hollywood films between 1927 and 1943. 12. Vera Schmiterlöw (1904–1987) was a Swedish actress who starred in German silent films in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Solveig may be Solveig Hedengran, who had a role in Deutsche Frauen—Deutsche Treue (1927), or Solveig Oderwald-Lander, who starred in Hallo! Afrika forude! (1929). 13. Tantris the Fool refers to Ernst Hardt’s play Tantris der Narr (1907). On Kainz, a famous Austrian and German theater actor, see the text by Landau in chapter 3 of this volume (no. 35). Paul Hartmann (1889–1977) and Raoul Aslan (1886–1958) were both stage and film actors who worked in Vienna’s Burgtheater in the 1920s.

155 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER All about Film Stars First published as “Rund um die Filmstars,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (May 10, 1931). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Though singling out the fan magazine Filmwelt, Siegfried Kracauer’s critique of the cult of stars could have applied to any number of publications of the time, which both elevated film actors to celestial entities and promised to connect fans to them through letters sections and instructions on obtaining autographs. Anticipating Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s chapter on “The Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Kracauer also indicts mass-cultural output for both awakening dreams in young people and diverting them, in his words, “from a struggle that could actually help them achieve better conditions of existence.”

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

345

Film stars: Night after night they rise on the screen horizon and cross the sky in luminous orbit. Their youth cannot age, nor can their beauty fade. Vienna, Heidelberg, Monte Carlo, Paris—all the world’s splendors serve the sole purpose of providing them with a backdrop. In the end, they are always blessed with true love and a convertible. And if they ever cry, their tears are dried, and they once again shine as radiantly as ever. Flickering so high above us, they shine into offices, girls’ schools, and factory rooms, fulfilling the dreams of countless typists, salesmen, shopgirls, and apprentices. It would be sheer foolishness to try to drag the stars into the eight-hour day. But for those who take pleasure in the stars’ extraterrestrial glory, should it not at least be possible to seize a small piece of heaven for themselves? It is surely possible. And the dreamers can in fact achieve their wishful goal in the magazine Filmwelt.1 This widely read magazine, which is distributed in cinemas alongside programs, contains a rubric that constitutes a kind of observatory for stargazing [Starwarte]. From this observatory, male and female film fans in Dortmund, Bautzen, or Magdeburg can look up toward higher regions and make out details invisible to the naked eye. However, some questions are forbidden from the outset. Stringently, the editors declare, “We do not publish the age of fi lm stars,” and they rebuff anyone who tries to sound them out on this point. As consolation, they reassure all those who write in to guess the stars’ age on their own that their guess is just about right. Then they share the birthdays and addresses of the artists and promise to forward their readers’ greetings. With a stirring thirst for knowledge, which ought to be directed toward other things, the unknowns in the lowlands approach their heavenly favorites. They burn to find out the stars’ favorite flowers, and we must hear, for example, that Willi Forst is a fan of roses and carnations, while Brigitte Helm treasures hydrangeas and orchids. Incidentally, I would have expected as much from Brigitte Helm, since there is something exotic about her. To judge by these magazines, a film artist without favorite flowers is nearly impossible. And what about their external appearance when they are out and about or at home? “Liane Haid is blonde and brown-eyed,” writes Filmwelt in response to an admirer, “Forst and Verebes have black hair and brown eyes.” The magazine also divulges the main facts of stars’ private lives without further ado. “You are right,” it confirms, “Henry Stuart’s father was Swiss.” We hear further that Käthe von Nagy has divorced Constantin David; that Heinz Rühmann is a husband, and Gustav Fröhlich has never even been engaged; that Marlene Dietrich and Hans Albers each own a car. Some questions come from understandable concern for the stars’ well-being. “Rest assured,” an apparently agitated coffee party in Neukölln is informed, “Dina Gralla has not shot herself.” It is true that Dina Gralla has not been seen for a long time, and nobody can know for certain what artists are capable of doing in the heat of passion. But as well informed as Filmwelt is, the audience frequently asks more questions than ten issues of Filmwelt could possibly answer. “We have not yet been able to ascertain how much the actress weighs,” runs one of the negative replies, which nevertheless allows for hope that the weight of the actress might one day be known. The actress in question is Lilian Harvey. She and her partner Willy Fritsch are positively mythical figures, with which popular imagination concerns itself time and again. 2 Since film fans believe them to be inseparable, however, they cannot understand that these two heavenly bodies recently split. “Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch will certainly film together again someday”—Filmwelt often has to console disappointed readers with future hopes. Or they feel compelled to explain that the two stars, despite their appearances together, are not married and that Lilian Harvey has no plans to poison herself. Just how far this hero worship goes can be seen from the following reply, which tries not

346

Film Culture and Politics

to destroy any illusions: “We do not know whether Willy Fritsch was ‘bright’ in school, but we certainly assume so.” Needless to say, those who adopt the title “Film Buff Fridel H. Sch.,” “Curious Movie Nut,” “Mickey Mouse from Hamburg,” or “Film-Ruth 9695 from Düsseldorf” cannot be satisfied by mere knowledge of their darlings. If they cannot consume these gleaming paragons down to the last crumb [mit Haut und Haaren], 3 they at least want to hold a token in their hands that allows them to participate in the existence of their ideal types. They go after autographs like the now-eradicated Indians once hunted for scalps. Luckily, the stars seem to understand that they must not merely shine but also let their signatures trickle down from the sky. “All film stars,” our information bureau writes, “give autographs. You can address yourself directly to them. Naturally, the appropriate picture card and a self-addressed stamped envelope should always be included.”4 Sometimes the token of favor fails to appear, but Filmwelt admonishes the tardy ones or urges those awaiting reply not to despair. “We are genuinely sorry that Gösta Ekman has not granted your autograph request. But unfortunately, we cannot help you. Perhaps you might try again! After all, as you know, ‘Good things come to those who wait!’ ” In certain circumstances, the saying “Constant dripping wears away the stone” might also not be out of place. Some particularly ardent admirers are not even satisfied by possessing the valuable names. They want to live among the holy themselves, sun themselves in the beams of the floodlights, and storm up to the heights where the Fritsch-Harvey constellation is in orbit. But the editorial office of Filmwelt stands like the angel with his fiery sword before the gates of film studio heaven. “If you want to be in sound fi lms,” it declares time and again, “you must first be trained in elocution.” Or, out of a sense of obligation, they simply snub the various film fans: “In order to save yourself from disappointment, we recommend against a career in film.” Rightly so. I doubt whether the advice makes a lasting impression, for the admonished readers can appeal to the aforementioned saying that in the end, good things come to those who wait . . . It is absolutely clear from this game of questions and answers, which regularly fi lls several single-spaced pages of the film magazine, what kinds of dreams haunt so many young people. Film kitsch has awoken these dreams within them. It fabricates a marvelous world on high, full of princes and princesses, and from now on the ignorant will mistake appearance for reality and gaze as though intoxicated at the fairy world above. They will thus be made useless and distracted from a struggle that could actually help them achieve better conditions of existence. But the correct task, which film too ought to share, is precisely not to mesmerize them into sleep, but rather to awaken them from their spell. Meanwhile, we still seem to be far from a time when all film fans will be cured of their stargazing. Notes 1. In this article, Kracauer quotes from “Fragen, die uns erreichten” that appeared in Filmwelt, nos. 16, 17, 18 (April 19, 26, and 30, 1931). 2. Between 1929 and 1939, Fritsch and Harvey costarred in Ufa productions including Liebeswalzer (Waltz of love, 1930), Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The three from the filling station, 1930), and Glückskinder (Lucky kids, 1936). Ufa deployed a marketing strategy suggesting that the two were also a couple offscreen. 3. Kracauer would later lend the title “Mit Haut und Haaren” (literally, “with skin and hair”) to one of the chapters outlined in his Marseille notebooks; this would later become the chapter entitled “The Spectator” in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). 4. The “picture card” refers to cards with star photos, which fans collected in cigarette packs and pasted into photo albums. See the final text in the current chapter (no. 157).

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

347

156 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Destitution and Distraction: On the 1931–32 Ufa Productions First published as “Not und Zerstreuung: Zur Ufa-Produktion 1931–32,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (July 15, 1931). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Much as Kracauer had argued in “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies” (1927) that “in the majority of contemporary films, things are pretty unrealistic,” he here critiques Ufa for privileging escapist genres to distract the moviegoing public from economic hardship and despair. Only months before this article was published, German unemployment fi gures had reached fi ve million and several banks had collapsed, leading the German government to restrict payment transactions between July 14 and August 5. Although Kracauer’s critique targeted the German film industry, his reflections bore broader resonance during a worldwide economic depression. This essay was indeed republished in France (in La Revue du cinéma) on September 1st, 1931.

In these dreary days, Ufa has announced their new production slate to the public. Despite all economic calamities, production has not been scaled down from previous years, but rather has expanded. It remains to be seen what considerations gave rise to this pleasant (in principle) optimism. First, a rough assessment of the program itself is called for. There is no denying that it includes many popular actors, directors, screenwriters, and composers. I will select a few notables at random: Werner Krauß has now been recruited for sound fi lm, and Leonhard Frank and Erich Kästner are joining the existing populace of screenwriters.1 Unfortunately there are no other reputable names from the literary world. Among the numerous feature films—I take my information from a Film-Kurier article that accompanied the production program 2—only six engage seriously with the present moment, and even they maintain proper distance from it. I am referring to the following films, which deserve a brief mention: 1. Stürme der Leidenschaft [Storms of passion], a big-budget film in which Jannings leads a double life between bourgeois respectability and the criminal underworld; 2. Der Sieger [The victor] with Albers, who starts as a small-time clerk and ascends to the heights of existence; 3. Die Gräfin von Monte Christo [The Countess of Monte Cristo], a variation on the novel by Dumas, with Brigitte Helm in the title role; 4. Matrosenlied [Le chant du marin / Sailor’s song] with Albert Préjean, a musical piece that takes place partly on the high seas, partly in various ports; 5. Das Geheimnis der Gräfin Karinsky [The secret of Countess Karinsky], a film that deals with a case of children switched at birth; 6. A Werner Krauß film whose subject is unknown.3 As we can already gather from these short descriptions, the burning issues of the day play a very modest role in all of these films. Even when material from our era comes into play, in most cases it is material that concerns us only indirectly. It originates in the sphere of light novels and does not even touch on the actions that actually make up our reality. All remaining production has absolutely nothing to do with topics that might have a chance of exciting us; rather, it is a parade of established stars and tried and tested products, which ostensibly suit the audience’s taste—whereby we can only ask if the audience does not frequently have better taste than that which has been dictated and forced upon

348

Film Culture and Politics

it. In any case, I can remember some fi lms that had apparently calculated all of the official dictates of taste with great precision and were still rejected by Berlin audiences. The program is teeming with sound operettas, musical comedies, burlesques, and farces. We know this genre, which does not free us from the hardships of our times so much as look away from them, no matter how amusing these films can sometimes be. The genre of historical dramas is also being enriched by the sound film Yorck (with Werner Krauß), and Film-Kurier is even pushing a comparison with Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci [The Flute Concert of Sanssouci],4 which achieved “an incomparable series of successes.” Otherwise, the Film-Kurier has nothing to report about this Fridericus Rex brand. The Kulturfi lms and educational fi lms are also traversing well-trodden paths. Geflügeltes Wild [Winged game], Von Ibissen und Reihern [About ibises and herons], Beim Tierdoktor [At the veterinarian’s], Aus der Kinderstube des Zoos [From the zoo nursery], Geheimes Leben in Teichen und Seen [Secret life in ponds and lakes], Was da kreucht und fleucht [Creatures that crawl and fly]: these are a few of the titles. If it continues like this, soon the entire animal kingdom will be exhausted. Perhaps it is not entirely worthless for us all to become great zoologists, but it would indisputably be more important to increase our knowledge of human conditions and connections. I could offer the producers of Kulturfilms some suggestions for subjects that would not even be very expensive to film. It goes without saying that the darling little ones have not been forgotten, and one Kulturfilm is actually called Babies sehen dich an [Babies looking at you]. The great expectations attached to the forthcoming Ufa productions are explained in the Film-Kurier as follows: “Certainly the funds available for entertainment have become more limited. But in times of spirit-crushing exigency, demands arise not only for bread and work, but also for distraction, and it will also be this way in the future.” These sentences accurately express the spirit of the Ufa program. Certainly, one cannot object to people making films that give destitute audiences the distraction they long for; it only remains to ask if crushed spirits demand distraction alone. It seems to me that this is the basic error of the new production slate. From the audience’s destitution it makes a virtue of distraction, thereby completely forgetting the public’s need for enlightenment. The fact that this need exists has been sufficiently and clearly demonstrated by, among other things, the demand for so-called contemporary dramas [Zeitstücken]. If Ufa believes that it should eschew, within the scope of its massive production, current films that really touch on the vital interests of the downtrodden masses, it thus demonstrates a one-sidedness that simply cannot be tolerated. Distraction is pleasant and perhaps useful as well, but if it becomes a leitmotif and completely pushes aside genuine education, its good sense is perverted. In cheering up crushed spirits, it only fogs them in more densely, and the relaxation that it provides to the public leads simultaneously to blindness. Precisely because Ufa attaches importance to a diverse program, it should have the double obligation to offer not only distraction but also films that give the masses information about the conditions of their existence and that make them a little bit more insightful. For the people who demand bread and work wish not simply to distract themselves every evening but also to find out what is happening around them and to learn how they can seize control of their lives. Do not tell me that I am demanding too much. The American film industry, not to mention the Russians, has occasionally brought us films that really engage with our existence. I am thinking of works like The Godless Girl, The Crowd, Lonesome,5 and so on. Why doesn’t Ufa venture to take up similar material? Why does it always withhold films that touch on contemporary German life? Why does it always only seek the sole outlet of distraction?

Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars

349

Notes 1. Frank worked as a screenwriter for the Ufa production Der Sieger (The victor, 1932), and Kästner for Das Ekel (The scoundrel, 1931), Dann schon lieber Lebertran (I’d rather have cod liver oil, 1931), and Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the detectives, 1931; based on his 1929 novel). 2. In this article, Kracauer references or quotes from the article “Die Produktion der Ufa 1931–1932,” Film-Kurier, no. 161 (July 13, 1931), 3. 3. A likely reference to Gustav Ucicky’s Mensch ohne Namen (Man without a name, 1932). 4. Both historical films were directed by Gustav Ucicky. Kracauer had reviewed The Flute Concert of Sanssouci in the Frank furter Zeitung on December 23, 1930, and he would review Yorck in the JanuaryFebruary 1932 double issue of Kunst und Künstler. 5. Kracauer had reviewed Cecil B. DeMille’s The Godless Girl (1928) in the Frank furter Zeitung on November 28, 1928, and Paul Fejös’s Lonesome (1928) in the same newspaper on April 9, 1929.

157 ANONYMOUS In the Empire of Film First published as “Im Reiche des Films,” in Josetti Film Album, no. 1 (Berlin: Josetti Zigarettenfabrik, 1931), n.p. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

This is the introduction to a “film photo album,” a marketing genre conducted in collaboration with cigarette companies (here Josetti) that emerged during the late years of the Weimar Republic and remained popular throughout the Third Reich. The principle was simple: each pack of cigarettes contained one star portrait, and it was up to consumers to collect all photographs to paste into the album, which was available from the company for free. This is one of the many anonymous texts at the time that not only offer a snapshot of international film marketing tactics but also refl ect on the affective potential of stars for millions of moviegoers.

Film! A generation ago this was only a word, which sounded like it belonged in pharmacies or laboratories and meant very little to most people. At the turn of the century, the dictionary defi nition of film was most likely to be “a thin membrane.” But one day, it occurred to us to cast the light-sensitive layer of a photographic plate onto a celluloid strip instead of a pane of glass; that was the genesis of the great global power “film,” which now stands on par with its older and more serious sister, “the press.” Today, the original meaning of that small word is nearly forgotten. “Film” has become a concept that enriches people’s everyday lives, allowing the work-weary to witness all the colorful events in the world. It has brought something new and unheard-of to the static tranquility of our grandparents’ calendars and almanacs: movement! That was the beginning of silent film. In a tumultuous evolution, it freed itself from its dependency on the theater and found its own dramatic form. Liberated from the limitations of the book- and newspaper-bound word, it leapt over the borders of nations and continents: what happened in Europe or America one day could be seen and understood by everyone in Africa or Asia a few weeks later, but the filmmaker’s creation raced around the globe in short order. Actors gained recognition in the farthest-flung circles, and the enthusiastic adoration that might have greeted the great figures of the stage in a city or a country soon spread throughout the world for popular film stars. Millions knew Asta Nielsen, Pola Negri, Fern Andra—people in all countries dreamt of their smiles and their tears. And then came the sound film, that incredible miracle of technology! Less than fifty years ago, at

350

Film Culture and Politics

a solemn session of the French Academy of Sciences, people said that it was presumptuous to believe that a miserable bit of metal could ever imitate the majestic sound of the human voice! And today? The chirping of a cricket, the thundering of motors, the softest quaver in the voice of a divine singer—every sound is picked up by the inconspicuous microphone, conducted through wires and bulbs, transformed into oscillating light and attached to the filmstrip. It rests there until the projection lamp’s biting flame brings it to life, and it wells up, clear and natural, behind the mute canvas! A nearly unfathomable victory of human ingenuity over the bodiless ghostly light of sound! With surprising rapidity, sound film transcended the inevitable imitation of live theater and found its own form. But only a few people imagine the enormous amount of work that goes into fabricating such a filmstrip. Starting with the writer, who must take all possibilities (and impossibilities) into account while writing the screenplay, up through the little-known man who cuts and pieces together hundreds upon hundreds of individual strips—with image and sound separate!—so that later, they may play as a complete whole. They all work with one unified goal: to complete one large, clear mosaic from thousands of little pebbles that seem to have been tossed together at random. Most especially, the actors must be animated by a single will. They do not have the incentive enjoyed by stage actors: the great, dark, feverish masses in the auditorium, who instantaneously accompany their every sentiment, who allow themselves to be swept away and pull the actors with them. In the merciless glare of floodlights, with only the cold eye of the camera for an audience, film actors must pour joy and pain and rage and grief into the screenwriter’s figures— and the omnipresent microphone registers every sound, every vocal vibration. Moreover, in the case of fi lm, the celebration that follows only a few seconds after a theatrical premiere comes days or weeks after shooting—but the mouths must retain their same smiles, the voices their identical allure; for fi lm does not account for time, only for meters! Millions know the famous names—white, yellow, brown, and black people see their shapes and hear their voices; but the impression gathered in an evening hour leaves behind only a memory. With these photos of the most popular stars of our time, we hope to have created a collection that, like notes in a travel diary, will help our smoking friends to remember unforgettable hours spent before the silver screen.

ELEVEN

THE MOBILIZATION OF THE MASSES

158 BÉLA BALÁZS The Revolutionary Film First published as “Der revolutionäre Film,” in Die Rote Fahne, no. 449 (October 10, 1922). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Although the mainstream film industry had consolidated its power by 1920 (see chapter 9) and mostly stayed away from overt politics, the idea of a nonbourgeois, revolutionary cinema by the masses and for the masses was kept alive among left-leaning intellectuals throughout the Weimar era. However, the exorbitant costs associated with feature film production meant that power remained in the hands of the big studios, which were run like industrial conglomerates. There were signs of hope for a politically engaged cinema when Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) became an unprecedented popular success in Germany in 1926, followed by a large number of Russian imports (including films by Dziga Vertov and Alexander Dovzhenko). The promise of a political cinema—vigorously advocated by workers’ film journals and film societies such as the Volksverband für Filmkunst (People’s Association for Film Art) in the late 1920s— nonetheless went largely unfulfilled. Béla Balázs wrote the following article, one of his first contributions to film theory, while living in “Red Vienna,” where he had emigrated following the collapse of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. His meditation on the possibilities and difficulties of a revolutionary cinema under conditions of capitalism responded to an article in Die Rote Fahne from a week prior and was followed by a response on November 13, 1922, that took issue with his optimistic views. Founded by the communist Spartakusbund in November 1918 as a daily paper for the revolutionary proletariat, Die Rote Fahne also featured movie reviews and essays about film’s potential uses for the working class.

Comrade Stephan recently wrote a piece for the Rote Fahne on the Volks-Film-Bühne [People’s Film Theater],1 subjecting it to a sharp and completely justified critique. The essential idea behind these intelligent lines was that the products of capitalist film companies are, necessarily and in every case, useless for the goals of the revolutionary proletariat, even if they romantically and sentimentally take pity on exploited poor people. Consequently, no “selection” of existing bourgeois films can suffice for the Volks-FilmBühne, because there is nothing there to select from in the first place. In this essay, someone “from the film world” can confirm Comrade Stephan’s argument.

351

352

Film Culture and Politics

On the other hand, it is clearly high time and urgently necessary to make films that represent the sensibility and worldview of the revolutionary proletariat. It is almost infuriating how broadly and deeply the cinema influences and confuses proletarian audiences. We cannot blame them. After all, the cinema is their only opportunity for distraction, and the suggestive power of sophisticated art is nearly uncontrollable. At the same time, on account of their origin, these bourgeois films are no longer unconsciously and naïvely capitalistic. In large part, they are now consciously used as propaganda tools in the hands of antirevolutionary capitalism. They no longer even disguise themselves. In today’s films, it is almost as common to see the revolutionary or the communist depicted as a “bad apple,” an arch villain, like apaches, for example, or detectives. Not to mention the hundreds of films explicitly written as propaganda against communist Russia. There is only one defense against this: to enlist film’s enormous power of agitation for our own cause as well. Attempts to do this with a “selection” of extant films are senseless and hopeless. We must build our own film studios, which will make our films. And they will do more than simply illustrate scholarly, sociological presentations. We can use them to draw the tired proletariat, hungry for distraction, out from under the spell of the bourgeois spectacle films. Our films would have to be at least as interesting and exciting as these. First and foremost, they must be inspiring! They must awaken class consciousness and the desire to struggle! And now one more remark on Comrade Stephan’s critique. “The proletarian film must,” he writes, “present the conflicts (between individual persons) as class conflicts.” That is correct. But if we wish to provide not only educationally illustrated, Marxist essay films but also warm-blooded life, interesting and suggestively formed, our films must present events and visually rich personal stories. Otherwise, they will lose precisely that seductive magic of the fable that we want to use, just as the capitalist film misuses it. Of course, this absolutely does not have to mean a cult of individualism. The image of these personal stories can show precisely the absolute social determination of individuals, and the intentional self-subordination of class-conscious, revolutionary workers to the general interests of the Party and, with it, the working class. We must create our own film companies! This is absolutely necessary! And there is hardly a company today whose success seems so certain. Not only moral, but also financial success. The money we would spend on this would surely yield rich interest. Not only because no private person would reap enormous profits from this enterprise, not only because a ready audience, the international proletariat, has long awaited these films, but first and foremost, because these films, in accordance with their natural material, would of necessity be much more interesting, colorful, and excitingly adventurous than the bourgeoisie’s insipid penny-dreadfuls. From the point of view of film alone, with regard to its craft, the history of proletarian revolutions, of the illegal, underground struggle of the revolution, and of the incomparable pathos of proletarian “heroes” offers such an inexhaustible and untapped trove of effective film subjects that I have always been astonished that capitalist film companies do not take advantage of it. It can be explained only by their unswerving class instinct, which in this case has not even deviated for a surefire profit opportunity. Not only the Paris Commune, not only the novels of Upton Sinclair and other authors!2 There is the entire fantastic-adventurous prehistory of the Russian Revolution and the memoirs that touch upon it. We already have a wealth of heroic legends in Spartacus’s rebellion, in the Finnish revolutionary struggle, and in the dictatorships of Munich and Hungary. The tempestuous movement, the monumental visuals, the surprising entanglement of these events (and on top of that, the fresh novelty of the object) exceed anything that the bourgeois fi lm can show in its detective stories, royal dramas, Indian hunts, and Oriental fables. First and foremost, however, the highest artistic potential can be created only through the absolute seriousness of the right attitude.

The Mobilization of the Masses

353

We must found our own film companies. This most urgent and effective counterstrike against bourgeois agitation does not even require sacrifice. It only requires sufficient funds to get started. Then we need a few writers and directors who possess not only communist sentiments but also good film skills, who are familiar with more intimate revolutionary history, and who have seen the forms of the movement with their own eyes. This company must succeed and would quickly yield incalculable significance for us. Notes 1. Representing the Kommunistische Jugend (Communist Youth), Stephan published an article, “Volks-Film-Bühne,” in Die Rote Fahne, no. 438 (October 3, 1922), in which he argued for films that “show the suffering and struggle of the proletariat.” The Volks-Film-Bühne was founded in 1922 by the Social Democrats and trade unions in the tradition of the well-established Volksbühne (People’s Theater), which had made classical theater available to the working class beginning in the 1890s. Such “bourgeois” endeavors that ignored the class struggle were anathema to the communist left associated with the Rote Fahne. 2. This is a reference to Stephan’s proposal from the article cited in note 1.

159 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER The Klieg Lights Stay On: The Frankfurt Screening of Potemkin First published as “Die Jupiterlampen brennen weiter: Zur Frankfurter Aufführung des Potemkin-Films,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (May 16, 1926). Translated by Miriam Bratu Hansen.

The German release of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was enshrouded in controversy and public debate. The film was first banned by Berlin’s Film Censorship Office on March 24, 1926, then shortened, and finally approved (for adults only) by the Central Censorship Board on April 10, 1926. The Central Censorship Board reversed its decision on July 12, 1926, however, with the argument that the film undermined the principle of authority in the military and thus endangered public safety. The film finally passed the board in another revised version (again with an age restriction) on October 2, 1926. In this essay, published on the occasion of Potemkin’s screening in Frankfurt, Siegfried Kracauer celebrates the fi lm for its truth-value, characterizing Eisenstein as “the first to have used cinematic means to represent a reality.”

This film distinguishes itself from the hosts of American and European productions— not by its greater art of direction, though that as well, not by the more meticulous use of the possibilities of film technology and the more powerful mobilization of the masses. There is something else that separates the film from the world production, something fundamentally different. It has pierced a wall beyond which these films never venture. It takes on a subject that is real; it refers to a truth that should matter. The rest of the films, often delightful and individually here and there humane—in one point they all timidly stop short and withdraw into emptiness. The instinct of the social class that gives birth to the glorifications of Fridericus Rex prohibits,1 in Europe as well as America, any overly glaring exposure of the critical facts that still determine our so-called social life. Anything but that. The screen might propagate emotions that are troublesome. The klieg lights in whose glamour some of the elevated down-and-out Zille types are still allowed to bask are turned off in time.2 One stays on this side of the wall, represses the only

354

Film Culture and Politics

content that would matter by way of historical costume dramas, private psychological or high-life bagatelles, and even the ultimately formally irrelevant slapstick comedies. This film does not repress anything. It allows—what miracle!—the klieg lights to keep focusing on the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressors. It shows a moment of revolution. The wall is perforated; a true content emerges. The Central Censorship Board has allowed the film to pass; it was allowed to do so because the film does not pursue immediate political goals. With an unprecedented sense for signs and effects, the film chooses the moment at which the revolution gathers from its real beginning to its dreamlike ending. A moment before the victory of the revolution, from the time of subversive foment and desperate protest during which the truth can still strike like a flash of lightning. 1905: The sailors mutiny on board the battleship Potemkin cruising before Odessa. The reason is at once minor and entirely major: rotten meat. The people of Odessa fraternize with the sailors on the cruiser—it is really the people who are agitated, who are stirring. On the other side, the blind violence of the Cossacks, the admiral’s squadron. The situation is so simple: a child will understand that justice stands against injustice, that the enslaved defend themselves against their harassers. But how does this struggle end, which ends happily only in a fairy tale? The film ends on the right note, which awakens an inkling of what the right ending would be. The sailors, ready to offer the approaching squadron a final, hopeless effort of resistance, raise the signal: “Side with us!” There is a response: the word Brothers emerges marvelously. Here the film breaks off; it has to break off here. Enough that the curtain was lifted once. When fully raised, the curtain never reveals what is sought after. Unlike films from the West, this film does not create suspense through sensations behind which boredom stretches. It is the cause itself that creates suspense, for it is genuine.3 The director’s name is Eisenstein. Mr. Eisenstein may be the first to have used cinematic means to represent a reality. He sticks to the surface, which is turned toward the cranking camera. He does not illustrate texts; rather, he confines himself to stringing together optical impressions. But who is doing the associating here? An imagination [Phantasie] filled with indignation, terror, and hope that revolves around a goal and is certain about things it knows. It perceives the mechanical movements of the Cossacks’ legs and flies over the faces of the crowd to rest on a baby carriage. In its eyes, the people of Odessa and the large staircase are fused into an inseparable unity, and the throng of human beings on the pier seems never-ending. Stirred by the cause, this imagination jumbles the sailors’ bodies around, glimpses human shadows through iron grids, stretches the shiny cannons across the sea. With rebellious haste it leaps from the lorgnette, the embodiment of reviled power, to the giant tower. Parts of things are as important to it as the mutineers because mutiny also resides in things. Only in nature, perhaps, is there a brief respite: segments of the shore unveil themselves in gentle intermediate tones, white sails are passing. The director’s name is Eisenstein. The performers from the Moscow Artists Theater remain anonymous; one does not have to recognize them. They have faces; they are human beings. They not only perform; they also believe in what they perform, but in addition they also act. It is not the case that only the cause and its cinematic organization excite us. Something else emerges, an unusual phenomenon: the matter-of-course interaction between human beings and technology. With us, those spheres seem separate. Where we engage in “interiority,” anything having to do with machines meets with contempt. Where technology is the thing, spiritual matters are not exactly a concern. Cars travel through geographical space; the soul is cultivated in the good parlor. This film does not know such segregation. While the crew operates among inextricable pipes and levers, the crowd prays before the dead sailor’s tent. There is no gap between expressions of reverence and the application of technological skills. The people, who have the right relationship with the right cause, do not hesitate to put things in their proper

The Mobilization of the Masses

355

place. At least in this one productive moment in which they, as actors, present themselves here. An unusual phenomenon. The film is now being shown in German cities, in which there is still a kind of theater being performed that no longer has anything to do with us; that goes as well for the picture palaces. Will the viewers notice how the film differs from the Fridericus Rex films, the psychological interiors, and the pretty diversions? Will they recognize the conditions with which this art is tied up? With such recognition, the klieg lights could be staying on. Notes 1. Fridericus Rex is a series of patriotic and monarchical films about the life of the eighteenth-century emperor Frederick the Great (Friedrich II). Kracauer had reviewed parts 1 (Sturm und Drang) and 2 (Vater und Sohn) in the Frank furter Zeitung on May 25 and June 1, 1924, and he would later review Der alte Fritz (in FZ, December 24, 1927) and Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci (in FZ, December 23, 1930). 2. “Zille types” are the working-class Berliners that populate Heinrich Zille’s humorous drawings. 3. This following passage was deleted from the proofs: “The film’s art is related to this cause. An action that has a meaningful beginning and a meaningful end takes an irrefutable, final shape in the film. A formal-aesthetic approach might dismiss this work as ‘tendentious art.’ But the propagandistic services that the film fortunately does render are not of an extra-artistic kind; rather, they warrant the authenticity of the cause, without which the artistic would remain mere semblance [Schein].” (Kracauer, Werke, vol. 6, part 1, p. 237. This reprint includes further discrepancies between Kracauer’s proofs and the printed version.)

160 OSCAR A. H. SCHMITZ Potemkin and Tendentious Art First published as “Potemkinfilm und Tendenzkunst,” in Die literarische Welt (March 11, 1927), 7. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

An essayist, playwright, and member of the Munich Bohème at the turn of the century, Oscar A. H. Schmitz (1873–1931) was an important fi gure in German fantastic literature. He dabbled in psychoanalysis, occultism, and esotericism and also authored Der Geist der Astrologie (The spirit of astrology, 1922) and the novel Bürgerliche Bohème (Bourgeois Bohème, 1925). In the following article, Schmitz questions characterizations of Potemkin as a work of art, arguing that the film’s collective subjects and caricatured bourgeois types lack the individualized, “differentiated humanity from which art grows.” His text and the following response by Walter Benjamin (no. 161) appeared in Die literarische Welt under the heading “A discussion about Russian film art and collectivist art in general.”

I will waste no words on our public prosecutors’ and police’s ongoing heavy-handedness in all areas where the arts overlap with political or moralistic interests, but the “cultural disgrace” of the ban on Potemkin,1 for example, is no greater than the erroneous belief among some leading journalists that this bureaucratic blunder will prevent the German people from enjoying a great work of art. Preventing the pendulum from thus swinging too far in the opposite direction is grounds enough to quickly release the film. I saw the film in Austria. Because the same misconception that elevates Potemkin to a work of art can also explain the miserable state of our postwar literature, I would like to try to refute

356

Film Culture and Politics

it in this context. Right from the start, the audience learns from a few sentences projected on the screen that this is not an individual but rather a collective work. With that, this film, however technically accomplished it might be, is banished from the realm not only of art but also of true human interest, for collective processes are subject to a mechanical causality that can be foreseen. What are not foreseeable, and therefore artistically important and gripping on a human level, are individual matters, the inherently predictable, collective series of events that constantly threaten at any moment to suddenly send any one of us down a harrowing path. If we take a severely constrained group of people and present them with the choice between starving or eating rotting flesh for a certain amount of time—this is the plot of Potemkin— regardless of what kind of individuals make up the group, even if it includes such splendid exemplars as you and me, dear reader, once enough time has passed, pushed to the end of their rope by hunger and rage, they will inevitably fall upon their superiors, try to kill them and thereby bring this unbearable situation to an end, no matter what circumstances might follow. This is as uninteresting as the fact that any person, regardless of social standing, will show signs of extreme suffering if his leg is cut off without anesthetics. Certainly there are countless people who would love to watch something like that, but to confuse their excitement with artistic emotion would be to make the same mistake as those critics who see Potemkin as a work of art. Precisely the human, and thereby artistic, elements are fundamentally suppressed in this film; this cannot but disturb unbiased spectators. This is not even considering the possibility that on top of everything else, the story could be distorted—this is certainly a reasonable suspicion, as a tendentious work is not required to be seen as truthful—but even if everything happened as it is represented in this film, the only human and artistically important question is how is it individually possible that the captain, officers, and ship’s doctor could be such monsters? What was going on inside of them during these events? Without this explanation, the whole thing is implausible, even if it actually happened that way. The explanation is very simple for Bolshevists. These superiors were “bourgeois,” and everybody knows what that means: sadistic oppressors of the people, against whom feeding their subordinates rotting meat is only one strike among many. This stereotypical and prejudiced (i.e., unindividual) perception of entire classes, professions, and stages of life is the primitive opposite of that differentiated humanity from which art grows, and it must be said that in our postwar literature, the examples of this humanity are few and far between.2 [. . .] There is absolutely no doubt that the bourgeois form of life to which we have been accustomed has become completely sterile, but salvation is not to be found in a new collective lifestyle, like the Marxist or völkisch model, but rather in individual humanity, which has been lost to the bourgeoisie but can ultimately be found again only by its own sons and daughters. Notes 1. For more on the censorship battles over Potemkin in Berlin, see Siegfried Kracauer’s text, no. 159. 2. In the following passages, Schmitz uses John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, and Jakob Wassermann’s Laudin und die Seinen as such examples.

161 WALTER BENJAMIN Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz First published as “Erwiderung an Oscar A. H. Schmitz,” in Die literarische Welt (March 11, 1927), 7–8. Reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 16–19. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

The Mobilization of the Masses

357

Appearing in the same issue of Die literarische Welt as the prior text, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) responds to both Schmitz’s charge of tendentious art and his complaint that Potemkin’s characters are insufficiently individualized. Addressing the broader relation between art, consciousness, politics, and technical revolution, Benjamin’s text also anticipates arguments from his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Benjamin wrote this response to Schmitz during a twomonth stay in Moscow, where he had immersed himself in Soviet culture with the help of his paramour Asja La ¯cis and her companion Bernhard Reich. According to Benjamin’s posthumously published Moscow Diary, he watched, with the help of a translator, Eisenstein’s Potemkin, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), and Yakov Protazanov’s The Three Million Trial (1926) in succession at the Gos cinema in Moscow on January 24, 1927.

There are replies that come close to being an act of impoliteness toward the public. Shouldn’t we simply allow our readers to make up their own minds about a lame argument full of clumsy concepts? In this instance, they would not even need to have seen Battleship Potemkin. Any more than Schmitz did. For whatever he knows about the film he could have gleaned from the first newspaper notice that came to hand. But that is what characterizes the cultural philistine: others read the notice and think themselves duly warned; he, however, has to “form his own opinion.” He goes to see the film and imagines that he is in a position to translate his embarrassment into objective knowledge. This is a delusion. Battleship Potemkin can be objectively discussed either as film or from a political point of view. Schmitz does neither. He talks about his recent reading. Unsurprisingly, this leads him nowhere. To take this rigorous depiction of a class movement that has been wholly shaped according to the principles of the film medium and try to see how it measures up to bourgeois novels of society betrays an ingenuousness that is quite disarming. The same cannot quite be said of his onslaught on tendentious art. Here, where he marshals some heavy artillery from the arsenal of bourgeois aesthetics, plain speaking would be more appropriate. We may well ask why he makes such a fuss about the political deflowering of art, while faithfully tracking down all the sublimations, libidinous vestiges, and complexes through two thousand years of artistic production. How long is art supposed to act the well-brought-up young lady who knows her way around all the places of ill-repute yet wouldn’t dream of asking about politics? But it’s no use: she has always dreamed about it. It is a truism that political tendencies are implicit in every work of art, every artistic epoch—since, after all, they are historical configurations of consciousness. But just as deeper rock strata emerge only where the rock is fissured, the deep formation of “political tendency” likewise reveals itself only in the fissures of art history (and works of art). The technical revolutions are the fracture points of artistic development; it is there that the different political tendencies may be said to come to the surface. In every new technical revolution the political tendency is transformed, as if by its own volition, from a concealed element of art into a manifest one. And this brings us at long last to the film. Among the points of fracture in artistic formations, film is one of the most dramatic. We may truly say that with film a new realm of consciousness comes into being. To put it in a nutshell, film is the prism in which the spaces of the immediate environment—the spaces in which people live, pursue their vocations, and enjoy their leisure—are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way. In themselves these offices, furnished rooms, saloons, big-city streets, stations, and factories are ugly, incomprehensible, and hopelessly sad. Or rather, they were and seemed to be, until the advent of film. The cinema then exploded this entire prison-world with the dynamite of

358

Film Culture and Politics

its fractions of a second, so that now we can take extended journeys of adventure between their widely scattered ruins. The vicinity of a house, of a room, can include dozens of the most unexpected stations, and the most astonishing station names. It is not so much the constant stream of images as the sudden change of place that overcomes a milieu that has resisted every other attempt to unlock its secret, and succeeds in extracting from a pettybourgeois dwelling the same beauty we admire in an Alfa Romeo. And so far, so good. Difficulties emerge only with the “plot.” The question of a meaningful fi lm plot is as rarely solved as the abstract formal problems that have arisen from the new technology. And this proves one thing beyond all others: the vital, fundamental advances in art are a matter neither of new content nor of new forms—the technological revolution takes precedence over both. But it is no accident that in film this revolution has not been able to discover either a form or a content appropriate to it. For it turns out that with the untendentious play of forms and the untendentious play of the plot, the problem can be resolved only on a case-by-case basis. The superiority of the cinema of the Russian Revolution, like that of the American slapstick comedy, is grounded on the fact that in their different ways they are both based on tendencies to which they constantly recur. For the slapstick comedy is tendentious too, in a less obvious way. Its target is technology. This kind of film is comic, but only in the sense that the laughter it provokes hovers over an abyss of horror. The obverse of a ludicrously liberated technology is the lethal power of naval squadrons on maneuver, as we see it openly displayed in Potemkin. The international bourgeois film, on the other hand, has not been able to discover a consistent ideological formula. This is one of the causes of its recurrent crises. For the complicity of film technique with the milieu that essentially constitutes a standing rebuke to it is incompatible with the glorification of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is the hero of those spaces that give rise to the adventures to which the bourgeois abandons himself in the movies with beating heart, because he feels constrained to enjoy “beauty” even where it speaks of the annihilation of his own class. The proletariat, however, is a collective, just as these spaces are collective spaces. And only here, in the human collective, can the film complete the prismatic work that it began by acting on that milieu. The epoch-making impact of Potemkin can be explained by the fact that it made this clear for the first time. Here, for the first time, a mass movement acquires the wholly architectonic and by no means monumental (i.e., Ufa) quality that justifies its inclusion in film. No other medium could reproduce this collective in motion. No other could convey such beauty or the currents of horror and panic it contains. Ever since Potemkin, such scenes have become the undying possession of Russian fi lm art. What began with the bombardment of Odessa in Potemkin continues in the more recent fi lm Mother with the pogrom against factory workers, in which the suffering of the urban masses is engraved in the asphalt of the street like running script. Potemkin was made systematically in a collective spirit. The leader of the mutiny, Lieutenant Commander Schmidt, one of the legendary figures of revolutionary Russia, does not appear in the film. That may be seen as a “falsification of history,” although it has nothing to do with the estimation of his achievements. Furthermore, why the actions of a collective should be deemed unfree, while those of the individual are free—this abstruse variant of determinism remains as incomprehensible in itself as in its meaning for the debate. It is evident that the character of the opponents must be made to match that of the rebellious masses. It would have been senseless to depict them as differentiated individuals. The ship’s doctor, the captain, and so on had to be types. Bourgeois types—this is a concept Schmitz will have nothing to do with. So let us call them sadistic types who have been summoned to the apex of power by an evil, dangerous apparatus. Of course, this brings us face to

The Mobilization of the Masses

359

face with a political formulation. An outcome that is unavoidable because it is true. There is nothing feebler than all the talk of “individual cases.” The individual may be an individual case—but the uninhibited effects of his diabolical behavior are something else; they lie in the nature of the imperialist state and—within limits—the state as such. It is well known that many facts gain their meaning, their relief, only when they are put in context. These are the facts with which the field of statistics concerns itself. If a Mr. X happens to take his own life in March, this may be a supremely unimportant fact in itself. But it becomes quite interesting if we learn that suicides reach their annual peak during that month. In the same way, the sadistic acts of the ship’s doctor may be isolated incidents in his life, the result of a poor night’s sleep, or a reaction to his discovery that his breakfast egg is rotten. They become interesting only if we establish a relationship between the medical profession and the state. During the last years of the Great War, there was more than one highly competent study of this topic, and we can only feel sorry for the wretched little sadist of Potemkin when we compare his actions and his just punishment with the murderous services performed—unpunished—a few years ago by thousands of his colleagues on the sick and crippled at the behest of the general staff. Potemkin is a great film, a rare achievement. To protest against it calls for the courage born of desperation. There is plenty of bad tendentious art, including bad socialist tendentious art. Such works are determined by their effects; they work with tired reflexes and depend on stereotyping. This film, however, has solid concrete foundations ideologically; the details have been worked out precisely, like the span of a bridge. The more violent the blows that rain down upon it, the more beautifully it resounds. Only if you touch it with kid gloves do you hear and move nothing.

162 LOTTE H. EISNER The New Youth and Film First published as “Die neue Jugend und der Film,” in Film-Kurier (January 1, 1928). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Working for the liberal Film-Kurier between 1927 and 1933, Lotte Eisner published film reviews and articles as well as occasional interviews with artists (see her text on Laban, no. 58) or the public, as in this text. The editors introduced her interview with members of the young proletariat as follows: “Film-Kurier plans to survey all youth organizations in Germany about their opinions on film. We are starting on ‘the Left.’ ” In 1933, Eisner emigrated to France, where she would write influential books on expressionist cinema, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang; she also served as chief archivist at the Cinémathèque Française.

Young people from the red Sprechchor.1 One of them toils in a factory for 32 marks a week and wants to become an actor. The others aren’t much better off. But all of them believe in the future. It is understandable that we are finally asking these young people about the future of film. What will happen? And what must occur? They want to talk. But they quickly remember their party’s watchwords. They become suspicious. They believe that as long as censorship and capitalism prevail, they have nothing to expect from film, and nothing to say in its favor. Nevertheless, you ask them to say something positive, to assume hypothetically that censorship and capitalism was not keeping them from carrying out their ideas.

360

Film Culture and Politics

But these people are too aware of today’s cruelty to envision a hypothetical tomorrow. If you finally move them to speak, you understand: for them, film is just a propaganda tool, not the expression of a new art. Any approach bordering on l’art pour l’art must seem snobby to them. And any artistic will [Kunstwollen] is just such an approach. “And Russian film?” you ask them. “Overseas,” they answer, “they have achieved what we are fighting for. Russia’s films have no need to be pure tendentious films. Their message is implicit, since it has been transformed into sociological terms. “Do you realize that this is why Potemkin and Mother—two Russian tendentious films—were more effective here than in Russia, where those struggles have long been overcome? But that Polikushka and The Stationmaster are better understood in Russia than here?2 Because the Russians could sense sociological evolution, immanent revolutionary events, while we at best saw a great film. “And our films? We must do away with film’s false ‘happy ending’3 and show life as it really is. A Zille film,4 where the hero gets out of jail and leaves a prototypical factory job to don a smoking jacket and marry the owner’s daughter—all by virtue of correctly repairing a machine—will seem downright ridiculous to us. What does reality look like? In real life, a man like that would go back to jail. Or in any case, die by the side of the road. “A film like Toller’s play Hoppla, wir leben! (Hoppla, we’re alive!)?5 It should be called Hoppla, We’re Dead. There are too many distortions and misunderstandings, as well. A comrade who cannot cope with life, who goes crazy, does more damage to our cause than a supposed comrade who weasels his way into the prime minister’s seat. “What do we want? We want to see someone film an individual fate, without ‘literature.’ A day in the life of a laborer in all its pathetic monotony. “Or, like the Russians, the fate of the masses. Reymont’s Polish peasants. The era of Wilhelm II—as a parallel to October. Or, to be historical, the reaction in 1851, or the Metternich Era in 1815.6 “We want to see the Arbeiter-Illustrierte [Workers’ illustrated paper] as a newsreel. For once, it would be a change from jubilees and sports festivals. “We want to see life depicted in its contrasts. In juxtapositions that make it clear even to the dullest viewer what the real story is: one image would show hungry children at the bakery window, the next one a chambermaid coifing the Bolognese puppies of the aristocratic class. “What do we think of a ‘Volksfilmbühne’ [People’s film theater]? With the way things currently stand, we view all these efforts with suspicion. These things usually end with the bourgeoisie. “Development has to start with us. Our artistic expressions cannot be separated from our politics. “You ask whether there are screenwriters among us? “If it weren’t for censorship, Becher, Kurt Kläber,7 and a few others like them would be able to write the proper film scripts for us. But until then, what is the use of making plans for the future? We must tear down before we can build up. “Only then will we have what we really want: proletarian film with an implicit, rather than explicit, message, and proletarian fi lm comedy, which, free of resentment, can be only proletarian comedy.” Notes 1. Common within amateur workers’ theater, the Sprechchor (speaking chorus) was a theatrical form in which multiple speakers recited the same text. The Communist Party founded its own Sprechchor in 1922, later merging with the Proletarian Traveling Theater and directed by Gustav von Wangenheim.

The Mobilization of the Masses

361

2. Aleksandr Sanin’s Polikushka (1922) and Ivan Moskvin and Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky’s The Stationmaster (1925) were Russian films shown in Germany. 3. The phrase appears in English in the original text. 4. “Zille films” refers to films that deal with the dismal social conditions of Berlin’s working class. Gerhard Lamprecht’s Die Verrufenen (Slums of Berlin, 1925) was based on Zille’s characters and stories, as was Piel Jutzi’s later Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause’s journey to happiness, 1929). 5. Toller’s proletarian drama Hoppla, wir leben! was staged by Erwin Piscator in a famous production in 1927 that included film projections. 6. The sentence refers to, in sequence, the Polish writer and 1924 Nobel Prize–winner Władysław Reymont, best known for his four-volume novel The Peasants (1904–09); Wilhelm II, German emperor between 1888 and 1918; Eisenstein’s film October (1928), which depicted the 1917 October Revolution; Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état that ended the French Second Republic; and, finally, the thirty-three-year period following the Napoleonic Wars, 1815–1848, named after Prince Klemens von Metternich. 7. Johannes R. Becher was an expressionist poet and later an active communist writer whose antiwar novel on poison gas (Levisite oder Der einzig gerechte Krieg) led to his indictment for “literary treason” in 1926. Like Becher, Kurt Kläber (a.k.a. Kurt Held) was an editor of Die Linkskurve (1929–32).

163 FRANZ HÖLLERING Film und Volk: Foreword First published as “Vorwort,” in Film und Volk: Zeitschrift des Volksverbandes für Filmkunst 1 (March 1928), 4. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Film und Volk was the organ of the newly founded Volksverband für Filmkunst, a film society that meant to unite diverse groups on the left (e.g., artists, filmmakers, intellectuals, Social Democrats, Communists) in the service an alternative film community that would oppose commercial cinema. Franz Höllering (1896–1968), the chief editor of the leftwing Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, also served as the editor of Film und Volk, which appeared between March 1928 and March 1930 before merging with the leftist theater journal Arbeiterbühne and becoming the more communist-oriented Arbeiterbühne und Film. On the question of the working class’s relationship to cinema, see also the exchange between P. Max Grempe and Roland in chapter 7, nos. 97 and 98.

The name of this new periodical explains its agenda: Film und Volk. Its contents will consistently offer answers to the great question of our times: how can the people find a film of their own? This will mean supporting the few honest, real films that help the people, shock the people, and amuse the people. It will mean combating all other films, their producers, their screenwriters, their directors, and their well-meaning critics. It will mean awakening the masses to the exploitation that they are subjected to, even in their scant free time, by a film industry that is dominated and financed by their class enemy, which remains as yet practically uncontrolled. Support and combat! But we will not be blind, neither in our love nor in our hate. We understand the economic determinations of all actions. But for precisely this reason, we will demand absolute clarity from all those who concern themselves with film. Either— or! The time for murky dealings has passed. This first issue is a beginning. It was produced in just a few days, commensurate with the development of the Volksverband für Filmkunst whose rapid rise exceeded even the

362

Film Culture and Politics

optimists’ expectations. Not yet complete, it is defining the battlefront. The slogan for the coming issues is “Attack, attack, attack.”

164 BÉLA BALÁZS Film Works for Us! First published as “Der Film arbeitet für uns!,” in Film und Volk: Zeitschrift des Volksverbandes für Filmkunst 1 (March 1928), 6–8. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

This text is based on a lecture, “Wie die Kamera dichtet und lügt” (How the camera invents and lies), that Béla Balázs delivered at the first meeting of the Volksverband für Filmkunst in Berlin on February 26, 1928; it also anticipates the concluding section of his second film-theoretical book, The Spirit of Film (1930). Balázs’s lecture was criticized from all sides: while Die Rote Fahne (February 28, 1928) noted its overly optimistic mode of argumentation, Der Film (March 1, 1928) commented on its strongly negative and tendentious tone. See also Balázs’s earlier views on revolutionary cinema, no. 158.

Let these words be a consolation to us. Film works for us. In spite of everything. Even in the hands of nationalist and imperialist high fi nance, it works against these interests. How hopeless the situation would be if film’s owners were able to use this most powerful propaganda tool however they wanted, as they can with the press. But precisely this most dangerous weapon does not allow itself to be fully tamed by them. The cinematograph revolts through its intrinsic disposition. The spirit of this technology rebels against its creators. It is an exciting and educational spectacle. Film belongs to them. But it belongs to us. It is under their command, but has simultaneously entered into an illegal alliance with us. They make it. But it is destined for us. Film has overcome the curse of the Tower of Babel to create a world Esperanto of gestural language understandable on an international scale. But understanding does not advance nationalism. Understanding works for us. Nonetheless, film is used, wherever possible, for national-imperialist propaganda. But this has its limits. Business interests draw them. For only internationally marketable films are profitable in the long term. In the service of profit, therefore, capital is also forced to produce and distribute “supranational” and even pacifist films, which obviously run counter to its political intentions. The law of the international film market requires generally accessible ideas and emotions. National idiosyncrasies are cheap. Even in the hands of nationalist capital, film ceaselessly develops an international human norm, while also liquidating the physically animalistic alienation between races. Film works for us. Along with these contradictions, which arise from the inner contradictions of capitalism (which has to create some things that are not good for it in the long term), we also find the following: film transgresses not only national limitations but also class and educational limitations. This is likewise for economic reasons. Film, the only art that capitalism ever created on its own, is the only art that—even at its most sophisticated—cannot be made into a cultural privilege of the upper classes. For they also need the people’s pennies. Film must remain a popular art, and in spite of “absolute” efforts,1 it cannot become a secret language of the cultural aristocracy.

The Mobilization of the Masses

363

But all these are not determining factors. For all its internationalism and popularity, in the hands of capitalist imperialists, fi lm can still be an easily manipulatable and reliable poison gas for the mind. Film’s revolutionary unreliability for its owners comes from its position as the art of seeing, which as such resists catchphrases. One can still write about the “heroic deaths” of thousands with suggestive enthusiasm. But when it is shown, fi lmed in unrelenting proximity, it can hardly be used as militaristic propaganda. The revolutionary tendency of film technique comes from this difference between reading and seeing. It exists despite every misuse and despite every violation. Film, the art of seeing, is art against abstraction, which in the spirit of capitalism has made things into wares, values into prices, and people into impersonally itemized workers. Abstraction makes it possible to read a war report of twenty thousand dead over breakfast and still have an appetite. Numbers have no face, no bloody foam on their mouth, and no piercing eyes that stare back at you. But when you have to see all this—not a careful selection, shown casually and from afar, as in our war films, but rather in closeups that confront us with personal reality—then you will lose your appetite, and you will ask, Why? And the answer would have to be shown without catchphrases, in inevitable realities, in order to be convincing. Film is the art of seeing. Its innermost tendency thus pushes for exposure and discovery. It is by nature the art of open eyes. According to its own laws, this photographic art derives its greatest riches from naturalism. But every new naturalism has a revolutionary effect. In the struggle for truth, there is no better weapon than the presentation of reality. It demands a response. In the struggle for humanity, there is no propaganda more convincing than the presentation of man in hardship and distress. The art of seeing is not the art of those who so frequently do not wish to look. It can never fully unfold in the hands of those who have much to hide and gloss over. They are also handicapped as artists because they have placed blinders over the lens and an obscuring veil over the subject. As artists, too, they cannot fully exploit their tools. For they have to dull the weapon before use. Given the same conditions, they will make worse fi lms. That lies in the essence of this art. Is the artistic superiority of Russian film a coincidence? Can it be explained simply by the greater personal talent of its directors? No. There, the art of seeing has free range for full development. There, they can let the camera run free. These directors are allowed to see and want to show. This is precisely on account of politics, which does not stop them from demonstrating every register of their art. Given the same conditions, they will always be able to make better films. The art of seeing is, of course, also the art of optical illusions. And how one can lie with photography! Lying with facts, under pretense of objectivity, is certainly the most dangerous type of lying. For there is nothing more subjective than the lens [das Objektiv]. Every calibration of the device indicates and suggests an inner human attitude. Every view of the world indicates and suggests a worldview. We lie with the camera through true pretenses, by means of selection and arrangement. Do not trust someone else’s eyes! Do not trust film without question. Trust only the camera itself: despite everything, even in the hands of your enemies, it is destined for you. And believe in the film of the future, which—as both art and weapon—will show its full force only once it is in your hands. Note 1. The word “absolute” alludes to the “absolute film” movement; see chapter 14, especially texts by Rudolf Arnheim (no. 205) and Walter Ruttmann (no. 208).

364

Film Culture and Politics

165 HEINRICH MANN Film and the People First published as “Film und Volk,” in Film und Volk: Zeitschrift des Volksverbandes für Filmkunst, no. 2 (April 1928), 4–6. Translated by Don Reneau.

Heinrich Mann’s text is based on the keynote address he delivered at the first meeting of the Volksverband für Filmkunst in Berlin’s Capitol cinema on February 29, 1928. Mann (1871–1950) was the first president of the organization, whose board of directors and artistic committee also included Balázs and Höllering (see their texts, nos. 163, 164) as well as Karl Freund, Käthe Kollwitz, Edmund Meisel, G. W. Pabst, and Erwin Piscator.

Shortly you will see—no, you were supposed to be able to see—a newsreel, the likes of which you have probably rarely seen before. It is conceivable that you have not yet seen anything at all like this—unfortunately—banned newsreel.1 Not that it would have been greater than any newsreel to come before. No, but it would have been less one-sided. The newsreel that you were supposed to see and that, once we have sorted out this matter, you no doubt will see, shows many sides of things, or, at least, shows things from both sides, from the right and the left, which is what makes things interesting in the first place. We could also say that it shows things from the front and the back. How is the world portrayed in an official speech and how does it really look behind the scenes? Or what happens to the left of the honor guards on parade, to the side of the wildly acclaimed exotic subjects or the luxury automobiles on display? Once embarked along this path, one can have some rather peculiar ideas, ideas that are, in fact, the most natural and obvious of all. They are only repressed artificially. The usual newsreels show Indian temples, which, one must admit, have been standing there for a good while now. On the other hand, has anyone already seen the much newer power plant at Rummelsburg?2 Perhaps. But then only, as with the Indian temple, the façade. Rummelsburg all decked out and shining with its significance for the German economy, technology, and international standing. But behind the façade lies the workers’ Rummelsburg; it is time to show this side of Rummelsburg. It is time for the real people to become visible behind and alongside all the parades. Our real work, our real needs, our specific feeling for life, and the cast of mind prevailing in reality could all be expressed in pictures. Not only newsreels, but also dramatic and feature films cry out for such treatment. [. . .] The recently founded Volksverband für Filmkunst does not struggle against the cinema as it currently exists. Given time, the social transformation of film will triumph on its own. On the contrary, the Volksverband wants to help film connect with the cast of mind existing in the world today. For, ultimately, filmmakers will have to search for this connection. No one claims that this search will be easy for them, even if they undertake it willingly. For film, the simple man is already rather spoiled. The work accomplished here is intended to help the simple man harmonize his relation to fi lm with his orientation toward the rest of life, and we seek to win back those whose intellectual discrimination has caused them to flee. A work from the Russian cinema will advance this effort here tonight.3 But one may hope that German films will also become available quite soon. Producers will surely make haste, once they see all of the left-leaning circles organized together into a Volksverband für Filmkunst. Rather than losing this sizable public, German producers will show flexibility in matters of taste and ways of thinking.

The Mobilization of the Masses

365

What are we demanding? That a majority of the population, which brings a higher level of intelligence to every other activity, not be expected to accept from film alone a decline in mental standards. Film should not falsify either history or the present, whether intellectually or in terms of art. Cinematic art rarely provides a topic for discussion in Germany. Here we hear only of the film industry. The distinction lies in the sole obligation on the part of the German industry to itself and its financiers. Art is responsible to all of its contemporaries and to posterity, and answers for even the most remote of its effects. Art, the sphere to which a people looks for guidance, does not seduce, but educates. It does not sell itself, and it does not stoop to distracting the people instead of teaching them to see and to think. Teaching people to think, to raise their intellectual level—any art taking itself seriously plans this task with its people. Notes 1. Due to censorship problems, the short compilation newsreel, Zeitbericht—Zeitgesicht (1928), by Ernst Angel and Albrecht Viktor Blum could not be screened. 2. The Klingenberg power plant in Berlin-Rummelsburg began operation in 1927 and was the largest in Europe at the time. 3. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927) was the main feature of the inaugural event.

166 ERNST TOLLER Who Will Create the German Revolutionary Film? First published as “Wer schafft den deutschen Revolutionsfilm?” in Die Welt am Montag (November 5, 1928). Translated by Tara Hottman.

The expressionist playwright Ernst Toller (1893–1939) was involved with the Munich Revolution, serving as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic from April 6 to 12, 1919; he was arrested and sentenced to fi ve years in prison, where he kept writing plays and poems. In this article, he envisages a film of the German Revolution—the counterpart of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which had depicted the unsuccessful 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors through the lens of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Toller went into exile in 1933 and committed suicide in New York in 1939.

We need a film of the German Revolution. To continue having discussions about it may be necessary for reasons of general clarification, but this must not delay the start of preliminary work. There are two official organizations that would have to take over the production of this film: the unions and the Volksbühne. Members of all proletarian parties and followers of different intellectual orientations belong to both institutions. For this film must not become the film of a single proletarian party; it must be made in such a way that the entire proletariat recognizes itself in it. How is this possible? It would be a mistake to make a feature film, a fictional film, out of the German Revolution. The film must possess the great historical tension of documentary record. Any romanticization would lessen, even destroy, this tension.

366

Film Culture and Politics

The demand for documentary authenticity implies that the film may not gloss over the rift within the proletariat, which was one of the factors that led the German Revolution to fail. And yet, the film would be at risk if this rift were put on center stage. One question remains unanswered: should the film focus on the causes of the revolution and end with the onset of the revolution and its hopes? Or should it show the development of the revolution, thus illuminating the tragedy of the German Revolution? It is my opinion that, in either case, this film would have a stirring and encouraging effect. I would like to see someone who wouldn’t square his shoulders after seeing the faithful hopes of that time and what remains today. As for the cast of this film, the main characters could be played by actors who capture the struggle of the proletariat, but much of the cast must be the workers themselves. This film should be a film of the German workers; hence, as was done in Russia, thousands of workers must be found who will make themselves available for a few hours to their organizations. The audience is always amazed at the rich diversity of Russian faces. If our film directors would venture to the north of Berlin or to an industrial area, they would realize what magnificent faces of men and women are waiting to be discovered there. This film will not cost millions because so much of the requisite documentary evidence is available in the archives. It would be wrong to show only crowd scenes, but the fate of individuals must be bound to the collective action. Going beyond general propositions, I imagine such a film as follows: brief scenes of everyday life before the war are shown briefly, conveying the illusion of the people that the time of wars was over; perhaps also the machinations behind the scenes at the Hague Peace Convention,1 the mobilization, the outbreak of the war, the delirium, the gradual awakening, and then, in dramatic detail, the case of the sailors Köbis and Reichpietsch2 up until their execution (which we know through the Reichstag records). Both men would have to emerge as ordinary men of the crowd. Then, to demonstrate that they did not die in vain, a quick transition would lead from the two rebels to the hundreds of thousands of marchers who finally smashed the rotting edifice of the monarchy and hoisted the flag of the revolution. Notes 1. There were two Hague Peace Conferences, in 1899 and 1907, in which laws of war and war crimes were established as part of international law; a third conference was scheduled for 1914 but was postponed and then cancelled on account of World War I. Germany repeatedly violated rules of the Peace Conventions during the War. 2. Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch, serving in the Imperial German Navy, were found guilty of antiwar rebellion and executed on September 5, 1917.

167 KARL RITTER Mass-Man in the Cinema First published as “Masse Mensch im Kino,” in Film-Kurier, no. 196 (August 19, 1929). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The question of how to mobilize the masses through film was also taken up by the right wing during the Weimar era. A former career officer and professional pilot, Karl Ritter (1888–1977) joined the Nazi Party in 1925 and became a production manager and screenwriter, later producing Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) and directing Pour le Mérite (1938), among many other films. In this article, he appears to address film theater owners who might

The Mobilization of the Masses

367

be unaware of cinema’s power to shape the minds of the masses. The title references Ernst Toller’s 1920 Masse Mensch (Mass Man), an expressionist drama about a bourgeois woman who joins the workers’ revolution before it devolves into violence. On the relationship between cinema and the masses, see also Duenschmann in chapter 8, no. 109; Nikolaus in chapter 16, no. 246; and Balázs and Kracauer earlier in this chapter, nos. 158, 159, 164.

Millions of eyes. Millions of brains. Millions of hearts: before your theaters’ white screens sit the people. Not the intellectuals, not the proletariat, not poor or rich, not right or left, young or old, man or woman. Before your theaters’ white screens sit the “masses.” No one can know the masses better than you! They pass through your hands by the hundreds of thousands, not indifferent, anonymous, passive, or mechanical, as in street traffic or the familiar course of their everyday lives. In your rooms the masses are animated, unveiled. They believe themselves unobserved, freed from the constraint of the light, conscious of their emotional receptiveness, but unconsciously expressing the full range of their emotions: from childlike bursts of joy to gasps of suspense, from gales of laughter to cries of disgust, from jubilant applause to brutal rejection. For you and only for you, the masses are a glassy-skinned giant monster, transparent to the very circulation of their blood, to their brains and their hearts. Nobody can create the atmosphere for moods, for sentiment, for the giant beast’s digestive system the way you can. You know its tastes, its needs, its favorite dishes and idiosyncrasies: you can stalk it for months, even decades, like the zookeeper with the predator that he feeds every day. Institutes for the study of mass psychology cannot unearth more than has already become apparent from your experiences. They should be collected and recorded, as a fundamental contribution to contemporary cultural history, along with the basic principles of our business. There must be exceptional politicians among you, leaders of the masses, whose instincts you know. One could even exhibit a certain power, couldn’t one? Isn’t that so? For—don’t forget!—before your theaters’ white screens sit the people. The masses pass through your hands!

168 WILLI MÜNZENBERG Film and Propaganda First published as “Film und Propaganda,” in Film und Volk: Zeitschrift des Volksverbandes für Filmkunst 2, nos. 9–10 (November 1929), 5–6. Translated by Erik Born.

Willi Münzenberg (1889–1940), a communist activist and media entrepreneur, was commissioned by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 to organize the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH; Workers International Relief) during a famine in Soviet Russia. The IAH created a film division the following year and subsequently aligned with Studio Rus to form MeschrabpomRus. Facing import restrictions in Germany, the IAH later decided to establish its own company, Prometheus-Film, which was founded in December 1925 and quickly became known as the German distributor of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Like Benjamin, who had emphasized that “political tendencies are implicit in every work of art” (see no. 161), Münzenberg here dismisses the notion of artistic neutrality and pleads for the production of revolutionary film propaganda.

368

Film Culture and Politics

Demagogues large and small are claiming that the noblest task of film is the cultivation of “neutral art.” They do so even though they know that there is no “neutrality” in film, and there can never be, just as there is no “neutrality” in the press, in art, and in other forms of social life. The cry for neutrality in film has the sole purpose of concealing the bourgeois propaganda that is being disseminated in bourgeois films. Today, film is a stronger and more effective means of propaganda than the press, and it is being used consciously by bourgeois parties and pressure groups. The current role that fi lm plays in bourgeois propaganda is not yet well enough known among revolutionary working-class organizations. Most people are generally aware that bourgeois films are being shot and screened for the purposes of bourgeois propaganda, but they attach very little significance to this fact. They spend significantly more time, energy, money, and attention on combating the bourgeois press than on combating the bourgeois film—completely unjustly and to the disadvantage of revolutionary propaganda. In this respect, Alfred Hugenberg’s work with film is a hundred times more dangerous than his newspapers, solely due to the fact that few workers read his newspapers, whereas millions of workers view the nationalistic and counterrevolutionary films that are being concocted in his poison laboratory.1 At long last, revolutionary working-class organizations have to recognize that when their bourgeois opponents are building film studios, creating distribution agencies, and acquiring movie theaters, they are doing the same thing as when they founded printing shops, created newspapers, and covered the land with a net of forwarding agencies and distribution services—doing so to an even greater degree in the field of cinematography. Recently, we have witnessed surprisingly large developments in this field, and it is high time that we recognize the changed situation, and that we confront our opponents on the battlefield that they have controlled almost exclusively up to now. [. . .] Today, film is not a matter of more or less pleasant entertainment. It is a political question of great significance. Film studios, distribution agencies, and movie theaters are just as necessary and indispensable for propaganda today as are magazines, printing shops, newspaper vendors, and news agencies. We finally have to accept this fact and, at the very least, spend the same amount of energy that we do in constructing our revolutionary press (co-ops, propaganda weeks, etc.) on an even more important means of propaganda: film. It is precisely the revolutionary organizations that should be availing themselves of the most advanced and novel technological medium for their propaganda. We need to counteract the bourgeois nationalistic film propaganda found in bourgeois, social democratic films with proletarian films that have an international, revolutionary ideology. Note 1. On Alfred Hugenberg, see chapter 9, no. 135, and the following text, no. 169, note 1.

169 A. A. World Film Report First published as “Weltfilm-Bericht,” in Arbeiterbühne und Film 6 (June 1930), 22. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The Mobilization of the Masses

369

Issuing a sharp critique of the newsreels produced by Germany’s leading fi lm companies, this text announces an alternative, proletarian newsreel in the form of a “Weltfilm report.” A. A.’s text appeared after Film und Volk merged with the theater journal Arbeiterbühne, becoming Arbeiterbühne und Film. The new paper lasted only a year, from June 1930 to June 1931, as a consequence of economic troubles. Albrecht Viktor Blum would direct seven Weltfilm newsreels in 1930; see also his text in chapter 3, no. 45.

Just to serve their purposes, Hugenberg and Severing-Emelka will shoot and edit their weekly newsreel.1 A newsreel of the bourgeois world, a newsreel for the bourgeois class. Without concession to the hundreds of thousands of cinemagoers who find these “reports” unsympathetic and hostile. A futile attempt was made to create left-leaning newsreels to address the cinemagoers’ concerns. To record and present what happens among the people rather than bringing spasmodic filmed news reports—that is, incoherent events that have been visually tampered with or staged. All attempts failed, and the Ufa and Emelka reports became increasingly inauthentic. Current sessions of proletarian organizations were hushed up. Has anyone ever seen anything in a newsreel about the great demonstrations of the unemployed on the 6th of March, about mass meetings of people from all nations, or about police actions everywhere? Where are the May 1st reports that actually report something instead of using a few meters of film to mislead audiences about these unpleasant subjects? Where have you seen reports on proletarian sports organizations, images of the farmers congress, or the impressive congress of the Leipzig youth? The material is there, by the hundreds of meters. But proletarian pastimes are hushed up or distorted under orders from Hugenberg, the dictator of the German fi lm industry. It has cost serious effort and long struggles for Weltfilm, the distributor for proletarian organizations, to establish an ongoing Weltfi lm report, which will be published under the name Welt und Arbeit [World and labor]. This report will deal with the world and the naked, brutal struggles being waged all around it—a Weltfilm report that must speak to millions and that will spark interest everywhere because of how people feel. You want to see unbiased reality recorded on film; here is a report on humankind’s struggle for freedom and existence. But one thing for today. German film has an aunt with a crotchety outlook and dusty glasses, who examines it—or rather, censors it—meter for meter. A hard struggle is about to begin; facts will be struck for their provocation of class hatred; other paragraphs will be sought and found in order to distort or utterly annihilate the Weltfi lm report. Cinema audiences must stand in unselfish defense of their Weltfilm report, in order to protect it from any and all attacks of the film shears. Then we will acquire the kind of film report that cinema audiences have awaited for a long time. In the focal point of international current events, focus your lenses on the proletarian newsreel. Note 1. Alfred Hugenberg was a nationalist politician and media magnate who bought Ufa in 1927 (see chapter 9, no. 135). Carl Severing was a Social Democrat who served as interior minister of Prussia and Reich minister of the interior during the Weimar era. In 1928, Severing helped bail out Emelka, Germany’s second largest film company, to prevent it from being purchased by Hugenberg, whose Ufa newsreels were discrediting Weimar democracy.

370

Film Culture and Politics

170 LUPU PICK Individual and Montage First published as “Individuum und Montage,” in Filmtechnik (August 9, 1930), 4–5. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Born in Romania, Lupu Pick (1886–1931) became an actor in German theater and film as well as a prolific director and producer. He worked with the screenwriter Carl Mayer to create the Kammerspielfilms (chamber play films) Scherben (Shattered, 1921) and Sylvester (New Year’s Eve, 1924), which presented melodramatic narratives in compelling visual terms, with sparse use of intertitles. This critical essay marks the end of Germany’s infatuation with Russian cinema, famous for its montage techniques, political determination, and lack of individual figures. See also Siegfried Kracauer’s review of Potemkin (no. 159) and the discussion between Oscar A. H. Schmitz and Walter Benjamin about collectivist art (nos. 160 and 161).

A few months ago, Viktor Turin, the Russian director of Turksib, gave a lecture. Had this lecture been delivered to a wider circle, a less unanimously assembled audience, it could have led, even then, to an extraordinarily stimulating and important discussion. Presently, we have grounds to revisit it. A new thesis was declared and established, radically and without limitations. The new Russian film is not and should not be a “play in images”; it should also not, in the manner of a magic show, illustrate the fate or experience of one or several people in a way that is absorbing, frightening, or cheering, in any case making a lasting impression and extending the spectator’s horizons. The new Russian film must obliterate the person, the individual, from its dramaturgy, from the perceptual life of its creator and its spectator. It should be able to reveal truth solely from the dynamic that arises from the relationship of the masses to the factory, to labor, life, the environment, and the dominant social conditions. Certainly, this is one point of view. A genuine new Russian one. Is there also another side? We may assume so. The intellectual world that gives rise to such theses is surely not a world of pure artistic thought. As surely as we can fight over whether “art” should have a purpose at all, it seems to me just as uncertain that precisely film art should be pronounced a “purposeful art.” The Russians, who used to brood quietly and slowly over the objects of this world and now race to proclaim—often very loudly—an end to all things, must be best suited to recognize the enormous persuasive power of the expressive medium “film” and how to try to use it for their “purposes”—and who honestly wants to deny that in some cases, these are human purposes and human goals? In this way, the artists working in Russian fi lm become subconsciously obsessed with the “idea,” with the ideal “purpose”; they resemble—it sometimes seems—tightrope walkers, who keep their eyes fixed on a single point, walking the line ever more quickly, causing it to swing more and more wildly, until finally, some kind of cramp shackles the body to the line and they begin to fear they can no longer free themselves from it, because every quick glance to the side could mean a perilous fall. This kind of approach is expressed in two ways, through content and aesthetic technique. Every work that wishes to be taken seriously must be unique.

The Mobilization of the Masses

371

Precisely in the case of Eisenstein, it was clear after Potemkin, which he apparently made in the grip of an obsession over the topic, that the formula was not quite right for October. In his latest film, The General Line, the actions of that one hideously beautiful woman came very clearly to the fore in a strong, celebratory, even heroic moment. Finally, in Dovzhenko’s film Earth, the hero is practically proclaimed. But let us not forget that in his essential definition, the dramatic hero was never simply the hero of his own fate, even if he gave this impression externally; rather and beyond this, he had to suffer a fate which, in its social determination, concerned all of us and thus awoke our sympathy and participation. Has it ever been any different? If not, then where is actually the essential difference? Certainly, we can imagine a dozen works like the Turksib film, with similarly captivating effects, as long as the topics are as dramatically effective and as well wrought as they are here. But to me, it seems unimaginable that the individual person, with his individual experiences and individual fate, would be able to disappear from an art form, without the latter being reduced (may this expression not be misunderstood!) to an “advertising medium,” no matter how perfect its artistic design may be. Any drama needs a spirited hero, with whom the spectator can fear and hope, for whom he can tremble and whose victory or defeat he will remember for a long time when he is on his own. To replace the lively hero with dramatic tensions that have been extracted from an “idea,” goal, or intended purpose is certainly possible, permissible, and welcome, if it leads to results like Potemkin or Turksib or other forthcoming works. But to confi ne such potentials in the prison cell of an artistic doctrine should not be permissible. Seven years ago, in the film New Year’s Eve, when I assembled sea waves, city streets, sparkling glasses, and huge watch-hands, all with a certain intention, it was clear that these approaches pointed toward possibilities for the composition of moving images, which must lead to extraordinary, as-yet-unknown effects. Today, we know what strange effects—nearly inexplicable to the scrutiny of analytic reason—can be achieved through the composition of certain moving images. It would thus be very easy to believe, spuriously, that an image sequence such as “foot, leg, hand, head, leg, hand, foot, head, hand, head, leg, foot, leg, foot, hand, head,” possibly with other “heads” interspersed here and there, would create a fascinating effect, while really it must ultimately produce a visually painful whir, without actually entering the spectator’s consciousness. Meanwhile, Piscator failed in the theater because the revolving stage, conveyor belts, multiplied stage designs, and moving trap doors still did not seem like enough to him,1 and finally the eyes, overloaded by automatic mechanisms at the cost of the ears, protested in anger. Spellbound, the Russians stare at the art of “montage” and attempt to pry out the secrets they still believe it is hiding. Transfixed, fanatic, they are unable to avert their eyes. This is leading and has already lead to an overassessment, to an exaggeration of the “montage concept,” to an overestimation of receptive capacity, to a false assessment of purely optical laws, to which the human pupil is subject. The Russians, and their imitators even more so, seem all too infatuated with this—let us not be fooled—truly cheap effect. After all, we could technically go so far as to take a single frame from every shot and string them together in a certain order. But then one could would no longer speak of an intentional sequence, seeking to achieve defined artistic effects, simply because the only overall impression it could produce in spectators would be nothing more than a disturbing and painful whir of images. Thus, we reach the limit here. In the one case as in the other, however, with regard to dramaturgical questions of content as well as aesthetic and

372

Film Culture and Politics

technological ones, there can be only one eternal law for all art forms: namely, that they cannot be bound by laws. Note 1. In the 1920s, Erwin Piscator had used still and moving image projections, conveyor belts, and other innovative effects in his theatrical productions. See also his text in chapter 17, no. 257.

171 BERTOLT BRECHT The Threepenny Lawsuit The following excerpts were first published as ”Der Dreigroschenprozess: Ein soziologisches Experiment,” in Bertolt Brecht, Versuche, vol. 3 (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1931). The thirty-one-page essay was translated by Marc Silberman and included in Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 172, 175–77, 180.

Premiering in Berlin on August 31, 1928, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) became the most popular stage production of the Weimar era. Nero-Film AG bought the film rights on May 21, 1930, and also later agreed to let Brecht complete the screen treatment, Die Beule—Ein Dreigroschenfilm (The Bruise—A Threepenny Film), which radicalized the original play. In coordination with Tobis-Klang-Film and Warner Brothers, Nero hired G. W. Pabst to direct German and French versions, and filming began on September 19, 1930, largely diverging from Brecht’s screenplay (after the writer refused to compromise). Claiming a breach of contract, Brecht and Weill filed lawsuits against Nero-Film on September 30 and October 1, respectively, and the trial took place October 17–20, drawing extensive coverage from the media. While the court decided in Weill’s favor, it ruled against Brecht, who reached a settlement with Nero on December 19. Pabst’s Die 3-GroschenOper (The 3 Penny Opera) premiered in Berlin on February 19, 1931, and subsequently opened in London and New York. In his book-length essay the following year, Brecht (1898–1956) used the court decision and surrounding discussions to analyze the status of cultural production under conditions of capitalism. His essay is subtitled “a sociological experiment,” suggesting his interest in the fate of intellectual property amidst the large-scale market forces that drive film production and that limit the possibility of a political cinema.

7. “A film must be work of a collective.” I could imagine that it would be quite meaningful for those involved, both the artists and the producers, to consult with one another about the question of forming a collective and its mode of working. (Reichsfilmblatt)

This idea is progressive. Indeed, a film should do nothing that a collective cannot do. This limitation alone would be a fruitful law; “art” would be excluded. In contrast to an individual, a collective cannot work without a clear point of reference, and evening entertainment is no such clear point. If the collective, for instance, had certain didactic intentions, it would immediately form an organic body. It is the essence of capitalism and not something generally valid that “unique” and “special” artifacts can only be produced by

The Mobilization of the Masses

373

individuals, and collectives bring forth only standardized mass commodities. What kind of collective exists today in the cinema? The collective consists of the financier, the merchants (public taste researchers), the director, the technicians, and the writers. A director is necessary because the financier wants nothing to do with art, the merchant because the director must be corrupted, the technician not because the apparatus is complicated (it is unbelievably primitive), but rather because the director has not even the slightest inkling about technical things, the writer finally because the audience itself is too lazy to write. Who would not wish under these conditions that the individual contribution to the production should remain unrecognizable? At no time during the work on the Threepenny film, including during the lawsuit, did those involved share a common notion of the subject matter, the purpose of the film, the audience, the apparatus, etc. Indeed, a collective can only create works which are able to make “collectives” out of the audience. [. . .] 9. “Political censorship is to be rejected on artistic grounds.”

The intellectuals’ battle for an improved cinema is especially unfortunate where it confronts the state and censorship. Here they must struggle not against the public’s condescension towards the cinema but against the censor’s condescension towards the public. Yet here finally the viewing masses’ real interests become visible, those about which even they don’t know much, but which the censor knows. Here and nowhere else the education takes place that the “progressives” and pathbreakers would like to control. The mass of petty-bourgeois consumers are to be educated in a morality that, rigorously applied, is suitable for ensuring the satisfaction of their entertainment and other needs. The social class which sets store by the sentimental and humoristic treasures of the cinematic army barracks and student bars is not always sure about choosing the correct political and cultural perspectives that ensure these charms. This class must hire professionals who can enlighten them. Interestingly it is not even necessary to draw on the wishes of the upper middle classes to understand the censorship process. It can be viewed and understood as a schizophrenic process within the petty bourgeoisie, based on the structure: I tell myself that I must restrain myself. The petty-bourgeois knows that he could not digest everything he might eat. An “unimaginative,” straightforward, pessimistically oriented filming of whatever can be photographed in a student’s life, that is, in the life of a type who in the briefest amount of time must hoard a maximum of expensive and hard-to-market specialized knowledge while sacrificing a large part of his energy, or in the life of the worker type who is drafted and drilled for war against his class brothers, this simple filming would attack the basic situation of these ticket buyers who could still imagine themselves even worse off than they are now. For there are people who can buy no movie ticket at all! [. . .] We are approaching the era of mass politics. What may sound comical for the individual (“I shall not grant myself freedom of thought”) does not for the masses. The masses do not think freely as individuals. For the individual continuity is a condition of thinking; and for a long time this continuity was only possible for the individual. Our intellectuals, who do not constitute a mass but rather dispersed individuals, understand thinking precisely as an inconsequential reflex because it has no continuity backwards, forwards or sideways. Anyone who really belongs to the masses knows that he is able to advance only as far as the masses can. Our intellectuals, who—each on his own—advance by separating themselves from the masses, do not really move ahead but rather hang on to their brief head start. The uniformly functioning masses of our age, who are steered by common interests constantly geared towards them, move according to clearly defined rules of thought, which are not generalizations of individual thinking. These rules have as yet been insufficiently investigated. To some extent they can be derived from the thinking

374

Film Culture and Politics

behavior of individuals where these think as representatives or agents of mass units. Thinking in the next phase of capitalism will not have the same sort of freedom that laws of competition have forced on the capitalists. But it will have a different one. 10. “A work of art is the expression of a personality.” A work of art is a living creature and the creator who will not tolerate its mutilation is right ten times over. (Frank furter Zeitung, the lawyer for the film company, Dr. Frankfurter)

It would have been possible to transform The Threepenny Opera into a Threepenny film while maintaining the status quo in the utilization of the film apparatuses if its social thesis were the basis of the adaptation. The assault on bourgeois ideology would have had to be staged in the film as well. Intrigue, settings, figures were to be treated with complete freedom. The approach of breaking up the work while maintaining its social function within a new apparatus was rejected by the film company. Nevertheless, the work was of course broken up, but according to commercial criteria. To reach the market, an artwork, which is in terms of bourgeois ideology the adequate expression of a personality, must be subjected to a very specific operation that splits it into its components. To a certain extent the components enter the marketplace separately. [. . .] The idea that the work of art is the expression of a personality is no longer valid for films.

172 HERBERT JHERING The Banned Kuhle Wampe First published as “Der verbotene ‘Kuhle Wampe,’” in Berliner Börsen-Courier (April 1, 1932). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Herbert Jhering (1888–1977) was one of the most respected film critics in the 1920s. This essay addresses Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe or, Who owns the World?), a 1932 film cowritten by Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Ottwalt and directed by Slátan Dudow, with music by Hanns Eisler. The film was made under difficult economic circumstances and was banned in March 1932 before finally opening (with cuts) in Berlin on May 30, 1932. (It had premiered in Moscow on May 14, 1932.) In applying Brecht’s principles of Epic Theater to film, Kuhle Wampe became a model for political “countercinema” in the 1960s.

What does Kuhle Wampe show? It shows an evicted family that moves from Berlin to the surrounding area, into the workers’ tent city Kuhle Wampe. The film is unsentimental and therefore fair. It does not color events. It does not idealize workers. On the contrary, it also shows the anti-intellectual sides, the petty bourgeois tendencies (at an engagement party and at the reading). It does not show sentimentality but rather the mean-spirited smugness of the narrow-minded. On the other hand, it also shows workers’ youth athletics. The film frequently uses landscape motifs, as Russian film did before it. Some transitions are abrupt. Rhythmic balance is frequently lacking. But precisely these elements

The Mobilization of the Masses

375

give the film its value. It is an experiment. It was made outside of the industry, with artistic dedication and an utter sense of commitment. The scene on the overcrowded urban tramway, during the ride from the workers’ sport festival to Berlin, is even extraordinarily well done. Someone reads the newspaper aloud, a story about coffee being poured into the sea in Brazil. This immediately sparks discussions about politics and about private life: chatty women talk about making coffee, while citizens and workers offer their opinions. Words fly back and forth. Classes and types become obvious. This is executed superbly. Some of the bathing scenes supposedly offend the church? Just because a bell tolls off in the distance? Nonsense. In that case, a hundred mundane films would have to be banned. What here could possibly be insulting to anyone? Even seeing things from the censor’s point of view, any obstacles would be easy to remove with just a few cuts. It’s no exaggeration: this ban, if it stands, if it is confirmed by the Central Censorship Board, will be the greatest blow yet dealt to German film. Not on account of this single film, but on account of the consequences. The nastiest cheap thrillers, the most embarrassing sensational trash, the most unrealistic social films will be able to run on unhindered. We intervene here. Film criticism has to be aware that it, too, will be disenfranchised if this ban comes into effect. It can no longer demand truthful representations from film if the will to truthfulness must risk not only failure but also interdiction. Who will keep investing money in such an uncertain venture? German film—confined by crisis, limited by the misled public, restricted by censorship—is losing its international standing.

173 GEORG WILHELM PABST Film and Conviction First published as “Film und Gesinnung,” in Felix Henseleit, ed., Der Film und seine Welt: ReichsfilmblattAlmanach 1933 (Berlin: Photokino, 1933), 98–99. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The article begins with the following editor’s note: “G. W. Pabst, whose artistic sensibility found its clearest expression in the film Kameradschaft, has now directed the film Don Quixote with Feodor Chaliapin. Here he discusses fundamental questions of filmmaking.” In the Weimar Republic, Pabst (1885–1967) directed a number of socialrealist films (e.g., The Joyless Street, Diary of a Lost Girl, The 3-Penny Opera) that ran into censorship problems, earning him the nickname “der rote Pabst” (the red pope). His film Westfront 1918 (1930) also provoked discussions on account of its strong antiwar stance. In the following text from 1933, he insists on film’s promise as “the property of the masses.”

Art film? Commercial film? We still hear this question so often. It should never have been asked in the first place—it profanes the strongest expressive medium of our time. Film is the most powerful weapon in the hands of those who know how to use it and refuse to let go! What could be mightier than film—this concatenation of machine and life! Why are writing and theater not subjected to the same level of observation and control as film? Because its power is known. Even in Soviet Russia, where the state provides film

376

Film Culture and Politics

with the most potential for development, it is carefully guarded as the strongest weapon, the mightiest means to propagandistic ends. There, too, censorship is strong: did not Stalin excise the character of his opponent, Trotsky, from the film The End of St. Petersburg,1 because this opponent was politically finished by the time the film was complete? This governmental struggle over film proves only too well how great the significance of this invention, still quite young, has become. No other artistic form is considered important, and therefore no other form is observed as closely. Film is thus the art form to which the future belongs. It is a revolutionary art form. Through film, the masses can be educated as to how their life looks, and how it should look, more thoroughly and quickly than they can via millions of pamphlets. Film must liberate itself from all terms stipulated by groups and economic forces, from all supervision—only then will it achieve the full development of its powers. This liberation will make film into what it really is, what it was born to be: the property of the masses! This attitude toward film explains my understanding of the task of a film director. A director is a fighter. If he is not merely an artisan, who only makes films on command for his daily bread, if he sees film as holy, so to speak—as the violinist sees his instrument and the painter his tool—then he can use film to suggest his ideas to the audience, to drive them home, just as a political journalist does in his articles. These jobs, fi lm director and political journalist, are the two most formidable careers of our time. The only difference is that the political journalist is an established figure, acknowledged and feared by all, but more seldom inhibited or handicapped since no one dares to do so, while the film director has yet to achieve this recognition. Is it any wonder, therefore, that someone who has a fighting spirit, but no talent as a film director, would take up a political pen? But what should we show the people, you will ask? Should film always address social problems, remain a propaganda tool, as it usually is in Soviet Russia? Absolutely not. Film should certainly elucidate social questions, thereby furthering the education and culture of the masses. But it should also show life’s happy sides in artistic form. Of course, this does not mean that film should be a simple “amusement” for the people. Even operetta films can be made to contain good and convincing ideas! What have we learned from the films of Chaplin, this ingenious director who was the first to understand the meaning of film? His films were the greatest “amusement” for the masses, and at the same time he used them to express particular and often grand concepts. With this weapon, film, he stirred up social questions; he said a lot, and everyone understood it, and all the while everyone “amused” himself. Chaplin is the only director who will leave behind his “collected works” when he eventually exits the scene. Note 1. Pabst refers erroneously to Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1927 film The End of St. Petersburg. It was in fact Eisenstein who was forced by Stalin to remove all scenes featuring Leon Trotsky from his film October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928).

T W E LV E

CHIFFRES OF MODERNITY

174 GEORG LUKÁCS Thoughts toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema First published as “Gedanken zu einer Ästhetik des ‘Kino’, ” in Pester Lloyd (Budapest), no. 90 (April 16, 1911), 45–46, and republished in a slightly expanded version in the Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 251 (September 10, 1913), 1–2. The translation by Janelle Blankenship, first published in Polygraph 13 (2001), 13–18, follows the longer version of 1913.

A product of technology, industry, and mass culture, cinema seemed to epitomize the very bases of modernity. To many philosophers and cultural critics, films served as a chiffre of modernity, a secret code that might unlock broader insights into the contemporary condition. Long before Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze approached film as a medium of thought, German intellectuals were engaged in thinking about cinema as the site of transcendental homelessness (Kracauer, no. 178, 179), ethical awareness (Pinthus, no. 177), the decline of experience (Benjamin, no. 185), and the dissolution of bourgeois individualism (Jünger, no. 188). Fascination with Charlie Chaplin, “an outcast in this world” (Kracauer), also united members of the Frankfurt School, despite their famous differences of opinion about the medium’s critical potential. Through an extended comparison between theater and film aesthetics, Georg Lukács (1885–1971) here presents cinema as a medium of modernity inasmuch as it lacks traditional metaphysical categories (e.g., fate, soul, meaning, motivation) and evokes “an entirely different metaphysics”—one based on action, corporeality, vivaciousness, and unlimited possibility. His argument about the lack of theatrical “presence” in cinema also anticipates Walter Benjamin’s theorization of “aura” in his Artwork essay from 1936. Lukács’s text—his first essay on cinema—was chosen for publication in the Frankfurter Zeitung over Bloch’s “Melody in the Cinema or Immanent and Transcendental Music” (chapter 15, no. 218). As students in Heidelberg, Lukács and Bloch had cofounded a club in 1910 in which they discussed cinema’s artistic possibilities.

We can never escape the state of conceptual confusion: something new and beautiful has come to be and yet instead of taking it as it is, one attempts to strip it of its true meaning and value and confine it to old, inappropriate categories. One interprets the “cinema” at times as an instrument of visual instruction, at times as a new and cheap competitor to the theater: on the one hand, it is viewed pedagogically, on the other hand, economically. That a new beauty is precisely a beauty worthy of its own aesthetic evaluation and determination—this is thought by only a few. A well-known Hungarian dramatist has fantasized from time to time that the “cinema” could replace the theater, through perfection of technique, through the full

377

378

Film Culture and Politics

reproducibility of speech. If this is made possible—he maintains—then there will no longer be an imperfect ensemble. The theater will no longer be tied to the local availability of good acting; only the best actors will act in these plays and they will only act well, as those performances in which the actors are indisposed will simply not be shot. A good performance, however, becomes something eternal. The theater loses all that is merely momentary and becomes a grand museum of all truly perfected achievements. This beautiful dream is nothing but a grave error. The dramatist overlooks the fundamental condition of all stage effects—the effect of the existing person. For it is not in the words and gestures of an actor or in the action of the drama where the root of theatrical effect lies, but rather in the power with which a person, the living will of a living person, without mediation and without restraining direction, streams forth onto an equally living mass or multitude. The stage is the absolute present. The transitory nature of its achievement is not a deplorable weakness, but rather a productive limit, the necessary correlate and most observable expression of destiny in drama. Destiny is presence in itself. The past is simply scaffolding in the metaphysical sense, something entirely without purpose. (If a pure metaphysics of the drama would be possible, in which one would have no need of a merely aesthetic category, it would no longer know notions such as “Exposition,” “Development,” etc.) And a future is for fate entirely unreal and irrelevant. Death, which ends all tragedies, is the most convincing symbol of this. Throughout the presentation of the drama this metaphysical feeling grows in immediacy and perceptibility: out of the deepest truth of people and their position in the universe grows a self-evident reality. The “present,” the essence of actors, is the most easily observed and therefore the deepest expression of drama’s destined few. To be present, to truly, exclusively, and intensely live, is already in itself fate—only this so-called life never attains an intensity that could raise everything up into the sphere of destiny. Thus the mere appearance of a truly significant actress on the stage, such as Duse,1 is already and without any great drama destiny, divine service, tragedy, mystery. “Duse” is the absolutely present person in whom, in the words of Dante, the “essere” is identical to the “operazione.” Duse is the melody of the music of fate that must sound, without regard to its accompaniment. The lack of this “present” is the primary characteristic of the “cinema.” Not because films are imperfect, not because the figures are still forced to move around in silence, but because there are only movements and actions of people—but no people. This is no defect of the “cinema.” This is its limit, its principium stilisationis. Through this, the cinema becomes uncannily lifelike. Not only in their technique, but also in their effect, cinematic images, equal in their essence to nature, are no less organic and alive than those images of the stage. Only they maintain a life of a completely different kind. In a word, they become fantastic. This fantastical element is not a contrast to living life, however, but is only a new aspect of the same: a life without the present, a life without fate, without reasons, without motives, a life without measure or order, without essence or value, a life without soul, of pure surface, a life with which the innermost of our soul does not want to coincide; nor can it. Even when the soul still—and often—longs for this life, this longing is for a foreign abyss, for something far off and internally distant. The world of the “cinema” is thus a world without background or perspective, without any difference in weight or quality, as only the present gives things fate and weight, light and lightness. The temporality of the stage, the flow of its occurrences, is always something of a paradox: it is the flow of grand moments, something internally deep at rest, almost arrested, something become eternal, as a direct result of the painfully strong “present.” The temporality and flow of the “cinema,” however, are entirely pure and clear. The essence of the “cinema” is movement in itself, an eternal variability, the never-resting change of things. These different concepts of time correspond to the different fundamental princi-

Chiffres of Modernity

379

ples of stage and cinema composition. The one is purely metaphysical, distancing itself from all that is empirically alive; the other is so strongly unmetaphysical, so exclusively empirically alive, that through this sheer extremity of its nature another entirely different metaphysics arises. In a word, the fundamental law of connection for the stage and the theater is inexorable necessity; for the “cinema” it is unlimited possibility. Individual moments, whose confluence is made possible by the temporal sequence of the “cinema”scenes, are only connected insofar as they follow one another, immediately and without transition. There is no cause and effect that would tie them together, or, to be more exact, their causality is not bound or hemmed in by any particular content. “Everything is possible”: this is the worldview of the “cinema,” and because it technically expresses absolute reality (albeit only empirical) in every individual moment, the validity of possibility is cancelled out as a category opposed to reality. The two categories become equal. They assume one identity. “Everything is true and real, is equally true and equally real.” This is the teaching of the shot sequencing of the “cinema.” Thus, there arises in the cinema a new homogeneous and harmonious, coherent and changing world, one that corresponds to the fairy tale and dream in literature and life: maximum vivacity without an inner third dimension, suggestive association through mere sequence, strict tied-to-nature reality and utmost fantasy, the becoming-decorative of that without pathos, of ordinary life. In the “cinema” everything that romanticism in the theater—in vain—tried to attain can now be realized: extreme, uninhibited mobility of figures, the full coming to life of background, of nature and interior, of plants and animals. It is a vivaciousness, however, that is by no means bound to the content and confining contours of ordinary life. The romantics attempted to force onto the stage the fantastical nearness-to-nature of their world feeling. The stage, however, is an empire of stripped souls and fates. Every stage is in its innermost essence Greek. Abstractly arrayed people step forth and present their plays of destiny in empty, abstract-grand porticos. Costume, scenery, milieu, riches, and a variety of outer events are all a mere compromise for the theater. In the truly decisive moment they are always in the way, they become superfluous. The “cinema” presents mere action but no motive or meaning. Its characters have mere movement, but no souls, and what occurs is simply an occurrence, but not fate. It is for this reason—and only apparently due to the present-day imperfections of technique—that the scenes of the cinema are silent. The spoken word, the sounding concept, are vehicles of fate; only in them and through them arises the binding continuity in the psyche of the dramatic character. The withdrawal of the word, and with it of memory, of truth and duty to oneself and to the idea of one’s selfhood renders everything light, bright and winged, frivolous and dancing. Worldlessness rounds out into a totality. Anything of importance in the exhibited events is and has to be exclusively expressed in actions and gestures. Every appeal to the word is a falling out of this world, a destruction of its primary worth. Through this, however, all that was previously stifled by the abstract-monumental weight of fate now begins to bloom, to take on a rich and abundant life. On the stage even that which occurs is unimportant, such is the overwhelming effect of its fate value. In the “cinema” the “how” of occurrences has the power to rule all else. The life of nature obtains for the first time an artistic form: the rushing of water, the wind in the trees, the serenity of the sunset, and the furor of the storm—these natural phenomena become art (unlike painting, which takes its painterly values from other worlds). Man has lost his soul; in return, however, he gains his body. His greatness and poetry lie therefore in the way in which his strength and skill are able to overcome physical obstacles. And comedy arises when these obstacles are insurmountable. The triumphs of modern technology, which remain fully meaningless for great art, here become fantastic, are able to pack a poetic punch. It is first in the “cinema”—to name only one example—that the

380

Film Culture and Politics

automobile has become poetic, as in the romantic thrill of a rushing car chase. Ordinary activity in the streets and markets here receives a powerful humor and an even stronger poetry: the naïve and base feeling of happiness of a child who delights in a well-done prank; the unfortunate one who cannot cope or has helplessly gone astray—these things are rendered in a most unforgettable way. In the theater we assemble in front of the grand stage of great dramas and achieve our highest moments. In the “cinema” we should forget these heights and become irresponsible. The child in every individual is set free and becomes lord of the psyche of the spectator. The trueness-to-life of the cinema is in no way bound or tied to our reality. Furniture moves around in the room of a drunkard. His bed flies with him high over the city—in the very last minute he is able to hold firmly onto the bed rail and his nightshirt waves around him like a flag.2 The balls, with which a group is about to go bowling, become rebellious and follow the party over mountains and fields, swimming through rivers, springing onto bridges and hunting up high stairs, until finally the pins spring to life and go for the balls. The “cinema” can also become fantastical on a purely mechanical level: when the film is projected in inverted order and people stand up under rushing cars, when a cigar butt becomes bigger during the duration of the smoke, until finally, in the moment of lighting itself, it is put back into the box. Or one turns the film upside down and strange creatures are acting there, suddenly springing from the ceiling into the abyss and then crawling back like caterpillars. These are images or scenes from a world like that of E. T. A. Hoffmann or Poe, like that of Arnim or Barbey d’Aurevilly3—only their greatest poet, who could interpret and classify, who could transform their simply technical and accidental fantasy into a meaningful metaphysics, who could save such scenes by bringing to them a pure style, has not yet arrived. What has sprung up naïvely, often against the will of the people, appears only out of the spirit of the technology of the “cinema”: an Arnim or a Poe of our day would find for his scenic longing an excellent instrument, as rich and internally adequate as the Greek stage was for Sophocles. Certainly it is a stage of recovery from oneself, a place of amusement, a place at one and the same time the most subtle and the most refined, the roughest and most primitive. It is never a place of edification or elevation. For this reason the cinema that is truly developed and adapted to its idea can clear the way for the drama (again, the truly great drama and not what is today termed “drama”). The insurmountable urge for amusement has all but eliminated the drama from our stages. We can see anything on the presentday stage—from dialogue-driven dime novels to innerly anemic short stories to empty, magniloquent, pompous presentations of grand historical events—only drama itself is no longer played. The “cinema” here can make the clear cut: it has the potential to present everything that belongs to the category of amusement and can be made clear more effectively and more beautifully than the speaking stage. Theatrical suspense can never compare to its breathlessness of tempo. Every approximation of nature attained by bringing nature onto the stage is scarcely a shadow of what is achieved on the screen. In lieu of the raw abbreviation of souls that are still, due to the form of the speaking theater, unintentionally likened to souls and therefore found repulsive, there arises a world of intentional and obligatory “soullessness,” a world of pure externality. What was brutality on the stage can here become childlike, suspense in itself, or grotesque. And if one day—I am speaking here of a very distant, but therefore deeply desired goal of all who take the theater seriously—the light-reading literature of the stage is struck down by this competition, then the stage will again be forced to cultivate that which is its true vocation: the great tragedy and the great comedy. And amusement, that which was condemned to roughness on the stage, as its content contradicted the forms of the drama-stage, can then find an adequate form in the “cinema,” a form so internally appropriate and so truly artistic that something of its type is seldom, if ever, found in today’s “cinema.” And if the

Chiffres of Modernity

381

smart psychologists who possess the gift of short story writing are expelled from both stages, this can only bring health and clarity to them and also the culture of the theater. Notes 1. On the Italian actress Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), see Carl Hauptmann in chapter 4, no. 49. 2. It appears that Lukács is referring to the dream sequence in Edwin S. Porter’s 1906 film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend. 3. Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–1889) was a French writer known for his tales of mystery and terror.

175 ALFRED A. BAEUMLER The Effects of the Film Theater: An Attempt at an Apologia for the Cinematographic Theater First published as “Die Wirkungen der Lichtbildbühne: Versuch einer Apologie des Kinematographentheaters,” in März 6 (June 1, 1912), 333–41; here 335–41. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Much as Georg Lukács aligned cinema with an “entirely different metaphysics” (no. 174), Alfred Baeumler here suggests a “deeper reason” for the appeal of movie theaters: their catering to the “spiritual needs” of modern mass audiences, who wish to experience their lives in the mode of fantasy. Baeumler (1887–1968) was a German philosopher who completed his dissertation on Kant’s aesthetics in 1914; he later became infamous for his appropriation of Nietzsche’s work to legitimate the National Socialist regime, as well as for his ideologically laden writings on political pedagogy. In this early text, he defends film against the cinema reformers, whose campaign against trash films was fueled by elitist assumptions about working-class viewers (see chapter 7). On the role of cinema as a “fantasy machine,” see also texts by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (no. 176) and René Fülöp-Miller (no. 187) in this chapter.

The cinematograph has few friends among so-called intellectuals. They consider it base, rough, and sensational. The audience, which sits wide-eyed in a darkened room before the rolling film, brings together many different types of people. Still, most members come from that dark, not yet individually differentiated mass of the people: workers, women, shopgirls, young men, children, artisans, and—here and there—perhaps some students and daughters of higher standing. Young people take a quite naïve, primal pleasure in the opulent visual life up there on the screen. Their interest is totally concentrated on the scene. One has to pay attention to follow the mute suggestions and signals, to bring sense and sound into the scenes that roll by so rapidly. Film makes people active; the spectator has to collaborate. Otherwise he loses track of everything. For this reason, the cinematograph’s audience finds itself placed in a unique intellectual tension, which we can literally feel when we walk into the room. The same atmosphere—just infi nitely stronger—prevails in a concert hall or in the theater. The interesting question here is what the masses experience at film theaters. Cultural prophets and literati know the answer well. The people, they argue, are looking to satisfy the baser instincts of curiosity and raw sensationalism. Film theaters debase the people in the same way as “trash literature” [Schundliteratur], by encouraging the masses’ predisposition to sentimentality and seducing them with bad examples. This

382

Film Culture and Politics

poorly thought-out argument is all over the streets. One person repeats it from another, and those who bring it up have rarely engaged sympathetically with the matter at hand. Perhaps the reason that the film theater has developed so rapidly goes deeper than the perverse instincts of a thrill-seeking mass. If we examine the people themselves rather than the reactions of a refined palate to the pleasures of the masses, we cannot escape the possibility of a deeper reason. What drives the masses to film is the need for appearance [Schein], transfiguration, and imaginary life: a need that is usually labeled artistic only when it occurs at a higher level. For what do they glimpse on the silent, flickering screen? Life, the present day, and humans who celebrate, suffer, and perish. The people watch all of this quite naïvely. It asks for neither causal relationships nor spiritual beauty nor psychology. It wants to be seized, swept away, and shaken; it wants to see feats, passions, and sensations. It wants to experience represented life in the same way it imagines the real thing: simple and striking, full of typical contrasts, explosions, and destinies. Limited, compressed life wants to breathe again, to enjoy looking at its own reflection. The masses are seeking the same thing in movie theaters that they demand in their literature, which is arrogantly dismissed as trashy: themselves. They want once again to enjoy their own existence, their laughter and tears, their delights and horrors, without the pressure of reality, free from all limitations. They want to live out their existence in fantasy. Is the need of intellectuals any different when they go to their theater? What do they demand from tragedy, other than to be agitated and gripped at their very core? Only the content of their experience is distinguished from the coarser content experienced by the people. No one will deny that the intellectuals’ theater enjoys a higher standing. But we should not take this as a reason to resent the masses for wanting a place where they can be brought to laughter and tears. Do “spiritual needs” exist only for refined spirits? Do the laws of psychology extend only to members of the upper classes? What the public demands are the simple elements of life, primitive tremors of the soul. This content has not been molded or formed; it is raw material. This is why intellectuals feel rebuffed by it. They find only matter, the sheer sensuality of existence, while they yearn for spirituality, for elevation to the personal, for art. The film theater, they say, does not provide art. But who is demanding art from film dramas? When they compare film to art, they are assuming that the people must be provided with art at all costs. Anything else would be dangerous. But the question is whether the need for art, in our sense of the word, is not utterly foreign to the people (to the masses as such, not their individual exemplars). The art of a mass, whose life unfolds according to different laws than ours, will also be subjected to different norms than ours. The intellectual rarely realizes this, but it is true: the people feel differently than he does; he does not understand the masses. They are sentimental. Without defending sentimentality, we can ask what use it is to struggle against facts. Do we believe that we can change a certain way of feeling, which is what sentimentality is, through education or good breeding? Such an education would require more time than the working people will ever be able to make available. An arrogant delusion is at work when intellectuals decry the people’s way of thought and feeling with words like sentimental and sensational. The instincts of the people are simple, brutal, and sentimental all at once. They cannot show understanding for a complicated spiritual conflict. But a mother’s love, a child’s pain at the death of this mother, the seduction and suffering of a young woman—the people understand such things and emulate them. They are swept up only when they can project themselves into the situation at hand. The processes shown in films are also emulated in fantasy. But it is always the same existence that the people empathize with: namely, their own. They never transcend themselves. Real artistic appreciation removes the limitations of personality and allows us

Chiffres of Modernity

383

to take part in another way of life. Anyone who has experienced the depths of true aesthetic process will neither expect nor demand it from the many thousands who are thirsting for some kind of fantasy experience. We have tried to identify what the masses are seeking in movie theaters. Let us now examine what these theaters are offering. The first property of the cinematograph is its affordability. This was what first enabled its victory over the masses. For thirty to fifty pfennig, even poor people can now afford an entire world of excitement, glamour, splendor, and curious things. The shows last for hours, image following upon image. There are not many bad seats in the house, and even a large influx can be managed with relative ease. These practical advantages form the foundation. Then comes the most essential feature of the movie theater: its absolute modernity. It cannot possibly be anything other than thoroughly contemporary. The life depicted by cinema is our own life. The streets that we walk along, the automobiles, the electric trains, the rooms in which we live, our clothing, our manner of eating—our entire way of life is reproduced on film. The singular vibrations of our daily atmosphere and the nervous, quick, abbreviated existence of modern man are extracted for a moment from the dancing and shifting of time to experience a moment of immortalization. Existence in pictures is a romanticization of existence. The effect of this elevation of the fleeting present into the sphere of reverie and illusion is so strong that we believe we can understand our existence only once it passes by us in a play. We see ourselves live. What torments and hinders us by day, the entire confusing variety of modern existence, here in the cinema, where we have no volition that could be inhibited, we come to enjoy it purely for its own sake. This is perhaps the most profound feature of the movie theater: that it calls for the world today, the doings of the present, so-called current events. It shares this quality with journalism in the true sense of the word. Many cinematographic theaters have introduced a sort of optical news report about the events of the week. Ultimately, any drama that is set in the present is current. It gives the sense that it could be happening somewhere nearby at this very moment. The topicality of the movie theater fulfills a specific modern need. Our life has taken on a breathless rhythm; events rush by so quickly that it can be frightening. Our way of life is a fleeting one. And yet, we cannot suppress our yearning for stillness, duration, and retention. Life itself cannot give us this stillness. We can live this longed-for moment only in pretense, and we possess it when we see the entire divine comedy of existence pass by us in images. The images are mute, but we have learned to see. As in a mirror, we glimpse our own unrest, our own disquiet. For a moment, the pressure of existence gives way to an eternal stillness. How precious is this moment, and how quickly it passes. But it is not an escape, not an intoxication followed by sobriety; it is, rather, a complete and utter affirmation of time, one which, however, is not plunged into its unrelenting flow. Everything real flows and vanishes. Only appearance [Schein] is eternal, because it has no reality. This moment of eternity, which a reader might take from a contemporary poet, is offered to naïve people when they see their lives reflected in film. [. . .] The movie theater can be further developed in the direction of modern life. It must reflect the breadth of our entire experience; in film, we are leaving behind a cultural document unlike anything left by any previous era. Film abolishes the insularity of individual existence: men of modest means peer with burning interest into the apartments of rich people; they enjoy seeing the life of other peoples, images of foreign lands. How broad and rich the horizon of the modern person has become! It is interesting to see a French film one day, an Italian film the next, and an American or Dutch movie on the following day. Foreign nations are becoming directly accessible to the eye. Characteristic

384

Film Culture and Politics

little gestures betray the Frenchman as unmistakably as the Italian. Nations change, and yet a Dane is as easy to understand as an Italian; the eternal commonalities and everlasting humanity that lie in physical expression connect north and south over the heads of nations, creating a single unified experience. Human destiny is the same everywhere. The cinematograph is international in that deeper sense in which this colorless word contains the meaning of general humanity.

176 HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL The Substitute for Dreams First published as “Der Ersatz für die Träume,” in Das Tage-Buch 2, no. 22 (June 4, 1921), 685–87. Translated by Don Reneau.

Like Alfred Baeumler (no. 175), who defended cinema against a condescending intelligentsia by theorizing the role of spectatorial fantasy, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) here suggests that working-class audiences frequent the cinema as a surrogate for childhood dreams—or, in his words, as a refuge from the “wasteland of existence.” In characterizing cinema as a visionary alternative to a modern world of monotonous mechanical labor and of abstract numbers, Hofmannsthal’s text also resonates with discussions of disenchantment, reification, and the return of visual culture in contemporaneous texts by Max Weber (“Science as a Vocation,” 1917/19), Georg Lukács (History and Class Consciousness, 1923), and Béla Balázs (Visible Man, 1924). Hofmannsthal dabbled in film as early as 1913, when he wrote the scenario for Das fremde Mädchen, a “dream play” directed by Mauritz Stiller. The text here was originally printed in one long paragraph, lending it a flowing, dreamlike quality.

What the people seek in the cinema, said my friend with whom I raised the topic, what all the working people seek in the cinema is the substitute for dreams. They want to fill their fantasy with pictures, strong pictures, ones that comprehend the essence of life, that receive their form from within the spectators and, simultaneously, affect them in their loins. For life owes them such pictures. (I am speaking of those who live in the cities or in large, interconnected industrial areas, not of the others—the farmers, the sailors, the loggers, or mountain dwellers.) Their heads are empty, not by nature but because of the life society forces them to lead. They live in agglomerations of coal-blackened industrial locales, with nothing but narrow strips of withered meadow-grass between them, where among the children growing up, not one in six thousand has ever seen an owl, a squirrel, or a spring—these are our cities, these endlessly intersecting rows of buildings. The buildings resemble one another; each has a little door, uniform stripes of windows and shops underneath. Nothing speaks to a passerby or to someone looking for a particular building: the only thing with a voice is the number. It is similar with the factory, the workroom, the machine, the office where one pays taxes or files applications; from all of this, nothing but the number sticks in the mind. Then there is the workday, the routine of factory life or of a trade; the few tasks for the hand are always the same: the same hammering, swinging of the arm, filing, or turning. Then the workers return home again, where the gas stove, the iron oven, the few utensils, and the little machines on which one depends must also be mastered through practice, so that, ultimately, the one who repeatedly operates them himself becomes a machine, a tool among tools. From this

Chiffres of Modernity

385

the working people flee in uncountable hundreds of thousands into the dim halls with the moving pictures. That these pictures are mute only adds to their charm; they are mute as dreams are mute. It is speech that these people, without knowing it, fear most deeply; they fear in speech the tool of society. The lecture hall stands next door to the cinema, the meetinghouse only an alley farther down, but neither possesses the power of the cinema. The entrance to the cinema lures the people’s footsteps with a power like . . . like that of the brandy shop. And yet the cinema’s power is something different. Above the lecture hall in golden letters stand the words “Knowledge Is Power!” But the cinema beckons louder: it beckons with pictures. For the people, the power acquired through knowledge has something unfamiliar about it, something unpersuasive, nearly suspicious. They feel that it leads them only deeper into the machinery and ever farther away from their real lives, away from something that their senses—as well as a deeper secret stirring beneath their senses—tell them to be their real lives. Acquiring education and knowledge about the connections between things loosens, perhaps, the fetters they feel drawn about their wrists—loosens them, perhaps, for a moment, in appearance, and perhaps only then to bind them more securely. Perhaps all of this leads in the end to a new form of chains and a still deeper servitude. (I do not say that they say this; but a voice, very quietly, says it to them.) Given all this knowledge, their souls would still be empty. (This, too, they say to themselves, without saying it.) The lecture hall cannot really heal that peculiar, dull emptiness of reality, the wasteland (from which brandy, too, provides a way out) and the few fantasies hanging in the void. Nor do the slogans of the party gatherings or the newspaper columns appearing daily offer anything that would transcend the wasteland of existence. This language of the educated and half-educated, whether spoken or written down, is something foreign to working people. It ripples the surface but fails to awaken what slumbers in the depths. There is too much algebra in this language; every letter conceals yet another cipher, the cipher an abbreviation of a reality—all of this hints at something from the distance, hints, too, at power, and even at a power in which one has some kind of stake; but all of this is too indirect, the connections too intangible; nothing in it truly elevates the spirit or transports it to a destination. All of this more likely leaves behind a feeling of hopelessness; it again leaves them with the feeling of being a powerless cog in a machine. And they all know another power, a genuine one, indeed the only genuine one: the power of dreams. They were once children, and at that time they were powerful beings. Back then they had dreams at night, but not only at night; they had them by day as well, had them everywhere. A dark corner, a breath of wind, the face of an animal or the shuffle of a stranger’s step sufficed to make palpable those dreams’ enduring present. As children, they had the dark space behind the cellar steps, an old keg in the yard half-filled with rainwater, or a box of rubbish; they had the door to the storehouse, the trapdoor to the attic, and the door to the neighbors’ apartment. Someone emerged, causing them to duck away in fear, or someone beautiful cast the sweet, indefinable shiver of a newborn desire far into the dark trembling depths of their heart. Now, once again, a box of magical rubbish stands opened: the cinema. It reveals everything that otherwise remains hidden behind the cold, impenetrable façades of the endless buildings; in the cinema, all the doors swing open, doors leading into the chambers of the rich, the young girl’s room, the hotel lobbies, the thief’s hideout, or the alchemist’s laboratory. The cinema offers the trip through the air with the demon Asmodeus, who removes all rooftops and exposes all secrets. But it does not merely appease people’s agonizing and so often disappointed curiosity; as with dreamers, a more secret drive is seeking an outlet in the cinema. Dreams are acts; involuntarily, a sweet selfdeception mingles in this boundless looking. It is as if people could do as they pleased with these mute pictures rushing by before their eyes, as if they could lord it over entire

386

Film Culture and Politics

existences. The landscape—houses, parks, forests, and harbors—fluttering by behind the characters accompanies them only with a kind of muffled music (inflaming God knows what sorts of desire and arrogance in the dark region into which neither written nor spoken words can penetrate). Meanwhile, on film, a whole literature flies by in ragged snatches—or more precisely, an entire chaos of literatures: the leftover characters of thousands of dramas, novels, and detective stories; the historical anecdotes; the hallucinations of the seers and the reports of adventurers. But film also offers beautiful beings, transparent gestures, and expressions and looks from which the soul as such bursts forth. These beings live and suffer, struggle and perish before the eyes of the dreamer, and the dreamer knows he is awake. He need leave no part of himself outside; with everything inside him, down the most secret of his folds, he stares at this flickering wheel of life that never stops spinning. It is the whole person who gives himself over to this spectacle, not a single dream from the early years of childhood, which would not join in the stirring movement. For we have only apparently forgotten our dreams. From every single one of them, and from all those we lost already upon awakening, there remains within us a certain something, a quiet but decisive coloration of affect; there remain the habits of the dream, which—more than the habits of life—contain the whole person, all the suppressed obsessions in which the individual’s strength and uniqueness subsist inwardly. As the eyes read from the flickering film the thousand-sided picture of life, the whole of this subterranean vegetation, down to the darkest regions of its roots, joins in the stirring movement. Indeed, this dark region of the roots, where the individual ceases to be individual, where words so seldom reach, where scarcely the word of prayer or the stammer of love is heard—this dark region of the roots joins in the stirring movement. In this dark region originates the most secret and deepest of all feelings of life: the suspicion of indestructibility, the belief in necessity, and the disdain of the merely real, which is only ever accidental. It is in this dark region, when it begins to pulse, that the power of what we call myth-making originates. Before this dark view from the depths of being, the symbol appears like a flash: the sensual image of spiritual truth beyond the reach of ratio. I know, concluded my friend, that one can look at these things in many different ways. And I know there is a different and no less legitimate point of view that sees in all of this nothing more than a pitiful confusion resulting from industrial greed, the omnipotence of technology, the depreciation of the spiritual, and a dull curiosity that will take any bait. But it seems to me that the atmosphere in the cinema is the only one offering the people of our time—those who make up the masses—an immediate and unrestrained relation to an enormous (even if oddly presented) cultural heritage; they stand before this heritage life to life, and the packed room with its semidarkness and its racing pictures appears to me—I cannot say it any other way—as all but sacred, as the site where souls propelled by a murky drive for self-preservation flee the world of numbers for that of visions.

177 KURT PINTHUS The Ethical Potential of Film First published as “Ethische Möglichkeiten im Film,” in Hugo Zehder, ed., Der Film von morgen (Berlin/Dresden: Rudolf Kaemmerer Verlag, 1923), 117–29; here 117–18, 120–21, 122–25. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Chiffres of Modernity

387

This essay appeared as a chapter in the anthology Der Film von morgen (The Film of Tomorrow), which assembled writings about cinema’s promise and possible futures. Noting the spatial and existential constraints of many filmgoers, Kurt Pinthus here celebrates film for its immediate accessibility, regardless of viewers’ class and cultural context. For Pinthus, the emergence of film is a momentous ethical and world-historical event, expanding the consciousness of a “tortured humanity” during a period marked by “general poverty.” See also Pinthus’s texts in chapters 5, 6, and 10 of this volume (nos. 74, 81, 86, 144).

When I speak of fi lm’s ethical potential, I am not making some vain quixotic argument. Opponents of film and film cynics should not smirk at this title, nor should film entrepreneurs and moviegoers in search of entertainment shrug their shoulders and turn away in boredom. This is not the writing of some noble knight (of principles) who, blinded to reality by his ideals, plans to launch an attack against the grinding windmills of our time in search of some completely unattainable—and completely undesirable—goal (such as tendentious films dripping with morality). Let me make it clear in advance that I am not using the word ethical here in a philosophical or narrow schoolbook sense but rather as a term with which to summarize the social, pedagogical, cultural, and delightful effects of film. To put it another way, I could say that the term ethical comprises everything that brings about movement, excitement, expansion, clarity, and perfection of consciousness. For this reason as well, I will in no way categorically demand here that film “should” or “must” do this or that. I wish rather to explore what film can do, what it is able to bring about in man’s inner being—which is already good in any case—according to its potential possibilities. [. . .] The invention of film itself represents an ethical event of the first order. In order to find a historical equivalent, one would have to go all the way back to the invention of printing. However, cinematography has one advantage over printing in that its reception does not require any special acquired knowledge, as do languages and the activity of reading; film is immediately accessible to illiterates and to the most distant peoples alike. While books can mediate facts and events only indirectly, so that the reader must first reproduce the visual phenomena in his own mind, film offers its pictures immediately to sight, and offers them, moreover, in a quicker, more concentrated form than either real experience or imagination spurred on by reading could do. Cinematography is inferior to printing in the mediation of intellectual ideas, although one can imagine fi lms whose ideas—released, as it were, from abstraction—would have a more powerful effect than those promulgated in printing and speech because they would spread more rapidly in their more comprehensible visual form. As a medium for the promulgation of ethical ideas, which have always relied on examples to exert the most powerful and suggestive influence, film outdoes not only the book but also speeches and sermons. This is no less true for those more general ideas or worldviews promoted by scientific discoveries; here, one might also consider the fact that words in the form of titles can come to the aid of film’s moving images. [. . .] When one considers the tiny portion of the earth’s surface to which ninety percent of the human race is banished, the tiny and monotonous sphere of action and experience in which this ninety percent of humanity bides its time, then one can understand that most powerful of human drives—second only to hunger and love—that goes by the name of curiosity: the drive for experience and adventure, in short, the longing for an expansion of our sphere of consciousness and emotion. When one then considers how few possibilities for this expansion are contained in the instructional and entertaining power of speech, books, the plastic arts, and the theater; how difficult it is for the masses to

388

Film Culture and Politics

translate into visual and conscious images what until now has been the most widely disseminated means of information, the newspaper, one immediately sees the significance of film for this expansion of human consciousness. This significance cannot be underestimated. The point is illustrated by statistics, which show that, in Germany alone, some two million people sit in the cinema every day, and that every film is seen by twenty million people on average, and for successful export films, one would have to multiply this number exponentially. Film’s ability to roam through nature, cities, social classes, houses, historical epochs, adventures, and tragic and comic events represents much more than the stimulation of the retina for purposes of entertainment. In every film, countless figures, faces, human characteristics, passions, facts, processes, landscapes, milieus, activities, and details hammer themselves into the consciousness of every spectator with a powerful force of suggestion. Consider how quickly and how economically the spectator experiences, in the space of just two hours, the most varied events, events that would require years to experience in real life; how he can see landscapes that would otherwise require long and arduous journeys to reach; how he learns of the life and activities of social classes otherwise inaccessible to him; how he is showered by a panoply of adventures, which books or the longing of his own fantasy can depict only at a slow pace. Precisely in these times of general poverty, when most people cannot even afford books or a newspaper subscription, film offers a substitute for that which reality refuses to today’s tortured humanity. It leads the individual across the entire surface of the earth, inserting him into varieties of life from which he is otherwise excluded. And with the current international exchange of films between all countries, the possibilities for gaining knowledge of the world are becoming infinite. [. . .] We can immediately counter the arguments of all opponents of film by pointing out the enormous contribution the invention of film has made to the happiness of mankind. Film’s opponents are generally educated people who can read books and newspapers, learn about the past, travel, and amass rich experiences in all sorts of domains. However, the two million people who daily attend the cinema in Germany are nearly all chained to their mechanical and monotonous work, which entails the same routine day in and day out; their existence plays itself out among a tiny sphere of acquaintances—indeed, in a little corner of the city. These people, and especially the young among them, harbor an enormous desire for the expansion of their sphere of experience and consciousness. Their psyche contains a hollow space, so to speak, around which surge currents of latent and unbalanced forces, of longings for happiness and of unquenched thirst for knowledge. Film fills up this empty space with a mass of material, which provokes an intense sensation of excitement and happiness as it flows in before descending into the subconscious, where it develops, finds its psychic place, and then leaves again. Through this process of reception, through this inner movement, huge sums of latent restless forces are abreacted in a harmless way. Many people believe that intense, adventurous, and fantastic actions shown on film have a suggestive effect on spectators, inciting them to imitation. I hold just the opposite view: the sight of foreign environments and intense events works precisely to abreact and thus eliminate the excess desire for experience and adventure so often at the root of crime. For many, the excitement and expansion of consciousness experienced in the cinema suffices to restore a balance, which the reality of their narrow sphere of existence could never offer them. In ancient Athens, where the theater played an important part in the lives of the entire population, it was tragedy that performed this function of catharsis for the masses. And just how clearly the wise recognized and understood this function can be seen in the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, which holds that the sight of the characters provokes fear and pity, through which the spectator undergoes a process of inner purification. While

Chiffres of Modernity

389

today’s theater reaches only a very few people, film has come into the world in order to revive this process of catharsis for the masses. One has the impression that the forms taken by this process have always been determined by the masses themselves, according to their psychic disposition at any given moment. The so-called primitive peoples practiced masked dances, demonic mysteries, and cultic rituals; the Greeks invented tragedy; the Romans of the decadent period had their gladiator fights (just as bullfighting thrives in Spain today); the Middle Ages instituted, on the one hand, joust tournaments and, on the other, the religious dramas performed on open squares; the period of the baroque and rococo absolutism created its magnificent opera. Allow me simply to assert here that this line has found its temporary end today in films and sports shows, without going into the question of whether these developments represent a psychic decline of the masses. In any case, as our epoch’s preferred means of catharsis, film and sports characteristically evince that nervous excitation and centrifugal tendency of the people, which flows partly into imaginary, worldly temptations and partly into a powerful condensation of forces. The actions and locations shown in films free the spectator from the monotony of his daily life; they assuage his desire to see other environments, other social classes, and other, more exciting events. They throw rapid and large bites into the snout of the insatiable psychic animal. Forgotten and murky events of history come back to life on film in a concise and universally comprehensible form. We suddenly find ourselves in distant lands; we see other peoples’ customs and lifestyles and the places where they live and how they work. People from every part of the earth file past us. And as knowledge of people expands, it seems to me, so does love of people. Ever since film first showed us the shiny bodies of Negroes, the supple expressiveness of East Asians, many people no longer see the Negro as an uncultivated black beast or the Asian as a deceitful yellow ape. We sense that all people of the earth are frightened or overjoyed by the same things; we become conscious of the fact that we all have five fingers on our hands; and somewhere in every woman, a feeling of community must surely arise when she sees how the Indian mother cares for her child and the Australian woman milks her cow. But to an even greater extent than the consciousness of the similarities between foreign peoples, the knowledge of their differences and distinct characteristics lends them a respectable and endearing quality in our eyes. We see how distant people walk through the streets of their cities, how they behave when eating, what trees and flowers grow in their gardens and forests; we see them at work and at play; we see how they dress and how they live. We see their particular bodily gestures, the ways in which they express their pleasures, vices, morality, desires, humor, and sadness. And we know that as we speak, people are sitting in Argentina and Haiti and learning about us through our films just as we learn about them through theirs. Whether living in Greenland, Tierra del Fuego, India, or Canada, everyone equally understands the hopeless sorrow or tremendous passion expressed by a human face when the muscles move in the right way. Everyone understands how Chaplin’s slapstick humor abolishes the reality that weighs down on us in daily life—and how, at the same time, by turning a sad gaze onto this pitiless world, it reveals the tragedy of our earthly destiny.

178 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER A Film First published as “Ein Film,” Frankfurter Zeitung (February 4, 1924). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

390

Film Culture and Politics The following is the second of Siegfried Kracauer’s three reviews of Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923) from the mid-1920s. He first reviewed the film in the Frankfurter Zeitung one day earlier, on February 3, 1924, and returned to it a year later (see no. 179). The Street became a key work in his early film aesthetics and meditations on modern, postlapsarian existence; for Kracauer in 1924, the film’s depiction of contemporary urban life—”a life bereft of substance, empty like a tin can”—finds ideal expression in the associative montage of cinema. Kracauer’s account of the alienated modern subject also echoes Georg Lukács’s ideas—not only his 1911 “Thoughts toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema” (no. 174) but also the “transcendental homelessness” postulated in his Theory of the Novel (1916/20), which Kracauer had praised in a long review, “Georg von Lukács’ Romantheorie,” in Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur, October 4, 1921.

The film The Street, which will now be shown in Frankfurt as well, is one of the few works of modern filmmaking in which an object takes shape that only fi lm can shape in this way, and in which possibilities are realized that are possibilities only for film. The production process of the film already suggests the object to which it is designated. The film adds shot onto shot, and from these, reeling one after another, it mechanically assembles the world—a silent world in which no word passes from person to person, but rather the sole language is the inchoate speech of optical impressions. The more the object represented can be rendered in the succession of mere images, the collection of simultaneous impressions, the more it corresponds to fi lm’s technique of association. Indeed, what would be more closely related to it than a life that exhausts itself purely in external occurrences? A life bereft of substance, empty like a tin can, which knows—instead of the inner relationality—only selective events that assemble kaleidoscopically in ever-new series of images? Only the surface is turned toward it, and in the activity of existenceless larvae, the chaos of the atom mixture, it finds itself whole again. The metropolitan street is the characteristic setting of such illusory life. People cross it as chance would have it, brush against each other, and withdraw without greeting. No encounter of souls takes place, no meaningful, lasting connection clenches and binds, nothing tragic happens between them, which would presuppose a concrete relationship and real decisions grounded therein—only figures bump into each other, events transpire, and situation piles blindly upon situation; all of this without continuity and order, a spectral, unreal togetherness of unreal people, which is unable to fill the time flowing emptily by. The individual placed into the disintegrated world who has any consciousness of himself is plainly lonesome therein. Only for moments can his soul assert itself and, in feeling its peculiarity, reveal the illusory quality of the bustle around it. This impact of the demoralized soul on the emptied world was imagined exemplarily by Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps the first to do so, in his tale “The Man of the Crowd.” Inwardness that finds no echo, that must go without answer because no one is aware of its question any longer, is also the recurring reproach of Georg Kaiser’s dramatic art. The film composition itself, a directorial creation of Karl Grune, silently and eerily attests to the suffering of the pining soul in the rubble devoid of existence. The moment, which is merely a point in time, becomes visibility in it; types that are entirely unrealized dimly move themselves in it through the tattered world. What besieges the lonesome wanderer in the voracious nighttime streets is expressed by the film in a vertiginous succession of futuristic images, and the film can express it in this manner because the yearning inner life releases only fragmentary ideas. The occurrences become enmeshed and unknotted again, and, since the people have perished, the inanimate things also join in the game as if a matter of course. Plaster walls announce murder, an illuminated sign flashes like a flickering eye: the entirety a confused coexistence, a chaos [Tohuwabohu] of reified souls

Chiffres of Modernity

391

and seemingly conscious things. Within this turmoil, providence is provided by the police, which encompass the mere outer world; the only real element within it is the child, who does not know that it is. The film closes as it began; nocturnal ghosts scatter in the sober morning, and whatever may have happened, it lacks the solidity to give it being. It remains worth noting that the performances are consummate, and gaze and gestures dominate the disintegrated world, which divests itself of the binding word.

179 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Film Image and Prophetic Speech First published as “Filmbild und Prophetenrede,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (May 5, 1925). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

This is the third text that Siegfried Kracauer devoted to Karl Grune’s The Street (1923) in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The text was originally part of a longer, programmatic essay, “Der Künstler in dieser Zeit” (The artist in this time), which Kracauer had published one month earlier in the inaugural issue of the German-Jewish journal Der Morgen, where it appeared alongside contributions by Leo Baeck and Franz Rosenzweig. Although Kracauer lectured at Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus and often invoked Jewish messianic tropes in his Weimar essays, he was sharply critical of the postwar religious revival and indeed saw in Grune’s film “a world where people have no connection to the divine.” This text also exemplifies the ways in which Kracauer employed film to think through philosophical and existential issues. The early, theologically preoccupied phase of Kracauer’s film criticism would soon give way to reviews driven more by Marxist materialism and social criticism.

The film The Street, which played recently in several German cities, shows a world where people have no connection to the divine. These people of the metropolitan street have no relationship with a higher plane; they are nothing more than externality, like the street itself, where many things occur, but nothing really happens. The bustling crowd of figures resembles the whirling of atoms: they do not encounter each other but rather collide; they drift apart but do not separate. Rather than living in connection with things, they sink to the level of moving inanimate objects: automobiles, fire escapes, neon signs that, unconcerned with time, light up and go dark. Rather than filling space, they draw their paths through barren wasteland; rather than communicating with language, they leave things unsaid that could unite or divide them. Love is copulation; murder a coincidence; and tragedy does not come to pass. A mute, soulless coexistence of controlled vehicles and uncontrolled drives, a throng milling about on the asphalt and in nightclubs, whose existence is reduced to mere expressions of life to the extent that it does not follow the goals set by detached reason [ratio]. Anyone who wanders about in this doomed reality, awake and yearning, seems to be a dreamer because truth becomes a dream when emptiness presents itself as true. Scraps of paper jeer at the sleepwalker, who tries in vain to grasp some meaning. But even if (and because) truth has been forgotten, it has not been obliterated, and in the horror at the vacuum that stretches between seconds, the negated divine makes itself known. The image of the present uncoiled in this film may find its justification in a foundation of conscience. Perhaps those very people who take truth seriously are twice as sensitive to

392

Film Culture and Politics

the force of the powers reshaping the world into a cosmopolitan street. And because they believe no less that only the acknowledgment and transformation of an unreal life can lead to truth, and that fragmented contents cannot be pieced together or dishonestly asserted, they strictly refuse the romantic attempt to suppress the realities of technology and business and to hinder the development of civilization by means that are no match for its magnitude. For them, it is far more important that the world completely reveal its illusory nature, that nothingness rule as long as it can. They are nihilists for the sake of possible positives, pursuing the end of despair, so that no yes might be hindered, powerless, halfway. This longing for the revelation of negativity stops them from attributing equal value to its opposite, which might prematurely flatten and obscure matters. The excesses of technology seem more real to them than spiritual rudiments, which no longer form a threshold, and they see danger in the claims of a reality that fails in the face of the reality of untruth. That is why they exaggerate negation, stretch emptiness, and reject souls that are nothing more than cosmetic. They believe that America will only disappear once it has fully discovered itself, and that they can still see the nakedness of the street, even where gazebos and ornaments provide an idyllic masquerade. The planar exterior that exists should exist for them, because if the surface is not included, the darkest thing not illuminated, every word is spoken in vain, and only the lucky ones can make themselves believe in salvation. As stated, precisely those people who long for truth would like to experience the closed-off unreality of time exclusively. But if the train to nothingness serves as their definitive reality, one commandment is given to them before all others: to create a connection to a higher plane that tears into truth. They must await the call that points to the divine; they tremble before the opening that will lead these figures from the street toward the correct path. Where the metropolitan street grows into infinity, news from a higher plane is required—otherwise, a great gap yawns between the film image and prophetic speech, and the middle remains unbuilt; the realm in between, which should fulfill the union of the spiritual world and worldly spirit, remains empty. Only when the impartation of truthful things awakens participation in them will illusory reality fade away, and no one can be a dreamer who wanders, yearning, through the bustling crowd.

180 ADOLF BEHNE The Public’s Attitude toward Modern German Literature First published as “Die Stellung des Publikums zur modernen deutschen Literatur,” in Die Weltbühne 22, no. 20 (May 18, 1926), 774–77. Translated by Erik Born.

An art historian and architectural critic, Adolf Behne (1885–1948) was a prominent voice in the Weimar avant-garde (see his text in chapter 14, no. 204). In this article, he exemplifies Weimar intellectuals’ fascination with the United States and the Fordist mode of production, here juxtaposing American mass culture with the dictatorial political and cultural regimes of Europe. For Behne, film was a sign of democratic modernity, replacing the aristocratic culture of the book and becoming “the literature of our times.” Noting the popularity of American cinema, Behne discerns in the films of Chaplin a desire to “elevate” (rather than “crush”) the masses. See also the writings on Chaplin by Theodor Adorno (no. 184), Walter Benjamin (no. 182), and Siegfried Kracauer (no. 183) later in this chapter, and by Claire Goll in chapter 9, no. 126.

Chiffres of Modernity

393

“You shall love me,” the Soldier King shouted at his subjects and lashed out at them with his swagger stick.1 “You shall love me . . . love me!” “You shall read us,” our anointed poets call out, and the prominent critics threaten people with their canes: “Read your poets—buy them, read them!” But people stream into the cinema. Curses, threats, and insults are useless, and promises will be fruitless. You cannot force anyone to love you. The principle of dictatorship is collapsing throughout our Western culture. Are Mussolini and Primo de Rivera anything other than Renaissance throwbacks?2 They play their grandiose roles with bravado—and completely fail to notice that someone changed the scenery a long time ago. (Those who think that there is “no difference” between Mussolini and Lenin should remember one of Lenin’s sayings: “We can only rule when we bring to expression what a people carries within itself.”) In the art world, educated Europeans still live under dictatorship. Americans no longer do. And that’s why Europeans call them “uncultured.” Culture is dictatorship. That’s why Americans almost never speak of “culture,” but rather more simply, plainly, modestly, and politely of “civilization.” While all of us Europeans are still creatures of the Renaissance, American history begins only after the Renaissance—and America became the first country to establish a democratic culture. Walt Whitman, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright—nearly all great Americans have paid homage to democracy as the basis of their work. You can read Lewis Mumford to get a sense of this deep, decisive feeling, 3 which is entirely new to us (Mumford refers to the “despotic character of classical architecture”). For Americans, democracy is something other than a “form” of government. American civilization was built on the hearts and the senses of the masses. That’s why we call it kitsch. But this kitsch protects Americans from our inhumanity. Europeans can think of only one possible relation between art and the masses: hatred. As Péladan characteristically puts it, “An artwork has to crush the masses.”4 [. . .] How might all of this change? It will change only if we convert from a model of production based on supplying luxuries to a model based on meeting demands, as Ford did in automobile manufacturing, thinking and acting democratically. A book of poetry will not become a mass-produced article if it doesn’t even know the needs of the masses, let alone acknowledge them—and if, furthermore, it attempts to assert its “grandeur” by threatening to declare the nonbuyer, the nonreader a philistine. But how are we to recognize the needs of the masses without abandoning quality and standards? The same people who could ask this question are able to discuss the topics of popular tales and popular literature academically for hours on end. As a matter of fact, poetry has already been restructured. The fact is that hundreds of thousands of people who would never read a book hear verses by Goethe, Stefan George, and Else Lasker-Schüler on the radio. I do not mean that so seriously, since this is ultimately a (very welcome) substitute for reading, as is the case with the mass audiences for the cinema. Film is something essentially new. It is the literature of our times. I cannot understand why anyone should attach importance to the book and to buying books. The book is nothing other than a distribution medium, nothing more than a form of communication. As soon as there is a more intense form of communication, a better distribution medium, the old one is doomed to extinction. Book culture today is like the culture of stabbing weapons in an age of chemical warfare. Literature is nothing but the subtlest form of argumentation and persuasion. What undreamt-of possibilities film gives authors for honing and condensing their arguments! And the more possibilities, the less “literary” the film.

394

Film Culture and Politics

Film is the simple, direct, and legitimate extension of the book—Edison, the new Gutenberg. Every little book that we used as schoolchildren, flipping through its pages to create a primitive film, was a significant moment of transition. Film comes about as soon as we take advantage of the sequence of pages in a book temporally rather than spatially. The time will come when we hardly write any more books—as long as we first recognize how much more precisely arguments can be made in films. For the time being, however, film will continue to influence literature in the sense of purifying it. In part, this effect can already be felt. Flowery language already seems dusty. And why is it that images are disappearing from essays, reviews, and feature stories, as they are from the walls of bourgeois apartments? Because in fi lm we have developed a language that is rooted in perception, and any perception that is rooted in language can no longer compete with it. At last, language will become clean, clear, and precise, and we will not need anyone to eliminate foreign words. The most important thing for us now is that fi lm has been democratic from the very start. High-society people have avoided it from the beginning with a certain degree of self-satisfaction, and for the highest society people, film does not even exist yet. There are no special copies of fi lms on precious celluloid with gilded edges made for collectors. Film began as an art of the masses, as a theater of the plebs. And any film production against the masses is out of the question. Film understood as an individual artwork in the old sense is not viable. Democratic film composition confronts aristocratic book composition as an art coming from below. The future belongs to it. It is fairly natural to find attempts to make “exclusive films” in Germany, the land in which books, or the ownership of books, were attributes of an entire class. But the masses have long since decided in favor of American films (which we don’t need to swallow hook, line, and sinker), films in which Charlie Chaplin appeared as the first great author of the new art—Chaplin, who always attends screenings of his films in cinemas of different ranks and sizes so that he can study how the masses react to one gag or another. He does so because, for him, the artwork is made not to crush the masses but rather to elevate them. And you can elevate only those who you can grab hold of properly. In always learning from the masses, Charlie creates didactic literature. Chaplin’s work is evidence enough that an accessible, popular artwork does not always have to be kitsch. It can be dignified, human, and brilliant to the utmost extent. Have no fear for literature! For now, the death of the book is a long way away. Even when it arrives, it will not mean the death of literature! The audience has no more interest in books? But they sit down with the modern book night after night, and learn how to see, think, and feel through films—books that millions read and no one “owns.” Notes 1. The Soldier King was the epithet of Frederick William I of Prussia, who reigned from 1713 to 1740. In various works of nineteenth-century German literature, the king beats an intimidated Jewish man who had run away from him and screams: “You shall love me, not fear me!” 2. Benito Mussolini was prime minister and Il Duce from 1922 to 1943; Miguel Primo de Rivera was prime minister and dictator of Spain from 1923 to 1930. 3. Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), an American architectural critic and philosopher of technology, had become widely known for Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (1924). 4. Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) was a French novelist known for his interest in mysticism and spirituality.

Chiffres of Modernity

395

181 FRITZ GIESE Revue and Film First published as “Revue und Film” in Der Auftakt: Musikblätter für die Tschechoslowakische Republik 8 (1928), 172–76. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

A psychologist and specialist in psychotechnics, Fritz Giese (1890–1935) was also a cultural theorist of modernity in the tradition of scholars like the psychologist Willy Hellpach and the historian Karl Lamprecht. In the same year that Siegfried Kracauer wrote his first review of the Tiller Girls (“Die Revue im Schumann-Theater”), Giese’s book Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem Rhythmus und Lebensgefühl (Girl culture: Comparisons between American and European rhythm and sense of life, 1925) examined the phenomenon of chorus girls, along with jazz and the movies, in terms of the new rhythms of life under modern capitalism. The following article, written for a special issue of the music journal Der Auftakt on variety shows, summarizes Giese’s understanding of chorus lines and film as two expressions of an age defined by mass production and technology.

Artistically speaking, revue and film belong together, since they gain their significance for us as expressions of a representational mode born of a technological age. To be sure, the invention of the printing press also had a revolutionary effect in its own day; the seclusion of literary works in the monastic sphere disappeared. No longer did people revere the knight who, in the words of a medieval epic, “was so learned that he read from books”!1 Reading and writing became profane, but precisely this profane art ascended in content and form toward the outstanding achievements of the classical era and bore a literary type that ruled throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and that today can be found only in the Viennese atmosphere (where it appears archaic). Through the fundamental resources of technology and mass production, our era has acquired different tools and with them, also a shift of emphasis in the artistic realm. But while the potential for radio’s effectiveness is limited, in part by the fact that it is nothing more than a formal tool, and while all of the prize competitions have brought no basic literary or performance-based innovations in the area of radio broadcasting (admittedly, there is particular potential in connection with acoustics—not just music), the technology of our era has to some extent left its mark on two better-known areas of application. They are the children of their time: revue and film. I.

What exactly is the essence of these revues, as we know them today and as they had already developed in a different form before 1914? Back then—in Berlin, for example— the revue was a timely political presentation with a predilection for ironic spirit; developed in places like the Metropol-Theater, it consisted of an overview of the year’s political events. It offered a cross-section of local color, national issues, and cosmopolitan news, which did not exclude the characteristic musical composition, even if this musical component always stayed within the realm of popular hit songs. In contrast, there is what we call revue today. It originates partially in Paris, partially in the music halls of the AngloAmerican world. Here the content shifts from the relatively elite cross-section of current events to an urge toward variety with the most diverse heaps of alternating images. And along with the images, this so-called art also brings “values,” which must be clear to the musician if he wishes to properly understand the action! First of all, this revue is, to a

396

Film Culture and Politics

greater extent than its predecessor, an optical act, a feast for the eyes. The director’s palette of techniques now includes the technological effects of sophisticated lighting, the revolving stage, the possibility of metamorphosis, projections of all kinds, and also the incorporation of film (Piscator is less original than many think). Secondly, alongside this optical “show” comes the motorization of everything: now we see acrobats and jugglers but above all dancers, slapstick routines and—as befits the technological age—those dance machines first brought to us historically by the Tiller Girls. No show without girls, no girl without dance! But with that, this revue of exclusively vocal pleasures, handed down from the era of the waltz, the “Washington Post,”2 and the one-step, incorporates all of the characteristic acoustic-musical expressions of our technological epoch: tempo, rhythm, international condensation of thought, and athletically intensified movement— in short, everything that we tend to associate with jazz and about which the present author wrote in more detail in his book Girlkultur.3 Thus, the revue is visibly shifting its emphasis. It is becoming a sequence of scenes in which optical intensity is reinforced by accelerated motor activity. The music adjusts to this shift; indeed, it even drives this partially intentional, but far more often intuitive development, thus leaving a perfect and lasting impression on a person. On the other hand, we see a decline in intellectual and purely spiritual elements. Two things result from this technological age. Firstly, this new form of revue—just like its predecessor before the last war—is certainly nothing more than an opportunity for entertainment, an art of nonartists in the general public. But, in typically technological fashion, it takes aim at mass humanity, as much on the stage itself as with regard to the headcount of the audience. It is a serial work in the true technological sense of the word. Made by many for the many. It is intended for infinite repetition in the yearly program, which is the only way to “recoup” investments, for this revue itself costs an enormous amount of money. But the music is one of its most essential factors, for without up-to-date music, the serial performance cannot hold its ground. Optics alone will certainly not suffice. It is interesting to see how composers like Lehár and Kalman totally conform to precisely this technological idea.4 Dance, however, as an expression of the musically driven motor activity of this era, transfers its rites to the audience. No one could see the old revue ballet as a norm. But today, everybody can imitate the performance of the girls and the techniques of partner dance in the amateur gymnastic and athletic activities that are so commonplace. Secondly, this revue addresses people in a new way. It no longer targets provincials, old men armed with opera glasses who hope to see some “leggings” from their front-row club chairs. The influence of fashion and athletic lifestyles, along with changes in other habits, has made the revue into a show for everyman. Grandmothers, too, go to revues, and even young people take in their Sunday afternoon performances (as in Berlin). And slowly, a purely erotic pleasure is becoming an optical-musical one, which no longer strives for interesting and rare “stimulations” but rather for the total image, the holistic effect. Today every seaside resort, every gymnastics hall can, under the right circumstances, show us more than the most popular ballet once could. Precisely this new man is now tightly bound by the chains of a grueling new professional sphere. Economic life demands one-sidedness and the utmost exertion during the workday. It is no longer possible to indulge in the leisurely satire of contemporary events. The revue no longer caters to the needs of people who have too much time; rather, it is a necessity for those who have too little. Professional life swallows up everything—people are grasping for easier, more relaxing breaks from consciousness: the revue swirls around them and neither demands problematic thinking nor awakens any kind of refinement on their part. Furthermore, as in a few German and many French models, it can also provide personal aesthetic pleasure. All of this occurs in the world of the average Joe, the person of mass artistic work. Ready-made theatrical conventions right off the rack, but only the observant outsider would comprehend this.

Chiffres of Modernity

397

II.

Now we must add that this very same type of thinking, perceiving, and searching finds support in that more widely distributed technological art: film. Summarily regarded, film too is nothing more than an industry, which for its part—with all the latest technological tools and under favorable, formal human circumstances (namely, the escape from meaning, mind, and ideas)—provides the man of the crowd with relaxation, distraction, stimulation, and even abreaction. What’s more, its technological momentum is unbroken, ready and willing to work at any time of day. But film and revue belong together not only with regard to their audience and technical background; they also share a bond in the impressions they make on the person watching and perceiving. What is the deciding factor in both cases? Quick alternations! No longwinded exposition, no epic scope! No overtaxing of thought! Rather, tension, diversion, and meticulous, industrially portioned movement through all mass human instincts: a little patriotism, a little religion, a touch of eroticism, lots of schadenfreude, mockery, rich sentimentality. And all of this leading to a happy end, all performed in the crush of mass humanity, rendered with such splendid technical mastery in film that, in the theater, only the revue can offer similar optical satisfaction. The “mass scene” of old-fashioned opera always seems pitiful, if not comical, alongside the array of masses of technological variants that film possesses by its very nature. An arena, a race, the theater in the theater, a boxing match—film can offer all of this perfectly, and if theater wishes to approximate film’s optical character at all, only the revue stage can achieve anything comparable. It goes without saying that we can now expect a change even in the truly literary-musical artworks of the theater, an intentional conditioning beyond the zones that technological “art” is better situated to exploit. III.

Thus, film and revue are united in the endless fluctuation of scenarios and themes, in the audience’s fleeting concentration and its lack of expectation for intellectual stimulation, and thus also in the “cheapness” of the object. But we err if we see this as exclusively negative, if all we do is weep for the dead! Precisely these two forms, revue and film, are well suited to the more prosaic, gritty worldview of our day. In America, female students could no longer understand Hamlet’s dilemma. Our generation has only a limited understanding of the Wallenstein conflict; indeed, the very rationalism of our time leaves them wondering if historical relations really were the way that they are so painstakingly depicted in the faltering, agonizing construction of older trilogies. Were there such people? Perhaps! But if they really did exist, they are becoming more incomprehensible to us; they no longer necessarily belong to us, and only Shakespeare, who grasped what was truly generally human, still lives among us. Schiller and to a greater extent Ibsen, for example, are forgotten problems. They are literary aspects or educational material for upper-level girls’ schools. This is the state of things, and we are realizing that this development is not simply negative! For the realistic sensibility of revue and film—inasmuch as they avoid banal-romantic fairy tale kitsch (dreams, the usual fantasy images!)—introduces, above all else, attention to everyday matters, to small things, tiny things, the life of everyman. Material comes not from the experiences of kings, knights, academics or artists but rather from the existence of X and Y and Z. None other than the greatest contemporary filmmaker, Chaplin, saw the future of film when he discovered this basic idea. This is why his films are so significantly superior to the visual appeal of beautiful and athletic male bodies, of romantic American kitsch plots with Him and Her. The philosophy of everyday life, the metaphysics of insignificance are seen clearly by Chaplin, mastered, indeed even poetically crystallized. We are coming out of the cramped zone of the most superficial film art, just as we rise above revue kitsch, when we see a Grock on the stage!5 It is totally false to say that revue and film are kitschy and depraved. The “classical” provincial

398

Film Culture and Politics

stage or the small-town music performances conducted in a “modern” manner can be much less significant, in both form and content. The important point here is to understand the cultural background of which the contexts briefly touched on here provide a hint. IV.

But with regard to their particular relationships to music, revue and film have already exerted a notable influence. Earlier, we mentioned the dance music that was born from revue—not film. We also note that even classical music reaches the average person today only via film; the technology of radio is similar! But we especially wish to recall that the contemporary films and revues could also bring to life the rudiments of a new kind innovative music, which strives to be anything other than modest, silly accompaniment for silent films or saucy profit guarantors for expensive revue images! We recall—to name only one case—Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf.6 This work still takes its source all too clearly from surface phenomena: jazz, America, everyday themes. But we feel with enormous clarity, even in spite of all modernity, that in this regard, the path of contemporary music is really leading toward those things that people in our era are seeking! And whatever our attitude toward one or the other might be, we have no doubt which will enjoy a longer life: Jonny or Die ägyptische Helena.7 The young man’s destiny has yet to be decided. But we know that the race will not be won by the lady. Generations decide. Greece or Africa? No, we are heading toward an un-American, a truly European music, mastered from the spirit and will of the times. Worthy of its already highly developed contemporary sister art “frozen music” [gefrorene Musik],8 as the Romantics called it, the architecture of concrete and iron. Notes 1. In the opening lines of Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich (ca. 1190), the poet introduces himself as “Ein ritter so gelêret was / daz er an den buochen las.” 2. A march by John Philip Sousa from 1889. 3. Fritz Giese, Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem Rhythmus und Lebensgefühl (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1925). 4. Franz Lehár (1870–1948) and Emmerich Kálmán (1882–1953) were operetta composers. 5. Charles Adrien Wettach (1880–1959), who went by the stage name Grock, was a Swiss clown and one of the most famous entertainers in Europe. 6. Austrian composer Ernst Krenek’s jazz opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny strikes up, 1927) was a worldwide success in the late 1920s. The opera’s plot centers on the encounters between an opera singer, a violinist, a composer, and an African American jazz musician in a European hotel. 7. The Egyptian Helen is a 1928 opera by Richard Strauss with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. 8. An early-nineteenth-century topos of architecture was “frozen music,” commonly attributed to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In The World as Will as Idea, Schopenhauer would trace the idea of architecture as “frozen music” back to Goethe’s conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann, dismissing it as a “jest.”

182 WALTER BENJAMIN Chaplin in Retrospect First published as “Rückblick auf Chaplin” in Die literarische Welt 5, no. 6 (February 8, 1929), 2. Published in English in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings vol. 2, part 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 222–24. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

Chiffres of Modernity

399

Much as Adolf Behne (no. 180) celebrated Chaplin for his devotion to popular audiences, Walter Benjamin here notes the film artist’s appeal to laughter, which he characterizes as “the most international and the most revolutionary emotion of the masses.” Five years later, in a fragment on “Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity” (1934), Benjamin would rearticulate this argument under new political circumstances, juxtaposing Chaplin with Hitler as “the ploughshare that cuts through the masses; laughter loosens up the mass.”1 Benjamin also wrote about Chaplin in his fragments “Chaplin” (1928–29) and “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression” (1935), as well as in his canonical Artwork essay from 1936. In “The Author as Producer” (1934) he wrote in relation to Brecht’s Epic Theater: “There is no better trigger for thinking than laughter.”2

The Circus is the first product of the art of film that is also the product of old age. Charlie has grown older since his last film. But he also acts old. And the most moving thing about this new film is the feeling that Chaplin now has a clear overview of his possibilities and is resolved to work exclusively within these limits to attain his goal. At every point the variations on his greatest themes are displayed in their full glory. The chase is set in a maze; his unexpected appearance would astonish a magician; the mask of noninvolvement turns him into a fairground marionette . . . The lesson and the warning that emerge from this great work have led the poet Philippe Soupault to attempt the first definition of Chaplin as a historical phenomenon.3 In November the excellent review Europe (published by Rieder, Paris), to which we shall return in greater detail, presented an essay by Soupault containing a number of ideas around which a defi nitive picture of the great artist will one day be able to crystallize.4 What he emphasizes there above all is that Chaplin’s relation to the film is fundamentally not that of Chaplin the actor, let alone the star. Following Soupault’s way of thinking, we might say that Chaplin, considered as a total phenomenon, is no more of an actor than was William Shakespeare. Soupault insists, rightly, that “the undeniable superiority of Chaplin’s films . . . is based on the fact that they are imbued with a poetry that everyone encounters in his life, admittedly without always being conscious of it.” What is meant by this is of course not that Chaplin is the “author” of his film scripts. Rather, he is simply the author of his own films—that is to say, their director. Soupault has realized that Chaplin was the first (and the Russians have followed his example) to construct a film with a theme and variations—in short, with the element of composition—and that all this stands in complete opposition to films based on action and suspense. This explains why Soupault has argued more forcefully than anyone else that the pinnacle of Chaplin’s work is to be seen in A Woman of Paris. This is the film in which, as is well known, he does not even appear and which was shown in Germany under the idiotic title Die Nächte einer schönen Frau [Nights of a beautiful woman]. (The Kamera Theater ought to show it every six months. It is a foundational document of the art of film.) When we learn that 125,000 meters of film were shot for this 3,000-meter work, we get some idea of the capital that this man requires, and that is at least as necessary to him as to a Nansen or an Amundsen if he is to make his voyages of discovery to the poles of the art of film.5 We must share Soupault’s concern that Chaplin’s productivity may be paralyzed by the dangerous financial claims of his second wife, as well as by the ruthless competition of the American trusts. It is said that Chaplin is planning both a Napoleon fi lm and a Christ fi lm. Shouldn’t we fear that such projects are no more than giant screens behind which the great artist conceals his exhaustion?

400

Film Culture and Politics

It is good and useful that at the moment old age begins to show itself in Chaplin’s features, Soupault should remind us of Chaplin’s youth and of the territorial origins of his art. Needless to say, these lie in the metropolis of London. In his endless walks through the London streets, with their black-and-red houses, Chaplin trained himself to observe. He himself has told us that the idea of creating his stock character—the fellow with the bowler hat, jerky walk, little toothbrush moustache, and walking stick—first occurred to him on seeing office workers walking along the Strand. What he saw in their bearing and dress was the attitude of a person who takes some pride in himself. But the same can be said of the other characters that surround him in his films. They, too, originate in London: the shy, young, winsome girl; the burly lout who is always ready to use his fists and then to take to his heels when he sees that people aren’t afraid of him; the arrogant gentleman who can be recognized by his top hat. Soupault appends to this portrait a comparison between Dickens and Chaplin that is worth reading and exploring further. With his art, Chaplin confirms the old insight that only an imaginative world that is firmly grounded in a society, a nation, and a place will succeed in evoking the great, uninterrupted, yet highly differentiated resonance that exists between nations. In Russia, people wept when they saw The Pilgrim; in Germany, people are interested in the theoretical implications of his comedies; in England, they like his sense of humor. It is no wonder that Chaplin himself is puzzled and fascinated by these differences. Nothing points so unmistakably to the fact that the film will have immense significance as that it neither did nor could occur to anyone that there exists any judge superior to the actual audience. In his films, Chaplin appeals both to the most international and the most revolutionary emotion of the masses: their laughter. “Admittedly,” Soupault says, “Chaplin merely makes people laugh. But aside from the fact that this is the hardest thing to do, it is socially also the most important.” Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, “Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity,” trans. Howard Eiland, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 793. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, 779. 3. The French poet and writer Philippe Soupault (1897–1990) had founded the journal Littérature with André Breton and Louis Aragon in 1919 and was a leading figure of the surrealist movement. His study of Chaplin, Charlot, was published in 1931 and reissued by Gallimard in 2014. 4. Original note: Philippe Soupault, “Charlie Chaplin,” in Europe: Revue mensuelle 18 (November 1928), 379–402. 5. Benjamin here likens Chaplin’s pioneering film work to the celebrated polar expeditions by Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) and Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) in the early twentieth century. See also Béla Balázs’s text on the Antarctic expeditions by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Henry Shackleton in chapter 2, no. 23.

183 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Chaplin in Old Films First published as “Chaplin in alten Filmen,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (February 21, 1930). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Chiffres of Modernity

401

In the following text, Siegfried Kracauer refl ects on the early comedies of Chaplin, seeing in them not only harbingers of his masterworks, but also alternative possibilities that inhere in all beginnings: “A charming indecisiveness that, like childhood, now has its own right to exist.” Kracauer’s emphasis on the “fairy tale atmosphere” in Chaplin’s works may be seen in the context of his sustained interest in the fairy tale’s progressive and even utopian dimensions; in “The Mass Ornament” (1927), he had indeed linked fairy tales with the “triumph of truth,” attributing revolutions of the past 150 years to a rationality derived in part from “the reason of fairy tales” (Märchenvernunft).1 Kracauer wrote repeatedly on Chaplin during the Weimar period, including reviews of Gold Rush (November 6, 1926), The Circus (February 15, 1928), The Pilgrim (December 23, 1929), and City Lights (March 29, 1931) in the Frankfurter Zeitung, as well as the general articles “Chaplin kommt an!” (Frankfurter Zeitung, March 11, 1931) and “Chaplins Triumph” (Neue Rundschau, April 1931).

Once again, a series of old Chaplin comedies have been assembled (by the distributor Karriere) into a film program. Seeing them triggers not only joy but also that marvelous chilling sensation that arises whenever the origins of great works come to light. The essential motifs of The Gold Rush and The Circus are not yet obvious; there might still be other possibilities that would not necessarily lead to later reality. A charming indecisiveness that, like childhood, now has its own right to exist. In the milieus of these early slapstick comedies, only Charlie has remained alive. The cuts of the men’s jackets, along with the women’s clothing and hats all climb, like the conventional gestures of the era, out of the grave and cannot be seized. But the little cane, the tattered boots, and the whole vagabond costume with the baggy pants move about the settings as youthfully today as they did then. This is how ephemeral the upper classes are in contrast to the lumpenproletariat; sophisticated literary works age, while fairy tales last. The fairy tale atmosphere that permeates the later creations can already be sensed in the beginnings. Perhaps—indeed, certainly—it goes back to the impressions of the child who was at home in the streets of London. The enormous giants and bearded men, with whom he already has exchanges in his first films, must have appeared to him there. Cowardly and resilient, he prances between them, like a street urchin, crafty and contemplative. But the street urchin is really a prince from no-man’s-land. Charlie glides across the roller rink like a prince with his lady; he is in his element, truly, floating toward his fairy tale home. The minute delicacy of his figure becomes a metaphor for the noble descent of the vagabond, who is an outcast in this world. Note 1. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 80–81.

184 THEODOR W. ADORNO Kierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin First published under the name “Wgd.” as “Kierkegaard prophezeit Chaplin” in Frankfurter Zeitung (May 22, 1930), 1. Translated by John MacKay as “Prophesied by Kierkegaard,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996), 58.

402

Film Culture and Politics Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) wrote this miniature while working on his postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation) on Søren Kierkegaard, which he completed in February 1931. He sent the short text to Siegfried Kracauer, film critic at the Frankfurter Zeitung, as a “byproduct of my work,” as he wrote in a letter to him on May 13, 1930, and with the request to give it a “place in the sun, namely, in the Frankfurter Zeitung.”1 Nine days later, it appeared on the front page of the paper. Adorno’s Habilitation was published in 1933 as Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic and dedicated to “my friend Siegfried Kracauer.” Like Kracauer, who characterized Chaplin as “an outcast in this world” (see no. 183), Adorno here notes Chaplin’s extraterrestrial dimensions, arguing that he “brushes against the world like a slow meteor.” Adorno would later meet Chaplin during his exile in California in the 1940s and would publish another essay on the star in 1964 (“Chaplin in Malibu”). Two years later, in his “Transparencies on Film” (1966), Adorno discussed Chaplin once more, arguing—much as he does below—that the comic figure was “reminiscent of old-fashioned photographs right from the start.”2

In Repetition, one of his earlier pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard gives a detailed treatment of farce, true to a conviction which often leads him to seek, in the refuse of art, that which eludes the pretensions of art’s great self-contained works. He speaks there of the old Friedrichstädter Theater in Berlin and describes a comedian named Beckmann whose image evokes, with the mild fidelity of a daguerreotype, that of the Chaplin who was to come.3 The passage reads: He is not only able to walk, but he is also able to come walking. To come walking is something very distinctive, and by means of this genius he also improvises the whole scenic setting. He is able not only to portray an itinerant craftsman; he is also able to come walking like one and in such a way that one experiences everything, surveys the smiling hamlet from the dusty highway, hears its quiet noise, sees the footpath that goes down by the village pond when one turns off there by the blacksmith’s—where one sees [Beckmann] walking along with his little bundle on his back, his stick in his hand, untroubled and undaunted. He can come walking onto the stage followed by street urchins whom one does not see.4 The one who comes walking is Chaplin, who brushes against the world like a slow meteor even where he seems to be at rest; the imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteor’s aura, which gathers here in the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace, while he strolls on with the cane and hat that so become him. The invisible tail of street urchins is the comet’s tail through which the earth cuts almost unawares. But when one recalls the scene in The Gold Rush where Chaplin, like a ghostly photograph in a live-action fi lm, comes walking into the gold mining town and disappears crawling into a cabin, it is as if his figure, suddenly recognized by Kierkegaard, populated the cityscape of 1840 like staffage; from this background the star only now has finally emerged. Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 7, ed. Wolfgang Schopf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 211. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique 24–25 (1981–82): 200. 3. Friedrich Beckmann (1803–1866) was a German comedian who performed at Berlin’s Königsstädtisches Theater beginning in 1824. 4. Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6: Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 163–64.

Chiffres of Modernity

403

185 WALTER BENJAMIN Mickey Mouse Unpublished fragment written in 1931. First published as “Zu Micky-Maus” in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, 144–45. Published in English in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 545–46. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.

The fragment here marks the first of Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on Mickey Mouse; he collected newspaper articles on the Disney character in the early 1930s, curious to explain the animated figure’s enormous popularity. For Benjamin, Mickey Mouse cartoons lent visual expression to aspects of modern life such as alienation, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, renewed barbarism, and a decline in experience. The Mickey Mouse boom started in Germany on January 17, 1930, when Walt Disney’s The Barn Dance (1929) was shown at Berlin’s Kino Universum as part of the opening program for Ufa’s Wenn Du einmal Dein Herz verschenkst [When You One Day Give Your Heart Away]. Benjamin returned to the cartoon character in “Experience and Poverty” (1933), the Arcades Project (1927–40), and his “Artwork” essay (1936), the first draft of which even adopted “Micky-Maus” as the title for the section on the optical unconscious. The figure of Mickey Mouse also became a point of contention in Benjamin and Adorno’s correspondence in the 1930s.

From a conversation with Gustav Glück and Kurt Weill.1 —Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen. The route taken by Mickey Mouse is more like that of a file in an office than it is like that of a marathon runner. In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization. Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind. These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences. Similarity to fairy tales. Not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked more unsymbolically and more unatmospherically. There is an immeasurable gulf between them and Maeterlinck or Mary Wigman. 2 All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.3 So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them. Notes 1. A close friend of Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, Gustav Glück (1902–1973) headed the foreign division of the Reichskreditgesellschaft in Berlin until 1938, when he emigrated to Argentina. On Weill, see the text in chapter 18 of this volume (no. 268). 2. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), a Belgian writer and dramatist, became one of the central figures in the Symbolist movement in the late nineteenth century. Wigman (1886–1973) was a celebrated German dancer and choreographer, known in particular for Ausdruckstanz (expressionist dance). 3. Benjamin here references the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen” (The boy who left home in order to learn the meaning of fear).

404

Film Culture and Politics

186 ERNST KÁLLAI Painting and Film First published as “Malerei und Film,” in Die Weltbühne 27, no. 22 (June 2, 1931), 805–8. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Whereas thinkers like Georg Lukács (no. 174) diagnosed the modern condition through a comparison between film and theater aesthetics, the Hungarian-born journalist and art critic Ernst Kállai (1890–1954) here considers the democratic mass medium’s competition with the fine arts—and, in particular, its implication within a contemporary “crisis in painting.” With its speed, movement, and variety, cinema is ideally aligned with modern urban life, serving as a “presentation of our era’s optical worldview as such.” However, rather than regarding moving images as a successor or corollary to expressionist and futurist experiments in dynamic painting (see Bernhard Diebold in chapter 13, no. 189), Kállai argues that the static medium of painting might seek a “new sense of composure and closeness of life,” thereby filling the present-day “spiritual void.” Kállai served as editor of the Bauhaus magazine from 1928 to 1929 and founded his own journal, Der Kunstnarr, in 1929.

The debate in the Berlin Secession and the discussion among Döblin, Behne, and Osborn on the radio touched on deep wounds in painting.1 These disagreements are beneficial, as painful as they may be for more peacefully tempered palates. They are to be welcomed even in cases where they miss the mark and cut into healthy flesh. Better to pass too harsh a judgment in the necessary and unavoidable court of art than to keep bumbling lethargically along like most artistic activities are doing today, nearly without exception. There cannot be enough clarity over the scope of the social and spiritual crisis in painting. And this is not simply a matter of pushing what is already decaying toward collapse. Only clear knowledge about what is lost and endangered can help us discover new creative possibilities. The crisis in painting comes sharply into focus through the competition it has entered into with film. This competition is most immediately noticeable in the defection of those spectators driven only by visual pleasure into the cinema. Of course, sporting events also exert a stronger pull than galleries and museums. But this popularity is determined by a very specific kind of “attraction” and therefore does not lend itself so easily to comparison. There are, however, very strong correlations between the sparse attendance at art exhibits and the mass operation of movie theaters. Cinemas are not just theatrical sites. They serve the presentation of our era’s optical worldview as such. Aside from the usual weekly newsreel and Kulturfilms, which are also, for the most part, narratively or dramatically framed, every movie offers up a varying series of portrayals of our environment. Even without literary padding, film’s objective content is so rich and absorbing that it can make art exhibits seem alienating to those spectators who are concerned only with the objective and thematic content of the images. And that generally accounts for 90 percent of people who visit exhibits. Today, people who used to attend art exhibits en masse, particularly big annual shows, simply because they could admire an impressive number of interesting objects “from near and far” and derive satisfaction from historical images of any genre, prefer to go to the movies. This is very understandable. For what exhibit could hope to contend with the abundance of images from all over the world that pass before audiences’ eyes evening after evening in the

Chiffres of Modernity

405

cinema? And beyond its numerical superiority with regard to objects, this visual abundance has still other advantages that assure its victory among spectators—especially bigcity spectators—over all other art exhibits. First and foremost, of course, is movement and the resulting elevated semblance of reality, which has recently become even more intense on account of recorded sound. Then there is the further sharpening of this appearance through the size and brightness of its images. Finally, there is the photographic mechanization of representation itself. It conforms to the general tendency of modern technological business operations, which are rushing toward the mechanization and standardization not only of inanimate but also of living “objects.” Anywhere where large-scale modern industries control the economy (and with it, life), man is becoming a kind of automated work machine. This development is especially obvious in large cities. It also and necessarily leads to a certain standardization of intellectual experience. The latter loses almost all of its personalized composition and depth but gains access to an unbelievably broad and general level of mass experience. The modern city dweller’s visual pleasure also undergoes this transformation. It becomes externalized and mechanical but at the same time democratic in the broadest sense of the word through the standardization of its tendencies and activities. Cinema’s mechanical photography, in its psychological neutrality, accommodates well this democracy of the eye, because it leaves the possibility for empathy with the image fundamentally open to all. The objective content of the film image asserts itself without the (often very convoluted) personal interpretations that dominate in painterly representation. A fi lm is easier to comprehend than a painting, whose inner growth and harmonic balance reveal themselves only upon concentrated and engrossed contemplation. Unfortunately, such contemplation is possible only for a tiny and disappearing minority of art lovers and connoisseurs. Film, on the other hand, whose mechanical representation makes it understandable to all, is a mass experience. With a minimum expenditure of observational activity, movie audiences get a maximum of highly varied objects to observe. They distract themselves brilliantly— and what is the goal of the mass audience’s visual curiosity, if not to find as much distraction as it can, as easily as possible? Film is thus truly the standard vehicle for our modern vision in its unsteadiness and its addiction to variety. The energetic machinery of film flickers continuously with new impressions captured from all around the world, which dissolve into movement without remainder. Its mechanized impressionism is exceedingly consistent. It tears things apart and disperses them into a flurry of alternating appearances. It is so abundant and so refined that any attempt by painting to approach its mastery of the visual variety is condemned to failure. Painting has nothing to gain in this direction. Not only no popularity, but also, and from the outset, no living poignancy, no tension, no nerve—and this is true even if a painter studies impressions with the discernment and diligence Monet evinced in his haystacks with regard to the variations of light and air. This is why painting will always be a stagecoach. Film, on the other hand, has speed. It is like automobiles and airplanes. The question remains whether impressionability and the fl ight of appearances, whether the confusing abundance of movement and images in modernity—particularly in modern cities—is the be-all and end-all of every art? Whether “speed,” and all that goes with it, is not already an all-too-contemporary concept? Upon closer observation, this speed reveals itself not as a manifestation of technology but rather as one of capitalist anarchy, of the chaotic disorganization of our entire lives. As utterly hysterical misfirings in the rat race’s idling engine. Through the compulsory but senseless and useless movements that accumulate in anarchic processes of production and distribution, man is

406

Film Culture and Politics

forced into a circular race of increasing speed and scale. In order to cope with the race, to finally outrun this whirlwind and escape from the field of competition, he increases his speed. But the whirligig only grows denser and faster. No escape. And chained to the economy, everything else races along: all of life, its pleasures, its restful moments, and its art. Ultimately, necessity is the mother not of virtue but of sport. A hunt for records. The tempo of this delirious addiction to movement operates simultaneously as centrifugal force. Bit by bit, all substance is extracted from man’s core, his natural ability to center himself in a deep, steady unity of all life’s interrelations. It is scattered to the winds. What remains is a spiritual void, a space for rationalism and utilitarianism to construct their false superiority. Room for all the illusions of sensuous and nervous stimulation, which modern man—hero and victim of these advances—has invented for his pleasure. Film first and foremost. Painting can forgo this position without envy. Its fundamentally static essence has a higher purpose: untouched by the hysterical spinning of addiction to speed, of unleashed kinesis and the never-ending hunt for changing images, it can search for a new sense of composure and closeness of life: in depth, in unity, in steadiness. That is to say, in a new organic system that would have the mechanical forces of business and technology at its disposal. At stake here is nothing more and nothing less than the artistic anticipation of a way of life that will finally be meaningful again, fit for human beings at last. A way of life beyond the individualistic dissolution of form and the monstrous compulsions of our present. A clean break from the jack-of-all-trades and his skeptical-rational mobility, released from the ideological nightmare of those puffed-up, idolatrous forces: capital, state, and church. Painting’s potential to become an art for the community once again corresponds perfectly to the possibility for this new organic form of social and spiritual life. And ever since painting abandoned impressionism thirty years ago, it has been reaching its antennae toward this new organics. Not all painting, of course. There is more than just the Berlin Secession; there is still a lot of painting that could be designated as part of impressionism’s bankrupt estate and its attempt to reconsolidate. I am not referring to so-called New Objectivity, that rather battered and browbeaten return to the old Biedermeier style—those are reactionary phenomena. The new movement looks different. Admittedly, when compared with film—that optico-phonetic superpower and record holder for up-to-dateness—this new painting is quite unfashionable and ineffective. It is not very popular. It is even hated by reactionary and revolutionary materialists, by the bourgeois and the antibourgeois. But this painting—from Munch and Nolde, Kirchner, Klee, Picasso, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Arp, and younger painters—represents a faith that gives it strength to persevere through even the iciest isolation. A coming congregation will build around this faith. Or with speed—speed!—the world will come apart at the seams. Then the cinematic eye would be the last breaking eye of humanity: kino triumphans. Note 1. The Berlin Secession was founded in 1898 to promote modern art. According to contemporary reports, Alfred Döblin had given a provocative speech on the occasion of an exhibition opening in Berlin, characterizing painting as a mere form of aesthetic pleasure, without meaning or purpose. In reaction to this speech, a discussion (including Döblin, Adolf Behne, and Max Osborn) was broadcast on April 20, 1931, with the title “Hat die Malerei heute noch eine kulturelle Bedeutung?” (Does painting still have a cultural significance today?). See the texts by Behne earlier in this chapter and in chapter 14 (nos. 180, 204). On Osborn, see chapter 4 (no. 53), and on Döblin, see chapters 5 and 17 (nos. 63, 260).

Chiffres of Modernity

407

187 RENÉ FÜLÖP-MILLER Fantasy by the Meter First published as “Phantasie meterweise,” in René Fülöp-Miller, Die Phantasiemaschine: Eine Saga der Gewinnsucht (Berlin: Paul Zsolnay, 1931), 54–65; here 54–58, 65. Translated by Tara Hottman.

Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in what today is Romania), René Fülöp-Miller (pseudonym for Philipp René Maria Müller; 1891–1963) was a prolific journalist and travel writer who also published numerous cultural-historical studies, often focusing on the Russian context. In 1930, he traveled to Hollywood and cowrote a book with Joseph Gregor on American theater and cinema. The following year, Fülöp-Miller published The Fantasy Machine: A Tale of Profit-Seeking, a series of essays on Hollywood and its psychological effects on audiences worldwide. In this excerpt, he argues that instinctdriven fantasies—formerly the privilege of the few—are now mass-produced for moviegoers, in an ambivalent process of both democratization and commodification. His discussion of primal desires and moral regimes also demonstrates the strong influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings.

If they wish to be met with universal understanding, the basic motifs of film must be on par with the most primitive feelings and drives, which are felt in the same way by a Chinese coolie as by an American farmer’s daughter or an English merchant, and which in the midst of the civilized world can only seldom find open satisfaction. The desire for power, prestige, and wealth is one such primal desire, which is specific to the deepest nature of mankind and which is suppressed again and again from its first stirrings on. In most cases, nature—in its unfathomable malice—already inhibits the development of this desire through a physical or mental deficiency, through feeble muscles, dull senses, or a sluggish brain that prevent it from becoming truly active. And even in the few cases in which nature has mercy, the relentless forces of a hostile world stamp down the will for power, which is degraded each and every day by parents, teachers, authorities, employers, and office managers. It almost seems as though human society created its moral laws, regulations, and institutions solely for the purpose of continually hindering the development of the desire for power of each individual. Already in the sphere of sexuality, in which the drive for power and the addiction to property are deeply rooted, the moral order opposes the passions with agonizing restrictions; with particularly relentless strength, the desire inherent in all people is persistently suppressed to the point of damage and cruelty. Here no one is allowed to be what he would like to be: constricted by the laws of nature, by a world full of uncontrollable, fateful events and situations, the desire for power finds itself continuously ensnared in a tangle of rules, prohibitions, and imperatives, which never allow the full, gratifying realization of primordial impulses. There is only one way to free oneself from all these bonds on human drives and to satisfy the need for expanding the individual sphere of living: fantasy offers man, who may in reality never unleash his instincts without restraint, the opportunity to flee from the narrow confines of his usual existence into the freedom of fiction. For in the realm of fantasy, and only here, the strictest constraint of civilized life, the necessity of the continual consideration of one’s fellow men, is lifted. Whereas reality is constantly dictated by goals, reasons, and outcomes, by inescapable commitments and necessary consequences, fantasy creates a world in which there are neither strict imperatives nor punitive

408

Film Culture and Politics

consequences, and in which the hunger for power, sensuality, and the lust for aggression can find satisfaction, uninhibited by any opposition, unthreatened by any punishment. At the same time, fantasy also affords man freedom from his temporal and spatial bonds. All at once, time is no longer a fixed, predetermined fact; there opens up the possibility of traversing thousands of years in minutes, of swapping the present for the fardistant past or future. And in fantasy, spatial boundaries are no more binding than temporal; fantasy makes us omnipresent and allows us to experience a variety of events in the most heterogeneous of locations. And yet this one substitute for that freedom which will never be enjoyed in reality is granted only to the few because, according to the basic principle of unfairness that controls all creation, fantasy remains the privilege of only a comparatively small number of preferred souls. Nature denies the vast masses this instrument, just as they are denied all chances of increasing their enjoyment of life. Yet in this land of America, which has taken on the task of making available to the masses all material conveniences and facilitations of life with the help of mechanical products, of democratizing needs and thus reconciling the injustices of nature, it should now come to the point that fantasy is also democratized and does not remain the privilege of the preferred few. The same mass production that makes good clothing, tasty morsels, and comfortable homesteads available to the poor for little money should henceforth also supply the spiritually poor with the enjoyment of fantasy experiences that provide clearly defined ideas to the unfocused, dull, and formless longing of those people who inherently do not have an active imagination or the ability to create at their disposal. With some directorial tricks and technical devices, this new apparatus is able to abolish compulsively causal thinking, to arbitrarily change the length and markers of time, to conjure up the past, to move smoothly from one place to another, and to allow the entire array of human dreams of yearning to arise playfully before the eyes in all the desired combinations. Film producers quickly learned never to disregard any of the many restrictions, needs, and hardships that people suffer from in their daily lives. If the drive for the exercise of one’s will, for struggle and possession, comes up against insurmountable barriers within civilization, and if this conflict arouses a feeling of hopeless inferiority in many tortured souls, then film at least offers the enjoyment of a fictitious fulfillment of human striving for recognition. [. . .] Thus the fantasy machine spares all those inherently poorly equipped people, who never once had the mental prowess to independently imagine the fulfillment of their wishes, any and all effort; it offers each of them his respective longed-after fantasy as a pre-assembled good available for purchase. It was inevitable that precisely this invention, which supplies so many millions with an important enjoyment of life that was previously refused to them, has become one of the greatest commercial successes.

188 ERNST JÜNGER The Worker Originally published as section 38 in Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1932; reprinted 1982), 130–36. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Chiffres of Modernity

409

Our chapter, which began with Georg Lukács in 1911 distinguishing the aesthetic and metaphysical categories of film from those of theater, now concludes with a section from Ernst Jünger’s The Worker juxtaposing the modern “type” with the bourgeois “individual,” as aligned with cinema and the stage, respectively. Although Jünger’s political views were far removed from those of Lukács and other Marxist intellectuals, he shared their interest in technology, visual media, and the modern condition. In the following text, Jünger (1895–1998) anticipates many ideas from Benjamin’s 1936 Artwork essay, including the difference between the film and stage actor, as well as the need to rethink the entire category of art in an age of the masses. Jünger’s discussion of the sadism of slapstick comedy also points forward to Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critical assessment in their 1944 book, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

That we are dealing with a representation of the type rather than of the individual becomes even more evident in the case of the cinema. The decline of the classical drama—whose last, wretched phases we ourselves still witnessed—is a process whose outcome had already been decided by the end of the eighteenth century. For this process reflects the decline not of the individual but rather of the person in whom the aristocratic world found expression. The theater encompasses not only actors and not only plays; it also encompasses the breath of life that forces its way in from streets and squares, from courtyards and homes, to set the candles of the chandelier flickering. The theater encompasses the absolute monarch, whose visible presence constitutes the center guaranteeing the inner unity of the entire event. But all of this—this harmony beyond our imagination, which sometimes calls out to us from historical accounts like the echo of some enchanting music—is reduced to a mere reminiscence from the moment when man abandons his search for absolute principles to take up general ones. The fact that the classical drama has lost any connection to real life is evident in the rise of a new group of spectators who seek out classical works in order to be edified. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this loss of unity than the barrier that has been erected between the stage and the audience. Long gone are those seats that brought part of the orchestra stalls right up onto the stage. But this invisible barrier that transforms the stage into a platform not only separates the spectator from the actor, it also separates the actor from the drama. The demise of the theater is revealed by the fact that, with the collapse of the aristocratic world, the great actor comes onto the scene and begins to make a name for himself, as can be seen in London, Paris, and Berlin. But this great actor is none other than the bourgeois individual, whose appearance on the stage also explodes the strict rules of classical drama. The victory of personality over traditional rules and characters replicates the victory of the individual over the person. The courtly theater of the constitutional monarchy is reduced to a cultural affair, to a moral institution, to a museum piece. The public it embodies more and more distinctly is not that of a privileged audience but rather that of paying spectators and paid criticism. Thus the theater is entirely unable to escape the sanctions of repeated attacks by vital anarchy, by the so-called bourgeois drama, and by social debate. Nonetheless, it still maintains an air of external unity, whereas the popular theater of bourgeois democracy breaks into a series of independent and conflicting elements. Here we find the theater serving as an instrument of general education, as a business, as an association, and as a forum for party affairs: in short, as an expression of all those endeavors peculiar to bourgeois society. However, this theater is no more a theater than this society is a society in the true sense. The decisive break occurred, as already stated, at an

410

Film Culture and Politics

early date. It coincides historically with the great theater scandals, in which bourgeois society gave expression to the fact that it no longer experienced itself as a unity. Today we see in cinemas, as they are beginning to develop in our time, not a continuation of this leveling process but rather the expression of an utterly different principle. To understand this, one must realize that, here again, the decisive factor does not reside in the cinema’s technological character or apparatus. This is already evident in the fact that the same technological character has also penetrated the theater, as one sees, for example, in the use of revolving stages, serial productions, and other phenomena. For this reason, it is a mistake when the theater attempts to distinguish itself from film according to the criterion of quality. Above all, one must realize that behind the claim to quality lie hidden two opposing value judgments. Individual quality is utterly different from the kind of quality recognized by the type. In the last phase of the bourgeois world, quality is equated with individual character, especially with the individual character and unique design of a product. Thus a painting by an old master or an object acquired in an antique shop possesses quality in a sense completely different from what was imaginable at the time of its production. The existence of advertising, whose techniques are employed in identical fashion for a brand of cigarettes and for the centennial celebration of a classic,1 clearly reveals the extent to which quality and commercial value have become identical. Understood in this sense, quality is a subdivision of advertising through which individual character is presented to the masses as a need. But since the type no longer feels any trace of the need for individuality, such claims to individual character appear to him as a pure fiction. Thus a man who drives a certain car will never seriously imagine himself in possession of a means of transport designed exclusively to suit his individuality. On the contrary, he would be suspicious—and rightly so—of a car existing only in one unique model. What he tacitly understands by quality is rather the type, the brand, the model constructed with the utmost precision. Individual quality, on the other hand, ranks for him as a curiosity or something for a museum. The same fiction comes into play whenever the theater lays claim to quality—in this case, artistic superiority—in comparison with the cinema. The concept of the unique model appears here as the promise of a unique experience. But such unique experience is one of the preeminent forms of individuality. It was unknown before the discovery of the bourgeois individual, since the absolute and the unique are mutually exclusive, and it loses its meaning in a world where the character of total work begins to take hold. The unique experience is the experience of the bourgeois novel, which is the novel of a society of Robinsons. In the theater, such unique experience is conveyed by the actor in his capacity as bourgeois individual—which is why theater criticism has, to an evergreater extent, been transformed into a criticism of actors. Corresponding to this process are those disastrous defi nitions that the nineteenth century imposed on art, such as “a slice of nature viewed through a particular temperament” or “a judgment day upon the soul” and the like. 2 The common denominator of such defi nitions lies in the preeminent place they assign to individual experience. These sorts of disputes about quality revolve around axes that have become imaginary. Art is not a valid criterion by which to compare the theater and the cinema, especially at a historical moment when we can either no longer or not yet speak of art. The decisive question at stake here—a question that has not yet entered our consciousness today—is the following: through which of the two media does the type reveal itself with greater precision? Only when one has grasped this—grasped, namely, that it is a question not of distinctions in value here, but rather of a difference in kind—can one view the matter with the necessary degree of impartiality. Then one will grasp the difference in nature that exists between the theater audience and that of the cinema right next door, even if

Chiffres of Modernity

411

the sum of people making up each group is by chance identical. One will grasp why people look for individuality and personality in actors, whereas such individuality in no way constitutes a qualification for film acting. There is a difference between the actor’s character mask and the masklike character of an entire epoch. Insofar as his task lies in the representation of a type, the fi lm actor is subject to another law. For this reason, what people demand of him is not originality but rather clarity. He is expected to give expression not to the boundless harmony of a life but rather to its precise rhythm. His performance is thus expected to convey the conformity of a specific and highly objective sphere to certain rules, rules that have become part of the fl esh and blood of every last spectator. Nowhere can one observe this transformation more clearly than in those moments where film seems to take up the opposite theme—namely, that of man’s inferiority to this objective sphere. Thus our time has produced a special form of the grotesque, whose humor lies in the image of man as the plaything of technological objects. Here, tall houses are built only so that people might fall from them; the purpose of traffic is to be run over; and motors exist so that people might explode with them. This form of comedy operates at the expense of the individual, who cannot master the basic rules of a very specific space nor the natural gestures corresponding to them. And the contrast through which this humor finds expression lies in the fact that these rules are utterly self-evident for the spectator. It is thus the type who laughs at the individual. What we have here fundamentally is a rediscovery of laughter as the sign of a terrible and primitive form of aggression. These cinematic projections in the centers of civilization—in safe, warm, and well-lit rooms—are absolutely comparable to battles in which tribes armed with bows and arrows are attacked by machine guns. The harmlessness, good conscience, and impartiality of everyone involved are largely indicative of a revolution sans phrase. This form of comedy, of destruction through laughter, is in keeping with a transitional period. Its effects are already beginning to fade, and fifty years from now, should anyone decide to dig up such a film from the archives, it will be no more comprehensible than a performance of La Mère coupable today is able to conjure the feelings of the individual coming to self-consciousness.3 That the cinema reflects a different kind of sphere from the theater also becomes clear when one considers the following: when the classical drama is imported into the bourgeois theater, this can be seen as a repetition in a weaker medium, but when it is imported into the cinema, it retains not a single trace of its old body. In the cinema, the classical drama appears as one motif among others, and it is related far less to its precursor than to the political newsreel or the African hunting scene playing alongside it in the program. This fact, however, is indicative of a claim to totality. Whichever segment of history, whichever geographical landscape, and whichever sector of society might serve as a film’s subject, the same question always searches for an answer in this subject. This explains the fact that the means employed in the cinema are in large part simultaneous, uniform, and unambiguous—in short, they are typical means. This becomes especially clear when we consider external characteristics. There are no unique performances in the cinema, nor are there premieres in the proper sense. A film can play simultaneously in every part of the city, and it can be repeated at any time with a mathematical precision extending right down to the second and the millimeter. The audience is not any particular group or aesthetic community; rather, it is made up of the same general public one encounters in every other sphere of life. It is also notable that criticism has less influence in the cinema, where it is replaced by announcements (that is, by advertising). As already stated, people demand of the actor a representation not of the individual but rather of the type. This requires an extreme clarity in the performance

412

Film Culture and Politics

of expressions and gestures—a clarity that has recently grown sharper through the introduction of the artificial voice and that will be heightened even further by subsequent developments. Notes 1. The “centennial celebration of a classic” refers to the 1932 centennial of Goethe’s death. 2. The two definitions are from the novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902) and the playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), respectively. 3. La Mère coupable (The guilty mother) is a 1792 drama by Pierre Beaumarchais (1732–1799).

SECTION THREE •

•

•

CONFIGURATIONS OF A MEDIUM

THIRTEEN

THE EXPRESSIONIST TURN

189 BERNHARD DIEBOLD Expressionism and Cinema First published as “Expressionismus und Kino,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung 137, nos. 1453, 1459, and 1466 (September 14–16, 1916), 1f. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In the early twentieth century, modernist artists rejected traditional, widely practiced modes of observation, evoking a new kind of relationality between human subjectivity and the objective world. While the impressionists had already substituted an apprehensible space for that of ordered, Euclidean geometry, modernists abandoned the mimesis of perceived reality altogether, replacing a fragmentary consciousness for the fixed, detached observer and negating rather than faithfully imitating the exterior realm. Most evident in the turn away from figurative painting, what José Ortega y Gasset described as the “dehumanization of art” in fact occurred across a broad range of media, finding its corollary in the retreat from the realistic, coherent plot in literature as well as in the dismissal of harmonic tonality in music. The texts in this chapter focus on the intersection between a major modernist movement—namely, the expressionism that emerged in prewar Germany—and the nascent medium of film. We begin with an essay that is often identified as the first to conceptualize the relation between expressionism and cinema, published over three years before the premiere of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Addressing the reception of trends in aesthetic modernism, Bernhard Diebold characterizes the new medium as the “fulfillment of expressionism” and highlights the promise of cinema in realizing the dynamization of modern visual art. Diebold (né Dreifus, 1886–1945) was a Swiss-born dramaturge, author of Anarchie im Drama (1921), and one of the preeminent theater critics of the Weimar Republic. He also became a frequent contributor to discussions of avant-garde film in the 1920s and ‘30s; see his texts in chapters 14 and 18 of this volume (nos. 202, 277).

There is an unknown, lawlike something in the object that corresponds to an unknown, lawlike something in the subject. —Goethe

When we first heard about the nature of cubist images, we were astonished, and when, upon inspection, the unbelievable proved true, we laughed. We could not take it on good faith that a man like Picasso, who also knew how to paint a respectable nude, suddenly saw the world as nothing more than a formation of basic geometric elements, such that he could paint it only this way and in no other, and we judged his works and those of his

415

416

Configurations of a Medium

followers to be the products of a herostratic desire for originality at all costs. Who even read the manifestos of Der Blaue Reiter, for example?1 After all, we did not want to add spiritual injury to the optical insult launched by these monstrosities, and nobody was eager to devote himself to philosophical painting or painterly philosophy. An art form that offered neither “beauty” nor naturalism, nor a “poetic” object, was and remained a brash impertinence. But there were more and more young painters who disregarded all this and expressed themselves in increasingly hieroglyphic forms, and even beyond the manifesto writers of these movements, voices grew loud, declaring that this “art” was simply the necessary consequence of an artistic intention that had already raised its head in the Orient, in the Middle Ages, in El Greco, Cézanne, and Hodler: to sacrifice external sight to inner vision, coincidental occurrences to the symbol of cosmic laws, natural matter to rhythmic ornamentation. Fritz Burger, Max Raphael, and Wilhelm Worringer explained the historical intersections and discovered connections, 2 but the biggest surprise was still to come. It was not to be a future scholar of art nor a mystagogic brushworker—no, it was Hermann Bahr, the impressionist, moody Viennese prattler, who wrote about expressionism, and not just a short magazine article, no, an entire book.3 Face-to-face with cubist and futurist works, he found himself in the “curious state of a baffled art lover” seeing unheard-of, never-before-seen phenomena. But Bahr does not wish to react like so many fathers, who, like philistines, pit their outmoded observations from the distant past against the oh-so-“uncultured” youth; he is not afraid of being judged a new type of “inverse philistine,” who for God’s sake does not want to fail to recognize new genius and who, utterly defenseless, would rather worship at a new altar that he cannot comprehend than stand branded before Clio. And Bahr reads Goethe’s Complete Works, which proudly demonstrate their completeness in his bibliography. In them, he may not find the path to an explanation of expressionist paintings, whose reproductions in his book remain unaddressed, but he does make his way to expressionist thought, to a new outlook on art, which he explains more clearly and in more detail than many of the movement’s leaders can do of their own art. But I am not writing a critique of Bahr’s book, which I mention only as a very meaningful symptom of the importance of this new idea, of its dissemination even among yesterday’s youth. The word expressionism is frowned upon by the faithful; every group has its own rules, such that the general term much too tolerantly unites the heretics with the chosen. But no matter their denomination, whether futurist, cubist, or ethnological-eroticist, all the various facets of this artistic Protestantism write the same thing on their red flag: Down with naturalistic imitations, down with impressionism! Our art is not about beggarly received impressions or stingy handouts from merciful Mother Nature; rather, it is about expression, expression of our spiritual experiences. Those other movements may find sources of inspiration in the charm of natural occurrences, but we do not recognize the passive sensitivity of the retina and its graphic reproduction as an artistic act; only the active “independence of the eye,” as Goethe put it, can reveal the creator’s formal will in natural material; only the “thinking” eye makes a tree out of a green speck in accordance with the laws of artistic recognition, which are simultaneously the laws of the entire cosmos—for the world is my will and my idea.4 These powers must be symbolized in the work of art. “The creative spirit manifests itself here,” cries Fritz Burger. “The artistic self becomes a servant to the eternal law embodied within all organic sensual life. The object of artistic figuration is the everlasting law of life.”5 Art is the expression of the mystical relationship between the self and the universe; let us think of Plotinus, the ancient mystic, who saw in self-contemplation the intuition of divine νοῦς,6 the highest form of thought. This intuition must become an image; let the “unknown law” that Goethe senses in things be realized.

The Expressionist Turn

417

But the unfamiliar has always been mistrusted and suspected wherever and whenever it has made itself known in unusual, archaic, or premature forms. So why should we care about our opponents and their dangerous weapon, ridicule. They also ridiculed Beethoven, Columbus, and Jesus Christ; they laughed at the Middle Ages, whose obligatory “darkness” corresponded to the inanity of religion, which could not agree that man descended from apes; they broke the Greeks’ marble gods, because they were pagan; they scorned the Gothic because it was barbaric, and baroque, because it “exaggerated”; and people used umbrellas to poke holes in the first impressionist paintings because they lacked “drawing.” Everywhere, truly everywhere, there is metamorphosis and transition. And people always demanded precisely what artists did not want to give: fresh confirmation of yesterday’s art. “Beauty” once became an artistic law, and yet people still yielded to Rembrandt’s power; art and nature are one, opined Lessing in his manner,7 yet still approved of the versification of human speech, which sounded in no way “natural.” Nothing, absolutely nothing that historically evolved, nothing molded on sensory phenomena, has proven to be stable in the Heraclitean flow, and all civilization, with its various stylistic or socio-ethical forms, has only dispossessed man of his primal instincts, distanced him from the power of Eros. Thus we are building on the only safe ground, on our active experience of our self [Ich-Erlebnis], which is untouched by any historical threat, any classical or impressionist norm, within the eternal orders that become apparent in the parallelism of phenomena, and whose soul is rhythm. Thus speak the expressionists. A Sturm und Drang movement. Begin with the elements, with the origin of everything! Their experience must not be hindered by any civilization, so that it might spring fully from the true self and not from a hybrid of memory images, associations, cultural customs, and matters of course that make up the philistine. Thus, Gauguin painted savages in a paradisiacal environment, a Mother Nature that embraces animals, clouds, plants, and earth with equal affection, and prevents the discrepancy between thought and being from emerging.8 Henri Rousseau builds a childlike world out of playthings with handmade trees and houses.9 Except ye become as little children!10 Others base their work on prehistoric images of animals, on the fetishes of exotic primitives, whose ornamental orderliness eased the spiritual agony provoked by the whims of natural forces, a fanciful ornamentation. Here, the exotic is declared the originary flow of the world, in which man floats harmoniously. We believe in the demonic instincts of these savages; we even envy them for their dread of nonmechanized elemental forces, for their instinctively phantasmagorical connection to the wholeness of nature, for their religio with the great Pan; conversely, we increasingly mistrust life’s “colorful reflection,” which impressionism in its credulous orthodoxy painted as a Biblia pauperum [Paupers’ Bible] for the poorest among us, who cannot decipher the secret code of the cosmos and who mistake the appearance of the world for the world. Not the appearance of nature, but nature itself! As paradoxical as it sounds, this would be the bitterest battle cry against impressionistic naturalism. [. . .] Hermann Bahr already referred to this unnatural expressionistic art as “music for the eyes,”11 without fully conceiving its formal potential in terms of music and without mentioning movement, although the visions that he describes of Goethe’s or Henslow’s “active” eye are all in motion and not still.12 In his book about impressionism,13 Werner Weisbach says that impressionism is the only technique that can convey impressions of movement, and I by no means want to embark on the perilous investigation of how extensively expressionism employs impressionist tools to express movement, or how much it even strives to represent movement in its images. But Burger, too, sees in the contemporary, scientifically inflected energy of currents and events “perhaps the most meaningful

418

Configurations of a Medium

characteristic of all modern art. Existence thus loses that pure state of being-for-itself and is drawn into the unity of an absolute becoming, which tells one moment of a hidden storm, and the next of explosively strong willpower.”14 And even where Apollonian serenity seems to prevail, he senses the “quiet continuity of growth,” the “quiet immanence of whirling life energy.”15 This much is clear to me: that movement is represented in Kandinsky’s famous Rider, in Campendonk’s circus clown, who lets his menagerie frolic in a circle around him.16 Just as a living force runs through the organically curved pipes of the Gothic bundle pillars in Delaunay’s Cathedral; just as Van Gogh’s landscapes tremble in electric currents, Cézanne’s Bacchanal in a chaotic waltz of flesh, earth, clouds and leaves; not to mention the surging waves of Marc’s Horse, his Shepherd, where wave, cliff, shepherd, and lamb flow into a raging whirlpool, or the twitching in Munch’s Northern Lights, in Kandinsky’s Improvisation: Presto.17 In all their nebulousness, even cubist images suggest crystalline growth, an eternal shifting of borders. Everything flows! And the pictures appear to me as still moments in a never-ending movement. Thus, lacking artistic balance, they have a grotesque and “unnatural” effect, like the momentary photographic pose of a racing horse, or even just of a person walking; for the gesture lacks a living soul: movement. And we may wonder: are not the natural laws cosmic wills, and eternal currents thought to take shape in works of art through moving visions inexorable movement in themselves? And are we not employing insufficient means when they have to be formed in latent congealment rather than as liberated kinetic energy? These words lead to the fulfillment of expressionism: to the cinema. Dance and theater also allow for art in motion, but here, form is bound by humankind’s natural material constraints, which will never fully disappear in the metamorphosis of ornaments, in spite of makeup and costumes. As long as the theater uses people as players, it will retain its illusionist orientation; even if one designs a “cubist” theater, it would be impossible to create an atmosphere appropriate to the design: in its stillness, the set decoration could never keep step with the body. A film that has been painted by an artist, on the other hand, would be fully liberated from bodily form, as from every other natural phenomenon. Just as in music, male and female motifs separate and come together again as they dance in struggle, just as their endlessly moving forms seem to lose their shape but always—according to the law of the most exact theory of all arts—return to their original form through dissonance, variation, fateful pedal points, and anarchic cadences, so might linear or planar currents, flames, winds, and waves, all bound to the same rhythmic order, move against, over, and behind each other: they could fight each other, engulf each other, or spit each other out again, and finally the figurations of a red major element would erase or drown those of its antagonist, a blue minor. Angular elements would become entwined in sinuous serpent motifs and emerge from their coils in new form; crystals would grow from the edges of the image toward the center and inevitably crash into each other in an enormous explosion. People would become demons, and demons would revert to the original ornamental forms of their generative, conserving, and destructive laws. Symphonies would become photographic “symphoties” [Sinfotieen],18 and according to the particular rhythm, dynamics, and color symbolism of this spectacle, the soul would be immersed in minor, major, adagio, allegro, or maestoso. Conventional allegory, which thoughtlessly employs music as a choral appeal to religion, as a marching rhythm and signal fanfare for heroic energy, could, in the hands of less allout “absolute” image musicians, gain new meaning through old symbols—cross and spear, sword and heart—and a new religion might create new allegories for us. And to this silent but unfrozen architecture of symbolic ornamentation, a sonorous architecture of music would be added that would accent all spatial development in temporal conso-

The Expressionist Turn

419

nance. That would be the absolutism of mystical expression: to capture the form of the infinite law in finite, nonrepresentational images. Thus the theory of pure expressionism would be complete, and for many of these modernists, the concepts of work, imagination, and skill would become honorable again in painterly praxis. For despite the use of photographic technology, the creation of this image with its thousand tiny displacements would still demand the quiet zeal of a Gothic miniature artist, and in order to conceive the eternal modifications of a theme stretching out sequentially in infinite variations, this ball of gold snakes, it would require a lively imagination and steady hands. But cinema would then no longer offer its circus only to the hordes of the fourth estate; it would become a true artistic institution and measure up to the standards of aristocratic aestheticism far better than theater does; freed from the unreliable, capricious material of human actors, an ingenious Kinarch19 —the painting musician or musical painter himself—would reign alone in his machinists’ lodge; the tempo of the neverending film melody: a Richard Wagner not of the word-sound drama but rather of the light-sound symphony, the creator of the new art of space-time eurhythmics. But this artist has not yet come to be, and his painted music rings out these days only as sonata quasi una fantasia.20 Notes Epigraph: Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (no. 1344). We borrow the translation from Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 471. 1. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) was a loose group of abstract artists based in Munich between 1911 and the start of World War I. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc edited an almanac of the same name in May 1912. 2. Burger, Raphael, and Worringer were art historians known for their early-twentieth-century writings on modern art movements, including impressionism and expressionism. 3. Bahr (1863–1934) was an Austrian writer, critic, and dramatist who helped define various trends in modernism. His book Expressionismus appeared in 1916. 4. A reference to Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (1819; 2nd expanded ed., 1844). 5. Fritz Burger, Die Malerei und Plastik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin-Neubabelsberg: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1915), 19, 23. 6. The ancient Greek word for mind, reason, thought, or understanding. 7. In the original, the reference to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing reads, “meinte Lessing in seiner Weise,” which is a likely play on the title of his classic drama, Nathan der Weise (1779). 8. French postimpressionist artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) drew inspiration from African and Asian art and also spent periods in Martinique and French Polynesia. His paintings of exotic locations and indigenous populations anticipated the trend of primitivism in modern art. 9. Rousseau (1844–1910) was also a French postimpressionist painter whose depictions of jungles are often associated with naïve art and primitivism. 10. Matthew 18:3 (King James Bible): “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” 11. Chapter 12 of Bahr’s book on expressionism is titled “Augenmusik.” 12. In chapter 11 (“Das Auge des Geistes”) of Expressionismus, Bahr discusses the “visions” of Goethe and the English clergyman and botanist George Henslow (1835–1925). For both men, these “visions” were the appearances of inner images that continuously changed. 13. Werner Weisbach, Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in Antike und Neuzeit (1910). 14. Fritz Burger, Die Malerei und Plastik, 24. 15. Ibid. 16. The references are to Kandinsky’s painting The Blue Rider (1903) and to a painting by the Dutch artist Heinrich Campendonk, who was a member of the Blue Rider group. 17. Diebold here likely refers to Robert Delaunay’s Saint-Séverin series (1909–10), Paul Cézanne’s Bacchanal (1875–80), Franz Marc’s paintings of horses (e.g., Blaues Pferd I, 1911) and Der gute Hirte (The good shepherd, 1911), Edvard Munch’s The Sun (1909), and Kandinsky’s Improvisation 5 (Presto) (1910).

420

Configurations of a Medium

18. Diebold’s neologism Symphotie is a variation on Symphonie, in which the root for sound (phone) is replaced by the root for light (photos). 19. The neologism Kinarch is a combination of the German words for cinema (Kino) and monarch (Monarch) to connote the aristocratic claim of expressionist film art. 20. Beethoven titled his two op. 27 piano sonatas Sonata quasi una Fantasia (Sonata in the manner of a fantasy); the second of these two (no. 14) is the famous “Moonlight” sonata of 1801.

190 GERTRUD DAVID The Expressionist Film First published as “Der expressionistische Film,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 658 (August 13, 1919). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In this text, Gertrud David (1872–1936) argues that cinema surpasses all other visual arts in its ability to depict “everything dreamlike, visionary, and unreal.” Identifying expressionism as the artistic style best suited to the possibilities of film technology, David—like Bernhard Diebold (no. 189)—envisions how an “expressionist film” might indeed appear. A noted journalist, Social Democrat, and campaigner for women’s rights, David wrote the screenplays for Die Geächteten (The outlaws, 1917), Unsere Kinder—Unsere Zukunft (Our children—Our future, 1919), and many other films that engaged with pressing social and political themes. Founder of the Gervid production company in 1924, David would also direct dozens of films for the German Red Cross, the Social Democratic Party, and other organizations in the 1920s and the early to mid-1930s.

Recently, the film press was full of the news that the “futurist film” had been invented and patented.1 Unfortunately, the notices did not say what is meant by “futurist” film, whether this is a question of a new artistic direction or a new technological achievement. The fact that it was patented seems to imply the latter. It is also difficult to imagine how a futurist film—in the sense of the word as it is understood in painting—would even be possible, since futurism in painting depends primarily on color effects, and color cinematography is still in its infancy. If the artistic-futurist film still faces serious obstacles, it seems to me that film is an ideal expressive tool for another area of art: expressionism. Expressionism, or the art of expression, means the outward projection of the artist’s inner life, as opposed to impressionism, which shows us the effect of an external experience on the artist. While impressionism was the last remaining trace of naturalism, expressionism renounces any accurate depiction of the outside world. We must regard painting as a truly inadequate means of reproducing inner experiences and sentiments because it is naturally bound to a single phase of movement; in order to represent the flow of movement or the complexity of a sensation, it must resort to the odd tactic of painting images on top of or next to each other. If, for example, in order to demonstrate the sensations experienced by a train passenger, an artist combines a large eye, a diagonally distorted, roaring train, a number of blurred telegraph poles, and perhaps the silhouette of the woman sitting across from him in the train; or if he attempts to express the mutual attraction of man and woman (who, in a familiar convention, are represented by a triangle and a circle) by drawing the two figures repeated in innumer-

The Expressionist Turn

421

able contours striving to reach each other, we get the impression of a certain helplessness, a desire that fails due to form and technique. How differently such inner faces and experiences could be expressed by a moving image, which can effortlessly follow the flow of sensations. Cinematic technology offers us the potential for such an image. It would be in a position, for example, to create a visual reflection of the series of feelings and perceptions that flood through someone who listens to a Beethoven symphony, just as it can, of course, reproduce even the most unconstrained visions of the artist. An excerpt from an expressionist film might appear as follows: a heaving sea as the home of all earthly life, from which a succession of figures emerges. A few of these figures detach themselves and float to the shore. A pair of lovers. He takes his beloved’s face between his hands, and under his rapturous gaze, her sweet countenance mutates into a Gorgon’s head. The lover shrinks back, horrified: the phantom of love is melting away between his hands. He climbs a mountain, higher and higher. Intermittent visions of his beloved. Another, sterner face displaces the first. A giant hand points the way farther upward. All kinds of ghosts want to lure him away from his path. Determined, he climbs to the highest peak. Above, he is surrounded by the icy chill of the thinker, and at his feet yawns an annihilating abyss. Of course, expressionist film could do without any sustained concepts, any “content.” Through the convergence of images, the superimposition of shots, perhaps in different proportions, through all the various special effects that would, in some cases, accompany animated images, film technology is more capable than any other visual art—more so than painting or theater, not to mention sculpture—of depicting everything dreamlike, visionary, and unreal. Until now, our film art had continued to wander along foreign pathways: it imitates theater and written novels. In both cases, it must resort to the aid of the word, a tool that is actually foreign to its essence and that so disruptively interrupts the stream of images in the form of “titles.” And yet these words are just a pitiful makeshift solution: subtle psychological motivations and characterizations, which are necessary to make a drama or novel into a real work of art, are impossible due to the telegraphic style of these interspersed film titles. Thus, even in cinematic circles, we frequently encounter the opinion that true film art is totally impossible. This is, of course, a false conclusion, just as invalid as the idea that etching cannot be an art because it lacks color. Just as we do not feel that a good etching has something to gain from the addition of color, so we must not miss words in a film that attempts to be a real work of art. Rather, in both cases, it is exclusively a question of finding the appropriate artistic style for the technology. For film technology, it seems to me that this purely artistic style is expressionism. A good film must speak to the soul through the eye without further explanation, just as music does through the ear. A main title to identify the content or, in certain cases, a program guide through the artwork, would be a final concession. Of course, this is absolutely not to say that the cinema of the future will or should consist only of this kind of art. Disregarding the fact that nature films, educational films, or propaganda films will remain completely untouched by such developments, most film audiences are longing for ever more facile entertainment, for amusement and thrills, which current films can offer much more copiously than “expressionist” films. Here, I mean only to point out one way in which the artistic film, which so many people long for, may become a possibility. Note 1. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and others had published a futurist film manifesto (“La cinematografia futurista”) in September 1916.

422

Configurations of a Medium

191 J. B. Expressionism in Film: The New Art in Film First published as “Expressionismus im Film: Die neue Kunst im Film,” in Film-Kurier 2, no. 4 (January 6, 1920). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Widely identified as the first work of expressionist cinema, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari would hold a central position in film-theoretical debates on the proper mode of engagement with external reality. From its premiere on February 26, 1920, onwards, Wiene’s film was praised by some for its attempt to redefine cinematic practice apart from naturalist representation—or, as Roland Schacht wrote, for lifting the medium “out of the realm of photography into the pure sphere of the artwork.”1 Among Caligari’s numerous detractors, criticisms included the film’s disregard for the medium’s unique features and devices; its impure combination of naturalistic and stylized elements; excessive, even enervating decor; and, finally, the linkage of expressionist aesthetics with the theme of insanity. The following article, published almost two months before the debut of Caligari, credits the film with extending “the most modern trends in visual art” to the cinema. Visiting the set of Caligari at the Decla studio in Berlin-Weißensee, the author remarkably anticipates many points of debate in the reception history of Wiene’s expressionist classic.

Film is not a painterly art, just as it is not purely dramatic. It is related to both in certain ways, has elements in common with both, but its essence lies in another direction. However, their unmistakable intersection at several points demands valuable cross-fertilization. At first, failing to recognize fi lm’s fundamental principles, we pushed it toward theater and led it down a false path, because the closer it got to the theater, the more it lost its independence and developed into an inferior surrogate. Thus, film opera and the many attempts at talking pictures did not represent progress, but detours. 2 The concept of film as a simple moving image—that is, the absolute emphasis on the painterly aspects—is no less disastrous. This notion robs it of yet another basic element: drama. Painting is repose, but film is an advancing story. Painting is the artistic outcome of a vision, whereas film the continuous development of a poetic thought. The answer lies in the middle. If fi lm wants to preserve its own direction, it must not turn to either side, but must look all around it for inspiration and adapt it to its own purposes. Sculptural elements, which were completely disregarded at first, are now gaining more and more influence. First, people began to recognize the actual significance of set design, which had been badly neglected up to that point, and today the best set designers have a home in film production. Another step forward was the visual design of individual scenes in view of their total effect, and we have a full complement of successful directors for whom dramatic structure goes hand in hand with visual texture. This was another significant breakthrough for film’s artistic development. Given the manifold recent attempts to expand upon what had already been achieved and to search for possible new paths, it was only a matter of time before the most modern trends in visual art would also fi nd their way into film. Now this step has also been taken, and once again new doors have opened onto unforeseen futures. Expressionism has made its entrance into film.

The Expressionist Turn

423

In the Decla Studio in Weißensee, the first promising attempt in this direction is nearing its completion. This quiet and serious company has always avoided the cheap sensations of the day and aspired toward artistic and cultural values. Now, Erich Pommer and Julius Sternheim, whose drive and energy laid the foundation, have been joined by a new man, Rudolf Meinert, who is being given a generous budget and the opportunity to implement his practical experiences.3 It was a feat of Decla to follow Robert Wiene’s inspiration and, unconcerned with ultimate financial success or failure, to give him free rein in this laudable artistic venture to deploy expressionism in film. We may prophesy as we wish about the economic outcome, but one thing is certain: a great artistic vision is in the making, and a serious, unfaltering artistic will has finally received its well-earned reward. The new Decla film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, provided director Robert Wiene with a welcome opportunity to realize a long-held plan. The strange and macabre tale of insanity, the story of this peculiar Dr. Caligari and his somnambulant wax doll, was particularly appropriate for Mayer’s vision. The painters Warm, Reimann, and Röhrig proved to be productive, richly talented collaborators,4 and the individual scenes that I was recently able to see inspire high hopes for the fi nished product. Before we saw this new world for ourselves, we were skeptical. We could not quite imagine the slanted lines, triangles, and rectangles of modern painting as three-dimensional forms in space; we expected an overwhelming sense of implausibility, especially alienating in the reality of film photography. But the impression has removed all doubt. The first thing I saw was a garret, a steep, overhanging roof. In the background, a window with haphazardly crooked bars, and far in the distance the silhouette of a roof with slanted chimneys. In the attic stood a humble bed and two chairs with infinitely high armrests. The wide walls were covered in paint, which bled onto the bed frame. The details are bizarre, but I have never gotten such a deep and immediate impression of oppressive bleakness, of torturous loneliness from a set design as I did here. Even more overwhelming in its strangeness is the angular fairground stall with its bulging awnings and that audience, whose pointed, Biedermeieresque hats protrude strangely from the crowd. No one can escape this stark impression, not even the emotionally uncomplicated extras and laborers, who are surely strangers to such new art. The dramatic characters then had to be placed into this fantastic, unreal environment, to be assimilated to this novel milieu, and to come alive in it. These were dangerous waters to navigate. For the set design could easily have given the impression of existing merely to reveal mad ideas. But fortunately, this problem is solved with artistic taste, in that the actual narrative frame remains in a consistent relationship with the scenic design. It is nothing less than amazing how the actors have adapted themselves to this emotional world, how, out of sensitivity to a truly artistic atmosphere, they have surrendered themselves to its fundamental style. The stocky figure of Werner Krauß is fascinating. He is half ham, half E. T. A. Hoffmannesque apparition. All his movements—the strange gestures of his arms and hands, his shuffling gait, the timbre of his voice—sprout directly from the style of the scene. He is no longer Krauß, he is Dr. Caligari in the flesh, in the entirety of his being, not only during the short periods of shooting, but even during breaks and conversations. Conrad Veidt is uncannily grotesque, long and gaunt in his black unitard, garishly made up with ghostly, deep-set eyes, the double of the fairground puppet and the somnambulist, who becomes an instrument of crime. In spite of the reality of his role,

424

Configurations of a Medium

Friedrich Fehér appears cloaked in mystery in his black cape, the glow of madness in his eyes. With twisted hanging locks, Lil Dagover resembles a painting by Gainsborough come to life; 5 H. H. von Twardowski, haggard and dreamy, suffers in his lonely attic chamber. The painters are devoted to their task. In everything they create, from the large outlines to the smallest details, there is a conscious artistic will. Even the most alienating motifs never appear wildly invented or constructed, but rather give the impression of a warm-blooded creation extracted from the most internal sensation. A studio visit has hardly ever been as interesting, novel, and inspiring as this one. We are quite excited to see the outcome of this film: for it is a new path, an upward progression for the image, a pioneering voyage into uncharted waters, and, as such, a true feat. Notes 1. Roland Schacht (a.k.a. Balthasar), “Caligari,” Freie Deutsche Bühne 29 (March 14, 1920), 695–98. 2. A likely reference to the Tonbilder (sound pictures) popular in Germany between 1907 and 1909; see chapter 17. 3. Meinert’s production company, Meinert-Film-Gesellschaft, merged with Decla in November 1919, and Meinert served as production manager of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 4. Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig were set designers. See Reimann’s text later in this chapter, no. 196. 5. The eighteenth-century English artist Thomas Gainsborough was known for his portraits and landscape paintings.

192 ERNST ANGEL An “Expressionist” Film First published as “Ein ‘expressionistischer’ Film,” in Die neue Schaubühne 2, no. 4 (April 1920), 103–5. Translated by Don Reneau.

Given the frequent association of realist and impressionist aesthetics with photographic representation, the relationship between expressionism and cinema was a contentious issue in the 1920s, enmeshed in broader debates about the medium’s specific properties and artistic potential. Although The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became an international success and inspired the discourse of “le caligarisme,” it also met with fierce resistance; Blaise Cendrars and Ezra Pound, for example, decried the film’s parasitic relationship to other media, as well as its opportunistic, even impertinent emulation of innovations within aesthetic modernism. In a similar vein, the Austrian-born Ernst Angel here dismisses Caligari as a commercially driven piece of “applied art” rather than a true realization of expressionist cinematic aesthetics. His critique of the film’s theatricality would be echoed in mid-twentieth-century texts by Erwin Panofsky (“Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” 1947), André Bazin (“Theater and Cinema,” 1951), and Siegfried Kracauer (Theory of Film, 1960). Angel (1894–1986) worked in Berlin as a theater assistant, critic, publisher, film director, and producer during the Weimar era. His collection of poems, Sturz nach oben, appeared in 1920, and he also wrote a biography of Thomas Edison (Edison: Sein Leben und Erfinden, 1926).

Decla made the announcement, but the very logic of the announcement placed its claims in doubt. Any “expressionism” going by that name has little hope of being the real thing.

The Expressionist Turn

425

From the moment this film’s images begin to speak, they give the lie to its own project. The titles appear unmotivated and out of place, scattered illegibly on a jagged, ornamental strip. This “expressionism” smells of applied art. In addition to his use of jagged titles, the innocent director also tried to demonstrate expressionism in the locations and sets. But would it not have been more challenging to realize expressionism in the structure of the plot and in the movement of the bodies? Any schoolchild can recognize expressionism in slanted walls, crooked doors, swollen chairs, and deserted buildings. In this film, someone who knows nothing about expressionism’s cause has bestowed independence upon its symptoms. Such scenery comes to nothing in the presence of conventional action and gestures. And even in those places where it does accompany substantive action, it amounts, at best, to a stylized decor that suffocates the film by forcing it into a predesigned milieu. What the studio displays to the world is a film enclosed in a few carefully prepared pieces of real estate (every square yard gobbles money!). But the prisoner succumbs amidst its custom-designed furniture. When the artificial cinematic stage wishes to appear natural, its chances of success stand in inverse proportion to the breadth of the scenery. The ridge of a rooftop, an arch, or a stairway might produce a natural effect, but a city in the background has the effect of a flat Lilliput.1 Film must overcome the surface of the screen through its depth of scenery and substitute for the metaphysics of dramatic action through breadth and simultaneity. The theater, which is naturally three-dimensional and thrives on the words and atmosphere of the play, brings the world in through its three walls. But film misunderstands itself when it tries to work with the tools of the stage; it can achieve no more than a poor imitation. The expressionist desire for expression produces mystical and grotesque phenomena, but these should not constitute a substantive precondition of that desire. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari begins with mystical-grotesque events and therefore produces an ambiguous mutuality instead of an inner agreement. And when, in the course of the film’s circuitous plot, this mysticism unintentionally winds up in a moralizing, Protestant Enlightenment, the film’s “expressionism” proves far more retrograde than that of eccentric American films, which exaggerate the most mundane aspects of daily life without justifying them rationally. Dr. Caligari, demonic doctor and murderer, beyond the reach of the law (he uses a sleepwalker as his tool), is tracked down in an insane asylum by his antagonist, a youth who has lost his friend to Caligari’s thievery. As it turns out, the fiend lives in the asylum as its director, but the avenging youth exposes this caretaker of the insane as an insane man himself, for whom a problem contained in some musty criminal memoirs has become an idée fixe. In the end, however, we find out that all of these events are only more fantasies of a sick mind, that of the youth himself, who narrates the story. Thus the fi lm makes its subject and its offensive decor palpable to a sympathetic public—all the more so since the asylum director, a de facto good guy, now offers the young patient the prospect of recovery. The audience has simply paid a visit to the insane asylum. And an agreeable smile graces “expressionism,” which once again, as absentee, pays the price. Such a thematic retreat is not necessary in order to draw a balance between the artistic strivings of our time and the commercial interests of its entrepreneurs; expressionism, which destroys given reality and filters the debris through its desire, does not admit of introduction into a factory-like Taylorism. Before nature gives over its anatomy, it must submit to a will, which molds it into a deeper nature. And before there were slanted houses, there was a raging desire to knock them down. No good director will disdain the

426

Configurations of a Medium

occasional use of designs to heighten expression in “naturalistic” films, or the attempt to use scenery, lighting, and perspective to the same ends. But such attempts can gain something more than a purely illustrative function only when they grow out of the plot and the art of the gesture. Note 1. A reference to one of the fictional islands inhabited by people one-twelfth the size of ordinary humans in Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

193 CARLO MIERENDORFF If I Only Had the Cinema! First published as Hätte ich das Kino! (Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, 1920), here 7–34. Translated by Jeffrey Timon.

This programmatic essay appeared in February 1920 in Die weißen Blätter (in a muchabridged version) and also as a short book in Kasimir Edschmid’s Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit series, from which the following is extracted. Using vitalist, “expressionist” prose, Carlo Mierendorff decries the embourgeoisement of cinema and pleads for the raw energy of earlier films—especially their wordless vigor, mass appeal, and embodied, sensory-affective registers. The essay thus exemplifies modernists’ return to the “cinema of attractions” (Tom Gunning) to showcase the medium’s potentiality and resonates with other texts in this chapter through its interest in cultivating an aesthetics distinct from the established arts. Mierendorff (1897–1943) was an expressionist writer, social scientist, and Social Democratic politician who later resisted the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

I.

The image grew out of the fairground booth. There, noses pressed tight to the glass, the people experienced the bloodiest, splotchiest, and most colorful panoramas: the earthquake at Messina, the murder of Lord Eckesvordt, or the harrowing end of a North Pole expedition. It was their newspaper; it offered an entire world, an exceptional, uncharted, secret, frightening, and enchanted world. It offered things human beings can’t live without, things they covet deeply, and things that make it all worthwhile. Crouching within us, the desire for the devilish demands to be fulfilled. In former times, man had Orcus, hell, Blockula, and the devil—all created out of the amorphous mass that wanders aimlessly in the dark, formed of the mysterious fog that surrounds the earth. Then the swaying canvas screens of the traveling fairs confirmed man’s imagination. In them, the picture of the world rounded itself out. Long used to experiencing himself as a fragmented being, man longs to hold together in his hand the beginning and end of his existence and to stand at the center of the earth. But in an era that forces everything into relation with everything else, the still image no longer suffices. Variation and abundance became a necessity. The screen had to come to life so that even those people beset by the lowest level of awareness—those who look out at the world from below and grasp only the smallest portion of it, who are bereft of overview and without flight over the map of the world—could become aware of

The Expressionist Turn

427

themselves, understand themselves, and see themselves portrayed. And so the cinema was born. And since this longing is at its most violent in the most subjugated human being, the most disenfranchised, the proletariat, so the cinema became his. The cinema is his cabinet of curiosities [Pan-optikum]. In it he embraces life. It is the classroom for those who live without books. Those with a vocabulary of sixty words. Those who remain distant from the cultural dandyism that bristles at the applause of its dozen readers (even if this number grows to 100 or 1,000). Those who are never reached by an author, perhaps never reached by a newspaper or a pamphlet, and perhaps not even by a five-minute heckler during an election campaign; those who always resubmerge into their anonymity. The cinema has reached them. And they always come here, of course; for here they are without mistrust; here they embrace excitement, pain, amusement, and rapture. A public, one million strong, which comes, lives, and goes; which has no name and is nonetheless there; which, moving in its gigantic mass, can assume any form; and which we must therefore try to get a grip on. There is no other means for achieving this than the movies. What is a book by comparison? What is the theater by comparison? [. . .] Activism does not suffice; it storms through the ranks of only one class. How is this supposed to revolutionize the whole of human society? From the top down? One does not blow open safes with little matches. This much we know: somehow the idea and the masses must come into inseparable union. What does it help to ram the idea into individual heads? Anyone capable of lending clear contours to the masses—that mysterious, reciprocal community of near-seismographic nature—lost his authority long ago. If all our efforts to refashion our existence are not to be in vain, then we must try to reach the masses. We must have the cinema. Ever since the cinema matured into that colossal beast that currently lies spread out over the whole of Europe, it sponges out of everyone’s pockets. It holds everyone spellbound. No one can escape it. Since it lives for all, it also lives from all. The audience of the cinema is a classless audience. I look into the Ufa-Theater, into the Kammer-Lichtspiele, the Biograph, the Palace Cinema, the Edison, Bio, and Eden theaters. In these catacombs, bored obliquely into the ground beneath the base of the city; in these long tubes, indolently sprawled out on the ground and absorbing everyone with gaping jaws, glowworms hurry about like ghosts before a sea of gropers; and everyone presses forward, toward that mighty, flickering square eye that conjures, threatens, and mesmerizes. There are longshoremen, financiers, dishwashing girls, and divas. A chancery clerk sees himself—or so he thinks—on the flickering screen, climbing to the level of boss and director (dream on!). A shopgirl, enchanted, sees herself up there, loved by Count and Baron alike. A young man cribs what’s chic. Someone reeks of champagne. Ladies are done up to the hilt. Someone is stealing someone else’s money. Gentlemen are yawning. A couple has come for the third time already.

428

Configurations of a Medium

There are waiters and ironers, porters and models, chauffeurs and housewives, painters and milkmaids, jockeys and schoolgirls, cyclists and hairdressers, furniture movers and domestic servants, ladies with diamonds and butchers, stable boys, and travelers—all of them separated only by the four seating sections. They form one mass, wet with the sweat of shock, bridged together and conglomerated. In the loges, one smells perfume and hears the rustle of silk robes; in the orchestra, there is the stench of orange peels and the sight of caps thrown back on the scruff of the neck. The greatest pleasure is to be right next to the screen. One hears shrieking in front and snickering in the back. Monocles look past Manchester trousers with scorn. Tightly wedged in—not a single seat is empty—the spectators gasp for breath in the obscurity beneath the images that hurry past. Sweat breaks out. The fi lm unwinds; now the man up there on the screen pounces on the woman. Down below, every woman feels pounced on, every man pounces. Fever ensues, groaning. An umbrella falls. Its owner has to bend over and reach around under skirts. Flesh dances against flesh. In the dark, the place dances on the back of your neck. Projectiles crackle through the steaminess, tinted green: a room, the edge of a forest, cavaliers. Who can still flee? White flashes. Black flits by. The light is scattered. The vibrations provoke a sweet stupor. The haste rocks viewers to sleep. Mist rises from the skin. Dankness impregnates the delirious senses. Many are already bent forward, swaying in sleep, their heads gently resting on their wretched breasts. Some embrace one another. Some whisper. Applause. Greetings. Protest. Eyes fixed. Obscenities. Stupid grins. Now light blazes, and the spell is broken; alleviated, redeemed, they all blink about in silence—the mechanics, postal workers, top hats, sailors, cabin boys, porters, bandanas, shop assistants, miners, call girls, stagecoach drivers, dandies, apprentices, waitresses, departmental managers, sergeants, straw hats, gentlemen in cutaways, bowler hats, poets, husbands, and the educated. Already it appears that man needs the cinema in order to survive. From machine hangars and department stores, from basements and housing projects, from country villas, from the east of great cities, from underground subways and trains, from foundries, factories, and offices, people ascend. An unending line marches into the movie theaters of metropolises and provincial cities. Townsfolk glimpsed the pushing and shoving of the cities, masts of lights, cars, hotel façades, and train stations. City dwellers got to see forested mountains, telegraph wires, thoroughfares and tranquility. Foreigners stood face to face with foreign continents, with deserts, the oceans, China, and India. Dark borders fell. II.

It is clear today how deeply the cinema has decayed. It began with the renowned poets, when they came in throngs to lend their arms to the cause; when Sudermann, filmed in Katzensteg [The catwalk], offered himself to even the most insignificant spectator;1 when Paul Lindau snipped Bassermann’s body in two in Der Andere;2 when the entire scum of bourgeois artistry threw itself into the cinema, eager to elevate it (and no doubt smelling prosperity); when, inclined to avert our eyes from their darker origins, we declared cinema to be appropriate for higher society; when it was discovered as an art. Since then cinema has simply mirrored the lowest common denominator of bourgeois culture: clean, unveiled, shameless kitsch. The bourgeoisie has fashioned the cinema in its own image. Of course it makes no sense to say that kitsch was absent from the cinema before this period. The producer of the first film could scarcely have done without kitsch. But the

The Expressionist Turn

429

cinema was originally the wildest of phenomena, the most elementary breakthrough of the instinctual into the populace. It grew out of the infernal stench of the back alleys; the hopelessness of the city outskirts gave birth to it. Thirsty souls grasped out at it. Because of this, no earthly subject was beyond its reach. Crime, obscenity, lasciviousness, hatred, cajolery, and adventure thrived in the cinema. It showed the infatuating splendor of million-dollar castles created from naïve fantasy. It showered audiences with endless Westerns: the prairie, moccasins, riflemen, hunting grounds, trappers, wigwams, ambushes, tomahawks, canoes, buffalo, bears, and lassos. There was murder, Nick Carter, skyscrapers, and gambling dens. Devilish and seductive, the films of our childhood leapt out at us with unbridled intensity. Between wooden crates, bent over in the dark in front of the screen, our communal heart beat loudly. There was Opfertod [Sacrificial death], Der Leidensweg einer liebenden Frau [A woman’s sufferings], Das Geheimnis des Bergsees [The secret of the mountain lake], and Im Banne der Leidenschaft [Under the spell of passion]. Films overrun with fever, full of tears, convulsing. Crass films, and gaudy, incomplete films, poor, moving on account their helplessness, kitschy, yes, but unheard-of kitsch, off-putting, the films—O pinnacle!—of Asta Nielsen, movie queen. All that is gone: gone the unheard-of, the daring, and the risky. Uprightness now stares down at us from the cinema screen. And this face-lift has succeeded magnificently. No more of the audacity that used to be there, even if it was only in the most vulgar films. The bourgeois gentleman has triumphed. Himself too timid for excess, and too scrawny, he tolerates only one thing: platitudes. I detest the censors. They roll everything flat. Maybe the old films were barbaric, but at least they were rich. Nowadays, on the other hand, everything is refined, authenticated, and poor because it lacks fantasy. Forsaken by instinct, directors barely understand how to juggle the elements of a film, how to swirl them together: car chases, bedrooms, racetracks, pistol shots, hotel thefts, airplane takeoffs. Their miserable repertoire spins around feebly like an old merry-go-round. They never even permit themselves the slightest extravagance within the bounds of the permissible. They always remain sedated. Do we ever see chases over rooftops anymore? They robbed film of its intoxicating tempo. Their well-fed, bourgeois conventionality could no longer keep up. Recklessness scared it. Turbulence upset it. It wanted meaning and content. The adventure film was eclipsed by the family melodrama. Pirates in the Malaysian archipelago were disqualified—now they just replay little love tragedies daily in different forms. There are no more dive bars anywhere; no more apaches. The world comes to an end at the front door. One sees only salons, buffet tables, boudoirs, bowing, and polite chuckling. These “society” films always include the same recalcitrant circle, worn out, tedious enough to make you yawn. The cinema harbors its own law. But instead of trying to feel it out, we cast sideward glances at the stages of the spoken word, stylize ourselves according to the theater, vulgarize its drama, copy its superficial aspects, and thereby lose all solid ground beneath our feet. The pathos of Die Gartenlaube has crept into the high-tragic dramas of manners and destiny.3 Kitsch has lost the last bit of liberality that made it almost noble and run aground on the shores of a shallow, provincial mediocrity. Kitsch has become cowardly and all the more unbearable. If the film is about love, only kitsch is authorized. Debauchery has lost its force; titillation has been completely castrated. Grated down to mere allusion, the shocking is shown only in sanctioned forms: cocktail clubs instead of brothels, registry offices instead of wedding-night scenes, décolletage instead of lace tights, and in the place of rape scenes, we might still get hugs and kisses.

430

Configurations of a Medium

Every day, entrepreneurs heave avalanches of such slime onto the people. Kilometers of film are proudly peddled as “prostitution,” “the road to damnation,” “the paradise of prostitutes,” and “half-virgins” in order to find takers for all this rubbish.4 The police always triumph—never the criminals. The affair always doubles back into reconciliation—the hero is never brought down anymore, nor does he bring about his own downfall. The cinema never offers destiny anymore, only verbosity. In the romanticism of capitalism, films are only meant to illuminate the nobility of the propertied class; love and generosity only characterize the rulers. And bonhomie devours its surroundings more and more. Even box office hits aspire to a snug sense of comfort. Historical masquerades played out before classical backdrops satisfy viewers deeply. Beethoven is made into a hero along with Lassalle and Queen Louise.5 From Quo Vadis to The Count of Monte Cristo,6 everything is rendered true-to-life. But nothing is more laughable in film than cardboard armor and togas, these Roman costume parties, Alexander’s world empire made from accessories! Filmed Egyptians, what an anachronism! Film has degenerated into just such a bastard. And this process is still continuing. Once, there was the rich fantasy life of the trashy novel. It died long ago. And with it went the detectives themselves. Instead of wielding pistols and dark lanterns, they pull heartstrings; they have become romantic heroes, swindlers, whose authenticity no one believes in any more. How great was the shrewdness of a Sherlock Holmes! How scanty in comparison the ingenuity of Harry Higgs, Joe Deebs, and Stuart Webbs!7 How pale are the plot twists, how boring, how perfumed! Extinguishing the last vestiges of tradition and deriving our enjoyment from mere scientific entertainment, we have descended toward mythology. We combine marching band music with laziness and punctilious exactitude, we play at culture, education, and upbringing, and we have even made an attraction out of the tragedy of the battlefield (this was the pinnacle). The bourgeois man has become so lazy that he now stakes everything on the machine and nothing on the intellect: the stereoscopic film and the four-color film are supposed to destroy the theater definitively. Technological perfection is supposed to whitewash the shabbiness of film. But the absolute perfection of the cinema will also spell its utter ruin. III.

Only the visible means anything in the cinema. It does not suffice just to stretch the sparse events of long conversational novels across film images until they break. When this is done, irrelevant material balloons out while the important elements are dismissed in a matter of seconds. There is no equilibrium. Incidental points dominate. In a book, the main conflict is read, but it cannot step out onto the stage. The dramatic is supposed to appear in film, but only surface phenomena become visible. Unimportant elements take up all the space, while costumes swagger about as if they were essential elements. The film slips off into random details: a man, hands half in his pockets, steps out the door, hails a cab, takes a ride (passing by streets, pedestrians, kiosks, and front gardens), stops, gets out, pays, looks up at the house (don’t forget the cigarette!), goes inside, climbs two flights of stairs, waits, says hello, pulls out a card, stands in the salon, turns, kisses a hand, smiles—? Here we have the miscarriage of book and photograph: the society piece. Rendered in pictures, serial literature is all the easier to digest.

The Expressionist Turn

431

But could the spiritual not be photographed? Could thoughts not be expressed in pictures? Is there not something like the indiscretion of the camera, that lens [Objektiv] which objectifies everything, which peeks everywhere, relentlessly capable of cataloguing and displaying everything? Which effortlessly strings all things together and represents them directly, so that there are no longer any secrets, neither among people on the street, nor within families in apartments, nor inside people or visible on their faces? The exposed photographic plate is the rude unveiler of all that is concealed, the lurking observer of all interior thoughts. Imagine a scene like the following: the porter (a hotel thief) slides his screen open to find the detective standing there. Bonjour. Composure. The detective passes. Unflinching, the porter looks through the window. The detective glides nonchalantly up toward the stairs. The porter, face flushed and ragged: will he find the room? The shelf? The secret compartment? The detective disappears. The porter, unflinching, walks straight ahead. This is filmic monologue. But what would happen if objects themselves began to deliver their own monologues? Forsaken articles of clothing crawling out from dressers to wander about. Filing cabinets descending from the walls. Files ripping apart tragedies page by page. Bank notes flying from defrauders’ hands. Beds tainted with murder. Misers’ cash-boxes. Chatty toilet tables. The whispering of bed curtains. Basements in the houses of abortionists. Tables in dive bars where thumbs stick in syrupy liqueur. Forgotten church garrets. Cobwebbed apartments. Mirrors reflecting faces engraved with the lines of pleasure. Play it already! Or what about a film without people? No clattering life. Full of solitude, it films and films, and still nothing happens. Or one might create superstitious symbolism, signs pointing to the otherworldly, harbingers of fallen and exalted spirits. One could show a murder by wishing. A needle pricks into the breast of a photograph and, somewhere far away, a living person mysteriously falls over dead. The cross of ashes paints itself. The sailor has drowned. These are signs, auguries. Nothing communicates inner agitation more abruptly and directly than gesticulation. Films that only supply us with pages of text are bad. What transpires must explain itself. But among the people living at our degree of latitude, the storehouse of gesture is scant. The gestures of human beings are not enough. The gesticulation of things must be added to them. Everything houses its own gestures. This is what makes the cinema so much better than the theater: the movie stage is not fixed, determined, bound, or constrained. Cinema can entice all the things of this world into its realm and enlist their aid at any time. And the things must all play along. Even on the most technically advanced theatrical stage, everything, once it has been placed there, remains cold, a mere prop: a table, a bureau, greenery, or a fence. Only the word of the poet spoken from the mouth of the actor can enchant things and bring them out over the proscenium. Then it seems as if everything were beginning to change. On the early stages of the mystery plays, rich metaphors and thickly packed, extravagant wordings made up for the paucity in scenery, even if they weren’t able to round out the illusion completely. But the invention of the Bioskop can lead us back to a purer distinction.8 Rich words can now more fully renounce stage scenery. Working in reality, fanlike, on and off, the cinema enjoys its own element: the image. For we understand images effortlessly. Herein lies the enticement of the cinema. An image brands itself ineluctably onto our minds, and that is its superiority over the theatrical stage. When a word comes down at us from the stage, a different idea instantly

432

Configurations of a Medium

flashes up in the mind of each person. The actor says “girl,” “sunrise,” or “park,” and each audience member sees his own image. Projected in film, however, the café and the ballroom always remain identical, clear and thoroughly defined in the same contours for every spectator. But film’s absolute clarity must nevertheless point in the direction of an opening in order to make possible what the cinema has thus far done without: comedy. That entails painfully stupid situations (like lanky maidens hugging paunches), in which gestures become grimaces. It is easy for the word, for intonation and nuance, to say yes and no at the same time, to both go and not move an inch from the scene, to couch insults in flattering words. The comedic sound must be transformed into a comedic image. Gesticulation must emerge from vocal gesture; double-crossing words should give way to hands performing contradictory actions. Whatever the hand swears to, the foot will deny; whatever the face admires, the bottom will lampoon. En face, we see a man of honor, from behind, a trickster. Why not try to roll two films into one, so that one stands up straight while the other stands on its head? What a great interplay. Below, we see the mask of deception; up above, the unmasking. Underneath, a silent conversation; up above, the story runs its course. How crazy when they both cross over into each other. An automobile drives, someone falls out and remains stuck against the other film with his stomach, hanging in the air; or he falls, falls from one scene into the next, from the balcony into the billiard party. Then the cinema would also become a realm of imagination, like the theater. Until now, cinema has been closer to the circus than to the stage. When a suicidal person throws himself over a cliff in the theater, we know it is only five meters and cardboard. We don’t shudder. In the cinema it is always an abyss (never a sham) and a real daredevil jumping out of the passenger train, down from the viaduct. The threat to life is not feigned, the titillating balance between life and, in the very next moment, sure death is damned palpable. If we could unroll all of this great tumult at once, tightly drawn and entangled pellmell, it would lead us close to the futuristic painting, which is like a movie inasmuch as it breaks through frozen rigidity and offers up the chaos of changing perspectives; yet futurist paintings are still more narrowly limited than the real cinema, since they have to squeeze the appearance of chronological development into the simultaneity of the image. The film image should not be equated with the image as such. It mocks the laws of physics. It is not an image that extends outward from a center according to some static law. It avoids customary means of observation that record organic developments starting with the root (a natural habit). Everything crashes in from above. Everything rushes after from above. Here, as well, film explodes all norms of corporeality. In catastrophic verticality, the images race down the screen. Everything is spurred downward. Nothing is more disturbing than when a creature grows from the top down. Points, let loose from the sidelines (they do not burst forth from the horizon), rain down in streams and become cavalcades, fencers, runners, champagne bottles, card games, and cash. That is the uprooting power of the cinema. Here we begin to observe that cinema is nothing but the representation of automated man. Music helps to prevent people from recognizing this. In days past, the orchestrion rattled, blew, and snorted. Now we have the harmonium, from which sadness wafts into the hearts of men. Above all, there is the prolonged sobbing of Puccini, second to no other music. In addition, we have all the music of Beethoven, because it always marches.

The Expressionist Turn

433

Where only the eye dwells, where conventional reality ends, where all the other senses are excluded, there must be music to animate the dancing shadows with blood and flesh, with organic fluid and fragrance. If someone screams and we don’t hear it, then his scream might easily have been engulfed in the din of the music. But if someone screams and we perceive nothing—then you’d better hang on for your life. When the music stops, things become frightening, ghostly, and eerie. Then we are no longer in the here and now. Gentlemen raise their hats, cars buzz by, girls give in, someone points a pistol at his forehead—muted, distant, and dreadful: here we have the destruction of the world. Melody, however, gives body to the imagination, makes things intimate. And we live on, redeemed and smiling about the whole affair. The battle between the demonic eye up on the screen and the sweetness of the music around us is so violent that the music is destroyed, deformed. It is devoured; it loses its face. We no longer hear the march, the aria, the serenade, or the bel canto; we hear only what flickers forth and chimes from the film: laughter and gunshots and perfume and ringing and hooves and entertainment and sobs and breathing. The music surges forth as if from distant basements, strangely played, as if from under the clouded mirror of a pond, as distant as diving bells. Does it not recall the hysterical wailing of pianos emanating from tombs? A dramaturgy of the cinema has yet to be written. Here lies a fallow field of possibilities. Notes 1. Der Katzensteg is a 1915 German film directed by Max Mack and based on the 1890 novel by Hermann Sudermann. 2. Der Andere (The Other, 1913), directed by Max Mack and written by Paul Lindau (based on his 1893 play), was one the most famous of the Autorenfilms of the early 1910s. In it, Albert Bassermann played a lawyer with a split personality. 3. Die Gartenlaube, an “illustrated family journal” that ran from 1853 to 1944, was the first major German paper in mass circulation, reaching millions of readers in the German-speaking world and anticipating later illustrated magazines. Aimed at the entire family, it was known for propagating bourgeois and liberal values, especially in its first few decades of publication. 4. The so-called Aufklärungsfilme (sexual education films) of the late 1910s included Richard Oswald’s two-part Die Prostitution (1919), Otto Rippert’s two-part Der Weg, der zur Verdammnis führt (The road to damnation, 1919), Friedrich Zelnik’s Das Paradies der Dirnen (Paradise of prostitutes, 1919), and Manfred Noa’s Demi Vierges (Half virgins. a.k.a. Moderne Töchter, 1919). 5. Mierendorff here references Emil Justitz’s Der Märtyrer seines Herzens (1918), Rudolf Meinert’s Ferdinand Lassalle (1918), and Franz Porten’s three-part Der Film von der Königin Luise (1913). 6. On Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1913), see Kurt Pinthus’s text in chapter 6, no. 81. Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) was the basis of numerous films in the 1910s, including Joseph Golden and Edwin Porter’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1913), Henri Pouctal’s serial Le comte de Monte Cristo (1918), and Friedrich Zelnik’s Die Erbin des Grafen von Monte Christo (1919). 7. Mierendorff here refers to a series of German crime film serials that began in the mid-1910s. 8. The Bioskop was the projection apparatus unveiled by Emil and Max Skladanowsky in 1895. See also chapter 18, no. 263.

194 ROBERT MÜLLER The Future of Film First published as “Die Zukunft des Films,” in Prager Presse, no. 198 (October 14, 1921), 7f. Translated by Michael Cowan.

434

Configurations of a Medium An enthusiastic filmgoer, the Austrian writer Robert Müller (1887–1924) had published the essay “Kino und Bühne” (Cinema and stage) in the expressionist journal Der Anbruch in 1918. In the following text from three years later, he discusses Mierendorff’s If I Only Had the Cinema! (1920; excerpted in no. 193) and refl ects more broadly on the relationship between expressionism and film. While claiming that no genuinely expressionist fi lms exist, Müller nonetheless contends that the medium itself is “quintessentially expressionist” (das schlechthin Expressionistische). His argument would be echoed in Visible Man (1924), where Béla Balázs wrote: “It is quite certain that film is the true terrain, perhaps the only legitimate home, of expressionism.”1

We have often heard the reasons why our artistic institutions no longer represent places of vibrant pleasure, but merely survive as conventional means of killing time. In order to transform theater from the phenomenal lie it has become into truth, directors, actors, and playwrights would have to leap into the thick of reality. This reality, however, consists of nothing but the object as it appears when summoned forth by our nerves. We have also discussed expressionist film, and we have shown that those films labeled as such were not really expressionist at all. Rather, they merely employed in their sets the most external features of expressionist or futurist paintings. Film as such, however, is expressionist. Every film, when approached correctly, amounts to a voluntary and, as it were, metaphysical form—metaphysical, namely, in that it rises beyond the physical and abolishes its rule—of what can be beheld inwardly. These conclusions do not simply result from some personal whims on my part. Numerous talented and resolute adherents of film have published various pamphlets in an effort to reach the general public. I have just come across one book from Carlo Mierendorff entitled If I Only Had the Cinema! (distributed by Erich Reiß in Berlin and published in Kasimir Edschmid’s Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit collection in Jena). As for my own views, I find myself in almost complete agreement with the author, and a paraphrase of his formulations should suffice in order to give a concise and clear outline of the possibilities still open to cinema. Today, cinema has lost its way no less than theater. It has deteriorated greatly since those days when, with insufficient technical means but with a wild momentum, it took hold of our genuine interest in life and animated it into a moving picture. As we have heard, various cultural authorities, including youth organizations, took it upon themselves to reform cinema. But the most erroneous of all reforms is to rob cinema of its wild and exciting qualities or, as the reformers attempted to do, to make it into a dumping ground for the ideas of applied art. Cinema requires the raging tempo of America. Here, there is simply no time to worry about the artistic design of a clock sitting on the chimney mantle, when already the champion burglar, or the detective hot on his heels, is emerging from the grate of the fireplace. After all, the overwhelming superiority of American or French films over our Central European variety resides in the fact that the former make the highest claims on the nerves, on fantasy, and on our pleasure in movement. The mission of cinema is not to be a poor copy of the idyllic bourgeois world but rather to destroy this world, to dissolve it in the most awesome explosion of pure vitality, to assemble the most complicated movement and then to break it down again, to bring to life at once both the simultaneous and the diverse—in short, to satisfy the modern soul and modern nerves in their most powerful incarnation. Every gentle film is a bad film. Good film is always exaggerated, eccentric, meaningfully confused, and athletic in every case. Only this can raise cinema into the realm of art. Today, Mierendorff rightly argues, anyone wishing to find resonance with the public should produce only entertainment, not art, even in theater. If this is so, then let us stick to entertainment and lift it up until it

The Expressionist Turn

435

itself becomes art. If all our efforts to refashion our existence are not to be in vain, then we must try to reach the masses. Already it seems that man needs cinema in order to survive. That is, man will reach the next station in his development by means of cinema. Film will be the machine that takes him to a higher level of consciousness. Originally, cinema was the wildest of phenomena, the most elementary eruption of the instinctual. Crimes thrived there, along with obscenity, lasciviousness, hate, flattery, adventure, million-dollar castles, the prairie, Nick Carter, skyscrapers, and gambling dens. Unfortunately, all of this is gone now, this unheard-of, daring, and risky business. Today, uprightness stares out at us from the latest abortions of capitalism. There is no more audacity, not even in vulgar films; everywhere, one sees platitudes; everything has been made honest, sincere, and unimaginative. Forsaken by instinct, directors no longer know how to juggle things, to whirl them together: car chases, bedrooms, racetracks, pistol shots, hotel thieves, and airplane takeoffs. When was the last time we saw a chase over the rooftops? They have robbed fi lm of its intoxicating tempo. The adventurer was shoved out by the family melodrama. But cinema harbors its own law. Its development is predetermined. It comes from the same world as the monumental forms of Walt Whitman and Verhaeren’s figures. 2 It is false to try to stylize cinema on the model of theater—a mistake from which theater also suffers; it should stick to the word and leave the domain of the visual to film. Beyond the ordinary and complex adventures in cinema, however, fi lm’s domain includes the larger adventure of seeing as such. Cinema should not be used to stretch the sparse events of long conversational novels across filmic images until they break. Filmmakers should avoid texts as much as possible, and the action should become frighteningly visible, just as Winckelmann and Lessing spoke of the pregnant moment in the movement of a sculptural artwork.3 Of course, the main conflict cannot step out onto the stage in person. Still, Mierendorff—in a cry of accusation against that miscarriage of book and photograph, the society piece—rightly asks: Could the spiritual not be photographed? Could thoughts not be expressed in pictures? Film has its own sort of monologue; that is, things speak for themselves. We understand this without difficulty when we see a grimace or a facial expression. But this monologue can be taken further; bodily expression can translate the most complex elements. Double-crossing words, for example, could be conveyed through hands performing contradictory gestures. But what would happen if objects themselves began to deliver their own monologues? Chests of drawers, out of which abandoned clothes wander about; filing cabinets that climb down from the wall; files that rip the pages out of tragedies; murder-stained beds that begin to bleed; or a film without people: empty, it films and films. That must be a horrifying sensation. What makes cinema superior to theater is that its stages are not rigid and constrained. Mocking all laws of physics, it can incorporate anything in the world. Thus it would also be possible to create a visual symbolism of the beyond. Rather than making films about spiritualism, one could make outright spiritualist films. The dramaturgy of cinema has yet to be written. As Mierendorff rightly states, film is a fallow field of possibilities. In reality, there are no expressionist films. But film itself is quintessentially expressionist. Because it is a psychologically complicated machine, it makes possible the direct translation of inner possibilities into external mechanics. It is a flickering crosscut through time. Notes 1. Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 46.

436

Configurations of a Medium

2. Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916) was a Belgian symbolist poet. 3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing presented the concept of the “prägnanter Augenblick” in Laokoon (1766).

195 ROBERT WIENE Expressionism in Film First published as “Expressionismus im Film,” in Berliner Börsen-Courier (July 30, 1922). Translated by Eric Ames.

Robert Wiene (1873–1938) here positions the expressionism that emerged in the decade before World War I as a reaction against aesthetic realism, whether in its historicist or naturalist guises. For Wiene, expressionism marked “an irrepressible countermovement” and had become the goal of film and all other arts in the current era. Wiene began to write and direct films in 1912 and had his breakthrough with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). He would use the expressionist style again in Genuine (1920) and Raskolnikow (1923) before turning to Biblical epics (I.N.R.I., 1923), horror films (The Hands of Orlac, 1924), and opera adaptations (Der Rosenkavalier, 1925). In his years in British and French exile, Wiene sought to direct a sound film remake of Caligari—a project that never materialized due to protracted rights negotiations with Ufa, as well as insufficient financial means.

Asking what role expressionism has to play in film is tantamount to asking what film has to do with art. Today, only someone unfamiliar with the development of film would pose such a question. Where artists create, there is art, and because film places artistic powers in its service, it is art—and therefore necessarily had to strive for expressionism. For expressionism is the goal of all art in our era. Should I explain what I mean by “our era”? Every thirty years or so, a new era begins. This one began in 1909–10, the one before it around 1880. At that time, naturalism arose and began its battle against historicism. Historicism in Germany led to the Meininger style and to the Piloty school; naturalism led to the theater of Otto Brahm and impressionism.1 The nineties were filled with the noise of the struggles between historicism and naturalism. Today we are able to better appreciate the intensity of that new movement. The most intense struggle, to put it in Darwinian terms, is always that between closely related species, such as historicism and naturalism, both offspring of the same mother called realism. If the task of art is to represent reality as truly as possible, then there is no essential difference between historical reality—or authenticity—and social truths of naturalism (that is to say, between the past and the present reality), and it is of little consequence that historicism prefers to extract from reality the “beautiful,” and from naturalism the “characteristic,” or as naturalism’s enemies would say, the “ugly.” To be sure, the concept of “reality” tends to vacillate. Naturalism in painting began with outdoor painting, with the acknowledgment, so to speak, that diffused light is real and studio lighting is a lie. The great confrontation with photography called painting into question in a new way. In trying to solve this problem, artists discovered that there are two realities; that of the photographic plate is different from that of the human eye. Impressionism was the attempt to render pictorially the pure sensory impression of the eye, not yet corrected by associations from experience. “As I see it”: this idea alone defined

The Expressionist Turn

437

the artist’s reality. Yet the very same program treated vision not as observation or desire, but rather as discovery. According to the true teachings of impressionism, art would be, in a certain sense, the finder’s reward for all good discoverers. Naturalism and impressionism had enjoyed an age all to themselves when suddenly, in 1909–10, there arose an irrepressible countermovement, which turned against the last vestiges of historicism—in short, against all forms of realism. This countermovement was called expressionism. Today, this name encompasses a variety of things. Yet all directions of expressionism have in common this negation; they all run contrary to realist art. For the expressionist artist, as well, the exterior means the external. Yet he tries to reflect the internal, to find the strongest (painterly or poetic) expression for his experience. Exterior impressions are merely occasions for experiences, and when, for example, a painter encounters a beautiful woman, his strongest impression must not be a painterly one; rather, it can be the memory of the affectionate tone of her voice. The question would then be how to express in painting the impression awakened by a voice; for the traits and hues of this woman would have faded in the artist’s soul, and nothing could drive him to paint her. Young hotheads and their associates are never content to speak of the reproduction of moods and feelings; they need celebratory words like “feeling for life,” “world feeling,” and “world outlook.” Expressionism supposedly offers a new world outlook because it places the soul above nature. Yet one could recall how often the naturalistic epoch spoke favorably of the man who “subjugates nature.” Perhaps later it will be said that expressionism was only a form of mastery over nature, not a disavowal of the mechanical age but rather an attempt at its completion (which futurism and Dadaism are already claiming for themselves). However that may be, through expressionism, we now sense deeply the indifference of reality and the power of the unreal: the unprecedented, intuitive, and outward projection of inner states of mind. If one compares film and stage dramas, one readily sees how superior the cinema, the true “spectacle,” is to the stage in its possibilities for representing reality. A film is not constrained by the space of the stage; it knows nothing of those scene changes that interrupt the illusion; it has no need of background sets and can only mock such functional stand-ins. Every real thing in the world—from the forest as God created it to the gardens of Le Nôtre; 2 from the most extraordinary buildings of all times to the simplest wooden hut—everything visible between heaven and earth, underground or underwater, as far as the light of the sun reaches, everything can be a setting for a film. An essential property of film is its freedom to travel. Take all the arts of staging in the great, indeed, the greatest theater, and what do they amount to? What is a staged Rome or Memphis compared to the images film can bring home from the real Italy, Greece, or Egypt! Yet the war, which is still being waged without weapons, deprived German film of its freedom to travel. Slowly we are regaining it, even if the devaluation of our currency still limits our mobility. Meanwhile, German film has had to proceed to its advantage; it has had to follow the command of stage sets; and even when it was mocked, did it trade Potsdam for Versailles? Would that not amount to naturalism stripped of nature? Modern art, according to one of its allies, “left the representation of the external world to photography and cinema.”3 But because this external world was everywhere off limits to cinema, fi lm had to resign itself to imitating theater, which it could never achieve without language and which it had to surpass by other theatrical means. The question thus arose as to whether the cinema would absolutely refrain from representing reality and whether it could find new possibilities in the realm of the unreal, the spectral, and the expressive. Very few among us are still sensitive to the unreal, spectral qualities of film. During the war, a friend told me how, in a village in the Carpathians where troops were

438

Configurations of a Medium

stationed, the peasants went to the cinema for the first time and came running out of the dark room, screaming out of fear; they believed they saw ghosts. How crude the bodies of ghosts—Banquo’s spirit or Hamlet’s father—appear on the stage! In contrast, film spiritualizes even the strongest corporeal presence, and the spirit maintains its transparent, shadowy body through which it becomes visible. Film technology itself meets the representation of the unreal—representation in the sense of expressionism—halfway. Film meets the demand for flat images; its colors function as mood indicators. For film is not a black-and-white art as everyone believes; rather, it has everything to do with color. Why else would artists work so hard to conceive of colorful backdrops and costumes? As anyone familiar with photography can tell you, colors come into play as values of intensity, and an artistic effect of color coordination is evident where an artistic drop in brightness manifests itself in the photographic reproduction. People also tend to speak of the emotional value of individual colors, but this is a mistake caused by habitual associations. Is white really the color of happiness? A pessimist might claim that white represents the snow that covers everything in life or the wall of atonement; in ancient times, white was the shroud in which human sacrifices were wrapped; and white is the color of the bridal gown, whose wearer, feeling herself sacrificed, sobs bitterly. Color in itself merely evokes the mood that we have assigned to it, yet the clashing of colors carries with it the power of emotional intensity, and in the filmic image, it is clearly a question of degrees of brightness. There remain to be discussed those forms with which the artist, having turned away from nature, looking out from the inside, represents his experience. Film happily seizes on such forms wherever it wishes to render unreal, fantastic happenings. Filmmakers will have expressionists build sets of fairy-tale forests, magical palaces, and all those places that might attract the imagination of an E. T. A. Hoffmann, so that they might secretly whisper the artistic intuitions of otherworldly things; in our bookish knowledge, we cannot even begin to imagine such things, unless that knowledge one day ceases to know and begins dreaming. But in that case, the dreamer would not express his thoughts in ordered speech; he would speak only in cries, in screams, as the expressionist poet prefers to do. These cries and screams provide the “titles” that the expressionist film drama cannot do without. The first attempts in this direction began to be seen a year ago. The shortage of such attempts is most evident to those who dared to make them first. But where there is an artistic will, there is also a way. Notes 1. The Meininger theater troupe, active in the late nineteenth century, was known for its attention to historical detail in sets and costumes; Carl Theodor von Piloty was a mid-nineteenth-century genre painter renowned for his realistic historical paintings. Otto Brahm was a critic, theater director, and manager of the Deutsches Theater and the Lessingtheater who staged and promoted naturalist dramas. 2. André Le Nôtre was the landscape designer and gardener under King Louis XIV of France. 3. Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus (Munich: R. Piper Verlag, 1920), 27. Fechter was a German writer and critic and first published Der Expressionismus in 1914.

196 WALTER REIMANN An Afterword to Caligari First published as “Ein Nachwort zum ‘Caligari’-Film,” in Die Filmtechnik 9 (September 25, 1925), 192, and in Die Filmtechnik 10 (October 5, 1925), 219–21. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The Expressionist Turn

439

Published a few months after The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was rereleased in German theaters, Walter Reimann’s text identifies lessons that the film industry might still glean from the work, whose “consistent and purely filmic conceptual will” stands in contrast to more traditional, naturalist film aesthetics. Walter Reimann (1887–1936) was a German painter and production designer who had collaborated with Hermann Warm and Walter Röhrig on Caligari’s sets and costumes. In the same month as this text appeared, Rudolf Arnheim published an article in Das Stachelschwein, “Dr. Caligari redivivus,” that ran counter to Reimann’s claims, characterizing Caligari’s “ ’expressionistic’ sets” as “conventional rather than progressive.”1 The following year, Virginia Woolf also wrote about a revival screening of Caligari in the essay “The Movies and Reality.” For Woolf, a tadpole-shaped shadow that accidentally appeared onscreen during the film was scarier than the work itself, which relied on more prosaic and noncinematic forms of horror.

This film was a starting point, an attempt to find a new direction for the cinema. That this direction was never developed further, indeed, that it has even been forgotten and is threatening to peter out entirely is due to the fact that prominent voices in the German film industry, leaders of production who set the tone for everyone else, misunderstood this film from the start and still do not understand its origins or intentions. Even today, people still believe that the film’s peculiar conceptual style was chosen exclusively to support the theme of insanity; this made them suspect that this design—commonly known as expressionism—is patented for lunacy and therefore cannot be used for any other purpose. Naturally, any particularly distinctive theme will always have a specific conceptual design that suits it best, but this cannot be taken from just anywhere and simply dropped onto the motif in question. Rather, it must develop from the screenplay’s specific character and mood. But this conceptual design has nothing to do with any contemporary style; far from stylization or even mannerisms, it is the content of the writing itself made visible and elevated to rhythmic visual drama. In my opinion, the actual value of Caligari and the reason it is always recognized as one of the most significant creations of film production lie not so much in its “expressionist” conceptualization (as far as I know, such attempts had already been made before this film), even if expressionism did make the film a “sensation” in terms of style; rather, it owes more to the fact that this was the first time a systematic and purely filmic conceptual will was in control, which forged everything—thoughts, images, and movement; the language of dead form, the language of living form, and the language of light—into a single dramatic whole. Indeed, Caligari is not just illustrated and represented in the eternally unchanging manner of naturalist reporting; rather, in order to lend it the greatest expressive power, it is conceived according to artistic points of view—it is experienced! That is the secret of this film’s effect! Only once influential figures in the film industry come to this recognition can film become what is actually is and grow out of the stage of lapidary feuilleton entertainment to become a source of artistic pleasure! We know that generally speaking, films are becoming shabbier every year; the great boom is starting to recede. Today’s films, with their fully conventional approach, are slowly approaching that neutral point where they no longer know what they should convey. The reservoir of subjects is exhausted. This can be explained: for an institution that works as steadfastly as film does, the realm of real life, always seen only one-sidedly in a naturalistic style, is too narrow. A time must come when the leaders of production, whether they like it or not, will have to ensure that the realm of material is expanded if

440

Configurations of a Medium

they do not want to dismantle their businesses. They will have no other choice than to adopt art, which is eternally fruitful, for their purposes. But—and I would like to emphasize this again—in the case of this art, I do not mean the contrivance of constructing new subjects; I refer rather to the power to shape characteristic things in a way that indeed lends them character. It is not a question of searching for things but rather of constantly reinvigorating the everyday objects around us through the currency of an artistic personality. For an entertaining and stimulating art—which film is!—any form of one-sidedness is dangerous. The Americanism that has been so violently forced upon us is dangerous for fi lm; it is dangerous to look at all things through the old-fashioned lens of “naturalism only”—of course, it would be just as dangerous now to pronounce an era of “expressionism”! Let us be fi nally be done with all these “isms”!—for the most dangerous of all are methods, holy formulas that seek a bottled cure for dreams and reality. Caligari’s success proves that audiences are not as averse to artistic conceptual design as film tradesmen always say. Audiences want to see new things and are right to demand enrichment for their daily lives. If the German film industry marches on with its current mindless system, constantly serving up the same stories in the same form for fear of rejection from audiences, it will be no wonder if cinema programs stop selling out. The film industry has to finally learn that it does not matter what stories it tells but rather how these stories are presented. In every art, the artist’s personality is always more important than the theme. This basic lesson of all art also goes for film! The original intention was to make Caligari realistic; it probably would have been an above-average fi lm, like many others, entertainment for an evening with no lingering effect, because the fi lm would have lacked what almost all fi lms lack: namely, the personal touch of its makers. That is Caligari’s secret—but it is such an open secret that one only has to reach out in order to discover it. But it is remarkable how a secret fear makes the German film industry beat around the bush when it comes to its best work, even though it knows that great profits are hiding in those very bushes. Let us hope that before foreign markets can take away and exploit our success, a Dr. Caligari will emerge in the weakening German film industry, who, like the wonderful Werner Krauß in the film, gravely wiping his eyeglasses, will declare: “I have diagnosed its illness! Now I know the way to its—(German film’s)—recovery!” Note 1. Rudolf Arnheim, “Dr. Caligari Redivivus,” in Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 111.

197 RUDOLF KURTZ Limits of the Expressionist Film First published as “Grenzen des expressionistischen Films,” in Rudolf Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film (Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1926), 126–29. Translated by Brenda Benthien.

The Expressionist Turn

441

A writer, dramaturge, and supporter of the expressionist movement, Rudolf Kurtz would become director of the literary division of the Projektions-AG “Union” (PAGU) at Ufa in 1916 and later editor in chief of Lichtbildbühne. His book Expressionismus und Film is a standard work on the subject, discussing six Expressionist films: Wiene’s Caligari (1920), Genuine (1920), and Raskolnikow (1923); Karlheinz Martin’s Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (From morn to midnight, 1920) and Das Haus zum Mond (The house at the moon, 1921); and Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924)—as well as the “absolute art” of Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, and others (see chapter 14 of this volume). The selection here is taken from the book’s penultimate chapter.

The difficulty of making expressionist film catch on does not lie in some variable external constellation, but in its intrinsic requirements. For there can be no doubt that, with the exception of the surprise success of Caligari, the expressionist film has not found favor with the public. To arrive at a categorical assessment, we must consider the primary function that the cinema is accorded in the broad economy of human energies. Among the inventory of human needs, film satisfies a very specific one. This has been demonstrated clearly by the global success of film in the thirty years of its existence. If film were only a popular and less expensive form of stage drama, it would long ago have killed off the theater, and it would not have reached any greater audience than the stage reaches at best. Cursory statistical information indicates that the effect of film on society is totally different, a mass phenomenon with individual coloration. The success of the cinema can be explained by means of its engagement with an intrinsic biological human need. The daily depletion of people’s energy, whereby their cells systematically degenerate, requires these cells to be rebuilt during breaks from work in the evening, which is achieved during sleep. This regenerative process requires a condition of intellectual relaxation, which is normally accompanied by a feeling of emptiness. This is where film comes in. It sets up new conditions for physiological rejuvenation; it leaves the viewer with his passive mood and still gives him the feeling of being intellectually occupied—an arousal that can be absorbed so effortlessly that only minimal active intellectual effort, or none at all, is needed. The cinema brings about the necessary feelings of relaxation that switch off the perception of emptiness and boredom, without bringing with it a noticeable disruption of balance. The effortless apperception of fi lm is thus one of its basic prerequisites. The viewer must be able to smoothly structure the contents conveyed by the film into his worldview, without this process requiring any form of intellectual activity. Expressionist film positions itself in basic opposition to this requirement, since the objective of its effort is the new structuring of formal elements based on a metaphysical intent. Psychology, the human soul’s usual mode of transportation, is put out of service, so to speak, since expressionist fi lm primarily involves not perception, but comprehension. Not empathy, but understanding. The expressionist film tended to make concessions from the beginning. It looked for bridges to connect the separate worlds of the fi lm and the public, fi nally resigning itself to treating expressionist means in such a way that people could psychologically empathize with them. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari produces a plethora of atmospheric factors, and it goes even further by setting up a common platform between art and the viewer: the plot involves the hallucination of a lunatic who, following his natural inclination, experiences the world as a distortion and a grimace. This is already an

442

Configurations of a Medium

admission that the expressionist film, in its pure state, must remain opaque to the viewer. Its artistic form requires hereafter a commentary, an excuse. This tendency continues in all films of this kind, which live off dreams and occult powers. Expressionist film is not capable of surviving as a pure art, and the first to recognize this fact were its inventers themselves. The linchpin of this crisis of understanding is the human being on film. The artist can create the active being in film to whatever extent required; he can completely alter his natural form or construct it anew, from the ground up. The fact remains that the viewer in the theater identifies with “the person.” No matter how man expresses himself on film, the moment he no longer expresses the soul of the viewer, contact breaks off and understanding and interest cease. The viewer tends to admit that bold exaltations of the spirit might still be possible—in principle. In order for him to conceive of the film’s plot as “real,” it simply must be possible, within the realm of his imagination, for a person to act that way at all. If this congruence cannot be brought about, the film remains an inassimilable foreign body and is meaningless to the audience. This presents an opportunity for the absolute fi lm. It categorically eliminates the potential for a comparison of formal elements, the “supports of the plot” in the film, with the viewing public. The natural object is neutralized and stripped of all accompanying sentiments. Line and surface speak as components of the space: if a natural object appears—if it is an element in space—its intellectual value is completely meaningless. A plate is not a utensil from which to eat, but a round, flat, hollowed-out disc, which behaves in varying ways in space. There is no value placed on it. It is clear that extraordinary activity on the part of the viewer is required in order for the process to be translated into a sphere of “understanding,” even though only elemental energies are visualized. This brings with it many implications. For easy perception and an effortless integration into the viewer’s preexisting imagination are not just preconditions for film as it attempts to realize its biological function. They are required if film is to prove commercial—which is the only way it can be distributed in a manner in keeping with its physiological task. That is why film is an industry and has no life outside of industry. When one views film as a commodity, expressionism becomes nearly irrelevant. This consideration is purely mathematical. Seen schematically, a manufactured good must not cost more than it normally yields when the prevailing profit margin is added to it. It must be at least feasible to achieve the required sales volume. A low estimate of the number of film consumers in Germany is around ten million people, with a correspondingly larger number abroad. Any film that does not compel mass acceptance narrows its capital base, thereby doing harm to the German film industry. Film is making its way in Germany from the metropolis to the smallest village. As differentiated as the human intellect is, by virtue of people’s profession and education, there exists nonetheless a certain emotional homogeneity, which of itself makes the case for film’s survival. Human differences do not exist where commerce is concerned: only that which correlates to universal constants makes profitability possible—and thereby the continued existence of the film industry. Insofar as the expressionist film incorporates these conditions, it still has prospects from a purely commercial point of view. But the more it turns its attention to the fundamental principles of film, and the more rigorously it aspires to shape reality in a unique way, the more it loses itself in commercial insubstantiality. It only remains to point out that the qualities of expressionist films could be used to stimulate the film industry as a whole, to open up new avenues of expression. But obviously the exceptional nature of such a phenomenon is assumed in its very mention, and such cases will be isolated and exceedingly rare.

The Expressionist Turn

443

198 HANNS SACHS The Interpretation of Dreams in Film First published as “Die Traumdeutung im Film,” in Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 35, no. 11 (March 14, 1926), 349–50. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Although G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) is often associated with a shift to Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), his Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul, 1926)—advertised by Ufa as a “psychoanalytic film”— arguably continued the tradition of filmic expressionism, particularly through its dream sequences designed by Guido Seeber. These sequences are part of a long history of experimental dream images, extending from the theatrical practices discussed by Kurt Weisse (see chapter 1, no. 4) through the scenes designed by Walter Ruttmann for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) and by Salvador Dalí for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). A close associate of Sigmund Freud, Hanns Sachs (1881–1947) was an Austrian psychoanalyst and coeditor of the journal Imago. Sachs spent the Weimar years in Berlin, where he trained other analysts and served alongside Karl Abraham as scientific adviser for Secrets of a Soul. (Freud himself had refused participation.) On psychoanalysis and cinema, see also the diary entry by Lou Andreas-Salomé in chapter 1 of this volume, no. 13.

Is dream interpretation possible? Can we shed light on the confused and disorderly sequences of images making up our dreams? From time immemorial, people have searched for a solution to this problem; ancient societies employed professional dream interpreters, while our present age has recourse both to popular dream books and scientific explanations. With his theory of “psychoanalysis,” which has aroused equal admiration and hostility, the Viennese professor Sigmund Freud holds the interesting view that dreams function according to a strict set of rules, by which they convert into images thoughts and wishes that remain “unconscious” to the dreamer himself. Thus the dream is a private theater, or better yet, a private film, that every man produces from his own psychic material. The dream has played a considerable role in the poetic works of all epochs; recently, we have also witnessed more or less believable dream images on film. Now, for the first time, a new Hans Neumann film from Ufa, Secrets of a Soul (dir. by G. W. Pabst), has attempted to make use of Professor Freud’s psychoanalytical method in order to offer a clear explanation of the meaning of dream fantasies. [. . .] Since the filmmakers wished to offer vivid illustrations of the psychic depths brought to light by psychoanalysis, they did not conceive Secrets of a Soul as a purely scientific educational film. Rather, a dramatic event was taken from everyday life. But behind such everyday occurrences, lurking in the psyches of the characters like monsters below the surface of the sea, lie unbridled passions, unchecked affects, and erotic fantasies and desires. In the film—just as in life— the symptoms of psychic illness at first make their uncanny presence felt in seemingly meaningless gestures, which Professor Freud has described as symptomatic actions or slips. Then, just after a serious anxiety dream, the protagonist falls prey to a strange neurotic illness. At this point, the psychoanalyst intervenes and, with his help, the protagonist is able to recognize the mechanism of the anxiety dream and eliminate the pathological processes. When the analytical treatment finally brings the “unconscious” into the light of “consciousness,” the patient is healed. Psychoanalytic theory generally traces the causes of neurotic illnesses back to disturbances in the development of the sexual drives.

444

Configurations of a Medium

The filmic representation of the dream posed some difficulties. A random mix of fantastic images—the method usually employed to represent dream sequences on the stage or on film—would not have corresponded to the intentions of this film. But unfortunately, one cannot hire someone to dream an appropriate dream on command. Thus the only feasible way to obtain material was for the writer of the screenplay to consult with experienced psychoanalysts and loosely construct the dream in the film from the actual dreams of real patients.

199 ROBERT BREUER The Film of Factuality First published as “Der Film der Tatsächlichkeit,” in Das Kunstblatt 11, no. 5 (May 1927), 177–82. Translated by Tara Hottman.

Recalling criticisms of Wiene’s Caligari (1920), Robert Breuer here faults Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) for mixing realistic and illusory elements and for neglecting the filmic medium’s fundamental link to what he deems “factuality.” In invoking cinema’s strength in the “capturing of nature, undirected, left to its own devices,” Breuer’s text stands in a long line of theories praising cinema’s photographic realism, from Henri de Parville’s early description of the Lumière brothers’ actualités as “nature caught in the act” to the “basic aesthetic principle” postulated by Siegfried Kracauer in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960)—a book that devotes a full chapter to “The Film of Fact.” Breuer (1878–1943) was a German critic and commentator who wrote for Vorwärts and Die Schaubühne and voiced strong criticism of the German Reich during the First World War. A confidant of German president Friedrich Ebert, Breuer served as deputy chief press officer of the Reich Chancellery and Foreign Office in 1919 and managed a department of the Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst from 1925 to 1932.

Metropolis was bad. Primarily due to the use of toys to simulate gigantic objects: skyscrapers assailing the heavens, city streets stacked one atop the other like terraces and crammed full of cars, powerful motors running at breakneck speed—all of this made of cardboard, plaster, and tin. Models. Hoisted up by the director and placed on tracks. The effect is a feeling in your stomach like that of being in a falling elevator or a careening swing. A constant back and forth between the momentary belief in reality and an awareness of stilted deception. A nauseating violation of the legitimate and naïve belief that film reproduces factuality. Certainly we know that shots of train collisions and sinking ships are in reality only five centimeters tall, but when we are assailed with a barrage of such tricks, then the insight that photography is a mechanical and chemical process, designed to capture nature and its variations, rears its head against this imposition of dioramas and stuffed dummies. Our feeling for honesty already resists the use of gum bichromate print and other artistic fixations that wipe away the essence from the plate in order to leave only a supposedly artistic idea;1 how much more will we have to rebel if the object itself has already become a shadow. There are differences. Art thrives on diversity. In the theater, when I receive the impression of a tree or a mountain, I know that some shape made of wood, canvas, and paint is hung down from the fly lofts. But when I see a city or jungle in a film, I do not want to be forced to ask myself whether Jerusalem in fact stood on Tempelhof Field and

The Expressionist Turn

445

whether the palm trees were borrowed from a gardener. There are differences. And it is certainly correct that a feature film, if it takes place in Africa, is made more efficiently in a studio. Filmmakers who wish to transfer Jules Verne onto celluloid do not need to travel around the world. In that case, the literary value outweighs everything else, and the illusion of nature is necessary only to pave the way for more important elements. If Ben Hur were shot in the actual desert, this would clash with the rushed pace of the scenes (an observation in no way intended as a judgment on the opus of the same title). 2 Staged dramas and geographical reality are at odds with one another. It is unbearable when, in the middle of high mountains during meteorological storms and snow, actors or made-up athletes suddenly start making faces. The effect is an insult to natural and eternal laws. The drama of the mountain is not intrinsically connected to the (perhaps very moving) drama of the two fictional characters. In books, these two elements can grow apart only to interweave and condense together so thoroughly that they form a unity, a composite (composition).3 The medium through which this occurs is alternately the imagination of the writer and that of the person who experiences the writing. In film, the process of imagination is materialized. The two sequences cannot be aligned; the actors, however earnest they may be, remain in an existence separate from nature. They do not blend in with the mountain or the tree any more than with the storm or the ice. We constantly see two different registers, two films; one is psychological, the other ethnographic or in the form of a travelogue or sports news. In order to turn everything on its head, filmmakers have dressed animals in human clothes, arranging monkeys as boxers and geese as women. Animals as actors: this was already a fatal combination in the circus and in the fairground booth. Not to mention cruelty. It is a degradation of animality, of glorious primal being, of vitality and strength into the ordinary, primitive petit bourgeois. A dog with a nightcap and a monkey in a frock coat: here we see the arrogance of a species that became a hunter through inexplicable chance and in reality is of lower quality. But here, again, we find the kind of sloppy hocus pocus, ham acting, and predictable reconciliation that belong to the pathos of the stage. Seeing the abused dog with the little Tyrolean hat on a rubber band, we know that it would be a more noble experience if the dog were standing on four legs and were not trained. But if such monkey business (for which the monkeys bear no guilt) takes place on film, we become irritated to the utmost. The reason for such resistance is that fi lm aspires to factuality as it is. We cannot rid ourselves of the notion that film contains truth—primitive reality captured by the lens, plate, and filmstrip. And thus animals in costumes and makeup turn our stomachs. Here again, experience and theoretical knowledge raise objections to the ideal of simple shots of nature, which (as the reader may have guessed by now) is to be set up as an opposing pole. Even a pure nature film (as it is called in the program) contains the traces of staging. If a rattlesnake fights with some four-legged predator of snakes, this sort of bloody exchange certainly takes place quite differently in the harsh reality of nature than it does on film. Presumably, the snake and its predator would not remain so politely in one spot as is necessary for a film; such affability is unlikely unless some sort of spellbinding force is exercised on the two duelists. We know that many of these “nature scenes” are shot in cages and in aquariums. Nevertheless, this is at worst an adjustment; it is hardly staged by the director and there is certainly neither lipstick nor a wig. Without a doubt, differences exist between an animal in the cage set up for shooting and another in unchecked freedom, but these differences are not great enough to warrant the charge of falsification. The same holds true for shots of South Sea islanders. They, too, are not captured in an unmediated state; at the very least, they know that a stranger is nearby who wants to undertake something with them, something strange, some kind of magic. In

446

Configurations of a Medium

this way, unnatural tensions arise in these natural subjects, like a child being observed. If we watch such films very closely, we notice a slight veil over the natural world. Not infrequently, we also notice the previous “rehearsal.” But even this source of error is so small that it does not appear to be a violation of the laws of photography. We can speak of a final, particularly auspicious possibility: the spontaneous capturing of nature, undirected, left to its own devices, and unaware of the eavesdropping hunter of images. For example, lions seen through a telescope, grazing antelopes through a longrange lens, nesting vultures from an observation hole hidden by foliage, or flamingos perched on one foot from across the water. Here it seems quite clear that these objects, having no training and other inhibitions, behave exactly as they would when no people are nearby, in the custom of their free existence, as they have done perhaps for centuries and perhaps ever since they attained their current form. Yet even such documents contain something specifically human, an optical individuality, a piece of photographic—or, if you will, artistic—personality. Place ten painters in front of the same model and they will give you ten different opinions. The same is true of ten photographers. Everyone has experienced at some point some shots that resemble their model more than others. But where is the measure of resemblance? Who says that the shot discarded as least accurate is not the most accurate? This opens up a labyrinth. And we will understand that even the grazing antelopes and the fishing flamingos, the lurking spider and the waiting frog can be seen and recorded quite differently. And again, one might ask whether shots that seem implausible by our habitual standards are not an extension of the perception of our eyes. Let us recall the phases of movement, the electrotachyscope (Anschütz’s magical wheel),4 and finally slow motion, which gradually revealed to us—and to art—the methodology of vision. We recall that, conversely, color photography confirmed the colors of the shadows long after the painters had experienced the green and violet of the shadows. The correspondence between image and reality is thoroughly variable. In some cases, reality can come to resemble the image. We will have to accept that in photography and even in the film of pure factuality, in which candid nature is captured through the elimination of all possible sources of error, there is still a medium that intervenes between the object and the lens, the medium of the cameraman. He determines the aperture, the viewing angle, the perspective, and the moment of capture; he tends toward the silhouettes or toward depth effects, reliefs, and three-dimensionality. He sees with eyes that are trained in some way; he may look through the lens of a painter—perhaps through van Gogh, perhaps through Hokusai.5 And so relativity comes full circle. Even in film, factuality is not absolute or irreversible; it is a result in which there is constant variation even when the same object is examined (and what object does not change in seconds). Of course, none of this changes the fact that when photography and film adhere to factuality, insofar as the phenomena of seeing and recording make this possible, they significantly enrich the eyes of those who do not have access to this or that natural phenomenon. But even eyes that see familiar things every day can be awakened by a “film of factuality.” Then comes the exclamation: “I would never have thought that this or that looks like this.” And so it is when a bird launches into flight—such rhythm, such music, such fantasy, such awe, such a demonic nature lies buried within something I long took for granted! The film of factuality cannot replace Rembrandt, but it can unlock a new path of truth that leads to him. We do not wish to be ungrateful; Polikushka,6 Potemkin, and Mother were films that had something to offer us. These were motors; they were ethos and voluntas. At the same time they were theater. Like all theater, they are mortal. The literal repetition of a performance by Brahms today would be a financial risk. Film requires literal repetition.

The Expressionist Turn

447

There are very few films that one can watch twice in a row without being disappointed. The directing work eats away at life. It is necessarily so. And thus the film of factuality, which contains the least amount of directing, will live the longest. Or at least it would if people did not all too often prefer the dead over the living. Notes 1. Gum bichromate was a photographic printing process developed in the nineteenth century. 2. The “opus” Ben Hur is the 1925 American epic directed by Fred Niblo. 3. The original text here plays with the etymologically related words Verdichtung (condensation, consolidation) and Dichtung (literature, poetry). 4. First presented by Ottomar Anschütz in 1887, the electrotachyscope creates the impression of continuous motion with a spinning wheel of chronophotographs. 5. Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) was a Japanese artist most famous for the woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. 6. Polikushka is a 1922 film by Aleksandr Sanin, based on Tolstoy’s story of the same name.

200 HENRIK GALEEN Fantastic Film First published as “Der phantastische Film,” in Edmund Bucher and Albrecht Kindt, eds., Film Photos wie noch nie (Giessen: Kindt und Bucher, 1929), 37. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The medium of film made a belated, even untimely entry into the expressionist scene. Already by 1920, when Caligari first ran in theaters, the art critic Wilhelm Hausenstein had proclaimed, “Expressionism is dead.” The movement’s death knell, however, was arguably sounded in 1925—the year that saw the publication of Franz Roh’s book Nach-Expressionismus (Post-expressionism) as well as the opening of Gustav Hartlaub’s Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim. Much as Hartlaub’s exhibition catalogue nonetheless emphasized that “the visionary fantasy of the old is preserved even in the verism of today,” Henrik Galeen (1881–1949) here argues that “even the most realistic films ought to contain at least a touch of the fantastic.” An early assistant to Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, Galeen first made a name for himself in cinema as the coscreenwriter and codirector of Der Golem (1915). His later screenwriting credits include the expressionist classics The Golem (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Waxworks (1924), and he also directed The Student of Prague (1926) and Alraune (1928). In refl ecting on semantic shifts of the “fantastic” under ever-changing technological realities, Galeen may be seen as part of a lineage of critics casting a retrospective gaze at cinema’s expressionist turn. Five years later, in a typescript for the Enciclopedia del cinema, Rudolf Arnheim would acknowledge expressionism’s important influence on film, likening it to the movement’s impact on other arts: namely, the prioritization and freer application of formal factors, thus ending “a period in which the object was overvalued.”1 Similarly, Siegfried Kracauer argued in 1939 (“Wiedersehen mit alten Filmen: Der expressionistische Film”) that expressionist films, although overly theatrical, had been fruitful in establishing the necessary distance from outer reality to approach it anew, released from the constraints of inhibition and convention.

It is about time that we updated our dictionaries. Today, most expressions no longer coincide with the concepts they are supposed to illustrate. After all, do terms like friendship,

448

Configurations of a Medium

heart, and soul still mean the same thing they did when the old dictionaries were written? What meaning do the old “fantastic” dream worlds of Grimm, Hauff, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and perhaps even Edgar Allan Poe still have for us and, more significantly, for our children today? Let us observe this literature through our modern lenses. It offers us a brilliant form of stimulation but nothing more; for even Jules Verne pales by comparison with the fantastic we now see all around us every day. Today’s reality rivals yesterday’s fantasy. And thus in order to create fantastic films, we should direct our attention to new problems springing from our current context. What do we call “fantastic” today? Everything that, although excluded from the habitual reality of everyday life, appears possible in the subconscious. In fact, the domain of fantastic film is inexhaustible, and we can safely include within the category of the fantastic those films we tend to call “slapstick” and thus correct our obsolete dictionary definitions. After all, the famous shoe-eating sequence in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush is not only comedic but can also be counted as fantastic. Without a doubt, it has moved into this higher region. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we have become more cheerful; we no longer cry over the story of a fairy-tale prince living off of roots in the forest. We no longer aspire to be princes; without shedding a tear, we prefer to observe ourselves suffering a “fantastic” hunger and gnawing on the soles of our own shoes. The traditional motifs haven’t changed. The giant from Harold Lloyd’s Why Worry?, who becomes a servant to the hero out of gratitude, or Buster Keaton’s cow, who, when Keaton performs the good deed of extracting a thorn from its foot, follows its new master with an unlikely and truly “fantastic” intelligence2—are these not old fairy-tale motifs dressed in new clothing? Seeing Douglas Fairbanks’s flying carpet, our youth shake their heads in disbelief.3 They sense the fi lm trick and search for the technique by which it was created. Where are the screws? Where is the motor? We are no longer astonished by technological feats. We have grown accustomed to seeing new technological wonders on a daily basis. Indeed, we are truly astounded only when the daily newspaper contains no reports of new inventions or wonders of technology. We are thus beginning to seek these wonders in and around ourselves, and the implausible is becoming fantastic. We notice the astonishment of dogs and children when they circle around a mirror after perceiving the wonder of a second face reflected in the front. We then ask ourselves, what if this double, this other, who resembles you so closely, walked out of the mirror’s frame . . . ?4 From this single observation, we draw all the conclusions and create the doppelgänger film. But is it plausible in reality that two people would resemble each other so closely? Although our understanding rejects this possibility, our subconscious affirms it, and this contradiction provides a sufficient basis on which to construct all fantastic possibilities. People often ask me why we do not cultivate more fantastic films today, why they appear so rarely. I believe that I can and must respond as follows: because the unusual, the strange appears only in exceptional cases, and the exceptional can never become an everyday affair. On the other hand, even the most realistic films ought to contain at least a touch of the fantastic, when we consider that the fantastic is the most authentic child of the imagination. Notes 1. Rudolf Arnheim, “Expressionist Film,” in Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 85.

The Expressionist Turn

449

2. Galeen here invokes Keaton’s Go West (1925). 3. A reference to Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924). 4. Galeen is here alluding to The Student of Prague (1913, 1926), in which the student Balduin’s reflection steps out of the mirror; Otto Rank would discuss this scene in his psychoanalytical study “Der Doppelgänger” (1914). In his famous essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud described his own doppelgänger experience upon seeing his reflection in a train compartment.

FOURTEEN

AVANT-GARDE AND INDUSTRY

201 WALTER RUTTMANN Painting with Time Unpublished manuscript, ca. 1919. First published under the title “Malerei mit Zeit,” in Birgit Hein and Wulf Herzogenrath, eds., Film als Film: 1910 bis heute (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1977), 63–64. Translated by Michael Cowan.

The avant-garde that emerged after World War I was not the first or only movement to call for an aesthetics tailored to the specific qualities of cinema (see, for example, the text by Carl Hauptmann in chapter 4, no. 49), but it was perhaps the most radical in its opposition to existing representational and narrative uses of film—a stance that made for a fraught relationship with the dominant film industry. The writings in this chapter, both by and about the avant-garde, reflect on experimental aesthetics, industry, and the links between the two. We begin with Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941), whose Lichtspiel Opus I (1921) is generally credited as the first abstract film to receive a public screening. Like many experimental filmmakers, Ruttmann came from elsewhere, namely from the world of painting and poster design, and he approached the medium as a means of animating the art he already practiced. While one can identify many forerunners to his abstract experiments before World War I, including the Italian futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna and the cubist painter Léopold Survage, his thoughts here are indicative of a new level of theoretical refl ection around such experiments, in particular an effort to rethink Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s famous distinction in Laokoon (1766) between visual and time-based art forms. Shortly after Ruttmann wrote this text, which remained unpublished during his lifetime, he applied for a patent on an animation table that used slow-drying paint and multiple moveable plates to lend painting a maximum degree of metamorphosis in time. Interestingly, Ruttmann here links the need to rethink aesthetics not only to the medium of film but also to broader questions of perception in a society marked by the accelerated flow of information.

The era in which we live is characterized by a peculiar sense of perplexity in artistic matters. A desperate insistence on a long-outdated approach to art coexists with the growing conviction that entire branches of art have lost their effectiveness—indeed, that we Westerners no longer have any use for the arts since they too are organic creatures subject to the laws of death (be it only intermittent deaths). But neither of these attitudes—neither the reactionary nor the skeptical—can be characterized as an honest confrontation between contemporary man and the intellectual

450

Avant-Garde and Industry

451

developments of our time. Both are nothing more than gestures of perplexity vis-à-vis the particular structure underlying the intellectual character of our time. This specific character derives, in the main, from the “tempo” of our era. Telegraphy, express trains, stenography, photography, high-speed presses, and so on—although not cultural achievements in and of themselves—have resulted in a previously unknown velocity in the transmission of intellectual information. For the individual, this increased speed of knowledge transmission results in a constant inundation with material that can no longer be processed using the old methods. People seek to remedy the situation by means of association. Historical comparisons, the citations of historical analogies, facilitate and expedite the effort to cope with new phenomena. But the ascertainment and assimilation of these phenomena naturally suffer from this method. What results might be a preoccupation with one’s time but not a “being of one’s time.” For it is evident that individuals cannot achieve an ideal, intimate connection to their time if they attempt to grasp phenomena using the gloves of analogy. But since the overwhelming proliferation occasioned by the specific tempo of our era does not allow us to process individual results directly without associations, and since ascertainment via analogy is insufficient or at best secondary, a completely new approach becomes necessary. And this approach arises organically from the fact that, under the increased velocity with which individual data are cranked out [gekurbelt], our gaze is drawn away from individual contents toward the total trajectory of the curve formed from the individual points, a phenomenon unfolding in time. Thus the object of our observation is no longer the static coexistence of individual points, but temporal development and the constantly transforming physiognomy of a curve. Here we also find the reasons for our desperate perplexity in relation to the products of visual art. Increasingly pressed toward the observation of temporal phenomena in intellectual matters, the gaze no longer has any use for static, reductive, and timeless schemas in painting. It is no longer possible to experience the action of a painting, reduced to a single moment or symbolized through a “pregnant moment,” as genuine life.1 Where is salvation? We will never find it in the reactionary violation of our intellect, never by forcing the mind into medieval or ancient costumes. We must provide the mind with the nourishment that it demands and that it can digest. And this nourishment would be a completely new art. Not a new style or some such thing. Rather, a new means of expression distinct from all known art forms, a completely new sense of life: “painting with time.” An art for the eyes, which differs from painting because it occurs in time (like music) and because the artistic emphasis does not reside (as in painting) in the reduction of a (real or imaginary) process to a moment, but rather in the temporal development on the formal level. Since this art unfolds in time, one of its most important elements is the temporal rhythm of optical events. For this reason, a completely new type of artist—one that previously existed only as a latent possibility—will emerge, positioned, as it were, midway between painting and music. The types of optical events depicted will of course depend on the artist’s personality. One can offer only hints and examples of what we will see here. The technology for displaying the new art is cinematography. For example, the projection screen might show a chaotic mass of black angular planes moving together in a clumsy and sluggish rhythm. After some time, they are joined by a similarly dark and lumbering wavelike movement, which stands in a formal relation to the angular black forms. The stiffness of the movement and the darkness increase until a certain rigidity is

452

Configurations of a Medium

attained. Then this dark rigidity is torn apart by lightning-like illuminations, repeated several times with increasing intensity and temporal succession, and a starry center of light forms on a certain part of the screen—the wavelike movement from the beginning appears again, but now increasingly illuminated by lively animation in connection to the crescendo of the central light. Round, soft, and bright spots begin to blossom—and glide into the black angular planes from the beginning and finally cover the entire image with a radiant, joyful brightness and dance-like agitation, which slowly transforms into a bright and cheerful calm. At this point one could introduce a dark and menacing crawling movement like a snake, which swells and drives back the brightness, provoking a heated battle between light and dark. White forms moving like galloping horses hurl themselves against the advancing dark masses—there arises a raging and splintering confusion of light and dark elements, until somehow, through the triumphant intensification of light, a balance is reached and the image fades away. This is an example of the infinite possibilities for using light and darkness, stillness and movement, straight and curved forms, delicate and massive shapes, and their countless gradations and combinations. Naturally, the new art will not appeal to the audiences of today’s film theaters. Nonetheless, we can certainly count on a wider audience than the one currently enjoyed by painting, since the activity of this art is much greater than that of painting on account of the fact that something transpires here. In painting, of course, the spectator must do the hard work of reconstructing the intended movement of the depicted object, which itself remains static. For nearly ten years I have been convinced of the necessity of this art. Only now have I mastered the technical obstacles to its execution, and today I know that this new art will exist and thrive—for it is a life form with firm roots and not a construction. Note 1. In Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing posited that sculpture and painting could represent motion only by depicting “pregnant” or privileged moments. In his Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze argued that chronophotography and cinematography transformed the aesthetic paradigm of privileged moments with their introduction of random cuts into time or “any-moments-whatever.”

202 BERNHARD DIEBOLD A New Art: Film’s Music for the Eyes First published as “Eine neue Kunst: Die Augenmusik des Films,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (April 2, 1921). Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Alongside “temporal painting,” “visual music” was another common intermedial framework for conceptualizing the challenge that abstract film posed to the traditional distinction between temporal and spatial arts in aesthetic philosophy. In this article, published one day after the first (private) screening of Walter Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Opus I in Frankfurt am Main, the theater critic and avant-garde enthusiast Bernhard Diebold argues for a new film art that would “wed” painting and music in a synesthetic experience. (See also Diebold’s essays in chapters 13 and 18, nos. 189, 277.)

A small number of invited artists and journalists in a Frankfurt movie theater, the U-T im Schwan, witnessed the following depicted against a black surface: Blue curves appeared in

Avant-Garde and Industry

453

rhythmic succession, stretching themselves and then dissolving into elliptical shapes. Astounding forms prodded one another, moving from the edge of the frame toward its center. Ribbons of pink and light green wafted above the screen as if dancing. Indescribable silhouettes soon fluttered about like birds; rounded and angular forms began violently prodding one another in prestissimo rhythm. A red sun sways as if it were rocked by the pains of labor; a colorful ray flows like a breath. Cubes are flung toward the center; waves billow and lap. And the impression left by this amorphous spectacle: creation itself. The designer responsible is the Munich-based painter Walter Ruttmann, who has created a profound work of fantasy with this as-yet-untitled Photodram op. 1.1 He painted ten thousand film frames in just nine months and turned his painted film into a reality by means of a technical device he invented. One writer discussed the performance of the film Sumurun, which was praised as an artistic and cultural feat just a short time ago, when the U-T im Schwan first opened, 2 and dismissed on principle the possibility that the old style of film could be considered art (Erstes Morgenblatt, September 7). I well-nigh insisted that painted film is a prerequisite for creating a new art form, the aesthetic possibilities of which I identified as early as 1916.3 This kind of art-heretical idea was of course firmly and successfully met by a great deal of logic, falsely applied aesthetics, and skepticism regarding the technology. This was admittedly a grotesque case of the theorist propagating an art form before it even exists. What does this mean for aesthetics? We must declare the existence of a new art form to join literature, music, the visual arts, and architecture, one that tentatively might best be approached theoretically as “absolute dance.” This art uses painterly style only superficially, as it addresses the eyes with hand-painted images. Its goal, however, is not painting of the traditional sort, depicting a single instant frozen in time (no matter how much imaginary motion this “pregnant moment” could artistically contain within itself); the significance of this new art is that it is animated painting. It divorces itself from the existing laws governing pictorial art in terms of its inner artistic essence. The creative genius of the new kind of artist is primarily concerned not with fixed forms but with movement. This type of artistic vision is thus much more closely related to that of the musician or of the dancer (as one who renders temporal motion sensible) than to the spatial-frozen-timeless perspective of the painter. How does this new art bring its optical-spatial apparitions in temporal succession? Fireworks have thus far achieved their effect thanks to the fire’s ornamental character when directed by gravity. And dance has exploited the naturalistic body of a living human being by using its proper motion to transform the spatial into the motion of temporal succession and to thereby subordinate spatial objects to musical principles. The problem was discussed in an aesthetic-critical manner in an interview with the dancer Niddy Impekoven (Morgenblatt, January 3, “Tanz aus Musik”).4 As already mentioned, dance is still bound by its naturalistic character and, perhaps even more so than literature, by virtue of its living performers. An absolutely pure dance of ornamentation, one that would lead (ostensibly in accordance with Hanslick’s theories) 5 to the creation of absolute music, poses an impossibility for the dancer. At the same time, the pure ornamental dance epitomized by the phenomenon of fireworks is painted by gravity alone and, bereft of any expression of artistic will, remains decorative and shallow. And now in addition to dancers and rockets, there is the medium of film, already discredited by so much banality that this new apparatus was met with a great deal of skepticism from the start. But this new movement-based art form has absolutely nothing to do with cinema in the conventional and old sense of the word. Just as certain woodwind instruments can both imitate animal noises and be used to perform serious compositions, this new art form has little relationship to the old craft of moviemaking. A piano, an

454

Configurations of a Medium

orchestra, a paintbrush, a chisel, and a steel-nib pen may serve both high art and kitsch. Thus far, film has been photography practiced as a craft, a substitute for novels, a substitute for theater; as a photographic vehicle, it remained an expression of pure naked naturalism that no amount of stylistic touching-up could change. But now the artist paints his film. It no longer obeys the naturalism of the actors, the landscapes, horses, donkeys, palm trees, and real plaster-wall constructions, submitting instead to the stylistic will of the creator of motion who, like the musician, gives expression to his soul via ornaments in temporal motion. The yearning for motion found in expressionist painting, the cinema-like haste of a futurist image with its frenzied confusion of thousands of allusions—this utter impossibility of holding together a temporal succession of events and associations in spatial coexistence finds its full realization in this new art of film, its deliverance from space unto time. Painting has wed music. Those boundaries that Lessing laid in Laokoon have been obscured.6 There now exists a form of music for the eyes. The painter Ruttmann appreciates the fact that film, like dance, could not exist without audible music. He surely knows, too, that his work is not a final stopping point but merely the first example, a demonstration of possibilities. In spite of its internal will, there is something of the arts-and-crafts to the veneer this attempt still wears. The primitivity of this geometric construct will someday be superseded by grand forms of expression, just as the mathematically contrapuntal in music once liberated music from its absolutism. The public premiere of this new construct will take place in Berlin in just a few weeks, and a piece of music composed especially for the purpose by Max Butting will sound along as rhythmic and melodic accompaniment.7 It must guard against becoming too self-aggrandizing or else this art for the eyes will be reduced to mere illustration. It must be content with being expressive “dance music.” The “Kinarch,”8 as we might call this new artist, is the one who sets the tone. Film born from music’s spirit is now a fact— film has become a medium of culture. Notes 1. Photodram op. 1 was an alternative title for Lichtspiel Opus 1. 2. Sumurun (1920) is an Ernst Lubitsch film based on the pantomime by Friedrich Freksa (see chapter 4, no. 48). The thousand-seat Ufa-Theater im Schwan had opened on September 4, 1920, with a screening of Lubitsch’s film. 3. Diebold is referring to his 1916 article “Expressionismus und Kino,” which is included in chapter 13, no. 189. 4. A celebrated German dancer, Impekoven (1904–2002) also appeared in several films in the 1920s. 5. Born in Prague, Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) was a music critic and author of On the Beautiful in Music (1854) who famously advocated the works of Brahms over Wagner’s “music of the future.” 6. On Lessing’s distinction between spatial and temporal arts, see the previous text (no. 201) by Walter Ruttmann. 7. The German composer Max Butting (1888–1976) closely collaborated with Walter Ruttmann on the music for Lichtspiel Opus 1, which had its public premiere in Berlin’s Marmorhaus on April 27, 1921. Butting also served as musical director of the November Group’s events in the 1920s. 8. On Diebold’s term Kinarch, see chapter 13, no. 189, note 19.

203 HANS RICHTER Basic Principles of the Art of Movement First published as “Prinzipielles zur Bewegungskunst,” in De Stijl 4, no. 7 (July 1921), 109–12. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Avant-Garde and Industry

455

Like Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter (1888–1976) had begun as a painter. His time in Zurich during the war brought him into contact with the Dada artists of the Cabaret Voltaire, Rudolf von Laban’s dance students, and the Swedish artist Viking Eggeling (1880–1925), with whom Richter collaborated on several projects. The two turned to film when, with financial assistance from a private patron and technical assistance from Ufa, they attempted to set their abstract scroll paintings into motion. Like Ruttmann, they saw film as an extension of painting, though they also insisted that their experiments were uncovering elementary principles (a universal “language”) applicable to all art forms. While Richter and Eggeling’s coauthored pamphlet Universelle Sprache (Universal language, 1920) is now considered lost, Richter would go on to present their ideas in several articles in the early 1920s. The present manifesto, though signed here only by Richter, was also published in a shorter Hungarian version under Eggeling’s name in August 1921 in the journal MA (Today). In contrast to Ruttmann, whose notion of a “constantly transforming” curve suggested a Bergsonian understanding of movement, Richter and Eggeling’s model of “the art of movement” (Bewegungskunst) was based on a dialectical concept of “polarity”—derived from German idealism—in which the relations between forms give rise to alternating tensions and syntheses (“contrast” and “analogy” in the artists’ language). The artists’ signature use of geometric forms owed much to the Dutch design movement De Stijl, whose eponymous journal published this article in 1921. Explanation.

The drawings below represent privileged moments of processes intended to appear in movement.1 These works will find their realization in film. The process itself: constructive evolutions and revolutions in the sphere of pure art (abstract forms): more or less analogous to musical processes familiar to our ears. As in music, the action (understood in an intellectual sense) appears with the pure material, and in this pure material it finds tension and release in a sense that is elementary and magical, since all material comparisons and memories are cancelled out.

I. (Suprahistorical) Genealogy.

a) Cézanne-Derain-Picasso attempted to strip down natural objects by means of scientific and intuitive methods, which led them to record objectively certain elementary relations of form (and apply them in a uniform rhythm extending over the entire painting). b) While these painters all acquired their knowledge through natural objects and reapplied it to those objects, there is a new path that emanates not from natural objects but rather from pure relations between forms. — — — Herewith arises the possibility not only to approach painting as an art of the surface but also to project it into time. c) That Cézanne, Derain, and Picasso did not succeed in introducing real movement into visual art can be attributed to the fact that Derain and Cézanne, despite the polar principle of construction informing all of their works, emphasize natural verisimilitude, thus clinging (albeit synthetically) to something that renders impossible a pure recognition of form relations (which should lead to movement). — Picasso, for his part, dispenses with natural objects to explore pure form relations, thereby achieving new freedoms but not with the same force and rhythmical unity (synthesis) as Cézanne and Derain. d) For these reasons, the painters above could not recognize the problem of time. — Viking Eggeling was the first to propose a synthetic solution to form relations, which are based upon a polar-rhythmic principle of intuition (including all subcategories of rhythm) independent of nature. In this way, he recognized the possibility of extending rhythmic phenomena into time, thereby opening up the terrain of a new art.

456

Configurations of a Medium

II. Basso Continuo. The “language” (form language) “spoken” here is based on an “alphabet” derived from an elementary principle of intuition: polarity. Polarity as a general principle of life = a compositional method for every formal expression. Proportion, rhythm, number, intensity, position, sound, tempo, and so on. Empirically, polarity appears as a relation of contrast in great or small oppositions; spiritually, as an analogous relation between objects, which distinguish themselves once again in another sphere. Creative alternation and logical relations of similarity and difference in the concept of the work in question. The great will and the visible goal of these works is not limited to the works themselves. The aesthetic principles of this alphabet show the way to the total work of art. This is because these principles, applied undogmatically and synthetically, are relevant not only to painting but also to music, language, dance, architecture, and drama. It is the idea of a culture as the totality of all creative forces extending from one common root to an endless and varied form (not addition, but synthesis). III. Definition of “Art.” a) Transcendental definition: art = the creative will of humanity. As such, it is the organ by which individuals find meaning in a transcendental world (supraindividual = transcendental striving). Art serves to realize a higher unity: the idea of the human in humanity: the perfection of the individual in a higher form of organization. The “whole,” the synthesis of individuals in humanity (constructive principle). The will to achieve this goal is an ethical demand. Ethics is based on the recognition that we are capable of a more perfect existence, and it postulates that we should act according to this recognition—the requirement of a total ethics (as opposed to religious or philosophical ethics), to gear one’s actions “toward totality.” The creative relation between individuals and the unity that encompasses them is the synthesis: logical relation of a creative rather than a mathematical type. Unitary character of the manifold, meaningful relation between contrasts and analogies (polar synthesis). If humanity’s creative powers (insofar as they are capable of synthesis) can acquire meaning through the idea of a total “being,” then “synthesis” constitutes the sign of transcendental determination. The result of such a recognition = the cultivation of this power, which leads to the unity of all creative expressions of humanity — culture. b) Practical definition: an extreme economy of means. Only a genuine discipline of the elements and their most elementary application will make possible the further development of this foundation. It must be emphasized again and again: art is not the subjective explosion of an individual but rather an organic language of humanity, which is of the utmost significance. For this reason, art must be so flawless and succinct in its foundations that it can actually be used as such: as a language of humanity. It is a mistake to believe that the meaning of art would reside in individual achievements. Rather, art itself confronts the individual with the general task of using that part of his work accessible to the will for the construction and enrichment of precisely this thought. Such a quasiscientific endeavor is not a restraint on intuition (on which artistic creation is based in the last instance) but rather its most elementary means. The impulse provides the precondition for creation, but realizing that creation requires power over the elements. c) Critical relation. The language of the psyche (= art) has a decisive effect on man, and one less inhibited than the world of concepts, to which the (abused) word has dulled our senses. For this reason, an objective—and unsentimental—investigation and precision of all the foundations of artistic language are decisive for critical judgment.

Avant-Garde and Industry

457

Addendum. There can be no doubt that the cinema, as a new domain of activity for visual artists, will find rapid and widespread use in productions of visual art. It is all the more crucial to point out that the simple succession of forms in the cinema is meaningless in and of itself and that meaning can be created only through art (as defined above). For this new art, it is absolutely essential to have clear elements. Without the latter, there might emerge a play (even a very seductive one), but never a language.

Note 1. Several drawings from Eggeling’s scroll sequence Horizontal-Vertikalorchester and Richter’s Präludium were printed along with the present text in De Stijl.

204 ADOLF BEHNE Film as a Work of Art First published as “Der Film als Kunstwerk,” in Sozialistische Monatshefte 27, no. 20 (December 15, 1921), 1116–18. Translated by Erik Born.

In contrast to other arguments about the need to shape film aesthetics according to the specific qualities of the medium, the avant-garde associated the idea with “nonreproductive” filmmaking, especially abstract animation, in an effort to legitimize film as an art form. For Adolf Behne, Eggeling and Richter’s experiments represented “film for the first time” because of their ostensible independence from all other arts, including music. Behne (1885–1948) was an art historian and specialist in modern architecture who championed the avant-garde during the Weimar Republic. On the notion of nonreproductive filmmaking, see also the text by Balázs in chapter 15, no. 227.

Thus far, film art has primarily been reproductive. Such reproduction is at its purest in shots of nature, landscapes, cityscapes, working processes, and so forth. The customary dramatic film exceeds pure naturalism. A scene is acted out according to the director’s instructions. Considerations of taste, unity, and clarity become important. But in each case, the object is first staged as a natural scene. The dramatic film is thus a hybrid of art and nature, of reproduction and design. Hand-drawn animated films alone eliminate naturalness. From the outset, the subject matter being filmed refers only to film and does not exist outside of it. But animated films have met with remarkably little approval. They have disappeared completely from distributors’ repertoires. The dramatic film, that compromise between nature and film art for which the soul provides the glue, is winning out across the board. Nevertheless, the character of animated films already contains a promising element of film art—if one takes the concept of film art seriously. In order for any art to develop and possess an inner sense, it must find its own new, particular task that another art cannot fulfill. Only when an art recognizes its final, true sense does a new technique become fruitful and necessary. Filmed drama inherits its task from another, older art. It is stage drama, modified only negligibly by a different form of communication. A good film director or a good film ensemble can achieve something more or less artistic. But film as such will never become art in this way. It remains a medium for reproducing another art (namely, stage acting). One must recognize this fundamental difference at some point. Perhaps a comparison will help:

458

Configurations of a Medium

riding a bicycle can doubtless be an art. But would it count as the art of cycling if someone were to sit on a bicycle, take a painting by Raphael or works by Goethe under his arm, and— thus equipped—ride more or less correctly? No, the riding in itself has to be artful. In this sense, film as a work of art does not yet exist. Even the best dramatic film still refers, in the best of cases, to another artwork, which works with its own resources. Now, however, there have been two attempts to realize the potential of film as a new autonomous artwork, leaving the early stages of hand-drawn film behind. Both attempts have clearly recognized the point of departure for a potential film art. What is unique about film is its ability to present the process of movements. The art of film is the art of movement. But we keep in mind that, insofar as film registers and plays back foreign movements (natural or staged), it is reproductive and not an artwork. The movements themselves have to make up the artwork. Then, and only then, do the movements shown coincide with those of film. In this case, film becomes a materialization of the art of movement, and, with that, a strange, unique new artistic medium. Here again, however, one should keep in mind that, although dance is definitely an art of movement, a film that recorded and played back a dancer would still be reproductive and not an autonomous artwork. A sequence of movements designed purely and uncompromisingly from an artistic viewpoint has to be designed exclusively for film. The sequence of movements must require film for its realization, and so it can be completely logical only when it is meaningless outside of film. It cannot contain any foreign elements. Indeed, film should not record movements in the sense of changes of position, which happen in natural space, but rather demonstrate pure laws of movement, free from any aim, directly and in an ideal space. In this respect, it is completely logical for the film artist to arrive at abstract forms, since they allow the lawful course of a rhythm to be made visible most forcibly. It is not the case that artists wish to impose certain innovations from painting onto film for the superficial pleasure of conquest. Rather, thinking through the problem of film as a new kind of artwork in a strict, objective manner leads—unsurprisingly—to forms that are related to those of contemporary painting and also have close connections with contemporary music. Anyone who witnessed the first attempt of this sort, the film by Walter Ruttmann screened a few months ago, could still think of forms that were borrowed from painting. These were more or less images that had acquired mobility—let us say an image from Kandinsky, though admittedly in the simplest form—and the projection was set to music that had been composed for the film opus. We should not underestimate Ruttmann’s achievement. Courageously, he even took up the problem of color. But at least for now, his film did not go beyond a somewhat charming dance of individual forms. It was not a rhythmic whole. The film’s coherence was created, to the extent possible, by the music, without which the film would not have existed. All things considered, this is an abstractly expressionist film, without question a praiseworthy feat, though we must overlook the temporary technical flaws in its execution to evaluate it properly. Viking Eggeling’s film is totally different.1 For the time being, it is only a fragment with a runtime of four to five minutes. But even though some major technical imperfections were still evident in the film, it made a very deep impression. Here the task of film as an autonomous artwork has been recognized quite clearly. In numerous respects, this film represents a significant feat, whose further development should be of the utmost concern. Apart from producing a great and novel artistic effect, the film holds out the possibility of providing a really meaningful lesson in art, even a general education in art. Significantly, this film, which represents the collaborative technical work of Eggeling and Hans Richter, not only foregoes any desire for musical accompaniment, it rejects this desire outright, since this film, a logical procession of precise geometrical abstract forms, is actually film for the first time: film as an artwork dependent only on itself and in no need of supplements. The law of the artistic processes of movement appears here with complete clarity and tectonic precision, which no one sensitive to

Avant-Garde and Industry

459

art can ignore. Any sort of musical interpretation would make it banal. Here film is no longer a dance, one thing coming after the other, but a unity. The film is not composed; it develops. Here we have arrived at an important artistic feat, and it must succeed in being perfected. It is a universal artistic language. To develop it is a task of general intellectual interest. The Hungarian Vilmos Huszár is working on similar problems with his Gestaltendes Schauspiel,2 as is Willi Baumeister, a painter from Stuttgart, with his Kunstspielwerk.3 It is remarkable that the only art magazine to report on these important works, which admittedly hold no interest for sentimental minds, is the excellent Dutch magazine De Stijl, often mentioned in these pages, whose existence we owe to the painter Theo van Doesburg. Small in size but rich in artistic content, this forum of the European art movement—a magnificent document of determined will and unequivocal action—has a keen sense for filmic artwork, as it does for all matters of art. Notes 1. Eggeling’s first animation tests for his abstract film Horizontal-Vertikalorchester were screened in Berlin shortly before the publication of the present article. 2. Behne is likely referring to Huszár’s mechanical dance figure, a shadow projection using a constructivist puppet that moved to form various geometric compositions composed of right angles. 3. The precise reference could not be determined. The artist Willi Baumeister (1889–1955) was known in the early 1920s for his so-called Mauerbilder (wall paintings), which depicted the human figure using the basic geometric elements of circle, square, and triangle.

205 RUDOLF ARNHEIM The Absolute Film First published as “Der absolute Film,” in Das Stachelschwein 14 (August 1925), 56–58. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

Organized by the Novembergruppe—a leftwing association of artists founded during the revolutionary conflicts of 1918—in collaboration with Ufa’s Kulturabteilung (Cultural Division), the famous matinee “Der absolute Film” took place at the Ufa-Theater am Kurfürstendamm on May 3 and 10, 1925. The program list included important works in experimental filmmaking: Walter Ruttmann’s Opus 2, 3, and 4, Hans Richter’s Film ist Rhythmus, Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Images mobiles (a.k.a. Ballet mécanique), René Clair and Francis Picabia’s Entr’acte, and a colored-light projection by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack entitled Dreiteilige Farbensonatine. One audience member was the young Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007), who wrote this somewhat flippant review for the satirical journal Das Stachelschwein at the age of 21. (His very first piece, “Die Seele in der Silberschicht,” had appeared in Die Weltbühne on July 28, 1925, critiquing Adolf Behne’s views on photography.) Arnheim would famously go on to become a vocal proponent of “film as art,” though his understanding of art was different from the more purist notions of the avant-garde.

On the darkest Kurfürstendamm, where the bob-haired girls say good night to each other, this event of the Novembergruppe succeeded in amusing the audience in a way that I have never before witnessed at a film, and seldom, if ever, at an academic event. The people literally fell from their chairs—albeit not straightaway. First, the man with the horn-rimmed glasses stepped into the spotlight and proclaimed, in rather impure rhetoric, some aesthetic matters;1

460

Configurations of a Medium

whereupon the statement, likely seriously intended, slipped out of his mouth that all art until now has been “inflexible” because it lacks the components of temporal movement. After he had dealt a final blow to the German language by “granting film the word,” film itself did not appear onscreen but rather a group of artistically reflected rectangles and circles, which performed drills and rhythmic gymnastics to music for a while. If the pianist became animated and started playing forte, the screen turned colorful, nervous, and jittery; if he tentatively stopped, the little squares slumped down, turning pale. The subject of the subsequent Symphonie Diagonale [Diagonal symphony] was a cleanly drawn cross between a pocket comb and a panpipe, which was engulfed in a mixture of lines for ten minutes, for the sake of variation but not exactly inventive. More amusing was the third example of art enriched through the components of movement: Ruttmann’s film games. Comma-shaped bacillus forms wriggled through the frame, bulged, burst, rolled together and apart again, and hacked at each other with exhilarating haste. The absolute forms conducted themselves in a very human manner, whereby they greatly exceeded the intentions of their creator but for all of that produced a cheerful mood: two vague figures in intimate flirting; a scrawny rectangle erratically running to and fro, like a husband whose wife is taking too long to get dressed. A domestic in the realm of mathematical embarrassment, how easily imitable our most essential things are—a success malgré lui. And then came Fernand Léger. This one did not even approach the “absolute,” even if it was colorful enough. A Grand Guignol of our everyday inventory, a fairground of quotidian objects. It revolved around Harold Lloyd’s straw hat—and oh, what all revolved around it. There was a parade of shiny kitchen utensils, eerily presented like a spiritualist materialization by an ingenious photographer. A hopelessly dislocated machine with its sparkling system of levers hooked hurriedly through the air. An old woman tried to get up a mountain and moved backwards over and over. Two lady’s stockings performed a ronde and cast salacious glances with the rosettes of their garters. The straw hat transformed into a loafer and back. A street was suddenly entirely concealed, which was hysterically funny. Lampstands and funnels rocked their hips in a matronly way. Scraps of paper looked like Chaplin, a document inadvertently stood upside down. The mimicry had moved into a hardware shop, and the tools demonstrated their highlights in drunken coquetry! And then another wonderfully pretty final thriller: Entr’acte by Francis Picabia. For this film, the man with the horn-rimmed glasses had prognosticated erotic dream work in the Freudian sense, whereby he had fortunately been too pessimistic. After several incidents worth seeing, someone was shot, and now many men in top hats stood behind a water truck decorated with wreathes. A large camel was hitched to the truck, and then it all started. One of the bereaved quickly bit a piece from a wreath, for it was actually a large pretzel—when one looked more closely. And suddenly the water truck broke away from the camel and sped off. The men in the top hats had to go after their deceased and made strong running motions. But unfortunately they didn’t move forward at all, as they were recorded in slow motion and were stuck, with all their effort, on their cursed soil. The deceased, however, made a spirited getaway on a rollercoaster, which incidentally stood on its head, and while those in the funeral procession took off their coats at a snail’s pace and sweated, the coffin rolled onto a field, where its passenger then still displayed plenty of activity. With vibrating midriff, massaged from side to side and rightly shaken, I staggered home, pleased at how these people had blended together atrocious workaday paraphernalia with a light hand and had made such a pleasant-tasting antidote to this very workday. Then suddenly . . . . . . there sounded military music. A dense crowd of people came up the street. A war memorial was being dedicated, with black-white-red flags, but in a municipal park.

Avant-Garde and Industry

461

I pushed my way through the observers. Behind the band came an endless procession of black-clad men in top hats. I examined soberly, as if I were still in the cinema, the types of beards, the expression of the eyes, the color of the cheeks, and also the hats, the colorful medals for prize shooting, the frock coats in march rhythm—and in view of this overwhelming composition I had to admit: dear God can do it even better!—Poor Léger! Poor Picabia! Note 1. A reference to Edgar Beyfuss, director of Ufa’s Cultural Division; see his text in chapter 16, no. 241.

206 LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY film at the bauhaus: a rejoinder First published as “film im bauhaus: eine erwiderung von l. moholy-nagy, bauhaus-dessau,” in Film-Kurier, no. 296 (December 18, 1926). Published in English in Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács, eds., Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 465–6. Translated by David Britt. Modified by the editors.

One sign of the avant-garde’s ambivalent relation with the film industry was its frequent self-stylization as a “research and development” wing. While rejecting the industry in its present state, avant-garde artists still sought industrial backing in order to carry out experiments that would—as the argument went—improve the quality of mainstream filmmaking. In this article, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946)—who had served as director of the preliminary course at the Bauhaus since 1923, where he also worked heavily in typographic design, photography, and film—responds to a critical review of a screening of experimental film at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Published a week earlier in the same journal, the review (initialed with “R”) had singled out Moholy-Nagy in particular for what the writer saw as his lack of practical abilities. See also the interview with Moholy-Nagy, “The Artist Belongs to the Industry,” later in this chapter, no. 210.

these lines are intended neither as self-defense nor as accusation—despite more than one sideswipe that might have been meant for me.1 i am glad that the issue has been raised and call upon all far-sighted individuals to work together toward a fair solution. “now the house, the stage, the students, the time are there—begin!” so film-kurier wrote on december 11. house, stage, students: fine. time: long since. initiator: also there, as can be seen in the very same issue. and if the initiator has yet to “prove” that his “promises” have a future: whose fault might that be? the industry expects proof, does it? if i could supply such “proof”—i.e., if i had the means to prove my point—i would not need the industry. all i would need would be an audience, and i have no fears in that regard. my—our—expenditure of strength takes the form of proposals, projects, plans, “scripts,” theories. it is for others—for the industry, let us say—to make a corresponding effort: that is, to make the means available at the point where results are to be expected. to expect: that is the task of supporting bodies. where “proof” has already been supplied, there is no task left to perform.

462

Configurations of a Medium

there are some individuals in the industry who have an instinct for what is to come. but the commercial factors let them down. years ago, when i showed my film plans to one of the directors of ufa, the situation was the same: he listened to me; he was extremely interested—and the practical outcome was a letter asking me to give ufa first refusal of my film on completion (!!!). on completion! who was going to complete it? what happens to the most magnificent projects if you have to reduce them to your own budget? result: what came out of this was not a film, but only “promises”: namely publications in books, magazines, lectures, etc. that is, i gave my plans to the public and abandoned the idea of executing them myself. those plans germinated, and the ideas found acceptance everywhere. my discoveries are now used in one way or another in many films. my script, dynamik der großstadt (1921–22), has survived to see—and really with no hard feelings—press reports that the fox corporation has commissioned walter ruttmann to make a big-city picture, berlin. so who is it who has “catching up” to do in the field of film (see film-kurier, december 11)? is it the bauhaus teachers? yes, if the bauhaus teachers were board members of a motion picture corporation, this would be a fair criticism. or if the bauhaus students had movie-director fathers—then, too, it would be easier to keep up to date with the practice of the contemporary film industry. however, the position at the bauhaus is the exact reverse of this. industry supports other schools and academies by supplying apparatuses and materials free of charge; why not the bauhaus? where is the instinct for what is to come? bauhaus teachers and bauhaus students have long aspired to set up an experimental laboratory for the art of film. we are glad that film-kurier responds affirmatively to such initiatives. this gives rise to a responsibility. not, initially, for us—we have taken many steps in that direction already—but for the author of the affirmative response, who stands between the parties concerned and can mediate between them. his affirmative response in principle must be translated into positive support. let us be given an annual sum for experimental research, and a time limit within which to work with that sum. let the sum not be too inadequate, for experimentation costs money—as every interested person now knows. but do not ask us to do costly work without the means to do it. try to understand the achievements that have been made at the bauhaus: the opening days may have afforded an opportunity for this. 2 to this add publishing (bauhausbücher), editorial activity (the fi lm and photography section of the new dutch magazine i10 and the bauhauszeitung), contributions to ten or more international journals, as well as one’s own work as a painter, photographer, etc., etc.; and then try to imagine whether an individual who is already doing all of this can work himself into the ground making films without money! i dare say that i do all of this and am entitled to ask that my promises—which, as i have said, contain powerful realities—be answered with realities. set up an experimental film studio for me or for the bauhaus, and then the work can begin. as i say: then i would have no fears as to the outcome. Notes 1. Moholy-Nagy’s article responds in particular to the following passage in the review “Film vom Bauhaus,” Film-Kurier, no. 290, December 11, 1926: Moholy-Nagy should begin realizing in earnest what he has been promising for years: the establishment and operation of an experimental laboratory for film art. Recently, he demanded the support of the film industry. He will receive it without a doubt as soon as he finally proves that he has more to offer to film than misplaced beautiful words, a long outdated “manuscript” [i.e., Dynamik der

Avant-Garde and Industry

463

Großstadt], and a bit of good will. The Reflecting Light Play is a start. Do the Bauhaus teachers not realize how much they still have to learn in the domain of film? Now the house, the stage, the students, the time are there—begin!

2. The phrase “opening days” refers the inauguration of the Bauhaus building in Dessau on December 4, 1926.

207 WALTER RUTTMANN How I Made My Berlin Film First published as “Wie ich meinen Berlin-Film drehte,” in Lichtbild-Bühne, no. 241 (October 8, 1927). Translated by Michael Cowan.

For the first six years of his film career, Walter Ruttmann worked almost exclusively in animation, including Opus I–IV (1921–25), several advertising films, and animated sequences for big-budget productions such as Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924). In 1927, he caused a minor sensation with his abrupt switch to live-action cinematography and montage in Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City). The following text, published two weeks after the film’s premiere, captures well Ruttmann’s blend of an experimental approach (still seeing film as visual music) with concerns more typical of documentary (contingency, catching subjects unawares, etc.).

I believe that the time has come to say a few words about the origin, development, and completion of my Berlin film. Throughout the many years in which I composed moving images with abstract means, I could not escape the longing to work with living material, to create a film symphony from the millions of kinetic energies already existing within the urban organism. After meeting with Karl Freund, who had similar ideas, I realized that it was possible to realize this wish. The long preliminary discussions with Freund came to an end. He had found one man with the courage to back this work: Julius Außenberg, the general director of Fox Europa. Now I stood alone before my work. It was clear to me from the beginning that, in order to create the film I desired, I would have to take full responsibility for every shot, for the lighting, tempo, and atmosphere of each and every meter. Filming began, and with it a long period of physical exertion and great tests of patience, both for my loyal cameramen and for myself. For weeks on end, we met at 4:00 a.m. to film “the dead city.”1 It was, of course, not possible simply to set up our equipment and start fi lming. With infinite cunning and aloofness, Berlin strove to elude my implacable lens. There were countless adventures in which some false note thwarted a situation just before we could capture it. A constant and thrilling fever of the hunt—constant excitement—and constant changes of plans. Some scene—let us say scene 183—was just ready for shooting when we had to drop everything suddenly and seize the opportunity to film scene 297. The most difficult scenes to film were perhaps those of Berlin asleep. It is infinitely easier to work with tempo and agitation than to maintain a consistent line of movement in a static and calm setting. Day after day, I rode through the city in my film truck, outwitting the pampered residents of Kurfürstendamm in the west or capturing the poorest echelons of Berlin in the Scheunenviertel. The footage was developed on a daily basis. And very slowly, in a way visible only to me, the first act began to take shape. After each attempt at editing,

464

Configurations of a Medium

I saw what was still missing: here an image for a gentle crescendo, there an andante, a metallic sound or a flute note. And thus I was able to continually determine what new shots were needed and what motifs I should look for. Again and again, throughout the production, I modified the form of the manuscript. Soon the problem of nighttime shots and interior shots arose. If the film was to maintain its consistency as a whole, it would be impossible to employ the familiar means— light trucks and the rest—in these settings. I discussed these difficulties with my cameraman, Reimar Kuntze, who—driven by necessity—managed to sensitize the fi lm material in such a way that we were no longer dependent upon light conditions. Now we could catch people by surprise here as well, capture traffic and life as it circulated through the streets by night, show the real life of taverns, dance clubs, athletic arenas, cinemas, variety halls—in short, everything I needed to let people experience the animated life of Berlin at night. During the editing, it became evident how difficult it was to visualize the symphonic curve I envisioned. Many of the most beautiful shots had to go, since I did not want to produce a picture book but rather something like the structure of a complex machine, which can only come into full swing if every tiny piece fits into the next one with the utmost precision. Many people are accustomed to hearing that we are only now learning to experience movement. And just as everything has to be reduced to the simplest formula for children, so the same holds true here. I believe that most people who experience the exhilaration of movement in my Berlin film will not know where this exhilaration comes from. But if I succeed in getting them into the swing, in letting them experience the city of Berlin, then I will have achieved my goal and proven that I was right. Note 1. Ruttmann here invokes the title of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 1920 opera Die tote Stadt (The dead city).

208 WALTER RUTTMANN The “Absolute” Fashion: Film as an End in Itself; Beware of the Art pour l’art Position First published as “Die ‘absolute’ Mode: Der Film als Selbstzweck.—Vorsicht vor dem l’art pour l’art-Standpunkt,” in Film-Kurier, no. 30 (February 3, 1928), 1. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

One of Walter Ruttmann’s most oft-cited statements, “The ‘Absolute’ Fashion” provides an explanation of sorts for his own turn away from abstract animation. But the text also touches upon a broader tendency of avant-garde filmmaking in Germany, where the call to “reunite art and life” was often realized through work on applied genres such as publicity films. The majority of Ruttmann’s own work in fact consisted in commissioned films, from his early advertisements to his late propaganda work under Nazism. For more on advertising and other forms of applied film, see chapter 16.

It was apparently inevitable: the “absolute” film has become fashionable. Years ago, when I showed the first examples thereof, some greeted it fanatically, while others patroniz-

Avant-Garde and Industry

465

ingly belittled it as the stuff of outsiders. An ebb in overall fi lm production is now the occasion for propagating absolute film as gospel. The lack of clarity over its nature is only advantageous for such propaganda. What is an absolute film? A film where one does not trust that art may emerge from the practice of filmmaking but rather where the theory, the confident idea of autonomous film art, comes first—the a priori certainty: “The aesthetic laws of fi lm are only thus.” In principle, of course, it would be gratifying if artists were to replace the old hands. But does one mean well for film when one pushes too zealously for its artistic purification? Does one understand it correctly when one wishes upon it, for example, the fate of absolute music? Should it drift into poorly frequented concert halls, distill itself monastically for a small parish of aesthetically discerning people who guard the “purity” of its structure? Let us not place art before all else! For film is (thank God!) not only an artistic but also, above all, a human and social affair! It is the strongest advocate for the spirit that reunites vital and artistic interests—for that spirit that renders jazz “more important” today than a sonata, a poster “more important” than a painting. For today, art—living art—is no longer what we were taught in school, no longer a flight from the world into higher domains but rather an act of entering into the world and elucidating its nature. Art is no longer abstraction, but a kind of statement! Art that does not contain a pronouncement belongs in the armory. Regardless, of course, of the subject of this pronouncement— whether feminine beauty, socialism, technology, nature, or their interconnections. The important thing is only the fact of the human statement. And the absolute fi lm avoids exactly this kind of statement. It wishes to leave an impact not by speaking well and forcefully but rather by doing something “beautiful” without saying anything at all. It does not strive to render a valuable thing so valuable and consummate that it becomes “art” entirely on its own but instead wants only art from the outset. That is its mistake. For it does not build the house but only the scaffolding. When it realizes this limitation, its integrative power is inestimable. But when it purports to be an end and goal in itself, it slides automatically into the junk room of l’art pour l’art, from which film had just released us.

209 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Abstract Film: On the Screening by the Gesellschaft Neuer Film First published as “Abstrakter Film: Zur Vorführung der Gesellschaft Neuer Film,” in Frankfurter Zeitung, no. 195 (March 13, 1928). Translated by Michael Cowan.

While Siegfried Kracauer’s criticisms of Ruttmann’s Berlin film are well-known, they formed part of a more sustained critique of any aesthetic in which “ornaments” are presented as “an end unto themselves”—an argument that resonates with Kracauer’s broader reading of capitalist modernity in texts such as “The Mass Ornament” (1927). The Gesellschaft Neuer Film, whose screening of abstract films is discussed here, was founded in October 1927 by Guido Bagier, Karl Freund, Hans Richter, and Frank Warschauer in an attempt to emulate the avant-garde associations in France and

466

Configurations of a Medium Holland such as that around the Studio des Ursulines in Paris. The short-lived Gesellschaft was overshadowed by the much more prominent left-wing organization, the Volksverband für Filmkunst (see chapter 11), which had its first meeting on February 26, 1928. In the chapter “Experimental Film” in his Theory of Film (1960), Kracauer would return to the works of Eggeling, Richter, Man Ray, Henri Chomette, and Alberto Cavalcanti, whom he discusses here.

The Gesellschaft Neuer Film [New Film Society] in Berlin has set itself the goal of foregoing standard narrative to show fi lms seemingly born from the spirit of fi lm itself. These are not translations of literary material into the silent language of optics, but original optical processes, which cannot be translated into another language. German and French film directors have already been experimenting with such films for several years. But up to now, seeing these films together was possible only in the Parisian avant-garde cinemas. The founding of the Berlin society is all the more welcome in that it also plans to bring its programs to the provinces. The screening held yesterday in Frankfurt included a few studies that revealed both the potentials and the limitations of these new efforts in abstract film. As a preliminary observation, we should note that almost all of these experiments derive—if not in terms of their historical origin, then at least in their intentions—from expressionism, that is, from the artistic will [Kunstwollen] that sought to create content without objects. A Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling (1917!)1 animates strips of light, bright ridges, and other geometrical fragments in a certain rhythm of intersecting movements. It is as if the types of images familiar from certain Picasso paintings had come to life. In Hans Richter’s Film-Studie, for which Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt provided the musical illustration, circles transform into eyes as they ascend through a cloudy chaos, and paving stones become a latticework that whirls about. The film Emak Bakia by Man Ray displays even more clearly the origins of abstract motifs in proper objects. The film distills movements of water into strange ornamental patterns and creates charming plays of movement from ordinary stand-up collars. Finally, the film by the Count Étienne de Beaumont creates radiant light effects from slowly spinning glasses and reflecting mirrors. As he is also concerned with visualizing velocity, the film includes accelerated images of metros and steamboats traveling through Paris. 2 The question here is what intention motivates these films. To be sure, they are all the more significant the less pretentious their demeanor. They make accessible a new and hitherto unimagined world of spatial configurations in a hitherto unimagined way. Great optical conquests occur not only in those film fragments in which static ornaments break their fetters to perform peculiar gymnastic exercises but also in all sequences where—whether through the choice of visual focus or through the isolation of partial objects—motifs are detached from our familiar world of things and varied so that they no longer correspond to identifiable aspects. The arbitrary modification of abstract figures and concrete objects is one of film’s proper subjects, which it can never cultivate enough. For in taking up this subject, film enriches the inventory of our imagination with forms and signs that can all one day become substance. But—and this is the essential point—such exploratory excursions are not an end unto themselves. What they reap is material that awaits its application within genuine contexts. Because the films shown behave for the most part as compositions, they falsely take this material for substance, thereby becoming no less hollow and affected than expressionism was in its guise as an established art movement. Eggeling believed that the activity of his diagonals constituted a symphony, and the other filmmakers also line up their impressions side by side as a totality, which they then take to represent something complete. However, their turn against narrative film in favor of films without objects is, in its

Avant-Garde and Industry

467

artistic posture, only a posthumous revolution, whose sterility in the domain of painting and poetry has long been evident. If only the compositions were dreams in the language of images—but even this is impossible on account of their all-too-systematic construction. They are, to put it bluntly, a collection, however stylized, of expressive elements that—combined to form autonomous works—express nothing at all. For in their empty combination, they forego precisely that connection to reality that alone could lend them meaning. Like expressionist painting, these film symphonies will also run aground in arts and crafts. In order to become useful, the newly found spatial themes would have to renounce their claim to intrinsic value. These motifs and combinations should not establish themselves as a special genre over and against the fi lming of reality but rather permeate the latter in order to bestow it with a fuller reality (something, incidentally, that has already happened in some films). These motifs take on meaning when they help to envision the life of people and things intensively rather than closing themselves off from life. They can attain the meaning of substantive signs only through the most intimate attachment to reality, which is the goal of every artistic representation, and not through the emancipation from reality. What can all abstract compositions offer in comparison to a single expression by Chaplin? Their elements could serve his humanity. The only figurative film of the program, La P’tite Lili, was made by Alberto Cavalcanti as an adaptation of a chanson.3 This film, which incidentally is already a few years old,4 succeeds in visualizing a hit song with great esprit and photographic wit. The charming ballad, an example of the still-neglected genre of slapstick drama, leaves the standard American slapstick comedies far behind. The matinee was organized by the Frankfurter Rundfunk [Frankfurt Radio], whose director, Dr. Flesch,5 made a few welcoming remarks. We also heard from a representative of the Gesellschaft Neuer Film, who thought it necessary to offer a philosophical explanation of the society’s goals. The audience, which followed the presentations with sympathy, reacted with a pleasant and odd surge of applause as the speaker’s podium was removed. Notes 1. Béla Balázs’s The Spirit of Film would similarly identify 1917 as the year in which Viking Eggeling invented the abstract film. The version of Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale shown at the Gesellschaft Neuer Film screening (and first shown in Der absolute Film matinée of 1925) was completed in 1924. 2. Kracauer is likely referring here to Henri Chomette’s 1925 film Jeu des reflets et de la vitesse (Games of reflection and of speed), which was financed by Étienne de Beaumont, a frequent patron of avantgarde filmmaking in France. 3. “La P’tite Lili” was a 1912 song by Eugène Gavel, with words by Louis Bénech. 4. Cavalcanti’s film was completed in 1927. 5. Hans Flesch (1896–1945) had become the artistic director of the Frankfurter Rundfunk in 1924.

210 LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY The Artist Belongs to the Industry! A Conversation with Professor L. Moholy-Nagy, Dessau-Berlin First published as “Der Künstler gehört in die Industrie! Ein Gespräch mit Professor L. Moholy-Nagy, Dessau-Berlin,” in Film-Kurier, no. 283 (November 28, 1928). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

468

Configurations of a Medium Art critics such as Adolf Behne (no. 204) praised early experiments in abstract film for their refusal to engage in mainstream (“reproductive”) film forms favored by most audiences. Over the course of the 1920s, however, the avant-garde was increasingly called on to justify its experiments in terms of possible contributions to the film industry. Moholy-Nagy, who grapples with this question here, had taught at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928 and had also published the book Painting, Photography, Film in 1925.

As was reported in last Saturday’s edition of Film-Kurier, Professor Moholy-Nagy has relocated from the Bauhaus Dessau to Berlin. We hope that he will have the opportunity to reveal in practice whether he himself is best able to realize the suggestions and predictions of his experimental work, and especially of his book that appeared a few years ago. We have asked him today to say a few words about his plans. Moholy-Nagy came to Berlin in order to finally engage in practical film work; that was the core reason why he left the Bauhaus, although, as he said, the work at the Bauhaus was extraordinarily fruitful for him personally. “I long toyed with the idea of leaving. I had the feeling that every additional year I spent at the Bauhaus was diverting me from my actual work, from the problems of design with light. On the other hand, I could not pull myself away from the communal efforts to develop the Bauhaus without the most serious of reservations. So I experimented on the periphery.” So, have you already made films? “Yes and no. I began a small film, 500–600 meters long, which hasn’t been finished. The studio shots, the artificial lighting effects are missing from it. Film cannot be a form of private pleasure. Laboratory work must find its practical confirmation in the industry, at the nodal point of economic and technical relations.” What is the basis of your ideas? “That is difficult to outline, and a short version is always especially questionable, because the compression into a few words assumes knowledge of the broadest background, which many still lack, and because the optical—that is, film—can be captured only very fragmentarily with words. “I wrote a lot about this because most people have kept silent, or because some have spoken incorrectly. But I always asked myself, why do people who write with difficulty even have to write? By the way, the essence of my views is perhaps known to you from my book Painting, Photography, Film and from numerous essays.”1 Certainly, but these are books with less-accessible representations of your ideas. “There you are correct. My responsibility vis-à-vis the written word is so great that I would like to respond to all possible objections from the outset. This preemptive struggle with potential, invisible opponents leads me to difficult, all-too-thorough formulations. But if I were to condense my findings, there are two principles: “First: Photography and film are design with light [Lichtgestaltung], subjected to our feeling for a world that exists only within (this design with light is the basis of pure, absolute light play [Lichtspiel]). “Second: Photography and film are the documentary rendering of outer, visibly tangible reality.

Avant-Garde and Industry

469

“Between the two, there are overlaps and complicated forms of interaction, whose technical breadth and intellectual efficacy are determined by movement, light, and shadow. “The camera captures fluctuating light and flowing shadows in a split second; it does not fix rigid form but rather the moving play of light. “In view of this, I conducted experiments with and without the camera, as well as studies of time and movement. These attempts were necessary for me to gain clarity about filmic means. Certainly, one gains a splendid, instinctive grasp of the problematic of film in top productions, but until now, few have concerned themselves with the elements unique to film. “Please do not think that it is a purely artistic challenge. Today, it is just as much a strong economic necessity as well. “The fact that only a few directors among the hundreds understand the possibility of such a line of inquiry costs the industry millions.” Do you really think that the lag in this realm is so great? The Russians are working hard on remedying this situation. “The Russian films and directors are excellent. Their work is superb. “But to date the possibilities—for example, of movement—have been insufficiently explored even in the Russian films. Even here, questions of light, material transparency, and spatial apprehension have been taken up only insofar as it was possible for this or that individualistic innovation. “Indeed, their experimental works, their statements show that we should have long ago established an international cooperative for the avant-garde of all countries to work through this theory of elements, which is still sorely lacking.” For analyses of this kind, greater material would also be necessary. “Perhaps you’re right. That’s why I now want to emerge from my seclusion and address the three kinds of film production recognizable today. “First documentary feature films: a simple plot, without politics, yet relevant and uncensored (even in France). “I’m preparing such a film with Ilya Ehrenburg. This film does not emerge from a plot conceived for the stage or a novel but rather from the optical sensation of parallels: fate and technology, nature and man. “Man should be optically recorded in his daily work, his desperate rebellion against unknown powers, his blind failure—and in his sudden enlightenment. With the clarity of optical relations—without the intellectual complications of literature and the stage—this film pursues its final goal: shaking up the masses. “The eyes receive impressions immediately; they do not need a predigested critique. What is shown must be directly experienced and interpreted by the individual in accordance with his visual faculty. “Herein lies the internationality of film. The condition remains, of course, that one performs his task. It is only then that the accomplishment can be creative and, at the same time, become a popular success.” Would you care to elaborate? “Let me refrain from that until the film is produced. I would rather tell you about the second part of my program. It includes the desire to realize

470

Configurations of a Medium

absolute films. That is to say its own optical action, optical movement, and structuring of tempo; instead of ‘plot,’ only the inner line, the dynamic of the optical. “Here lie a thousand possibilities: from the abstract play of light to the rhythmic synopsis of events. Not simply placing them all next to each other but rather in relation to an inner core.” And the third point? “The talking film. But more on that another time.” Thus ended the conversation and . . . It will be continued, hopefully, in practice. The American motto “Give a chance to everybody”2 also applies here. The avant-gardist now belongs to the industry in order to prove himself there. Notes 1. Malerei, Fotografie, Film appeared in the Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books) series in 1925. 2. This motto appears in English in the original.

211 LOTTE REINIGER Living Shadows: The Art and Technology of the Silhouette Film First published as “Lebende Schatten: Kunst und Technik des Silhouettenfilms,” in Film-Photos wie noch nie, ed. Edmund Bucher and Albrecht Kindt (Giessen: Kindt & Bucher, 1929), 45–46. Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi.

A popular form of animation during the Weimar Republic, the silhouette film was frequently used for both fairy tales and advertisements. Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981), who created one of the first full-length animated films with The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), was the undisputed master of the form. Whereas most women in the avant-garde had to work in the shadows of male artists (e.g., Bauhaus artist Lore Leudesdorff, who served as Walter Ruttmann’s assistant), the silhouette—which had long been identified with women illustrators and print artists such as Käthe Wolff— offered a form in which a filmmaker like Reiniger could gain recognition as the principal author of her own films. In this article, Reiniger discusses the painstaking work of the silhouette animator and argues, like the authors of several other essays in this chapter, for the potential contributions of such experimental forms to the film industry.

There is film and then there is film. The difference lies not only in quality or success but also in technology and mode of production. We are still in the early developmental stages of this new medium of expression and have only just made our first attempts to speak in this universally intelligible language of the “living picture”—and already we are confronted by new forms of speech and possibilities for expression. The normal form of film is the photographic reproduction of a process of movement. With the aid of recording devices, one can capture a large number (twenty to thirty) of individual phases of a normally lit movement on the filmstrip. When one projects these many individual images one after another onto a screen, an exact photographic image of

Avant-Garde and Industry

471

this movement emerges, as long as one projects exactly the same number of images per second that were recorded. Most films are made this way—documentary reports, expedition films, views of nature, and feature films. The bulk of the work here occurs before the filming, which itself takes exactly as long as the process it photographs. This differs fundamentally from the mode of recording used in so-called Trick filme [animated films], my own silhouette films included. When one hears the word trick, one thinks, “Ah, there is something more to it!” For of course, there is some “trick” at work. One does not record, as usual, many images one after another but rather only one single image, and between one image and the next lie hours of arduous labor. The task of the animation artist is to evoke impressions of movement without photographing movement. He or she must break up the envisaged movement into small elements. Every individual image is arranged in relation to its predecessor and successor so that it appears, when projected, as one cohesive stream of movement. This mode of work is most similar to that of the composer who breaks up his desired sound into individual notes, painstakingly writing them one at a time. This mode of work has the advantage that the artist can disregard the otherwise allpowerful laws of gravity and material context—in short, all natural laws that govern natural movement—in his or her sketches. The artist has free rein over his or her shapes and forms—it is precisely this complete reversal of the laws of nature that plays the leading role, for example, in the marvelous American cartoons of Felix the Cat or Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. There, an animal becomes longer, for example, because its front legs move quicker than its hind legs; a train can broaden to accommodate a wider track or contract to pass through a narrow tunnel. The wildest of fantasies need know no limits. Conversely, the greatest effects can be achieved when—as in my films—shadow figures act with such lifelike movements that one completely forgets that they are not real actors. In my silhouette films, I do not follow the otherwise-common technique of illustrating the individual frames. Instead, following a system tested for years, I use lead and cardboard to construct figures who act on an illuminated surface. From frame to frame, the small black actors are altered in accordance with their intended movements. This is not so bad with individual figures and close-ups. It becomes less pleasant when there are many different actors at the same time. In such cases, it often takes days to produce but a few seconds of film. Here, the clear execution of the various processes is more difficult than the work of movement and recording. People are generally astonished by the volume of handwork, the multitude of images recorded. Yet such is the work of every artist—the pianist, the saxophonist, the painter, and the composer, who writes down his countless individual notes. The most difficult and most important aspect is the mental and emotional concentration, which makes it possible to render visible an idea. The beauty lies in the unexplored quality of this entire realm. With such work, one new possibility after another reveals itself. Unfortunately, very few artists concern themselves with this new realm of expression. The reasons for this are obvious. First, the work is too expensive—the material and equipment cost a lot of money. Individuals cannot afford such a venture, but the industry has shown little inclination to date in fostering animated film as an independent form. In most cases, the industry uses only the most obvious effects, generally for the purposes of advertising. Stand-alone works are rare. The Americans produce the greatest share with the marvelous animations of Felix the Cat and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, whose global success proves that pure animation also bears great business potential. The great interest in my works strengthens my resolve to stake further positions in this unexplored field of human expression, with the hope that each new production will help open up one of the most promising realms for film.

472

Configurations of a Medium

212 HANS RICHTER New Means of Filmmaking First published as “Neue Mittel der Film-Gestaltung,” in Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 4, no. 3 (February 1, 1929), 53–56. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

At least since the German screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in 1926 (see chapter 11, nos. 159, 160, 161), Russian film served as a model of political filmmaking for left-wing film groups in Germany. For avant-garde filmmakers like Hans Richter, on the other hand, Russian film offered an ideal for the unification of experiment and industry—a situation opposed to what Richter here calls the “nonunified society” of Europe. Die Form was a bimonthly publication of the Deutscher Werkbund edited by Walter Riezler. This text was part of a series of articles published in anticipation of the Werkbund’s “Film und Foto” exhibition, which took place in Stuttgart from May 18 to July 7, 1929.

A man sits in the cinema and watches one and the same film sixty times. At first, his interest is drawn to the plot and the subject, then the facial expressions and appearance of the actors, direction, decor, and costumes; but to the extent that his interest in plot and the objects’ surfaces wanes, his interest in something that is in the film regardless (fascinating even in the worst one) increases: namely, what takes place onscreen behind the narrative action. The play of light, the abundance of movements, and the lure of the single form will force themselves upon him; the natural beauty of what film could actually be will reveal itself to him. To speak about this is relevant today, as one has already seen the great majority of films sixty or more times. Today, there are only a dozen films at all, which are shown everywhere in endless repetition—even the audience is beginning to notice this and to have enough of it. If one wishes today to speak of film as an art, one can only assume that 90 percent of all films that are shown in the movie theaters are not “film.” Like every other art, film is based on its own laws. Film people and outsiders have worked to discover these laws. Whether the results of this work manifest themselves in the form of earth-shaking documents, as with the Russian films, or as “experiments,” as with the avant-garde films, will not be examined here, since our primary concern is with the cause and not its effect. In 1924, the painter Fernand Léger made a remarkable film, Ballet mécanique: only objects—no plot. He says the following: The error of cinema is the scenario. Freed of this negative weight, the cinema can become the gigantic microscope of things never before seen or experienced. There’s an enormous realm which by no means is restricted to documentary but which has its own dramatic and comic possibilities. [. . .] I maintain that a stage door that moves slowly in close-up (object) is more emotional than the projection of a person who causes it to move in actual scale (subject). Following this line of thinking leads to a complete renovation in cinema [. . .]. Subject, literature, and sentimentality are all negative qualities which weigh down the current cinema—in sum, qualities which bring it into competition with the theater. True cinema involves the image of the object which is totally unfamiliar to our eyes.1 Léger has documented the spirit, the wit, the life, and the form of the objects—as opposed to the actor, on whom film today is based. With him, the object, which is dead decor at the moment, becomes a filmic living being.

Avant-Garde and Industry

473

In and of itself, however, the object is still a dead entity, insofar as it is merely photographed (filmed). It is still literary-unfi lmic as long as it is not released as a light-form, lifted out of the sphere of the purely naturalistic, the photographic, through photographic forming. Whether film deals with a person, a single object, or even just a light reflex does not matter for the time being. Everything in film that has not become a luminous figure is dead. (If one wants to depict a head in a visionary way, one has to light it from below; if one lights it from the side and behind, as is commonly done, it comes off as realistic.) Mastering the play of light is one of the main demands of film. The American painter-photographer Man Ray has provided notable material toward this end in numerous experiments, though he has not found ultimate principles. He has found a way out of the usual scheme for treating light in film (just like Léger, without an actual plot) and has virtually discovered light as a form-giving, artistic factor for film. (Even the ever-so-advanced Russians still work quite conventionally with light in many regards.) Almost more decisive, but even more unsettled in any case, is the problem of movement. When one speaks of movement, one takes for granted something that is, in reality, unknown—so unknown that one does not even see a problem therein. One understands movement in general as the natural, the automatic course of time of some action, the normal movement, the natural function of a natural object, roughly so: a man walks, a bird flies. Walking and flying are governed in nature by the laws of nature; walking and flying in film are subject to the laws of film: one sees only the legs of a man in a flurry: He goes (indecisively) 4 steps forward and 3 back, 8 steps forward and 2 back, 12 steps forward and 1 back. That is an extreme case and would be absolute nonsense on the street, but possibly extraordinarily exciting in fi lm, the rhythmic back and forth providing a means of increased expression. The very naturally recorded flight of a bird by no means has to actually convey the impression of flying. This art has the means, including a filmic arrangement of the single moments of flight, to render it vivid on screen. It is not natural movement alone that lends things in film their expression, but rather the artificial, the rhythmically organized—in the rising and falling, back and forth— parts of an artistic plan. The means of the style of movement are already ample today. Slow motion transforms commonplace, nonexpressive movement into a miracle. Time-lapse photography brings a bud to bloom in sixty seconds. To a certain extent, then, one has come by the art of movement from outside, from the technical. Insofar as film is an art at all and not just a Luna Park affair, the questions mentioned above are of decisive significance. Whether a film will find a large or small audience is thereby unimportant, however decisive this question must be for film in general. That the development of the fledgling film art in Europe takes place in an “avantgarde” apart from the industry whereas in Russia the boldest attempts in motion pictures take on a form immediately understandable to all is due to the disparity between the societal structures. One has no “avant-garde” in Russia since one does not use film for entertainment but rather deploys it for public life and for all the questions of said life.

474

Configurations of a Medium

Such functions enlist creative forces for entirely concrete works, in which they can develop and use their art, whereas the young generation of Western Europe remains outside the actual production. In our nonunified society, industry (economically oriented) and “avant-garde” (artistically oriented) are still at odds with each other. The dissolution of this opposition is less a question of artistic development and far more one of societal development. The amalgamation of feature film and art film into “FILM” is taking place slowly, but it is occurring nonetheless. Note 1. Fernand Léger, “Peinture et cinéma” (Painting and cinema), Cahiers du mois 16–17 (1925), 107–8. We borrow the translation from Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 372–73.

213 WALTER RUTTMANN The Isolated Artist First published as “Der isolierte Künstler,” in Filmtechnik (May 25, 1929), 218. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Although we think of interwar Germany today as a hub of avant-garde innovation, German filmmakers often pointed to France and Holland, with their more successfully institutionalized ciné-clubs, as models of a flourishing avant-garde culture. This article by Walter Ruttmann was published in Filmtechnik, a technology-focused trade journal that also included frequent discussions of the state of the avant-garde in Germany and internationally.

Film comprises negative and positive. In the negative, black is white; in the positive, white is black. Further, film comprises art and commerce. In art, commerce is anyone’s guess; in commerce, art is generally negative. The only positive certainty is that, in the case of art and commerce, it has never been possible to establish the self-evident, mutually dependent relationship between negative and positive that characterizes film technology. “It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”1 It is clear that this relationship between art and commerce, which is adversarial as a matter of principle, is untenable. For both rely on each other. Art prepares the commerce of tomorrow, while commerce feeds on the art of yesterday. The proper solution would be to find a compromise between yesterday and tomorrow geared toward today—because that would be not a compromise but, rather, simple rationality. But who can initiate this rationality? For commerce, the concept of art exists only as a decorative element—as a means to tax exemptions and as a decoy. And what place does this uncomfortable, incalculable, numerically indeterminate something have in the transactions of an industry that refuses on principle to count on long-term profitability and whose entire structure is dependent on making people devour its products immediately as if by surprise attack? Thus, for them, art comes into consideration only as an occasionally appealing figurehead, and it is useful only in a very diluted, denatured, and adulterated form.

Avant-Garde and Industry

475

It is conceivable that there could be a reconciliation and balancing of art and commerce with the help of an external power factor: a patron or the state. But patrons exist only in fairy tales or for the promotion of divas, and the state seems—at least in our capitalist countries—to be totally uninterested in this question for the time being. So only the initiative of art remains. But who will represent the arts for film? In France, maybe also in Holland and elsewhere, there is the possibility for a coalition, a united front made up of those who want art and find it necessary. They call this the “avant-garde,” have recognized its existence, and reckon with it to a certain extent, because it has proven that there is demand. In these culturally rich countries, there are cinemas that, in spite of resisting dominant trends, are able to continue growing in number. However, this success that has been achieved elsewhere is not easy for us to imitate in Germany. We do not have a talent for making collective will into something expansively productive. Here, any recognition of a shared impulse automatically leads at best to the establishment of a new regulars’ table, which secures its bylaws and closes itself off, rather than colonizing other areas. Thus, we can only hope for a personality that is strong enough to risk all compromises without degrading itself, a personality that is elastic enough to weasel its way into the headquarters of the enemy—in order to convince him. Note 1. Genesis 3:15 (King James Bible).

214 HANS RICHTER Avant-Garde in the Realm of the Possible First published as “Avantgarde im Bereiche des Möglichen,” in Film-Kurier, Sondernummer [special issue]: “Zehn Jahre Film-Kurier” (June 1, 1929). Translated by Michael Cowan.

Published the same year as his richly illustrated Filmgegner von heute—Filmfreunde von morgen (1929), the following article by Hans Richter elaborates on the book’s closing arguments about what film is and could be with the help of the avant-garde.

For the time being, the realm of the possible would be “Kulturfilm and feature film.” Whether and to what extent a creative generation can contribute to industry productions depends both on the insight of the industry producing films and on the extent to which its goals correspond to those of the avant-garde. If the industry realizes that its topics to date have been too limited, that an expansion is necessary (inasmuch as one can even describe the elimination of bad films as an “expansion”), then it will enlist the work of people with the will and qualifications to make avant-garde film. If the industry notices that certain audiences no longer find any enjoyment in the current profit-driven productions, then it will pay attention to projects no one would have dared pursue up to now (since people made do with the current type of film). If the industry comes to understand that completely different ways of filming, directing, and acting are still possible, that these elements can lend films more charms than the ones demanded and permitted up to now—then it will promote new forms of filming, directing, and acting.

476

Configurations of a Medium

If the industry senses that repeating the same routine is detrimental (not only to art but also to business), then it will have to seek out more of its employees among those who approach film as an art form in their work. It is not true that so-called avant-garde artists, if they even exist, harbor utopian goals. Their artistic program encompasses narrative films and Kulturfilms (no less than slapstick and poetic films). But the depravity and stupidity of contemporary entertainment film, its spiritual aimlessness and social irresponsibility, excludes the avant-garde a priori. Up to now, the industry has allowed avant-garde artists to embellish normal films through visions, preludes, and impressions, and thus to demonstrate their technical abilities. It had no use for alternative types of comedy, everyday films, and short films, let alone long narrative films. But film as a whole remained on the old path. If the state of film is really as bad as people constantly claim today, then why keep taking the same path that led us here in the first place? The development of Russian film has shown how important the avant-garde can be for an industry that operates not on economic but on cultural principles.

215 ANONYMOUS “Candid” Cinematography: ‘Kino-Eye’ in the Rathaus-Lichtspiele First published by N. N. as “ ’Ungestellte’ Kinematographie: ‘Kinoauge’ in den Rathauslichtspielen,” in Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, no. 176 (July 1, 1929). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Kinoauge is the German translation of Kino-Glaz (Kino-Eye). The word was both the title of a feature-length newsreel by Dziga Vertov (Kino-Glaz, 1924) and the designation for Vertov’s broader concept of film’s capacity to surpass human vision, particularly through montage. Vertov embarked on his first foreign tour from May to August of 1929. While visiting Munich June 29–30, he gave a lecture in German, “Was ist KinoAuge?” According to a fl yer, the lecture also included excerpts from Vertov’s Lenin’s Truth (a.k.a. Kino-Pravda No. 21, 1925), A Sixth Part of the World (1926), The Eleventh Year (1928), Kino-Eye (1924), and Man with a Movie Camera (1929). The following article reported on his appearance in Munich at the Rathaus-Lichtspiele, a 750-seat theater opened in 1920.

All members of the filmic avant-garde yearn to get away from narrative cinema and the many “lies” that moving pictures—despite the fact that they are capable of, and even called to, the strictest objectivity—produce to please the public. In fact, it is a curious irony of this technology that the camera, the most relentless observer of external reality (and often also the internal reality that accompanies it), has, with the narrative fi lm, beaten all records set by the old arts in the falsification of images of life. The Russians around Dziga Vertov say that dishonesty came into the film world with rationalism, which necessarily accompanied psychological drama and its main support, “staged” [gestellten] cinematography. And so they call for films without plot! Films made with a handheld camera that people do not see or with a large camera used in such a way that they do not see it or that they cannot “adjust” to it and thereby “lie.”

Avant-Garde and Industry

477

Up to now, this has been partially accomplished by Kulturfilms. But they are not filmic enough; they lack tempo, atmosphere, and montage. Montage: for the Russians, this is everything. They claim that reality is not true as it lies before us, in a rational context. It becomes true only when someone breaks it into (candidly photographed) bits and uses these to assemble a vital organism according to his vision of the truth. The truth that can be caught on camera becomes true only when it is organized according to principles—principles of conviction on the one hand or of flowing musicality on the other. Thus Hegel is combined with Bergson! The films that have come from this Russian movement, which we have been able to see in Munich thanks to the efforts of the Werkbund and the Bayerische Landesfilmbühne [Bavarian State Film Company], are captivating in two regards. They open up a view onto a new era of film, which, far more than ever before, will engage both the forming person and formed reality in the film arts. It will eliminate from film the final remnants of “literature,” the translations of verbal drama and other logical-dialogic ideas into the world of moving images. Film will become far more of an end in itself than it has been, for example, in narrative films without intertitles. It will be guided back to the principles of the “newspaper,” which will now be shaped into an artwork through musicalization and symphonization. The exhibited films, excellently and ingeniously introduced by Dziga Vertov and Dr. Franz Roh,1 draw from an enormous reservoir of individual observations, like those used by Walter Ruttmann for his films Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Melodie der Welt [Melody of the world]. But the Russian technique is far more refi ned, methodical, and thematically deliberate in the extreme. Ruttmann arranged his Berlin film in a completely unmusical and uncinematic fashion: he followed principles of coincidental juxtaposition, random space. Not until Melody of the World did he begin to use contrasting and associational principles more consciously. Vertov’s montage, which works with these and other intellectual viewpoints, exceeds anything imaginable. Compared to his work, everything we have seen thus far in narrative and documentary cinema looks like raw material next to perfected form. Vertov’s images also indicate a resurrection of trick film in production and postproduction; in fact, they are the first to employ it for an intellectual effect. They extract the last imaginable consequences from the element “film tempo.” As in Man with the Movie Camera, they accelerate the tempo so much that it hurts. But Dr. Roh comforts us with the assurance that in a few years, this pain will turn to natural delight, just as the entire “Kinoks” movement, 2 which we understand intellectually today, will be an emotional matter in ten years, an instinctual one in twenty. As for the increased truth that this movement is supposed to impart, the film Lenin’s Truth gives us every reason to be optimistic about its future prospects. For the present, these creations will generate enormous excitement in the film industry. Compromises with narrative cinema through the inclusion of sequences in this format are conceivable. But that is not the true significance of these methods. It is impossible to build a popular dramatic film with them. At least for now. For the time being, it is all still functioning as Labausch’s absolute dance once did before it.3 Notes 1. Roh (1890–1965) was an art critic and photographer who had invited Vertov to Munich. On June 29, 1929, he wrote an article (“Ein Film-Ereignis”) in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten announcing Vertov’s lecture. Together with Jan Tschichold, Roh also published the book Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye) in 1929. 2. “Kinoks” (literally, cinema eyes) was the name of the film collective around Vertov. 3. The writer is likely referring here to the dancer, choreographer, and theorist Rudolf von Laban (1879–1958). See also Lotte Eisner’s report of an interview of Laban in chapter 4, no. 58.

478

Configurations of a Medium

216 LOTTE H. EISNER Avant-Garde for the Masses First published as “Avantgarde der Massen,” in Film-Kurier, no. 207 (August 31, 1929). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Whereas some avant-garde “insiders” such as Hans Richter called on the industry to change its ways, Lotte Eisner here points out how much mainstream filmmaking has already learned from experimental film and calls on avant-garde artists to seize opportunities for connecting with the masses. Emphasizing the ways in which techniques that once seemed radical can be integrated into narrative film, Eisner’s article points to a question of “co-optation” that still has relevance today when jump-cuts, involuted montage, and other breaks with continuity have become part of the common repertoire of mainstream filmmaking. See also Eisner’s “The New Youth and Film” in chapter 11 of this volume, no. 162.

Avant-garde for the masses seems like a paradox. If we look more closely, it is an unexploited opportunity for the avant-garde. After all, it is easy to work in isolation from these masses but difficult to serve them. Ways to connect must be sought out—in one sense, they have already been initiated. Let us look at contemporary films. The superimpositions, photomontage, and film tricks we find there are based on activist films. In particular, narrative films have adopted two elements of avant-garde film, in part consciously but in part unintentionally: deliberate abstraction and the exaggeration of types. Girls’ legs in film, endlessly lined up alongside each other; greedy, money-grubbing hands at the casino; hundreds of faces, moving over and through one another, agglomerating into a mass or whirling about like a carousel—all this comes from avant-garde film, and has become a valuable and integral part of narrative film. With it comes the intensification of the typical. There were already close-ups of doorknobs and faucets. But now the uniqueness, distinctiveness, and vitality of objects are being extracted to achieve the maximum suggestive effect. A doorknob moves, and in its movement becomes a turning face. A faucet drips unceasingly, until it drives one to despair. The same thing is happening to people. They become objects, seen only for their most crucial, ultimate essence. We penetrate through the mask to the very core. Narrative film has achieved all this; it remains only to continue working on this basis. For avant-garde film must not be allowed to inbreed. To avoid paralysis, it needs the masses; it needs to be employed in the industrial realm.

217 ALEX STRASSER The End of the Avant-Garde? First published as “Ende der Avantgarde?,” in Filmtechnik (July 12, 1930), 6–8. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Avant-Garde and Industry

479

On the whole, the film industry and theater owners had little use for the film work of the avant-garde apart from the occasional inclusion of animated shorts in opening programs, the sporadic insertion of experimental sequences into mainstream films, or the production of so-called quota films. (Even Walter Ruttmann’s celebrated Berlin film was the result of quota agreements obliging Fox-Europa to finance a certain number of German productions.) Here, Alex Strasser (1898–1974) predicts that the new financial burdens linked to the coming of sound will only compound the hurdles facing the production and distribution of experimental film. Though most today would dispute the idea that the avant-garde ended or “failed” with the coming of sound (see especially Malte Hagener’s work), Strasser’s argument did point to some of the fundamental challenges of financing experimental sound film. Strasser worked as a camera assistant, made short animated films including Die Landpartie (The outing, 1927) and Grotesken im Schnee (Comic sketches in the snow, 1928; codirected with Lotte Reiniger), and was a film director for theatrical productions at the Piscator-Bühne.

Around four to six years ago, after the war, when film was experiencing its second great heyday, we began to notice a group of filmmakers, who, while partially connected to each other and partially working in isolation, were in every case totally disconnected from the official film industry. They were, for the most part, French, German, and Dutch. They called themselves, or were called, perhaps rather ambitiously, the avant-garde of film. To what extent the bearers of this title were really breaking new ground is still hard to judge. In any case it is clear that film also received new and decisive impulses from the industry itself. We need only think of Swedish films, of American slapstick, of the German Caligari, not to mention the special case of Russian film. On the other hand, it is also clear that the elements of new film design were always most clearly manifested within the avant-garde movement. Moreover, this group’s creative output was in no way homogeneous. A lot of it consisted of purely time-based optical play, as for example the “absolute” films by Eggeling, Richter, and Ruttmann, or René Clair’s Entr’acte. Much of this consisted of intellectually tinged optical reportage, like Montmartre by [Alberto] Cavalcanti,1 the films of the Dutchman [Joris] Ivens, or some of my own minor works. Many works evinced a highly aesthetic, quite difficult art of the fingertips (Lotte Reiniger, [Berthold] Bartosch, [Ladislas] Starevich); and finally, many other films were shorter or longer narrative works, always very atmospheric, weak on story, thriving on the imagistic (Man Ray, [Jean] Renoir, and [Jean] Epstein, later also René Clair and Cavalcanti). The movement’s difficulty cannot be blamed on the meaning of the term avant-garde; rather, the problem was that a group of people who—unswayed by convention, compromise, or fi nancial considerations—persevered in their own artistic vision, created a wealth of incredible beauty and stimulation, and ultimately helped film as such to gain a great number of friends among people who had theretofore remained aloof. The tragedy of the avant-garde movement is that its strength is simultaneously its greatest weakness. Absolute independence allows them to follow through on their artistic visions without consideration or compromise, but on the other hand, it forces them into the tight corner of their economic possibilities. Generally, they have the means to produce only short films. But to the ears of the film industry, “short film” is an extraordinarily odious term. Short films are the stepchildren of film. They are necessary for the purposes of tax relief and program extension, but nobody wants to pay anything for them. Theater owners order them from distributors as add-ons. They are, as the southern German butchers so eloquently put it, “bonus parts” [Beiwaage]. So no one can do good business with short fi lms, unless they are part of a greatly hyped, cheaply bought series. To make a few dollars, Americans throw a series of films intended for the opening program,

480

Configurations of a Medium

which have already amortized many times over in America, into the European market. The distribution companies, who will invest a hundred thousand in a feature film without a second thought, will offer—hesitantly and grudgingly—only a few hundred marks for a short film, no matter how good it is. Along with the traditional fear of all new and unconventional things, this timid approach to short films is surely one of the main reasons why the industry has almost completely disregarded avant-garde production. Thus, the avant-garde has been left without a forum. The French were able to help themselves a little bit by establishing a chain of avant-garde theaters in Paris; the Dutch founded the Filmliga; in Germany, we were satisfied to organize occasional matinees. But all these are merely makeshift solutions, which offer no opportunities for analysis: films must be profitable if their producers want to continue working. The avant-garde’s conviction that only truly valuable films have a future is surely correct, but it cannot help them to survive the calamity of the moment. Of late, the avant-garde movement has stagnated due to material blood loss. We have heard nothing more about new works and only a few new names. And yet, 1928 and 1929 were not such bad years for the idea of the avant-garde. During this time, the industry found itself in the midst of an extraordinary crisis. The films that had been perennially produced according to the same old model became indigestible even to the most enthusiastic film fans: the audience was weary of the cinema, and producers were out of ideas. “Popular taste” had ceased to follow them! For a short time, it seemed that the hour of the avant-garde had arrived. But then a spontaneous new development occurred: the sound film came. With great fanfare, new people, new firms, new programs, and new hopes. It came and led us straight back to the earliest beginnings of film. Later, sound film revived certain artistic forms of silent film. Today, it is being enthusiastically taken up by many but rejected with equal force by many others. We don’t yet know what will happen tomorrow, but one thing is certain: the technical requirements of sound film, on account of their high costs, spell doom for any independent work by the avant-garde. Working in your own studio, with a small budget, has become impossible. Here, the avant-garde movement will find its second, much more serious demise: where once avant-garde films had difficulty finding an audience, now their very production is in short supply. Ideas and designs can no longer be realized by a single person—only formulated. People who have something to say can no longer get behind the camera and start working; they must go through production offices. And how will the industry—which, even under much more favorable circumstances, usually failed with regard to finished works—receive this new arrival? The answer is not difficult to predict. [. . .] A large part of film production will now be handed over to electrical companies. They have doubtlessly conducted their production—heretofore, exclusively technical—according to the reasonable rules outlined above: perhaps now they will try to use the same methods to manage the artistic material that has fallen into their hands. Today, precisely today, facing these new problems, dozens of people in the avant-garde are full of creative urges, but they must fold their hands in their laps. Dozens want to work, work, work, and instead must negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. The large new firms can help them: a few thousand meters of film, a corner in their giant studio, a bit of pocket money would suffice to put a host of filmmakers on the map, who, as was demonstrated in the silent film era, can at least provide stimulating ideas for large-scale production. That would be one solution to the avant-garde problem heralded by the sound film. For the moment, this problem has a different solution: the avant-garde as a phenomenon no longer exists. A few of its members may find a way into the industry; others will resign. Or wait for a day when the technology becomes more affordable, the licenses terminate,

Avant-Garde and Industry

481

the patents expire. Or, perhaps starting tomorrow, they will finally concern themselves with the renaissance of silent film. Note 1. The author is likely referring to Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1926 film Rien que les heures (Nothing but time).

FIFTEEN

THE AESTHETICS OF SILENT FILM

218 ERNST BLOCH Melody in the Cinema, or Immanent and Transcendental Music First published as “Die Melodie im Kino oder immanente und transzendentale Musik,” in Die Argonauten 1, no. 2 (1914), 82–90. Translated by Eric Ames.

Although film aesthetics is now a common phrase, the word pairing was by no means self-evident for much of the history of this technologically based medium. In his 1966 essay “Transparencies on Film,” Theodor W. Adorno wrote, “The photographic process of film, primarily representational, places a higher intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically autonomous techniques; this is the retarding aspect of film in the historical process of art.”1 While, as Adorno argued, film lacked the clear distinction between technique and technology that had characterized the autonomous arts, especially music before the electronic age, his essay would go on to use composer Mauricio Kagel’s multimedia work Antithese (1962/1965) as an example of cinema’s “most promising potential.” In theorizing the dynamic interplay between music and film, Adorno joined a long trajectory of German theorists extending at least as far back as Ernst Bloch (1885– 1977), whose 1914 essay “Melody in the Cinema” addressed the contribution of music to silent film aesthetics (see also Friedrich Sieburg, no. 39), as well as the promise of cinema to reawaken the tradition of melody—which, as Bloch argued, had been in a losing battle with symphonic arrangement. Published in the second issue of Die Argonauten (1914–21), a journal edited by the expressionist poet Ernst Blass, Bloch’s essay focuses on one among many elements of film aesthetics theorized during cinema’s silent era, as subsequent discussions of lighting, intertitles, camerawork, screenplays, set design, and fashion will demonstrate. Taken together, the texts in this chapter represent what David Rodowick, in Elegy for Theory, has called the “aesthetic discourse” as a primary mode of film theory beginning in the 1910s.

As far back as our memory reaches, melody has always been at home in the movies. Like merry-go-rounds or curiosity cabinets, the cinema booths of the fairgrounds were always adorned with an organ grinder. It sang of the wood auctions in the Grunewald forest, and with the same turn of the handle, in the more elegant locales, it sang of the unfortunate Tannhäuser and of the dazzling messengers of the Grail. Outside, it lured the visitors to enter the booth; inside, it spurred on the rotation of the carousel horses, it interrupted the horrible stillness of the wax figures, or it enlivened the boredom of the world events so blown out of proportion. In this way, its sound and its solemn narcosis also pour into the interior of the picture palaces. Now that the house orchestras of local coffeehouses 482

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

483

have aroused in today’s petty bourgeoisie a widespread desire for musical entertainment, the film projector, once it has been made stationary, could employ the piano, the harmonium, or that awful trio in the so-called Paris Arrangement.2 Indeed, even the thirty-man orchestra could take over the old functions of the organ grinder; the one—and aesthetically all-important—difference is that now, the music’s exterior function of attracting the public has disappeared, and the clearer or more serious melodies accompany only the pictures themselves. With this development, the movies have gained a certain kinship with musical pantomime and opera. But on the whole, things have remained the same. People now know that the harmonium must play in tremolo when the son of the house has been shot or when the film shows the fall of Messina. They have also learned to distinguish between fast and slow and between light and dark. But in essence, all that has really happened is that the cinema has elevated the piano improvisations performed by good old school teachers at the end of the day to a legitimate form of art. Thus from the fatigue or the indifference of the piano player, from the discrepancy between the small number of piano pieces and the endless wealth of film repertoires, and finally from the film scene itself, always expanding and proliferating into new adventures or obstacles, there has emerged a style of piano accompaniment that is necessarily piecemeal, dully patched together, and unimaginatively sustained. As a result, we fi nd a suspension of all closed forms. Waldteufel, Czibulka, and Eilenberg are combined with the Ninth Symphony and Tristan, a process that yields those deplorable salon pieces that have been pieced together, broken up, and fused together again.3 The situation is somewhat better when an orchestra accompanies the film. But here, too, intentional deletions or tasteless expansions are the rule, since there is no necessary agreement in length between the march “Blaue Jungens” [Blue boys] and the film Lehmann als Boxerkönig [Lehmann the boxing king] or Nauke als Held [Nauke the hero]—or even between the overture to Martha and the drama Die Bettlerzunft von Paris [The beggar’s guild of Paris].4 All in all, one can say that the status of music in the cinema leaves much to be desired, and that in spite of the enormous demand, there currently exist neither specific compositions for the cinema nor any other solutions to the highly interesting problems presented here. As visitors to the cinema, we have to rely first and foremost upon the eyes. The sense of touch conveys the strongest impression of reality. With film, however, we must do without everything that, in the form of pressure, warmth, smell, sound, and sensory immediacy, otherwise lends to the things we see their full character of reality. All the other sensory organs—the skin, the nose, and the ears—are shut out, while the eye is overloaded. Film extracts only the optical impression of black and white from the world; appearing with all the chaotic movement of the immediate moment and without any stylization, this impression produces the uncanny effect of a solar eclipse, of a reality that has been silenced and sensually diminished—and even if the intensification of this reality through accelerated tempo and increased concentration still does not amount to an aesthetic or ideal escape from the world below. But now the ear assumes a particular function. It serves to represent all of the other senses. Since the crackling, rubbing, and noisy crashing of things can be immediately converted into tones (and this is especially true of human voices, which ring out with affect all on their own), the art of music inherits all the colorful sensuousness of unmediated reality and thus creates—in one great swoop that never recalls the individual sense—total sensuousness; for nowhere in the world does there exist an articulated sound, and nowhere a half-finished product that can compete with music. Music, too, offers a photograph of the world; characteristically, however, it does this not by copying a few figured sounds but rather by lifting all of the mixed images of extravagance, gushing overflow, and flaming fullness offered by life in its entirety from their immediate objects

484

Configurations of a Medium

and weaving them into a carpet—a carpet with its own all-encompassing intensity, quality, and therefore reality. Thus what represents the greatest danger in opera can work to the advantage of the cinema. After all, a bad opera does not have such a ridiculous effect because singing never occurs in reality, but rather, on the contrary, because the notes blunt all clarity, diminish every distance, and convert every reverie into something so very real that only a partial reality, indeed, a ridiculous and unsuccessful reality emerges. The film scene accompanied by music, however, need not fear this same incongruity. When the notes serve to unfurl a carpet underneath the filmic image—a carpet woven from the empty manner of impressions, that is, from the all-encompassing, affective forces of reality but without its contents—then the scenes occurring above these variously ignited fires appear removed from the pressure of sound and word through their purely optical character. On the other hand, they also appear related to the carpet itself, as form, by virtue of their pantomimic character. Finally, by their expressed intention to represent nothing but our everyday reality, the one that inhabits the same floor we do, such filmic scenes appear secured against every musical attempt to drag them back down into this reality. In addition, cinema offers another advantage. No doubt in most operas, the relationship between song and text betrays a certain degree of chance, which might be less pronounced in terms of measure and melody than in fi lm, but which nonetheless, above all in the boundless recitatives of the Wagnerian style, permit one to imagine arbitrary and farreaching changes. The criterion of necessity is missing. If this lack is not so noticeable in opera, this is only because a good carpet matches all furniture. But because the music accompanies the action intensively and qualitatively rather than logically, it attaches itself unambiguously to the action in terms of only its tempo and lyrical types but not its recitatives and symphonic arrangements. Now in the cinema, the tempo of the orchestra, which is the easiest to arrange, corresponds completely to the tempo of the action on the screen. In the same manner, a limited number of very simple melodies must suffice to illustrate all those easily comprehensible types and those powerful, highly uncomplicated characters that can exist only in film. Here one need only recall the exemplary changes that the Carmen motif produced through its shifting tempo. The duel scene between Escamillo and Don José also provides, through the rapid-fire changes in the music (which nonetheless, on account of its simple melodies, could consist entirely of a series of closed forms), a typical example of the compositions we ought to promote in cinematic art, and that have an a priori place there. Such compositions will draw not only on Bizet but also on Hermann Goetz and on the more intense and powerful style of the Italian and French composers of the beginning of the nineteenth century. Here we encounter a turning point in that battle between melody and symphonic arrangement, a battle in which the melody—the singable, long, drawn-out melody, which is not always repeated by the next bar—has been falling ever further behind. Until now, the wonderful unity of both moments, as it succeeded in the music of Bach, has never been restored. This is one of the most important and far-reaching chapters in the philosophical history of music. Hopefully, fi lm will contribute—should a fi lmmaker with specifically cinematic-technical skills ever appear and produce a work with a lasting name and exemplary quality instead of the abundance of mostly worthless factory productions currently being made—hopefully, this film poet will contribute to the recovery of the music performed before the screen from the death of closed melody. This death of melody has led all mere talented composers into chaos and self-destruction, and only Beethoven and Wagner were able to transform it into an inimitable resurrection in the realm of the spirit—indeed, in that of great mysticism. After all, the movies are a worldly art, and the wonderful frieze of intoxicating, dazzling, devilish, and totally earthly reality that music can unfurl below

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

485

the scenes could gain from the cinema a totally new illustration, like the invention of a new ornament. Notes 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, nos. 24–25 (1981–82): 202. 2. The Paris Arrangement (Pariser Besetzung) refers to a salon-orchestra instrumentation that emerged in the nineteenth century and was commonly found in Parisian coffeehouses. 3. Émile Waldteufel, Alphons Czibulka, and Richard Eilenberg were composers. 4. Lehmann als Boxerkönig was the German title of Boireau, roi de la boxe, a 1912 French film starring André Deed. Martha is an opera by Friedrich von Flotow that premiered in 1847.

219 OSKAR KALBUS The Muteness of the Film Image First published as “Die Stummheit des Filmbildes,” in Film-Kurier 2, no. 25 (January 30, 1920), 1–2. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Although the essay by Ernst Bloch (no. 218) reminds us that the term silent film was more often than not a misnomer, many works of early film theory would articulate the aesthetic character of cinema in terms of its muteness—perhaps most famously Film as Art (1932), where Rudolf Arnheim wrote that “silent film derives definite artistic potentialities from its silence.”1 Published a dozen years earlier, the following text, “The Muteness of the Film Image,” argues that words are unnecessary in film on account of the medium’s ability to represent all possible locations. Suggesting a dialectic of constraint and creativity, Kalbus also contends that the very muteness of film lends a greater freedom and hermeneutic openness to actors’ performances. A research consultant for Ufa’s Kulturabteilung (Cultural Division) beginning in 1920, Kalbus (1890–1987) also wrote a book on educational films (Der deutsche Lehrfilm in der Wissenschaft und im Unterricht, 1922) and later worked as a film historian and producer.

If every question in the study of the cinema’s aesthetic character is surrounded by misunderstandings and ambiguity, close investigation reveals an explanation for this in the nature of cinema itself, in the technical principle of cinematography. The soul of the film image is movement, recorded photographically and represented through projection. For the time being, it must not have any other content. When a director goes to work, his actors must be moving people—that is to say, people who execute actions in the interest of a psychologically motivated goal. Thus, the nature of artistic cinema is intrinsically dramatic from its outset, because drama is essentially action [Handlung], and every wellrounded action appears as drama to our aesthetic sense. The cinematic drama is, therefore, a palpable action; its characters are acting [handelnde] people. Of course, theater, the only embodiment of drama before the birth of cinema, has the advantage of speech, which seems indispensable to some, over silent film. And yet there is no real qualitative difference between film and theater, only different intensities of dramatic emotion. In the theater we encounter living, speaking people; in the cinema, flitting, silent images. But cinema compensates for its lack of words with superior technology when it shows the spectator a larger-than-life close-up of a performer. How vividly and enthrallingly we

486

Configurations of a Medium

experience the play of expressions and gestures in these images, the subtlest changes and movements of facial features and glances! How we witness every expressive detail. In this, the cinema has a clear dramatic advantage over the theater, which keeps us, the audience, at a great distance from the living actors. This flaw in the theater has, of course, long been recognized. Our intimate chamber plays were intended to remedy the problem, and the central significance of the amphitheatrical space in the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin, which places the “audience on stage,” comes from the spectators’ optical and intimate relationship with the dramatic events and the actors. 2 And yet, most people fail to recognize fi lm’s dramatic significance because of its muteness. But the word itself is never the goal of a dramatic action; rather, it is a means and a vehicle for the stage. In the theater, a plot must be condensed temporally into a few acts, and spatially to the small area of the stage. Words replace missing locations and the backstory that is left out of the play. Through monologue and dialogue, we find out what has occurred and is occurring beyond the stage. In film, words are unnecessary in this regard, because the difficulty of location falls away. All locales and actions from the backstory can be effortlessly represented visually, occurrences linked to each other through images, dreams presented as reality. But should the continuity in an ongoing story line be interrupted, then intertitles can bridge the gaps. Thus, for the purposes of depicting location, words are fully replaceable by moving images or, less desirably, by intertitles. The absence of words becomes perceptible as an explicit lack only in one case: namely, where they would be used on the stage for lively discussion, the expression of feelings, and the conveying of inner life—that is to say, when speech is the innermost meaning of the dramatic play. If only every director would realize that it is dramaturgically impossible in film to give dramatic form to anything that has an exclusively psychological focus! The psychological value and content of a Hamlet monologue, King Philipp’s jealous moan after waking during the night, or the bloodcurdling cry of Gretchen’s dying voice, “Heinrich! Heinrich!” bear a soulful mood and wealth of human thought, desire, and feeling that no ever-changing film image, no intertitle, and no film lecturer can offer. Thus we have determined one essential feature of cinematic drama: “Bereft of words, but superior to theater through the availability of every imaginable location, it is first and foremost situational drama.” That is absolutely not to say that the acting figures in film should lack characterization and psychology. They should and must not be conceived in exclusively external terms or as outlines. The film’s action, the exposition of conflict, the development, and the resolution must be constructed without words and with minimal intertitles. Furthermore, film’s muteness requires from its players a very specific art of acting, which is frequently misunderstood and underestimated. Paul Wegener, Albert Bassermann, Bruno Decarli, Werner Krauß, Emil Jannings, and Ludwig Hartau are the greats, but in spite of the fact that their accomplishments are the most marvelous ever to appear onscreen, they can be found in newspapers only with the help of a magnifying glass. Words are, in their infinitely variable nuances of tone, dialect, tempo, and vitality as well as in their intellectual content, the most natural signifiers of psychological processes. Film actors have to get by without this important representational instrument; they must replace it with external behavior and clothing, facial expressions and gestures—in short, through performance. Without a doubt, the absence of words lends the film actor’s performance a more eloquent and natural overall impression because his freedom as a performer is not bound to any memorized lines, rehearsed inflections, diction, or proper pronunciation. Conversely, spectators experience far more of the actor’s performance in film—the expressive range of his entire body, the subtle language of his eyes, and every tiny gesture used as a mimic instrument—than in the theater, where they are distracted by words.

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

487

The spectator’s empathy with the film actor’s performance must be greater than with the stage actor’s for the simple reason that the playwright leaves his specific imprint on the words of his play, whose content is permanently set, whether clever or banal, genuine or false; film, on the other hand, preserves the origin of its feeling for the spectator. Because the playwright and stage director only know one interpretation but people go to the theater with fundamentally different understandings or nuanced moods, one audience member will find the playwright’s work epiphanic while another thinks it indifferent; one will hear truth where another finds only emptiness. But in its wordlessness, the mute film image does not postulate any predetermined perceptions; the audience can weave their own words into the story. Germans can go into a French or American film, or the other way around. Film stands apart from the Babylonian confusion of languages; it is the only true way for nations to understand each other, an Esperanto for our souls. If born from the brain of a true artist, film can heal wounds from the world war and convey thoughts valid for all of humanity. That is the unmistakable value of film’s muteness. Notes 1. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 109. 2. Designed by Hans Poelzig, the Großes Schauspielhaus opened in Berlin in 1919 (a year before the present article was published) to house Max Reinhardt’s theater productions. Although remembered today primarily for its expressionist architectural style, the 3,500-seat theater was also notable for having been built in a remodeled circus building and for the semicircular seating around the stage.

220 ALBIN GRAU Lighting Design in Film First published as “Licht-Regie im Film,” in Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (Film-B.Z.), no. 64 (March 5, 1922). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Beginning in the mid-1910s, when American dark-studio shooting allowed for a more fl exible, controlled, and even artistic use of light, lighting design would be developed as one of film’s most powerful aesthetic means, on a par with camera and montage techniques. While members of the avant-garde such as László Moholy-Nagy characterized the medium itself as a form of “Lichtgestaltung“ (see chapter 14, no. 210), practitioners of narrative cinema arguably regarded light as no less defining for film aesthetics. Among these practitioners was Albin Grau (1884–1971), best known as the set and costume designer for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Arthur Robison’s Schatten (Warning Shadows, 1923), as well as for his interest in the occult. This article by Grau appeared one day after a preview screening of Nosferatu in Berlin’s Marmorsaal and was reprinted from the film’s program.

Set design is, for the most part, more the concern of the painter than the architect; film relies exclusively on visual effect. Unfortunately, the art of our time is so burdened by the nightmares of the past that people believe the architect is the only one who can sort through the “trash heap of art” that the storeroom of almost all film studios represents. And he is indeed the only one, as long as the pure film of illusion [Illusionsfilm] with naturalistic decor continues to prevail.

488

Configurations of a Medium

In short, the task is as follows: set design has to make the rhythm of life, the spirit of various epochs believable as an artistic reflection of our spirit, according to a given dramatic situation. As Herwarth Walden said, art is presentation, not representation.1 When applied to film, architectural design must not strive to be anything other than an atmospheric frame governed by the painterly arts, welded to the dramatic events, nothing other than the great fundamental tone [Grundton] to which the plot is tuned: the “play space” created by the artist is in harmony with the scenic events. It is clearly evident that the essential lifeblood of set design is lighting. Though it is actually the main factor, lighting is usually put in place only once the set is already “standing.” Thus the light sources usually produce conceptions of space that the artist had no intention of creating. Either the light twists or ruptures the space, or it turns out that the available light sources are insufficient to illuminate everything. Lighting must be taken into consideration—and must indeed be the foremost consideration—from the outset, when the decor is first being sketched out. Light is not there to illuminate the decor but to shape the image in its components—scenery and story—and bring it to life. Let us envision the process of a studio shoot with an eye toward lighting technique. To create clear images, the camera lens requires great brightness, so sunlight is supplemented by the strongest artificial light sources. Unfortunately, this practice has the disadvantage that it renders a distinguishing lighting with a sense for the pictorial nearly impossible, or at least very difficult to create. We never get the feeling that there is a central light source—sun, moon, lamplight, and so on—but rather an even, neutral brightness prevails, which naturally does not allow any unified visual impression to emerge. Theoretically, there are two possible ways to redress this. We could introduce an even stronger principal light source on one side—a bulb as bright as the sun—which would then create light and shadow effects. However, we do not yet have such a strong light source in practice. That leaves only one other possibility—namely, the opposite: we must create shadow sites in the decor, or parts that absorb the light more or less strongly. Color, with its varying light sensitivity, offers us a way to do this. Thus, even in our black-andwhite art, color has an important role to play, and, I might add, there are still large and almost completely unexplored areas in the realm of film design technique. In connection with this, I would like to anticipate an objection that will most certainly arise, namely that adhering to such practices will make it impossible to shoot natural settings. Yes and no: in any case, this is not the upshot of my remarks. I would like to remind the reader of Japanese and Chinese gardens and landscapes. Why do they look absolutely stylized, even in photography? Because when choosing subjects for shooting, we take account of East Asians’ great spiritual capacity for stylization and show only those natural scenes that suit our artistic sense of Japan and China. And at home? Do similar things not exist here? Seen with profane eyes, nature is profane; that is the reason why “similar things do not exist” here. Germany, yes, all of Europe, is richly blessed with natural scenery of stylistic grandeur; we only need to have the eyes to see it. And one last comment: film professions often go to great lengths to pretend that the represented space continues on to the right and to the left, which discredits the effect of the image; the scenery seems to be haphazardly cropped. This problem could be remedied by eliminating purely illusory set design. The painter-architect must arrange the frame of the story. Only that can yield effective images.

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

489

Note 1. An artist, critic, and founder of the expressionist journal Der Sturm (1910–32), Walden was a leading authority on avant-garde art.

221 HANS PANDER Intertitles First published as “Zwischentitel,” in Der Bildwart: Blätter für Volksbildung 1 (January-February 1923), 16–20. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In the early to mid 1920s, German Kammerspielfilme (chamber play films) such as Scherben (Shattered, 1921), Hintertreppe (Backstairs, 1921), Sylvester (New Year’s Eve, 1924), and Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) were noted for using as few intertitles as possible, aiming at a fully visual mode of storytelling. Countering this trend, Hans Pander here argues that intertitles are in fact indispensable, particularly in aiding audience comprehension, providing emphasis, allowing for narrative ellipsis, and presenting “essentially unfilmable material.” Pander was a columnist and film critic for Der Bildwart, a German journal that appeared between 1923 and 1934 and was devoted to cultural and educational films. He was also a founding member of the Bund der Film-Amateure (Amateur Film League), and published the books Der Film-Operateur (1928) and Kinematographische Unterrichts-Kurse für Anfänger (1928).

Are intertitles necessary in film? Many theorists and aestheticians have long claimed that film, as “visual narrative,” should contain no words in the form of intertitles. We should, these theorists say, let the images speak for themselves. Thus, to them, every intertitle is horrifying, a crude stylistic misstep: for words are fundamentally and essentially different from images, although no one has ever dared criticize someone like Wilhelm Busch, for example, for interspersing words with pictures.1 Recently there have been films—grand, indeed great full-length works—that respond to this challenge from the theorists. Such films have been made in England as well as in the United States, and German film studios have produced two significant “chamber films” based on scripts by the Caligari author Carl Mayer: Shattered (Rex-Film) and Backstairs (Gloria-Film). More chamber films are in the works. Critics have showered these chamber films with praise and recognition. Theatergoers were certainly more reserved; indeed, one had the impression that they—at least the vast majority of them—were left cold and were able to follow the events on the screen only with some difficulty. These films were fables of utmost simplicity. Aside from the lack of intertitles—if one does not count the title-like indications of time and date—Shattered differentiates itself from other, more typical films through three essential attributes: there are very few (four) characters; the only locations are a signalman’s hut and its immediate surroundings; and the fable is completely devoid of the usual complications. Its starkly reduced structure, rendered in telegram style, is as follows: father, mother, daughter— family life and duty—the unknown seducer, dishonor, the mother’s suicide (or a psychologically equivalent disaster) —the father’s revenge on the offender—confession—the daughter’s madness. One cannot help but think of how contemptuously Nietzsche condemned the raw material of Faust, Germany’s greatest national drama, as the story of

490

Configurations of a Medium

the seduction of a poor seamstress. The fable of Backstairs is similarly primitive. There are only three characters. There are just as few locations as in Shattered, while other films make abundant use of their nearly unlimited mobility. The fact that these chamber films have three essential attributes in common is no coincidence. Though the scripts might be formless in a literary sense, they try to give the reader a poetic impression, for he knows that words have the power to elevate everyday material to greatness. In the completed films, this effect fails—at least for the vast majority of spectators—due to the lack of titles. Anyone who tries to write a film without titles—and any honest film reformer should attempt this at least once—will soon see that he can use only a small number of characters, very few locations, and a sparse plot if he wants his work to be comprehensible to a large international audience. Only truly universal human subjects are comprehensible in this sense, and there is very little material of this sort, as can easily be concluded from a survey of dramatic literature from around the world. Verbal dramas can modify these few subjects in a thousand different ways; the possibilities are endless. But when this material is filmed, the old saying comes to mind: “Dirt that we tread / is not hardened but spread.”2 For in filmic representation, the creative power of composition—or rather, of concentration—is in no way as powerful as it is in the work of a poet, or any other kind of artist. Film is similar to pictography, which can indeed be read in all languages but requires an enormous number of different symbols—in fact, a new symbol for every object. Oddly, neither screenwriters nor directors, nor even film critics seem to consider this essential aspect of film: film is thoroughly concrete and its symbols demand the same integrity as pictography, whereas words and writing represent aggregations of many different things. For this reason, when detached, words can have multiple meanings but become unambiguous when they are integrated into sentences and texts. What film does not show is not present for the spectator. Even things that are in fact present but not close enough to the central focus of attention are not present for most spectators, because they go unnoticed. When things are expressed in words, an abundance of meaning—often the most important, psychological issues—always hides between the lines. To understand it, then, we first and foremost need time; film, on the contrary, operates according to an untamable schedule: anyone who takes the train must ride it to the end and may not tarry along the way nor even look out the window. Thus, the spectator’s mental field of vision is doubly restricted with regard to supplemental associations: firstly, by the abundance of necessary details that take up nearly all of his attention and secondly, by the compulsory connection to time. This is where intertitles can intervene to the spectator’s relief—at least, the average spectator. Without them, the film demands work from the spectator that he either finds unpleasant or cannot perform. Thus, intertitles are necessary for the vast majority of the audience. They are dispensable only in the case of extremely unambiguous images. But this is true of visual representations only in exceptional cases: namely, when their individual parts are completely bound to well-known things. Even art connoisseurs are unsure whether certain ancient Greek sculptures represent dancers or racers. How, then, is the common man supposed to properly grasp Apoxyomenos if nobody has previously explained to him, in part through titles, how Greek athletes used to cleanse themselves of dust and oil?3 But this is exactly how the average cinemagoer relates to the average film when it takes place outside his own environment. Furthermore, he has by no means learned how to link images to one another. Contemporary people almost always construct series of thoughts or ideas in some form with the aid of more or less conscious linguistic concepts. But the film spectator must first take possession of the new things, people, and relations in order to be able

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

491

to knit them together and to follow their development; as unnamed things, they would appear too lacking in content and, most importantly, not be connectable. Thus intertitles, which in this sense serve to make visual material comprehensible, are no mere mnemonic tricks; they are necessary. Any teacher who has walked pupils through an untitled film consisting only of objects understands the importance of “taking possession of content with the help of words.” Even beyond film, the desired unambiguousness is frequently achieved by means that are equivalent to intertitles. With a single word, Shakespeare’s stage transformed a throne room into a cemetery or what have you: whenever necessary, this one word provided the audience with a new idea of the location. Whether in Shakespearean theater or contemporary film, such a word can be the impetus that places a spectator into the desired frame of mind for a certain amount of time. A film about which we know absolutely nothing, not even the characters, could begin with an image of a man and a woman fighting shown in night-tinting. “Leo bummed around”—this three-word title would force the spectator to label the two characters as a married couple, the henpecked husband and the old battle-axe, and to understand what followed through this lens. With the title “Unsuccessful break-in,” the same scene would speak to a totally different set of ideas, and the people would have completely different characters. By changing the order of scenes or through retitling, the course of the plot can be utterly changed; indeed, to be blunt, this strategy alone could turn a comedy into a tragedy—such is the ambiguity of purely “visual storytelling.” Besides these intertitles that are indispensable for the average spectator, there are some, especially common in German comedies, that serve as emphasis. From a literary standpoint, they are almost always extremely pitiful. But fi lm manufacturers—fi lms are industrial products, after all—see film as a commodity, fabricated as entertainment for the masses; therefore, they measure its success by their wallets rather than literary or arttheoretical standards, and they use such titles in spite of all the cinema reformers’ protestations. For the most part, nine-tenths of the humor in German fi lm comedies resides in the titles, but even when it is clear from the image, a title usually captures the heart of the matter in words. And laughter only breaks out once the intertitle has appeared—proof of how well the manufacturer knows his audience. This practical psychology allows for no substantive opposition. Another kind of intertitle bears the name only falsely. These are the titles that have nothing to do with the previous or next scene but that contain exposition or parts of the advancing plot. There is always a good portion of any film’s plot that people prefer not to shoot because audiences don’t want to see it, because the effort is greater than the reward, because the spectator has seen this a hundred times, probably done better, because he can see it live in his own home any day of the week, because the star is no longer available but the film absolutely must be finished by a certain date—in short, because it is not essential to the film. When a film’s first title is “Count Egon returned from his three-year journey around the world,” we understand, without needing to see any of the voyage, that it will not come back or play a decisive role in the images that follow. When Friedrich has waited in vain for his tryst, a title will suffice to inform us because the situation is not so original that we have to see it depicted, and something like waiting without avail, which is both negative and stretches over a long period of time, can hardly be visually represented. In all such cases, the compressing power of words is rightly used in place of broad filmic pictography—for film is not a work of art but a compromise for the purposes of entertainment [. . .], and this usage of so-called intertitles is what enables film to infinitely expand upon its actual (theoretical) domain, which is limited to the pictorial. Finally, we must mention those intertitles that prove that a movie deals with essentially unfi lmable material. They never fail to appear in psychological fi lms, problem

492

Configurations of a Medium

films, and literary films. They fill the gaps whenever a film is supposed to represent conceptual, abstract, or purely psychological subjects, which is never possible in images. Their appearance indicates a reversal of the relationship between image and text: the text can and must helpfully intervene as a supplement, to clarify details and parts of the backstory or the current plot, but it must never become the main event and carry the thread forward all on its own. Notes 1. Wilhelm Busch was a nineteenth-century poet and illustrator famous for his satirical tales, which presaged comic strips in their combination of text and image. 2. “Getretener Quark wird breit, nicht stark,” from Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. The translation comes from West-Eastern Divan, trans. Edward Dowden (London: J. M. Dent, 1914), 88. 3. A common subject of classical sculpture, the Apoxyomenos (the “Scraper”) is an athlete removing sweat and dust from his body with a strigil.

222 BÉLA BALÁZS The Close-Up First published as “Die Großaufnahme,” in Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Vienna/Leipzig: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924), 73–86. Translated by Michael Cowan.

A key figure in the development of film aesthetics in the German-speaking world, Béla Balázs is still associated with the close-up more than with any other filmic technique. The following chapter is taken from his first film-theoretical book, Visible Man or the Culture of Film (1924); six years later, he would also devote a section to the close-up in The Spirit of Film. As Mary Ann Doane has noted, the close-up was pivotal to early theoretical attempts to characterize fi lm as an art—from Hugo Münsterberg’s “psychology of the photoplay” to Jean Epstein’s photogénie to Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious”—and would later reappear in the writings of Christian Metz, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Aumont.

The close-up is the most authentic domain of film. Close-ups reveal the new territory of this new art, a territory known as “the little things in life.” Even the greatest of lives, however, consists of these little things, of details and individual moments. Broad outlines tend only to result from the insensitivity and sloppiness with which we smudge over life’s individual details. The abstract picture of a great life usually comes from our shortsightedness. But through the camera’s magnifying lens, we can approach the individual cells of life’s tissue; this lens allows us once again to feel the material and substance of concrete life. It shows you the movements of your hand that you otherwise never notice when it strokes or strikes something, since you inhabit this hand rather than observe it. It shows you the intimate face of all your living gestures, which reveal the soul that you never knew. The camera’s magnifying lens will show you your shadow on the wall, which accompanies you through life though you never notice; it will show you the adventures and the destiny of the cigar in your unsuspecting hand, as well as the secret—secret because unnoticed—life of all those things that accompany you and that together make up your life. You have observed your life as a bad musician listens to an orchestra. He

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

493

hears only the leading melody, while the rest merges into a general wash of sound. But through close-ups, a good film will teach you to read life’s polyphonic score, to notice the individual voices of all those things that make up life’s great symphony. In a good film, the decisive moment of the real action is never shown in a long shot. For an overview can never show us what is really happening. The long shot serves only to orient the spectator. When I first see the finger pulling the trigger and afterward the gaping wound, I have seen both the origin and the outcome of an action, its birth and its transformation. What lies in the space between the two is, like the flying bullet, invisible. The Director Guides Your Eye

What gives these close-ups their unique filmic quality? After all, the theater director can also construct the stage set to include such painstaking details. This filmic quality lies in the possibility of separating the individual image out of the whole. Not only does this allow us to see these tiny atoms of life more clearly than details on the stage, but it also allows the film director to guide our eye. On the stage, we always see the total picture into which these little moments disappear; and when they are made to stand out, they sacrifice precisely their atmosphere of secrecy. In film, however, the director focuses our attention by means of close-ups; after a long shot, he shows us those hidden little corners in which the silent life of things retains its atmosphere of secrecy. The close-up is the art of emphasis in film. It points silently to important and significant elements and thus interprets the life shown on the screen. Two films containing the same action, the same performances, and the same long shots but that employ different close-ups will express two different views of life. The Naturalism of Love

As precise observations of details, close-ups amount to a sort of naturalism. But these observations exhibit a tender quality that I wish to call the naturalism of love. For the things we love we know well; we lavish tender attention on their tiniest details. (Of course, there also exists a cold sort of observation and thus a naturalism of hate). In films containing many good close-ups, one often has the impression that they represent the observations of a good heart rather than a good eye. They radiate a kind of warmth, an indirect poetry, whose particular artistic significance lies in its ability to have a moving effect without becoming overly sentimental. It remains impersonal and sober. It awakens a feeling of tender affection toward things, a feeling, however, that is never mentioned by name (by its all-too-worn-out, all-too-common name). On the “Insertion” of Close-Ups

In addition to the close-up, film’s means of emphasis also include lighting effects and long shots. All of these factors play a role in the director’s decisions. For the art of film directing also includes knowing where to insert such a close-up, at what moment it may interrupt the whole. The danger is ever present that the individual shots will chop up the film’s continuity. It often happens in bad films that we lose our orientation in space; we no longer know whether the details being shown are supposed to be located upstage or downstage, or how they are situated with respect to one another in space. When a long shot fi nally does come, we scramble in our surprise to patch the scene together after the fact. This mistake usually results when the close-up is filmed from a different perspective than that of the long shot preceding it. It also often occurs that the lighting used during the long shot is insufficient for a vivid close-up of a detail, which then requires a different mode of

494

Configurations of a Medium

lighting. As the lighting of the close-up no longer blends in with the rest, we can no longer locate the detail within the whole. Not only space, however, but also time can be torn apart by splicing in close-ups. For film has a temporal perspective, which must remain coherent throughout the action, just as everything in a painting must be seen from the same spatial perspective. Now, the closer the action on-screen is to our eye, the more slowly it appears to occur. This stands in direct contradiction to the optical laws of nature, where an object seems to move more slowly the farther away it is. This appearance in film, however, is based not on optical laws but rather on psychic ones. At close range, we see the details. We need time to perceive them all. That is to say that it seems to us as if we needed more time to capture the greater wealth of visible things. For this reason, an action shown at close range often seems to occur more slowly than the same action seen in a long shot. One can get dizzy among these various speeds, as when one sits in a railway car while trains pass by on the right and left at different velocities. One of the most difficult tasks in film directing is to preserve the temporal perspective despite the combination of close-range and long-range shots. Now we might ask, which elements of the action should be shown in close-up? Modern directors generally do not choose to use close-ups for the main elements, those that already attract the attention of spectators by themselves and that for this reason have no need of special emphasis. This certainly stands to reason. On the other hand, close-ups should not cause us to stray from the dramatic path and graze idly at the side of the road. For the individual elements of a plot do not always have the same atmosphere and the same sense as the whole. The uniform coloring of a meadow results from the blending of the most various flowers. If we observed them at close range, one flower might resemble the soft eye of a child, while the next one will seem more like a prickly little monster. But the particular color placed before the eye should not contradict the hue of the whole. One of the most common and unsophisticated examples of the this error occurs when certain directors, wishing to include “bright moments” at any price, insert shots of cute and humoristic details right into the middle of tragic scenes. On the other hand, one of the subtlest techniques of film directing is to use little details shot in close-up to lend a specific atmosphere to a scene. For example, we might show a long shot of a man chatting away with an air of natural calm. But the close-up of his fingers, nervously kneading the bread crumbs on the table, will provide the atmosphere for the whole image. Or the physiognomy of things might reveal a premonition of future events not yet available to the characters. From the close-up of a cloud formation, a crumbling wall, or the dark opening of a door, there emerges an atmosphere of fear and anxiety that engulfs the unsuspecting characters. We already see the silent shadows of destiny gliding past. The close-up is the director’s profound gaze, his sensitivity. The close-up is the poetry of film. Close-Ups and Shots of Magnitude

The pathos of magnitude is an effect that no other art can produce as well as film. A surging sea, an iceberg towering above the clouds, a forest in a storm or the painfully infinite expanse of a desert: these are images before which one stands eye to eye with the cosmos. Painting cannot attain this overwhelming monumentality because the image’s fi xity allows the spectator to fi nd a standpoint, a firm position before it. But in the uncanny movement of these cosmic magnitudes, the rhythmic waves of eternity appear and submerge man’s stunned heart.

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

495

The theater stage is even less able to achieve such monumentality. The most enormous things might be painted onto the backdrop and the sets. But the actor always stands before them fully life-size, so that we can never see his tiny stature in comparison with them. We never see him from the perspective where he seems to fade and disappear among the world’s giant structures. Certain films, however, can show us the face of the earth. Not idyllic countrysides, nor the triumphant views reached by mountain tourists, but the physiognomy of the planet earth itself, of that heavenly body that, hovering in the endless expanse of outer space, carries the little animal man on its back. The images of Shackleton’s expedition to the South Pole, showing people at the farthest reaches of the earthly kingdom, were unforgettably overwhelming.1 On the cap of terrestrial life, little black silhouettes stood peering out through the eternal night from one star to another. Truly, these are magnitudes on a cosmic scale that only film can represent. Scenes of Masses

Another kind of monumentality that no other art ever attained before film can be found in those more worldly magnitudes of giant buildings and masses of people. For such giant constructions (the singular work of thousands) and mass formations (the singular organism made up of the thousands of people absorbed into it) show us supraindividual constructs of human society: not simply the sum of individuals but proper living beings with their own forms and their own physiognomies. Until now, these forms and physiognomies of human society have never been visible in the individualist arts. And this is not simply for reasons of technology. In our time, we are becoming more and more conscious of the phenomenon of society as such; its physiognomy is becoming more and more visible. For this reason, it must be represented visually. For like the movements of individuals, those of the masses also represent gestures. Although we have participated in these mass gestures, we never noticed them before, and their significance is still a mystery to us. But good directors sense their meaning unconsciously. In order to show distinct gestures, however, a mass formation must have contours; it cannot be chaotic and amorphous. In good films, every last detail of a crowd’s physical arrangement and movement is meticulously composed. Such arrangements are often composed simply to produce a decorative effect. This can be beautiful and artistic. And why not? Among other things, a film should be a feast for the eyes. But decorative productions quite often fall into the trap of being too beautiful. The life on screen takes on an ornamental quality reminiscent of applied art. When groups are always placed into immaculate decorative lines, one has the impression of watching well-rehearsed ballet scenes. But when film simply becomes a series of “moving pictures,” then its pictures no longer move anyone. A good director will show the living physiognomy of the crowd—the play of expressions on the mass face—only in close-ups, which never allow the individual to disappear or be forgotten. In this way, the mass formation will not appear as a dull, lifeless element like a rock slide or a lava flow (unless the director for some reason has the intention of characterizing it in this way). A good fi lm assembles the crowd out of partial shots, which contain their own meaning and life. Through a series of close-ups, it shows us the individual grains that make up this desert, so that even with the return to the overview in a long shot, the life of the atoms teeming on the inside remains present in spectators’ minds. In such close-ups we can feel the living, psychic, spiritual material of which the great masses are composed.

496

Configurations of a Medium

Filmic Impressionism

But the representation of magnitude in film does have its limits. These reside in the border of the projection screen, in the limits of our field of vision. A film can show pictures of the pyramids, views of Babylon and Nineveh, images of mass migrations or shots of New York City traffic, but none of these will be larger than the screen. American films long ago filled this frame until it overflowed. Nonetheless, the impression of magnitude can still be heightened. For on screen, everything is a question of illusion. For this reason, modern directors are coming to rely more and more on impressionist techniques of illusion. Today, photography has become so refined that it can suggest what cannot be shown and stimulate us to imagine magnitudes that no photograph could ever capture. Modern directors no longer need a hundred thousand extras in order to produce the effect of large masses. A much larger crowd of people can disappear behind a cloud of smoke, for example, than could be shown in an illuminated field. In the latter scene, we see only a hundred thousand; in the former, we sense millions. For the largest number does not always look like a lot. The agitation of a popular uprising blazes more intensely in the wild undergrowth of a hundred outstretched hands than in the endless expanse of a procession of demonstrators. Similarly, a wooden beam beginning to crack and give way can produce a greater atmosphere of catastrophe than a long shot of giant towers collapsing. To an ever greater extent in modern film, such close-ups will come to replace shots of great magnitudes—and not simply because monumental sets are more expensive. Oldstyle monumental shots take up too much space in film. Such colossal constructions and enormous mass formations are shown from the right, the left, the front, and the back, from at least ten different perspectives—and this not simply because directors, having invested so much money, wish to obtain a correspondingly high number of pictures. Such colossal images must be shown often and for a long time simply in order to be perceived; otherwise, our eye cannot digest them. Consequently, these monumental shots take up all of the room within which a film can move, and there remains too little space for those individualizing scenes that alone give film its clarity and excitement. The Reality of Magnitude

Of course, monumental shots can produce a reality effect that no impressionistic illusion could replace. In Griffith’s Intolerance, there is an image with the title “King Cyrus’ armies march to Babylon.” At first, we see only a dark and rainy moor, filmed from a great distance through a telephoto lens. Without contours or boundaries, this space resembles some odd landscape or part of the earth’s surface. Over this uniform and level surface, one can see something like dark grass swaying softly in the wind. But suddenly this grass comes to life. The earth’s surface begins to slide, and the grass turns out to be made up of pointed spears. Over the endless moor surges a dense growth of human beings lacking any boundary or contour. These are the peoples of the earth. And they roll toward us in uncannily slow, thick-flowing streams like shock waves of some worldwide earthquake. No close-up could create such an impression. There are also giants living on our earth, whose form as a whole has a significantly different character from that of their parts and cannot be replaced by them. A colossal department store, a giant factory, or an urban train station has its own face when seen in full. But certain directors employ the effects of such shots in their films without any compelling reason, merely as an “interlude” in the film-like dance numbers in an operetta. They would do well to be more careful. For with their dance, such mammoth shots trample over the drama. Such scenes, which could just as easily be performed as little

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

497

parlor idylls, represent a kind of artistic frivolity when inserted merely as background, detached from the organic whole of the film. The monumentality of the set becomes dangerous when simply tacked onto the story. It crushes the film. Moreover, this practice shows an insulting lack of respect. After all, one would not have Asta Nielsen appear in a film without giving her a suitable role. Now it seems to me that Niagara Falls and the Eiffel Tower are also stars and should not be employed merely as extras. Atmosphere

The soul of a landscape or of any other setting is not revealed to the same extent in every spot. It is similar with people. The eyes, for example, are more expressive than the neck or the shoulders, and a close-up of the eyes radiates more soul than a long shot of the whole body. The director’s task is to find the eyes of a landscape. Only in the close-up of these details will he capture the soul of the whole: its atmosphere. Location shots of a city, in addition to containing the particular charm of credible reality, can also be very beautiful. But they rarely show us those eyes that radiate the city’s soul, and they often amount to no more than educational pictures in a geography lesson. On the other hand, the black silhouette of a bridge with a gondola swaying in the water below or a shot of steps descending right down into the murky water in which a streetlight is reflected better captures the atmosphere of Venice—even if filmed in a studio— than a full shot of St. Mark’s Square. Like the atmosphere of a landscape, that of an event is often best captured through close-ups of its smallest moments. An image of wailing sirens (and we see their wailing in the jets of steam pouring out), of trembling fingers pounding frantically on a windowpane, or of an alarm bell swinging back and forth conveys panic in a concise form; the horror we experience here is more concentrated than in the full shot of the gathering crowds. In the same way, the atmosphere of a human being is a whole that no image can convey as such. The individual moments, however, can capture the expressive gaze of the eye. Such moments shown in close-up make it possible to offer a subjective image of the world and, despite the objectivity of the camera, to show the world in the hue of a temperament, in the light of a feeling: poetry objectified and projected onto the screen. A film made from Gerhart Hauptmann’s novel Phantom attempts to convey a vision of the world as it appeared to an agitated dreamer. 2 Here, objective reality is beside the point. Dream visions, inserted in at various points, are not clearly distinguishable from the rest. For reality itself appears through the fog of the protagonist’s delirium. The impressionist style of this film consists in the fact that in certain places, the objective, logical structure of the action disappears entirely, leaving only atmospheric snapshots of fleeting, incoherent images as they appear to hover and sway before the protagonist’s clouded gaze. We see the world just as he does. One act in this film is titled “The Delirious Day.” It would be impossible to narrate its content. Streets file past with roaming rows of houses before the eyes of someone standing still. Steps climb up and down under feet that do not seem to move. A shiny piece of jewelry flares up in a display window. A bouquet of flowers opens up to reveal a face looking out. A hand reaches for a glass. Columns in a ballroom stagger as if drunk. Blinding lights shine out from a car. A revolver lies on the ground. From the protagonist’s subjective perspective, we are shown only close-ups of the various seconds but no temporal overview. Film’s impressionism resides here, in the fact that we see only that which makes an impression on the protagonist, and nothing else. For only a temporal overview (over the entire course of an action) and only a longshot of space (in which the action occurs) can give us the feeling of objectivity.

498

Configurations of a Medium

Notes 1. Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Irish explorer who led several expeditions to the Antarctic. See also Balázs’s “Reel Consciousness,” in chapter 2 of this volume, no. 23. 2. The film is F. W. Murnau’s Phantom (1922).

223 FRITZ LANG AND F. W. MURNAU My Ideal Screenplay First published as “Mein ideales Manuskript,” in Film-Kurier 6, nos. 72 and 74 (March 24 and 26, 1924). Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

In 1924, Film-Kurier journalist Eduard Jawitz led conversations with prominent directors on their “ideal screenplays,” often prompting programmatic statements on film aesthetics more broadly. The following two texts by Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) appeared as part of this series of conversations, which was published in the trade journal Film-Kurier between March 24 and 29, 1924. (Other interviewees included Ludwig Berger, Karl Grune, and Robert Wiene.) Film historian Lotte Eisner would later devote monographs to both Lang and Murnau, characterizing them (alongside G. W. Pabst) as the “great directors of the German cinema.” On the idea of film poetry, see also Ernst Lubitsch’s text in chapter 6, no. 89.

Fritz Lang

Only a screenplay that gives a film what it needs and earnestly adapts itself to film’s possibilities will become film art. The fusion of poetic visions, painting, and music. That which no other form of art can express. The ability to render visions, fables, and imponderable depths of the soul in an image. A miracle! Such was Der müde Tod [Destiny]. The screenplay must be a contemporary work of art that has something essential to say to its time, something beyond base sensationalism. In Dr. Mabuse this was the power of evil, which held up a mirror to a corrupt era. With respect to Die Nibelungen, the film is neither theater nor literature, but something new. The progeny of kings do not comport themselves like common fishwives. Here, subdued, consciously restrained people are shown in heroic action. It is a question of style! Criticism has tended to overlook the fact that what is of importance here are the events, the acting, the set design, the performance of the entire ensemble. We are not concerned in this respect with highlighting one particular actor. Die Nibelungen was conceived in this manner. As for the dramaturgic and technical treatment of the screenplay, what is important is to portray the action in the most concentrated form. The goal is absolute knowledge of the craft, a familiarity as thorough as that of the traditional German trades. Extracting the constructive elements! An example of this would be the Bauhütte in Weimar.1 Everything down to the very last title card must be finished before the camera crank is engaged. And if any changes are necessary, then only in keeping with the screenplay. As admirable as attempts at making films without titles may be, there are still things that simply cannot be expressed without titles. How should the details of an inheritance be expressed, for example? And finally, even a film without titles begins with . . . a title.

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

499

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

Were the other arts not to exist, film would have been forced long ago to find its own techniques—and this for the same reason that ancient man was forced to communicate through images before the first system of writing was developed. Still lacking any techniques of its own, film does everything on the basis of a false model. It makes use of the means of the novella, the novel, and the play; it borrows all the techniques from the other arts without the slightest need to develop its own. The ideal screenplay (understood as an ideal challenge, not an ideal form overall) would be a kind of film poetry that would artistically force the director to act solely according to the intentions of the writer, at least where no improvisation is possible. If the director can operate freely without violating the poetry, perhaps even using improvisation to reach a high level for the first time, then it is the director who is the author. The ideal screenplay should provide even a naïve viewer a reassuring feeling that he is in the presence of a harmonious structure. It must not crawl, and its internal structure ought to correspond with its external structure, even with regard to the placement of the camera. One can see from the use of titles the degree to which the other arts have paved the way for film. The title, seen as a something that logically comes between images, is quite simply an obstructive presence in film. As a stand-alone element, the title is unavoidable at first. Film is still too young an art; it does not yet fully appreciate its own forms of expression and its material; it avails itself of all possibilities without any degree of sophistication. Note 1. In founding the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, Walter Gropius had invoked the Bauhütte, a medieval mason’s lodge.

224 PAUL LENI Architecture in Film First published as “Baukunst im Film,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 911 (August 4, 1924). Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Linked to the emergence of new lighting practices, set design gained independent standing by the mid-1910s, at a time of historical spectacles such as Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) and D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). If, as Kristin Thompson has argued, German cinema continued to prioritize “attractive” sets into the 1920s, even after Hollywood had adopted more “classical” norms,1 the following text from 1924 seeks to shift the understanding of set design from the construction of “ ’pretty’ spaces” to the creation of a particular “mood.” Paul Leni (1885–1929) was a prominent set designer and the co-director of Hintertreppe (Backstairs, 1921). Following in the tradition of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Destiny (1921), his episodic film Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924) offers examples of the kinds of antirealist, stylized architecture that he calls for in the following article of the same year. Leni would be recruited to Hollywood in 1926, directing The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928)—films that left an indelible mark on the decidedly nonclassical genre of the horror film.

500

Configurations of a Medium

The Große Berliner Kunstausstellung [Great Berlin Art Exhibition], 2 which offered the public an opportunity to consider the designs of German film architects as works of art, may be deemed a success. Given what has been said in public and in the press, we may assume that the architect in film has finally broken free of his reputation as an auxiliary tradesman in the studio. He is now considered an independent creative artist, one who makes a substantial contribution to film’s characteristic style. Architecture’s task and objective in film find their origin in the sense that film, from an architectural perspective as much as from any other, must be more than just a pale photographic imitation of reality—it must have its own style. I always regarded my task in film work to be the crafting of an appropriate background to the actions and scenes the director was orchestrating, one that gave expression to the mood created by the director’s work but did so through the actual material composition of space. In order to produce the desired atmosphere, it is not enough to simply copy beautiful spaces of the kind that one finds in castles and people’s homes. A decorative concept must draw instead on the emotional content of the scene, producing a composition that hits the right notes. The architect is of course not free to do whatever he pleases; his charge and the restrictions he must respect in his work are handed to him by the director, who always remains the master on set. The way the film is shot, the directions of motion, the movements: all of these factors are as vital to the architect’s decision-making process as the way lighting is placed, the camera’s position, the angle of view, and the choice of what is placed in the frame. It takes real talent to bring an artistic vision to completion when one faces such extensive limitations. Lighting technology has gradually allowed us to create characteristic cityscapes and snapshots of natural landscape both in the studio and outside. Were the architect to produce a picture-perfect copy, the resulting image in the film would have no identity, no personality of its own. The opportunity must be there to accentuate and give shape to the most essential and characteristic features of a natural object in such a way that they lend the resulting image a particular style and tone. Joe May’s Tragödie der Liebe [Love tragedy] comes to mind, in which even a scene set in a small train station with an arriving train was produced in the studio. The impression we were charged with creating was that of a small train station on a cold, frosty winter’s night. Had we shot the scene in a real train station, we would have undoubtedly ended up with an image that appeared thoroughly natural and realistic, but we would never have been so wildly successful in conveying that particular impression—a combination of loneliness, the country, the winter’s night, the frost, and the squalor—that the studio allowed us to create. It is here in the studio that the angle of view, lighting technique, and decor can all be precisely coordinated with each other. The creation of believable natural objects is especially important to the success of films that take place in an unreal world. In my fi lm Waxworks, I sought to create an architecture that was so thoroughly stylized that it would completely preclude any thoughts of reality as such. I constructed a fairground that was entirely devoid of details, conveying instead a nearly indescribable ambience produced by lights, moving bodies, shadows, lines, and curves. The camera does not capture reality, but rather the reality of our experience. This is so much deeper, more potent, more gripping than what we look at every day with our eyes, and I really believe that film can effectively reproduce this enhanced form of reality. Allow me to mention the Caligari film and also The Golem, with its monumental cityscape created by Hans Poelzig. I cannot emphasize enough how far the film architect

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

501

must really turn away from that world we see before us every single day in order to put his finger on that pulse beating just below the world’s surface. I am about to begin the challenging task of creating the background sets for Joe May’s latest film Der Farmer aus Texas [The farmer from Texas], which, as you undoubtedly know, is based on Georg Kaiser’s comedy Kolportage. The architect has been given the concrete task of creating everything from halls in castles to hotels to rooms small and large. But an artist like Joe May naturally demands much more than that. This is no simple matter of throwing together a couple of tastefully decorated rooms in a studio. He requires spaces that can, in and of themselves, generate precisely the same mood that is created in the scene that is being enacted in those spaces. We traveled extensively to ensure that there were no contradictions—down to the smallest detail—between the interior and exterior shots. We also learned how independent the architect could be in his work without marring the special character that is created in the exterior shots. It is clear, then, that what is asked of the film architect is certainly not to construct “pretty” spaces. He is asked to penetrate beyond the surface to reach the heart of the matter. He ought to create a mood, even if the only tools at his disposal are those simple, everyday objects we can all see lying around us. And this is precisely what makes him an artist. Were this not the case, there would be no need for an architect in film in the first place and no reason whatsoever why a talented apprentice carpenter could not replace him. Notes 1. Kristin Thompson, Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 57. 2. The Große Berliner Kunstausstellung was a yearly art exhibition in Berlin.

225 JULIE ELIAS Film and Fashion First published as “Film und Mode,” in Das große Bilderbuch des Films (Berlin: Film-Kurier, 1924), 36. Translated by Tara Hottman.

In interwar Germany, cinema served as an important site for fashion exhibition, as film scholar Mila Ganeva has demonstrated. The popular actress Asta Nielsen selected costumes that would produce an optimal impression on screen and even observed a link between “a well-made film” and “a good fashion magazine.”1 From Nielsen’s statement, it becomes clear that fashion was not merely a question of commodity display and consumption but also a central element of film aesthetics. In the following text, fashion journalist Julie Elias (1866–1945) argues that film compensates for its lack of color through its basis in movement, which facilitates multiperspectival examination of actors’ garments. Noting that fashion undergoes constant change, Elias also suggests that films might serve as “a sort of fashion journal or a chronicle of fashion over time.”

A cursory inspection may lead to the preliminary conclusion that film and fashion are traveling on different paths and that these paths do not intersect. Film is certainly not the place where fashion can assert its special power, its significant influence: the element of

502

Configurations of a Medium

color, on which its shine and shimmer seem to thrive. Cut and color are and always have been the decisive and harmonious factors. Nevertheless, the cinematographic fashion shows—which we have witnessed frequently for some time now (also thanks to the pretty models who added grace and chic to the chic) —were so good that we barely missed color. The miracle of advanced photography has made color seem dispensable. Visually, color was replaced by the sharp yet elegant distinction between black and white. Cut and line were so clearly emphasized in the photograph that the eye was able to imagine further aspects, so to speak, and thus achieve the feeling of fabric and color. Indeed, modern brocades and lamé fabrics are especially well suited as cinematic garments because of the bold raised patterns of brocade and the dazzling brilliance of lamé. Even new kinds of beadwork have this color-suggesting ability. In general, the more valuable the fabric is, the more it qualifies to be reproduced in film. Even the least sensitive of visual organs can distinguish a valuable fabric from a worthless one in film, a soft leather glove from a coarser cotton glove. It is photography that effectively reproduces things: it is the most relentless of all means of revealing things. Therefore, the major fashion studios now gladly provide their services to film. Even men’s clothing must be made by a first-rate tailor: a tailcoat that does not sit impeccably is irritating to the eye. A society film requires, like any other film, far more time for its total production (i.e., until it is presented to the public) than does the rehearsing of a play. For this reason, formal attire should be designed and executed by the fashion studios at the forefront of the fashion world—for such studios are not glued to the present but already looking toward the future. Yes, we can almost certainly determine the age of a film based on the type of evening clothes worn by the actors. A dress that is worn beyond even one single season already appears dusty and provincial. In the theater, clothing can be updated, but not in film. In modern films, it is difficult to convey a sense of modernity to the audience if it does not see modern fashions on the screen. The progress of film lies in this matter of taste; in the past, we did not take this seriously, even though the French had already cultivated great elegance in their first filmic scenes of high society. In theater, we have the competition of the ear, but in film, every effect and every pleasure is concentrated in the eye. Here everything depends on visual art, just as everything in radio depends on auditory art. Just as the fidelity of costumes is required in historical films, so too, in society films, we expect the authenticity of the current dress, the dress of the time in which the film takes place. Yet ultimately, historical pieces put the rule to the test. Until now, they were quite literally the costume dramas of film; here is the reason for this unusual popularity of certain films that deal with French history—especially the dramas about the eighteenth century. It was the magnificent costumes of the rococo, the revolution era, and the empire that delighted audiences so much that they could not get enough of them. It was the fidelity of the costumes that so delighted spectators—the fidelity to a modernity of the past! In the theater, a tremendous coloristic appeal emanates from feminine clothing, an intrinsically distinct colorfulness that, as stated above, the cinema must forgo, at least for the time being. But to some extent film is still able to compensate in other ways for the lack of this lovely allure: namely, through movement, which reveals the force of the lines of these garments in their rich and changing abundance. On the stage, we see women as we see them in a room. We see them differently in film. We see them in the great outdoors; we observe how the wind stirs their clothing and plays with it. Is there anyone who has not already experienced such an incomparable feast for the eyes as when a lady walks through a park in a film and her dress blows in the wind, stirring and moving like the

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

503

foliage of trees? And how much more amusing does a coat look when a storm inflates it like a sail compared to a coat that hangs—plain, dreary, and tedious—from an actor’s body? On stage, actresses usually just face the audience frontally or—because this has now made a comeback—turn their backs. In the varied movements of film, by contrast, they can be seen from all sides. In short, in film, where the spoken word is replaced by movement, formal dress could come into its own to a higher degree artistically than in theater—insofar as the eye is more or less able to wander around it. In this way, a current play could become a sort of fashion journal or a chronicle of fashion over time. Note 1. “Asta Nielsen wieder in Berlin,” Elegante Welt (June 18, 1919), 7; quoted in Mila Ganeva, Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918–1933 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 113.

226 GUIDO SEEBER The Delirious Camera First published as “Die taumelnde Kamera,” in Die Filmtechnik, no. 5 (1925), 92–93. Translated by Don Reneau.

Although tracking shots and pans can be observed in early “phantom rides” and actualities such as Guido Seeber’s Ausfahrt der Chinakrieger von Bremerhaven mit der Straßburg am 31.7.1900 (1900), the aesthetic possibilities of camera movement would find full expression in the 1920s, when the “delirious” or “unchained” camera became a veritable tour de force. In the German context, this was thanks in no small measure to the long-standing efforts of Seeber (1879–1940), a pioneering cinematographer who became most famous for developing trick photography and moving camera shots for films such as Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913), Sylvester (New Year’s Eve, 1924), and Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul, 1926). In addition to writing books on camerawork, special effects, and amateur filmmaking, Seeber also served as coeditor of the journal Die Filmtechnik. On camera movement, see also the texts by Karl Freund (no. 229) and Lotar Holland (no. 230) later in this chapter.

In order to achieve its purpose, which is to capture on a strip of film individual images of the moving events that take place before its eye, the lens, the movie camera must be solidly anchored during its activity, remaining as unshakable and immobile as possible. Thirty years have already passed since Lumière established the principle that in order to prevent the camera from creating detrimental motion that could damage the image, the film camera should be set up on a very stable, solid tripod and that the one operating the camera should lay his left hand atop the camera while turning the crank with his right. The result of these Lumièrian suggestions, when followed correctly, was in fact a stationary, stable, absolutely static image. But the camera should at the same time reproduce the visual impressions we perceive while we are moving. One of what is likely among very first film images, one recorded and made public by Lumière himself, provides a shot from an elevator that goes up the Eiffel Tower in Paris. We see the iron construction of the Eiffel Tower gliding past us in unmediated closeness. The view through the ironwork reveals that we have moved far

504

Configurations of a Medium

from the earth, climbing ever higher. This must surely be one of the first shots about which one can say that the movie camera was in motion during recording. Later we can find a camera sitting on a locomotive or a car: the surroundings glide past, as in a cyclorama; we approach tunnels and bridges; houses and trees course past with the familiar effect of depth, forwards as well as backwards. Sitting in a boat, we see the most beautiful shores gliding past evenly, and here, too, the stereoscopic effect becomes visible. As I said, in order to achieve the effect that the spectator experiences in reality, the camera has been brought onto all vehicles that roll, float, or that rise above the earth, be it a hot-air balloon or an airplane. Yet in all of these types of shots, the camera was stable and securely set up, fastened, anchored. But it was inevitable that the camera would be liberated from the legs of the tripod so that it could be placed on other legs, those that walk. The camera was simply strapped onto the cameraman; it was powered by a second man who walked alongside and generated the power for the shot with a loose cord. Our camera now ran on its own; it was no longer stiffly bound to one location and could now effectively see that which our eye usually perceives when we ourselves move, either directly or indirectly. However, the crank still constituted a hindrance; it too had to disappear, had to be replaced by something else. Over ten years ago, someone had invented a camera, the Aeroscope, which was driven by air pressure. A built-in gyroscope stabilized it, and one could shoot however one desired, be it walking or even on horseback. When the Kearton brothers experienced such great success with their first recordings of live animals,1 it was in fact this camera driven by air pressure that paved the way for them. The toughest competition for this camera was created by a small electrical motor that could be used as a power source, drawing the required energy from a generator or a dry-cell battery. Even before the war, such cameras were successfully built, and it then became possible to record in any conditions. But with this invention, we were still far from reaching the end effect. It was still most desirable to film as invisibly, as imperceptibly as possible, to create as little sensation as possible, without giving rise to any suspicion that cranking was necessary. Working like a detective, the cameraman was to place the events on the filmstrip unnoticed. This was made reasonably possible through a small handheld apparatus that was driven by springs. It was small and delicate and equipped to record for up to fifteen seconds. With this invention, a new epoch began. Earlier, certain free movements of the camera during the recording were permitted to a limited degree. But as a result of the small size of this camera, one was now in a position to present impressions that earlier could only be achieved with severe limitations. In fact, this little camera has become the norm. There are scenes in just about every feature film that were recorded solely with the Sept, 2 scenes that on occasion escape the keen eye of the technician. I recall now Die freudlose Gasse [The Joyless Street], a film in which many transition shots of the characters moving from place to place were recorded with the Sept. The little camera is held in the hand during filming. This requires some practice but it works. And even old, very conservative, skeptical directors will be converted. The camera itself does move, but it still must be held. Instead, it should become completely free, should float through space; it must dangle and swing. In the film Die Biene Maja [Maya the bee], 3 it must float next to its subject in order that nothing escape it, in order to capture the impression of the bee as it hurries from blossom to blossom. This little wonder could conjure up all the effects perceived by creatures not bound to the earth. A ski jump! We on the sidelines, who stand in awe of the jumper, have no sense of how the surroundings are reflected in his eyes during the jump. But wait! We could strap this

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

505

camera to him, he could trigger it with his mouth at a given time, and we would see what he sees during his jump through the air. Or the same could be done during a pilot’s looping, during his sideslips, during all caprioles that the skillful commander of an airplane can come up with. The dramatic plot of a film often requires that someone or another jump down from a high place or that he fall, or meet his end in a similar manner. Shouldn’t dropping this camera create the sensation of free-falling? It should suffice to let the camera free-fall, slowed by a small parachute that could provide orientation during the fall. Such images, such impressions, would contribute to the creation of more effective, technically precise, and visually accurate representations of such events. There is no telling the possibilities offered by such a camera. And should an improved model with two lenses of differing focal lengths and with a depth of field of thirty meters come onto the market, then it will only be up to the scriptwriters and directors to imagine what all one can do with such an instrument. Notes 1. Cherry and Richard Kearton were animal photographers who wrote With Nature and a Camera (1898). 2. The Debrie Sept camera was a 35mm French camera introduced onto the market in 1922 for both still and moving images. 3. Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer (1926) is a live-action Kulturfilm adaptation of the famous books by Waldemar Bonsels.

227 BÉLA BALÁZS Productive and Reproductive Film Art First published as “Produktive und reproduktive Filmkunst,” in Filmtechnik, no. 12 (June 12, 1926), 234–35. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

For early-twentieth-century German commentators who categorically denied film’s status as a new form of art, the camera appeared as a mere tool of photographic reproduction. It is thus no coincidence that virtuosic cameramen of the Weimar era would often define their work in terms of artisanal craftsmanship and that leading film theorists such as Béla Balázs would highlight the creative, “productive” dimensions of cinematography, lending the filmic apparatus artistic and even spiritual qualities. Balázs’s text is based on the lecture “Filmtradition und Filmzukunft” that he delivered to the Klub der Kameraleute Deutschlands (German Cameramen’s Club) in Berlin on June 9, 1926, on the invitation of its chairman Karl Freund. The text was printed in the Russian language journal Kino on July 6, 1926, prompting a famous and polemical attack by Sergei Eisenstein (“Béla Forgets the Scissors”), which appeared in the same journal on July 20 and August 10, 1926. The distinction between productive and reproductive filmmaking was a common trope of the avant-garde (see, for example, Behne’s “Film as a Work of Art,” no. 204) and continued into later decades; in “The Film as an Original Art Form” (1955), published in the first issue of Film Culture, Hans Richter argued that the main aesthetic question of cinema is the degree to which the camera is used “to reproduce (any object which appears before the lens) or to produce (sensations not possible in any other art medium).”1

506

Configurations of a Medium

Is it conceivable that a film could attain the artistic value, the spiritual significance, for example, of Goethe’s Faust, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or Michelangelo’s Moses? The question sounds almost harsh. For although there is no longer a rational person who would doubt that a film is—or at least can be—a work of art, the most passionate advocates of the “new art” are themselves still humble. Even in their wildest dreams, they would not envisage film at this highest level of human revelation, in the sacred, holy sphere in which the spirits of the immortals give us light. They have often been touched and deeply moved by a film scene, but to apply the standard of absolute high art—to think of Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo by way of comparison— would seem like blasphemy even to the film fanatic. This is not only because film is a young art that still has its best to give. No, they do not believe at all in this ultimate, highest potentiality. Why?! Is this uppermost level of art denied to film on account of its nature? And why does it still appear that way today, if this is indeed only an appearance? Is, for example, the performance of Asta Nielsen in Absturz or of Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms not the highest conceivable form of art?2 It is thus not because of the acting. The mimic revelations that the film transmits to us have already reached that sacred sphere of eternity. Is it because of the film story, the script? Certainly we still lack a Shakespeare of the screenplay. But no one could prove that film writing is fundamentally inferior and must always remain inferior to the other genres of poetry. Even the director has more, not fewer opportunities in film than in theater, which was never denied this highest consecration of art. So why is it, then, that the nobility of the highest art is not even expected of film? Not because of the acting, the script, or the direction. Perhaps it is because of the cinematography. Before I elaborate on this, I would like to briefly point out a historical fact. When film first began to be regarded as an art, it was the actor who was first recognized. The “stars” became famous. Later, one noted the artistic significance of the mise-en-scène and the editing, and the directors were awarded laurels. But the name of the cameraman, if mentioned at all, is still not cited with the reverence and love due to the “great artist.” To the broader public, he seems to be a mere intermediary, as if the actual artistic work has already been completed when he begins his work. And yet it is ultimately his work that we see in the film—not the acting or direction, but rather the image of the acting and direction. The reason for doubting the highest artistic value of film is that it can presumably only be a mediated art. It is a deeply rooted prejudice that cinematography is and can remain (and should remain, as some argue!) a mere technique of reproduction. The actual artistic event, so it seems, occurs in the studio. If film offers us only a reproduction, then the film itself is indeed not an artwork from which the magic force of the creative spirit can transfer itself to us through immediate contact, as occurs when we stand before a Rembrandt painting or a Michelangelo statue. For film, it appears, can at best function only as the photographic reproduction of artworks that we do not, and indeed cannot, see in their original. Like the table of contents of lost books, film seems to furnish information only about an art that never appears to us in immediate form. Thus, film could become a work of art in this highest sense only if it were not reproductively but rather productively shot; if the ultimate and crucial creative expression of spirit, soul, and feeling were to first emerge not through the acting and scenery but rather in the film images themselves through shooting; if the cameraman, who ultimately makes the film, were the spiritual creator, the poet of the work, the actual maker of the film for

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

507

whom the acting and the staging are only the occasion and basis to which he relates like a painter to the scenery (even if it is the nicest) or the model (even if he or she is the most beautiful). The acting and staging turn into an artwork on screen only because they become an expression of his soul. But as long as the cameraman is the “last man,”3 film will remain the last art. That sentence, however, should be reversed! When I speak of the special artistic value of fi lming, I do not mean the decorative beauty of the images, which is already very common and which receives greater emphasis than is beneficial. For the decorative beauty of individual shots gives film something stably pictorial, painterly, self-contained, quasi self-enclosed, lifted out of the streaming flood of phenomena. The film then jolts in staccato from one beautiful shot to another like a series of fixed tableaux vivants, even though the essence of film art lies in capturing the rhythm of movement of the streaming flood of phenomena of vital life. No, I mean the latent symbolic power of expression, the poetic meaningfulness of the shots, which have nothing to do with “decorativeness” and “beauty” and are not provided by the acting, by the objects, but rather are exclusively created through filming. I would like to demonstrate this using two recent examples, two wonderful shots from Battleship Potemkin. The exultation of the population of Odessa is shown through the rhythmically intensified grouping of the masses, until it seems that it cannot become any greater. How could one express any more enthusiasm, any more exultation and bliss in an image? And then comes that magnificent image that drowns out all the previous ones like an ecstatic chant: the sailboats that take flight from the ship! According to the content of the story, they carry food to the sailors. But according to the content of the image, they all seem to bring hearts to them. In this simple, buoyant flight of hundreds of billowed sails, a group gesture appears in the image that expresses more exultation, love, bliss, and hope than the greatest actor’s face could express. This shot—indeed the shot and not the motif!—is imbued with an effusive lyricism to the point of overflowing, with an allegorical power, with a poetry that is almost beyond comparison with any written poem. In this latent allegorical power of images, which has nothing to with “decorative beauty,” one finds the poetic-creative potentiality of the cameraman. We then see the sailboats from the deck of the ship. As if by command, all lower their sails at the same time. The streamlined “content” of the events is that the boats stand still in front of the ship. But the effect of the image is as if the hundred sails, the hundred flags were bowing to the hero in salutation. In this allegorical power of the images, one finds one’s own poetry, which first emerges in the image through filming. For if, for example, a greater portion of the natural surroundings were presented, the two shots would feature the same motif without this symbolic-poetic expression. If these sailors were only part of a broader landscape, then they would not determine the expression, the physiognomy of the image. Only the consciously chosen shot that lets the sailors fill the entire frame gives it the definiteness of a physiognomic expression and the significance of a gesture that becomes the emotional content and meaning of the image. In this case, it is easy to prove that the poetic expression of this image was created through filming and not through the motif. But it can be reached only when the film is not the copy of art but itself becomes the primary work of art. Of course some will say the two shots in Potemkin of which I spoke were perhaps specified by the director and were not the cameraman’s own independent ideas. That may be. It is irrelevant who controls the filming and whether the director or the operator is the creator of such art. It is crucial only that this specific film art can emerge only via the gaze through the lens and can be created only through the filming process.

508

Configurations of a Medium

Notes 1. Hans Richter, “The Film as an Original Art Form,” Film Culture 1, no. 1 (January 1955): 19. 2. Balázs here references Ludwig Wolff’s Der Absturz (Downfall, 1923) and D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919). 3. A reference to the German title, Der letzte Mann, of F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), a film renowned for Karl Freund’s cinematography, especially his “unchained camera.”

228 FRITZ LANG Looking toward the Future: On the Occasion of the Paris Congress First published as “Ausblick auf Morgen. Zum Pariser Kongress,” in Lichtbild-Bühne 19, no. 229 (September 25, 1926). Translated by Sara Hall.

The metaphor of cinema as a universal language can be found in the early filmtheoretical writings of Béla Balázs, Ricciotto Canudo, Louis Delluc, and Vachel Lindsay, among others. Taking up this metaphor, Fritz Lang here argues that through its “mute speech,” film might help facilitate reconciliation among the various nations. Organized by the League of Nations, the first International Film Congress was held in Paris in September 1926 (shortly after the Locarno Treaties were ratified) to explore the uses of film for international understanding.

In the beginning was . . . not the word. Nor was it the deed. In the beginning was motion.1 Motion is the most basic testament to life. It does not matter whether we are dealing with the dance of the stars or of the mosquitoes. The old “I think, therefore I am” should be translated into “Moving, therefore alive.” Nature has forced our age—the first since the Earth’s creation to sense the attraction of movement as the rush of speed—to create the moving picture that we call film and to raise it to the level of self-expression. Although it may still seem primitive, this form of expression is following the consequential and logical path to becoming an art form. Viewed externally, it appeared for a time as if the unprecedented ravenous appetite with which the broad masses gobbled up film would do more to hinder its transition into an art form than to help it. Film’s quality could not keep pace with the demands of this appetite. The subtlest creation ever born from imagination and technology risked suffocating irretrievably in the swamp of the most insidious kitsch. Only a very few of those working in film from the beginning possessed a broad perspective not only on film’s potentials but also on the unfathomable responsibility that film would assume as a means of nourishing the intellect and the spirit of the people. But imagination and technology saved their own creation. Technology did so by successfully attempting to lend new forms to all-too-familiar realities, and by transforming the depths of the banal into something that could be raised to the heights of an ingenious realization. Imagination worked to master film poetically. I am completely convinced that the rebirth of film can result from this idea alone. Today the genius of technology remains the dominant presence in film, and it continues to satisfy itself by surprising, baffling, amusing, or gripping us—as when, for example, it uses fast motion to speed things up for us to the point of becoming grotesque or

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

509

when it reveals to us the beauty of moving things, right down to the last mystery, through the use of slow motion. But the true greatness of film will be revealed only when, as we hope, tomorrow’s film emphasizes the experience of an idea, the genius of the poetic. Let us be clear about this. Film is the rhapsody of the twentieth century. But it could be much more for humanity; it could be the traveling preacher who speaks before millions. Through the mute speech of its moving images, in a language that is equally comprehensible in all hemispheres, film can make an honest contribution to repairing the chaos that has prevented nations from seeing each other as they really are ever since the Tower of Babel. As paradoxical as it may sound today, we will begin to use slow motion to record thoughts and feelings in order to show the mystery of their emergence. Or when it is called for, we will use fast motion to vividly portray the chaotic eruption of a nervous breakdown. There are no limits to film’s potential. Its task is to bring everything that moves and lives through movement closer to our senses, whether this be the procession of white clouds past a snowy peak or the twitch of the lips between a laugh and a cry—a distant and unseen past or a far-off future. However, I believe that one of the most wonderful tasks for fi lm will be to better acquaint us with a being we perhaps know least well precisely because it is always far too close to us: the human being. Did film not reintroduce us to the human face? Should we not also call upon it to rediscover the human soul—this great and adventurous miracle of beauty and ugliness, of lofty and base thought, of nobility and malice, and, to a certain extent, of the touching and the comic? Film is a moving image of life in motion. It is technology as the harbinger of the visually poetic. And what is the final goal? If the film of tomorrow, graced with poetry, can teach us to recognize more clearly the person beside—and within—us, this will perhaps amount to a step forward on the path to goodness, sympathy, and self-awareness, a step toward an all-redeeming belief in the gifts of the world. Note 1. A reference to the famous scene in Goethe’s Faust in which the title character translates the Gospel of John.

229 KARL FREUND Behind My Camera: New Possibilities for Shooting Film First published as “Hinter meinem Kurbelkasten: Neue Möglichkeiten der Filmaufnahme,” in Uhu 3, no. 9 (June 1927), 64–71. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

In the 1920s, the technique of the “unchained camera” (entfesselte Kamera) became a distinguishing marker of German cinema. Developed by Karl Freund for films such as F. W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and E. A. Dupont’s Varieté (Variety, 1925), this technique allowed the camera a new degree of mobility, with the apparatus mounted, for example, on a bicycle or a trapeze. Freund (1890–1969) was the cinematographer for The Golem (1920) and Metropolis (1927), among many other

510

Configurations of a Medium Weimar films. Moving to the United States in 1929, he directed several horror films for Universal, including The Mummy (1932), and later won an Oscar for Best Cinematography. In the following text, he discusses the salient contributions of camera technique to the evolution of film aesthetics more broadly.

Naturally, filmic material has experienced an extraordinary metamorphosis. As with every optical invention, we began with pure studies of movement, filming a galloping horse, a jumping person, a flying bird, and so on. We thus limited ourselves to short, oneact films, in which as much as possible had to be going on. People jumped from windows, cyclists raced through the streets, tables and chairs fell over—in short, there was a tendency toward slapstick-like actions. Or there were sentimental scenes; people felt the greatest joy and the deepest sorrow and gesticulated theatrically on the screen, whose occasional flickering was nearly unbearable. Of course, there was not yet a psychology of film, nor dramaturgy of any kind. Everything that appeared on the screen in moving—and at the time literally “flickering”— pictures was new and interesting. A military march was every bit as enthralling as a mother tending to her child on a stretcher. Over time, we tried to endow film with its own style, to create material appropriate to its unique qualities that would translate psychological conflicts into optical terms. But let it be noted that even today, film has no specific laws, or at least none that are valid for more than particular, discrete experiences. This is the most important chapter in film history. Developing the external form of the apparatus for shooting and playback is extraordinarily important, because our efforts are not directed merely at the technical quality of the image. We want to totally revolutionize the manner of shooting. This impulse leads us in the most varied of directions. On the one hand, due to the short daylight hours, we need extraordinarily light-sensitive film stock in order to shoot even in adverse lighting conditions; on the other hand, we want to get away from the studio with its lamps, its more or less theatrical sets, and its excruciatingly cumbersome tripod. By building faster lenses and hypersensitive film, we have nearly reached the first goal of being able to shoot outside of the studio as much as possible. As for the call to “do away with the tripod,” we already have a series of handheld camera devices. By the way, we have no desire to swoop around like birds with the camera, visually torturing the audience; rather, we wish to make use of the untethered, “flying” camera only where it is logically required. Like the human eye, like an invisible spectator, we want to eavesdrop on every activity, follow every movement—from underneath, from above, from the left, from the right, forward and backward, in every phase and direction of movement. And in our efforts, our search for new paths, we have realized that the camera and its technique will play an enormous role here—we might even say a bigger role than direction, performance, and set design, which are frequently just distracting accoutrements. In our technique, at least as I define it, we must distinguish between the effect of the object itself, the effect of the story, and the viewer’s impressions and thought processes, while also considering the subject in question. If the thing in itself plays a role—the hand, the eye, the wagon wheel, the bayonet’s point—the focal position (and thus the shooting technique) will be completely different than a shot that is supposed to evoke a psychological moment for the spectator. If we want to show an optical process, an excerpt of human life as seen from a particular angle, we will look for a certain standpoint from

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

511

which the image will have a definite effect on the spectator. This is where camera direction diverges from what we commonly know as film direction. This is also the point at which a knowledgeable director has to decide to what extent he sees the camera— detached from a fixed position—as the “eye of the world,” a simple bearer of the film, as the static point in the fleeting appearances. Film is the heaven of realism. Children and animals, animals and children, always appear on film in their unaffected naturalness, creating a thought-provoking effect. And who can know if the ultimate realism that we filmmakers are striving for lies not with actors but with everyday people. The Americans were the first to recognize that film has its own laws, that realism is much more important in fi lm than in theater. The same American directors who invented the close-up also stressed the importance of naturalistic performances. They practically bred film types, casting even the smallest roles to make the audience believe they were witnessing real life. But they were also the first—building on the idea that film is a purely optical matter, whose crescendo and decrescendo must lie in editing and image selection—to give film its rhythm. American film rhythm, that dynamic escalation that piles effect on effect and never leaves the spectator languishing even for an instant, is renowned all over the world. And that is exclusively the director’s concern. He must know how to take more or less uninteresting visual material and use this rhythmic technique to make it optically interesting and captivating. People always claim that film shoots require unnecessary efforts, that we are spending profligately, and that not enough economic principles prevail. This does happen to some extent, since generally speaking, there is not yet such a thing as a real fi lm businessman. The what isn’t significant for film, but rather the how. Fashion doesn’t determine a film’s success, but its form, the method of its creation. And in Germany we have seen that films on a giant scale, which gobble up massive sums of money, have failed in the end despite their artistic and technical mastery. On the other hand, we have also seen huge films with large budgets that have turned huge profits, but that was because their director understood that impressing the spectator by grand and wasteful means was only as important as capturing his heart or electrifying his nerves. And that spectator’s heart, his nerves must be the objective of the producer’s efforts. He must know that in the end, the highest art will always speak to the public’s soul. And even the smallest well-made film will achieve this more easily than the grandest, if the latter is built on an empty foundation. We who stand behind the camera should replicate life in all its gruesome reality, reveal its deepest secrets. But we should also see with an artistic eye, dissect the universal human core and show these tiny experiences for what they really are, a little piece of the staggering drama of the world’s fate. But we shouldn’t let the instincts of the masses set the standards for us, not the false sentimentality of melodrama, the hollow gestures of the theater, which we should have left behind long ago. Not the kind of artistic sleight of hand that is just an end unto itself and has absolutely nothing to do with the things we want to show. Popularization, as I understand it, means singling out an individual destiny from the crowd. Leaving trivial things behind to show the essential—the battle of outlooks and ideas, a battle of moral opposites—and addressing everything that is current, spiritual, or meaningful. The popular film will bring us the drama of ideas. The popular film will be the expression of our time!

512

Configurations of a Medium

230 LOTAR HOLLAND Subjective Movement First published as “Subjektive Bewegung,” in Filmtechnik 3, no. 23 (November 12, 1927), 407–8. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Participating in wider discussions of mobile camerawork in the mid-1920s, Lotar Holland’s article focuses on the possibilities of camera movement to provoke “subjective identifi cation” on the part of cinematic spectators, anticipating Christian Metz’s distinction between primary and secondary identification. Featured in F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) and Tartuffe (1925), subjective camera movement would also be used in a trajectory of later films including Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009).

The term unchained camera has now become a catchphrase. And people really are beginning to allow the camera more mobility during filming than before. Specialist publications are also welcoming this development—without, however, submitting the achieved results to a satisfactorily critical observation. For, like the panning camera, the unchained camera presents a potential pitfall since the intended visual effect can easily veer into a mere game of technical gadgetry. All too often, spectators who had freely identified with a film up to a certain moment are suddenly unable even to follow it; placing a visual puzzle before their eyes, the film yanks them from their emotional involvement by requiring an involuntary intellectual effort to understand what the point of this moving image could be. In general, movement represents one of the most elementary components of expression in film; as is well known, we encounter filmic movement in the following three forms: the objective movement of the things and people being filmed, the subjective movement of the camera itself, and the formal movement of the filmstrip during projection. Let us consider each of these three forms in terms of its intrinsic value in the creation of the typical feature film today. The first is without question a function of the object itself in nature, the second a means of secondary artistic creation, and the third a mode by which the completed film is presented. Camera movement, or what goes today by the name of “unchaining” the camera, belongs therefore to the second category, and thus plays the central role in the artistic creation of a film in general. This circumstance, however, accounts for the absolute necessity of educating oneself about the nature and possible laws of camera movement. Even if the spectator identifies with the film unwinding before his eyes to the extent that we can speak more or less of an experience, we must nonetheless define his behavior before the screen more closely to draw conclusions about subtler methods of filmmaking. What we find is that, at certain points, the spectator’s behavior tends more toward objective observation of the events in the film, while at others, it leans more toward a subjective identification with them. More precisely, as one can learn through self-observation, the spectator tends more to observe the movements of actors—that is, objective movement—as something unfolding before him, while he experiences camera movements subjectively. At certain moments, he has the illusion that the camera’s movements are his own, as in the well-known phenomenon where, watching a shot taken from within a moving train, one imagines oneself traveling in the train. Let us elaborate on this last example and suppose that a previous shot had shown a person looking out of the train window; the spectator will then imagine himself subjec-

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

513

tively transported into the role of the passenger. In subsequent shots, there would then be no need to show the passenger leaning back away from the window at the sight of an oncoming train or taking his seat. Rather, the camera itself could perform the passenger’s movements; the spectator would then grasp these movements and identify with them. We see, then, that camera movement can actively draw spectators into the action. And with that, we can now divide camera movements into two principle types according to their effect: movements corresponding to a character’s action (action movements) and those corresponding to a character’s emotions (affective movements). As already remarked, however, the spectator perceives both types as his own. Consequently, in both of these types of effect, the motion of the camera must correspond exactly to the movements that the spectator, if placed in the situation shown in the film, would execute with his own body, and more precisely with his head; in this way, the camera lens can record only what the spectator himself would see in reality, be it as a result of conscious or unconscious movements. The imitation of conscious, voluntary movements will be the task of the camera’s action movement; affective camera movement, on the other hand, by imitating unconscious human movements driven by inner stirrings, will convey emotions to the spectator and increase his inner identification with the processes shown on the screen. Up to the present, subjective camera movements have only rarely been applied systematically. We leave aside those superficial practices such as panning and camera tilting, with their goal of “showing” audiences some object lying below the frame or to the side of it. As a living, artistic organism, the work of film can only be hampered in its effectiveness by such arbitrary external interventions. In a film, one should never be able to perceive the hand of the director behind the scenes. A work of art should rather unfold on its own and from within. Let us now consider some examples of subjective camera movement. As explained above, in order to convey emotional experiences, the camera would have to imitate the emotional reflex movements of the spectator placed in the same situations in reality. Let us imagine, for example, a revolutionary film or an adventure film in which an excited crowd races across a square (obliquely toward the camera) and, suddenly seeing something terrifying in front of them (behind the camera), comes to an abrupt halt. What should the camera do at this last moment? In accordance with the movements that the spectator would actually make in this situation (in which he would hold his breath and open his eyes wide), the camera itself will abruptly move a few centimeters backward and upward, only then to return to its previous objective, passive position. In this case, the expression of sudden fright, which began with the objective movement of the crowd, would be channeled into the subjective emotional experience of the spectator. To offer another example, during the closing shot of a landscape in the evening, a shot normally faded out with a stationary camera, one can tilt the camera a few degrees forward during the fade out. Similar motifs also guide camera movement in scenes involving a death. If one wishes to express the shock of death, one can suddenly insert a blunt, still image of the dead person into the film. On the other hand, in order to convey pain and mourning, one can slowly lower the camera a little, a gesture perfectly adequate to the real bodily movement and inner emotion of someone standing before a dead man in reality. Let us recall, in this context, a scene from a well-known film in which a policeman orders the inhabitants of a village to disperse. The policeman, whose facial expressions represent a figure of unlimited power, walks out of the film set and closer and closer to the camera until, in close-up, he finally shouts his order right at the spectators in the auditorium. There follows a title, and the scene then comes to a close. The use of camera movement could have considerably intensified the scene’s filmic effect. As long as the policeman

514

Configurations of a Medium

continues his approach toward the camera, spectators have the illusion that he is approaching them personally; this illusion reaches its climax with the largest close-up. But the spectator’s experience is necessarily transformed into mere observation at the sight of the subsequent title; for his own common sense necessarily informs him that this command cannot be meant for him at all, that he is sitting in the cinema and that his previous experience was only an illusion. However, this transformation could have been avoided if, in place of the title, the camera itself had followed the policeman’s order and backed away. This would have also permitted some of the dispersing groups of town inhabitants to appear in the expanding frame. Through such a gesture, of course, the camera movement would have already taken on an action-oriented character. In opposition to the subtle, affective movement of the camera with its musical qualities stands the objective movement of action. The latter does not address the spectator’s personal feelings directly but rather only through the detour of the actor. The spectator imagines himself transported into the actor’s role and, from the point of view of the latter, perceives the moving image recorded by the camera as if it were the perception of his own eyes. Generally, in such scenes, the camera continues independently to execute the movements suggested by the actor in the first shot, while the actor himself disappears from the subsequent shots. This method has already found frequent application in fi lms where, for instance, an opening shot of two men, one of whom is attacking the other, is followed by a shot of the attacker approaching the camera itself, which now backs away from him in fear. During this scene, one should naturally hold the camera in the exact position of the head of the character backing away, so that the lens can record everything from his perspective. It is thus extremely clumsy of directors when, for example, an actor looks down in one shot at an object such as a clock lying on the table below, while the next shot “illustrates” the same clock from a horizontal point of view. The spectator should, rather, see this clock from the same angle as the actor, lest the film become a mere description or an illustrated novel. As a blatant example of the incorrect usage of camera movement, let us recall that scene from another well-known film, in which the experience of a woman’s sudden internal breakdown is conveyed by showing—simultaneously in the same shot— both the figure of the woman in the center of the room and the room spinning before her eyes. This scene amounts to no more than an illustration of the words: “She begins to sway, and the room seems to be spinning around her.” Had the camera itself recorded the impression of the room’s spinning walls, or even sunk to the ground, it could have produced a more subjective effect—although in such extreme cases, one should always take care to maintain a certain restraint. Through its expressive power, subjective movement—in a combined form of action movements and affective movements—is able to attain the highest degree of autonomy. Thus the camera can act out entire segments of the plot in the actor’s stead. By way of example, let us consider a scene in which a thief takes flight after being discovered in someone’s house. In today’s films, the director “shows” the thief’s surprise, his flight, the pursuit, and his capture. But “filmed,” this scene would appear as follows: in the first shot, one sees the thief stealing an object, taking fright at being discovered, and fleeing off screen. From now on, this flight is taken up by the camera alone; from a short distance, one sees the robbed man sounding the alarm and people rushing up; the camera rushes down the steps of the house, but stops short when it sees people climbing toward it from the bottom of the stairs; it turns and jumps through the window and down to the street—whereupon the screen fades for a moment to white; then the camera rushes through the streets, ducks behind the corner of a house, sees the people approaching, and continues its flight; a constable appears in the frame facing the camera; it slows its pace,

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

515

people enter the frame from the side; then it receives a blow from behind, so that it sinks, lens-first, to the ground. The next frame shows the dismayed crowd surrounding the thief on the ground take a few steps backward. There follows a single still shot of the thief lying on the ground, blood gushing forth, and so on. As described here, these scenes perhaps sound a little crude, but this description is intended only to illustrate the principle. In addition to the two types of camera movements described here, there exist a number of others, of course; but these belong in a separate group, since they do not number among those elements of filmmaking that contribute to the production of illusion but are rather of a more formal nature. These include, for example, ornamental camera movement, which in the majority of cases is used to create static equivalents of dissolves and similar effects within the frame.

231 GIUSEPPE BECCE Film and Music: Illustration or Composition? First published as “Der Film und die Musik: Illustration oder Komposition?,” in Melos: Zeitschrift für Musik 7, no. 4 (April 1928), 170–72. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

If accompaniment practices were often makeshift in the early years of cinema, as Ernst Bloch argued in his essay at the beginning of this chapter (no. 218), film music would become a highly developed form by the 1920s. This was due in no small measure to the efforts of Giuseppe Becce (1877–1973), one of the most prolific and important film composers of the early to mid twentieth century. Through numerous publications, Becce sought to raise the level of film music discourse and practice; he founded Kinomusikblatt in 1921 (renamed Film-Ton-Kunst in 1926), published a Kinobibliothek (1919–29), and coedited the Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik (1927). Becce also became director of Ufa’s Musikabteiling (Musical Division) in the 1920s, conducted orchestras in various cinemas in Berlin, and scored the music for Weimar films such as Destiny (1921), The Last Laugh (1924), and Secrets of a Soul (1926). The present article, which appeared in the music journal Melos, asserts the centrality of music to film aesthetics and calls for close artistic collaboration between film directors and composers.

“We are undoubtedly witnessing the beginning of a development through which music will no longer be subjected to the task—unworthy of its essence and dangerous to its value—of constituting an inconsequential ingredient in film, as has been the case heretofore, but will rather become an organic component of the cinematic work.” Thus wrote Max von Schillings last year, once he had had the opportunity to grapple practically with a film of artistic quality (Hanneles Himmelfahrt [The ascension of little Hannele]).1 And Richard Strauss, who, as is well known, wrote the music for the fi lm Der Rosenkavalier,2 said upon the occasion of the film’s London premiere, “Were I only young enough, I would be happy to write music especially for fi lm, but I am old, and many years are necessary for that.” I am intentionally citing the opinions of these two important composers because they demonstrate that the view of film music as a necessary evil, even a superficial appendage, is becoming increasingly rare.

516

Configurations of a Medium

Indeed, after many fruitless attempts, film music has fortunately reached the point where directors and producers fully recognize its significance. I would like to single out two cases I know, in which, during the creation of the film, the director constantly took into consideration the character of the music that would accompany the scene. F. W. Murnau, whose newest film Sunrise premiered last fall in the Capitol Theater in Berlin, told me that he had consciously extended many scenes, because he knew from long experience that the musical line in these scenes would otherwise not be able to unfold fully. Thus he created these scenes as a kind of visual music, which existed in felicitous congruence with absolute music. Similarly, Gerhart Lamprecht fashioned the great love scene in his film Der Katzensteg [Betrayal, 1927] with utmost regard for the accompanying melodic line, thereby allowing the scene to achieve the maximum possible impact, something that would have been impossible otherwise. He similarly created the ghostly nocturnal flight through the woods and, later, the lament at the beloved woman’s grave in a way uniquely suited to the accompanying music: as a kind of visual music that has its own melody and rhythm and that grants the musical illustrator the freedom of the line and the possibility of climaxes. With that we come to the question, illustration or composition? In practical terms, most films make use only of common illustration. The nature of film production generally is such that the illustrator has very little time for a film’s musical accompaniment. But what is an illustration? Today, we understand it to mean the assembly of extant pieces of music, which provide a background for the respective filmic events. In the past, illustration was a primitive affair. The illustrator took pieces from operas, operettas, symphonies, and so on and patched the whole thing together into “accompanying music,” which did not shy away from any form of tastelessness or lack of style. This musical barbarity has not yet been entirely stamped out. However, in the larger film theaters at least, illustration has now taken a step forward. Inventories of music have been composed and catalogued in socalled film music collections [Kinotheken]. These collections help to illustrate typical and regularly recurring filmic situations and events. They are indeed a form of progress— first, because they arose from filmic situations and second, because they make it possible to adjust their length to the dynamic curve of a given filmstrip. The illustrator can bend them, stretch them, shorten them, or change them instrumentally in order to forge a new whole. This whole can very easily attain an organic character through the experienced hand of the illustrator, who knows how to skillfully hide the seams that necessarily appear. Such an illustration would naturally display a unified character only if it came from the material of a single illustration-composer. In this regard, I would like to speak of two kinds of artistic films: those that exist in an absolutely close relationship to music and those that, despite their artistic value, contain scenes that have no relationship with music. The former are, understandably, exceedingly rare. In the case of the latter, the moments in question always constitute a problem for the composer. From a strictly artistic point of view, music should be silent in such “musically dead moments.” Only the necessity for some acoustic element forces composers and illustrators to create accompanying music for such sequences. Here and there, some producers of artistic films have recognized the need for an original composition, and thus in the last fourteen years, some film music has been created that raised the level of film illustration. Unfortunately, these original compositions (also in the case of some successful illustrations) can be heard in only a few large film theaters, sometimes in only one single theater, while the film is left to its usual cruel fate in its travels to smaller theaters.

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

517

This is an organizational flaw. Original composition and good illustration are useless if film producers cannot resolve to deliver complete orchestral material along with their films (only artistic films of quality come into consideration here), as is done for operas, operettas, and so on. But this will be the next step in the elevation and development of film music. Notes 1. Max von Schillings was a composer and conductor who succeeded Richard Strauss as intendant of the Berlin State Opera from 1919 to 1925. He wrote the music for the premiere of Hanneles Himmelfahrt, Urban Gad’s 1922 adaptation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play. 2. A reference to Robert Wiene’s 1925 film version of Strauss’s opera.

232 BÉLA BALÁZS Farewell to Silent Film First published as “Abschied vom stummen Film,” in Der Querschnitt 10, no. 4 (April 1930), 248–50. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Although film had shown itself to be more than a simple means of reproduction during the silent era (see Balázs’s “Productive and Reproductive Film Art” earlier in this chapter, no. 227), this was once again challenged in the late 1920s with the advent of sound film technology. In The Spirit of Film (1930), Béla Balázs wrote, “This as-yet undeveloped new technology has attached itself to a highly developed cinematic art, and has thrown it back to the most primitive stage.”1 The following text from the same year also addresses the fear that aesthetic developments in film would be forsaken with the transition to sound. Maintaining an optimistic attitude, Balázs suggests that much as “silent film taught us to see, [. . .] we will learn to hear.” On Balázs’s views of sound film and his concept of “acoustic close-ups,” see also “A Conviction” in chapter 17, no. 252.

No, it is not as bad as one might assume. One needn’t get upset. Certainly silent film had just begun to mature. The camera acquired nerves and imagination. Filming technique and editing had overcome the material resistance of primitive objectivity. Some of the latest Russian and avant-garde films have already projected the subtlest intellectuality onto the screen. There was the optical music of visual rhythms. Even in America, they had a try at veracity and turned the camera on the “man of the crowd.”2 Only now would the actual inner development of silent film begin. But the best arrived too late. The brilliant visual poems of Dovzhenko,3 the Ukrainian, can no longer be shown in Europe. Sound films have taken over the cinemas. The root idea of the next sound film will probably be “Who will cry when we go our separate ways?”4 It is a beginning that has brought with it an end. It is one path that is blocking another. A new development has halted an older one (for the time being). Only philistines will commiserate or turn up their noses instead of getting involved. Was the development of silent film still far from complete? Not everything has to be completed. In the end, it comes down to the person, not the works. Man does not necessarily ride every train to the end of the line. He often transfers on his journey. Please change trains! Sound film! No, it is not as bad as one might assume. Cinematography also started with simpleminded primitivity. Think of the first silent films, and you will become optimists. Why

518

Configurations of a Medium

does the operetta-like kitsch of the first sound films seem so dreadful? Because the rapid development of silent film has spoiled us. We use its high standard to judge all work in film. We find the current sound films so kitschy because we are already able to imagine them as high art. And that will indeed be the case someday. For technical possibility is the most effective inspiration. The camera is the muse. It wasn’t sculptors who invented the hammer and chisel. But the tools inspired them to develop a particular kind of use. In the history of art, every “machine” has appeared at first as a soulless concept. But man quickly assimilates the machine such that it becomes a bodily organ. It turns into his fingertips. Does anyone today still speak of mechanical photography, of the soulless camera? It will be the same for the sound film camera. The technical aspects will come the most quickly. We have complete trust in engineers. By tomorrow, every sound will be perfect. But the text! Is it not striking that the majority of sound fi lms currently being made in Germany are comedies? This is a marker of the Germans’ culture. They still tolerate this degree of triviality in jokes and gags, something that could otherwise only be seriously expected of Americans. It didn’t have to be Chaplin or Asta Nielsen. A heartfelt smile or an intense look always contains something unspeakable. But alas, it is now spoken. What an unmasking! The best poets must now come and replace the poetry of gestural dialogue. You will learn to appreciate actors now that they must communicate not with their innermost language but with the audible words of authors. That too will come one day. With the microphone nestled in their hearts, poets will capture the most tender notes of the music of life, and in their acoustic close-ups, a sound will resonate between notes, just as the fi nest prose could be read between the lines in their writings. They will uncover relationships between forms and sounds that remained unconscious to us until now. And so we will learn to hear, just as we learned to see through optical film. And we will recognize beings through sounds just as we recognize them through their forms and faces. But now I would like to identify the “problem” that will cause the greatest concern for aestheticians and philosophers of art, a problem that cannot be solved through any technical accomplishment. With sound recording, there are (for the time being?) no means of adjustment. A sound may come from above or below, from near or far. But this is just a matter of its localization in space. Perspective does not change its form, its “physiognomy.” The same sound coming from the same place cannot be recorded—“grasped”—by three different cameramen in three different ways, as is possible with every optical recording of every object. The subjective temperament of the person recording cannot fundamentally alter the character of the sound—the same sound will remain. And yet this is where the art of sound film would begin. Art begins with such potential for subjective adjustment. Interpretive choices are precisely that which makes silent film not simple mechanical reproduction but rather an original art form. There may well be great art to the way the actor speaks and the way the sound mixer composes his sounds in the studio. To repeat: in the studio. But in the sound film, it all sounds like nothing more than the reproduction of the artistic effort witnessed in the studio. It is not even representation. The image of the actor appears on-screen. Not an image of his voice but rather the voice itself, which is simply passed on mechanically, as with a telephone. Think of a painting on which no light was painted but which gleams from a nearby lamp! The impossibility of tone adjustment also of course prevents any sort of visual adjustments to the source of the sound. If a sentence, in order to be heard clearly, is recorded in

The Aesthetics of Silent Film

519

a simple and direct fashion, there is little room to play with the speaker’s head in any interesting way. Visual techniques in sound films will become primitive again, like they were years ago. But here, too, a solution may come. The ear is our least developed, least trained organ. Sounds do not cast shadows. They do not cover each another. They do not remain distinct when next to one another. They cannot be aimed, like a spotlight’s straight beam. Sounds blend into one another and therefore do not, without an image, give us a sense of space. They are thus difficult to localize. But when we recall how silent film taught us to see, it is impossible to predict the ways we will learn to hear. And as for the current sound films, we need only remind ourselves that they will certainly not be around forever. Directors and actors of a later generation can reinterpret a play, making it contemporary once again. In a sound film, however, every acoustic nuance is set for all of time. No other director can stage the work differently. The original artistic will of the creator (or happenstance) has been clearly and inconvertibly “immortalized” down to the last detail. But that is precisely why it is doomed. For only those works that offer the possibility of misunderstanding or of reinterpretation will be preserved for the next generation. For all that, great sound film art is definitely coming. Was it not the mystic Meister Eckhart who said that “our happiness in heaven is secured not through our eyes but through our ears”? So let us wait and see. Notes 1. Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 183. 2. Balázs here invokes the German title, Ein Mensch der Masse, of King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928). 3. Alexander Dovzhenko (1894–1956) was the writer and director of Arsenal (1929) and Earth (1930), among other films. 4. A reference to Hugo Hirsch’s hit song “Wer wird denn weinen, wenn man auseinander geht?” from the operetta Die Scheidungsreise (1918).

SIXTEEN

FILM AS KNOWLEDGE AND PERSUASION

233 HANS HENNES Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry, with a Description of Some Rarer Motion Disorders First published as “Die Kinematographie im Dienste der Neurologie und Psychiatrie, nebst Beschreibung einiger selteneren Bewegungsstörungen,” in Medizinische Klinik, no. 51 (December 18, 1910), 2010–14; here 2010, 2013–14. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Focusing on spheres ranging from medicine to advertising to police work, the articles in this chapter all address uses of cinematography beyond art and entertainment. It should be noted, however, that the awareness of this “beyond” emerged only gradually, for scientifi c, industrial, and educational fi lm could be understood as marginal phenomena only after entertainment cinema had come to constitute the norm. As the industrial filmmaker Arthur Lassally observed in 1932: “The pioneers of cinema [. . .] could not have predicted the actual development of the ‘dream industry’ against which the moving image in the service of science would appear as a lesser form.”1 Most of the articles gathered here share this sense of examining alternatives to the “dream industry”: not only other ideas about what cinema could be but also other spaces of spectatorship, other archives and distribution networks, and other types of infrastructure. In the first text, Hans Hennes, a doctor at Bonn’s Provinzial Heil- und Pfl egeanstalt (Provincial Sanatorium and Mental Hospital), refl ects on the potentials of amateur film technology to enhance the practice and study of neurology, arguing that film recordings offer a more reliable means of reproducing motion disorders for observation than live demonstrations with “uncooperative” patients.

Rarely has an invention achieved such wide dissemination and unprecedented popularity in such a short time as the youngest sister of photography, cinematography. Today, one would be hard-pressed to name a town or city in which living pictures are not projected on a nightly basis. But as varied as the program of a cinema theater might be, all of the films show movement, above all the natural movement of human bodies. Thus it is not surprising that cinematographic recordings, having proven to be of great use and practicality for many other scientific endeavors, would also fi nd use in those branches of science dedicated to, among other things, researching pathological disorders of bodily movement. I am speaking of neurology and psychiatry. The present essay will show that “living pictures” have found here a thankful and promising field. At the International Congress for the Welfare of the Mentally Ill [Internationaler Kongreß zur Fürsorge für Geisteskranke], which met in Berlin on October 2–7 of this 520

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

521

year, we2 projected a series of nineteen films demonstrating motion disorders caused by a variety of neuroses and psychoses before a gathering of doctors.3 All but two of the fi lms were made by me using a small amateur cinematograph designed by the H. Ernemann Company in Dresden,4 with which I filmed patients from the Bonn clinic for psychiatric and nervous disorders and the provincial sanatorium. Four scenes also featured patients from the Hephata Institute for the Mentally Disabled in MönchenGladbach,5 whose director, Dr. Kröbler (Rheydt), I would like to thank here for his generous assistance. During my first experiments, it quickly became apparent that the small Ernemann cinema, originally designed for amateur uses, could also meet more demanding requirements, so that it was not necessary to procure a large expensive apparatus (for standard Edison film). By equipping the small projector with a sufficiently strong light source (preferably an arc lamp) and using a so-called total reflection screen [Totalreflexwand] coated in aluminum bronze, one can achieve images of a sufficient size, clarity, and brightness for an auditorium of 150 people. Already in 1907, the Ernemann Company had used its apparatus at the Convention of German Natural Scientists and Doctors in Dresden to project “pathological cinematographic images” filmed in the Sonnenstein State Sanatorium and Mental Hospital near Pirna. These experiments have now been developed systematically at the Bonn clinic and, as the demonstration at the Berlin Congress showed, lead us to the conclusion that cinematography should be seen as a valuable means of enriching education in neurology and psychiatry. In our lecture, we first projected two cases showing characteristic movements of catatonics. For the sake of comparison, these demonstrations were then followed by four cases showing the characteristic and mannered movements of the mentally disabled, who typically differed from the previous patients in their facial expressions, cranial formations, and so on. There then followed a classic case of euphoric mania, in which one could clearly observe the patient’s manic-compulsive movement. Other images showed disorders of the gait: tabetic ataxia and spastic paraparesis in a patient with Little’s disease. As the program continued, these films were then followed by images of chorea minor and Huntington’s chorea, which once again demonstrated the characteristic movements of these diseases with the greatest clarity. The remaining films then showed a selection from the vast wealth of hysterical motion disorders that have been observed recently in the Bonn clinic and polyclinic. [. . .] It goes without saying that a cinematographic demonstration can never replace the presentation of live patients. But as I intend to show, “living pictures” offer a valuable support for clinical demonstrations in a series of cases. One should emphasize first of all that filmic demonstrations are always cooperative. How often have lecturers had to contend during their presentations with a patient who fails to perform, a manic who suddenly changes his mood, or a catatonic who abruptly ceases to display his characteristic movements. Although he performed his pathological movements undisturbed in the clinical ward, the unfamiliar setting of the lecture hall causes him to stop producing his peculiar feature, so that he fails to display precisely what the lecturer wanted to demonstrate. Other patients “spitefully” show their interesting peculiarities only at times when no lectures, courses, and so on are taking place. Such problems, which often create a hindrance for clinical teachers, find a perfect solution in the cinematograph. The filmmaker can wait calmly for the most appropriate moment to record a movement. Once the recording has been made, the images can be reproduced at any time: the film is always “in the mood,” and there are no more failures. One can watch the images as often as one likes, and one of the great advantages and amenities of the cinematograph is that it is always cooperative. Another advantage, which applies

522

Configurations of a Medium

particularly to the demonstration of manic patients and other raging illnesses, is that film allows us to show—at least in images—very aggressive and destructive patients who otherwise could not be used for demonstration on account of possible disturbances. This, too, can occasionally be of great value. I would further mention that the cinematograph makes it possible to provide a greater number of interested people access to particularly interesting and instructive cases. In this way, unusual phenomena can be captured forever and studied repeatedly. Rare cases that would otherwise be retained only through verbal descriptions achieve a completely new significance when one can supplement description with a lifelike demonstration. If everyone contributed to the collection of the most interesting cases, then we might create a cinematographic archive, similar to the phonographic archive, which would undeniably be of lasting value. Many particularly pathological movements can be described only with difficulty, and even the most meticulous descriptions remain incomplete. In many instances, it is impossible to depict certain cases of abnormal movement in words with sufficient clarity, since description fails to convey precisely that factor that distinguishes perceptions from ideas: living sensory reality. In every case, the cinematographic image can clarify and supplement the lecture, providing a visual dimension that the most exhaustive form of description cannot begin to attain. [. . .] Cinematographic recordings further offer the possibility of observing phases of the same illness, which are more or less temporally distant from one another, within the same patient sequentially in the shortest amount of time. For example, it is possible to show a given patient in a state of manic excitement and immediately afterward in a state of complete depression. Where applicable, we can also demonstrate very well the external bodily signs of a gradual recovery from a condition such as amentia or, conversely, the bodily and mental decline of an advancing paralytic. The influence of a certain therapeutic intervention can also be made visible with great clarity. For example, if we film the gait of someone suffering from ataxia before and after a treatment using Frenkel exercises, then one can form a much better judgment concerning the minute distinctions between the two gaits by projecting the two films simultaneously side by side. This can be extremely valuable for students. Today, students see a great number of patients every semester, and it is impossible—for example, in the scenario mentioned above—for them to remember a case witnessed weeks ago with enough clarity to determine whether or not the patient shows genuine improvement. Here too, then, cinematographic demonstrations function as an aid and a supplement. Finally, I would point out that the cinematograph allows us to transform a rapid movement into a slow one. In this way, the quickest movements, which can be observed only imperfectly and with great difficulty in reality, can now be analyzed and studied in their individual details. Such investigations are, however, still in their initial experimental phase, so that it is impossible to submit them to a conclusive judgment. [. . .] Should the cinematograph find extended usage in our branch of science—and I have no doubt that it will, given the above list of potential uses—this will benefit not only the advancement of science, but also and not least of all its students. What our demonstrations at the International Congress in Berlin sought to show is also evident in the above discussion: namely, that the introduction of cinematography provides a significant means of enriching, supporting, and perfecting education in neurology and psychiatry. Notes 1. Arthur Lassally, “Verwendung des Films in der Technik,” Filmtechnik 8, no. 22 (November 5, 1932), 4. 2. Original footnote (translated): Westphal, Hübner, and Hennes, Kinematographische Demonstration von Bewegungsstörungen (see the conference report).

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

523

3. The official conference report was published as Justus Karl Edmund Boedeker and Wilhelm Falkenberg, eds., IV. Internationaler Kongress zur Fürsorge für Geisteskranke (Halle: Carl Marhold Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1911). 4. Founded by Heinrich Ernemann (1850–1928) in the late nineteenth century, the Ernemann company produced cameras, film cameras, and film projectors. 5. Founded in 1859, Hephata was the first establishment for the disabled in all of Prussia. Still in operation, it is now known as the Evangelische Stiftung Hephata.

234 OSVALDO POLIMANTI The Cinematograph in Biological and Medical Science First published as “Der Kinematograph in der biologischen und medizinischen Wissenschaft,” in Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift 26, no. 49 (December 3, 1911), 769–74. Translated by Tara Hottman.

A physiologist at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples and later director of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Perugia, Osvaldo (or “Oswald,” as he was known in German) Polimanti (1869–1947) was also an early pioneer of scientific cinematography. He made several films on the neuromotor system of dogs, and he would go on to collaborate with Franz Paul Liesegang on the four-hundred-page manual Wissenschaftliche Kinematographie, einschließlich der Reihenphotographie [Scientific cinematography, including chronophotography] in 1920. In this programmatic text, Polimanti situates filmic images within a genealogy of mediated movement observation stretching back to nineteenth-century techniques of graphical inscription, while also extolling cinema’s ability to record the movement of microscopic organisms.

When viewing an instantaneous photograph, we often notice the strange and unusual position of a human or an animal during a specific movement recorded by the photographic plate. By means of the exposure of light recorded in a fraction of a second onto gelatin coated with silver salt, the plate was able to freeze this phase of a movement, which occurred too quickly to capture our attention or our eye. A sequence of such photographs, which shows us the phases of a particular movement such as the flight of a bird, would give us a precise idea of the spatial positions that the wings take during fl ight because these phases follow in rapid succession. Based on this idea, the French physiologist Marey constructed his chronophotographic gun, a rotatable device like a revolver, which is outfitted with a photographic lens; located in each of its chambers is a small photographic plate that, through a latch and a trigger, is brought more or less quickly before the object whose motion is to be analyzed.1 In this way one can dissect precise movements of the relevant animal in an almost perfect manner. But this instrument was, of course, very primitive, and Marey decided to replace the photographic plates with a continuous strip, which could be shorter or longer depending on the time during which one wished to experiment; he replaced the trigger, which moved the cylinder of the revolver, with a crank, which could open and close the lens with great speed using a plug. With each new opening, the crank advanced a new section of film in front of the lens, where it lingered for a fraction of a second, which was enough to generate an impression. This was Marey’s chronophotographic apparatus, whose maximum capacity of fifteen photographs per second enabled him to analyze the movements of people, as well as several land and marine animals.

524

Configurations of a Medium

When the principle of the apparatus was discovered, inventive engineers (the Lumière brothers in Lyon) succeeded in attaining great accuracy; they achieved even higher speeds in the rotation of film, and thus the modern cinematographic apparatus was created. [. . .] Without the help of the cinematograph, it would have been impossible for us to analyze the movements of small and very fast animals such as dragonflies, flies, mosquitoes, and others. How could one follow the movements of a spider as it spins its web with the naked eye alone? This is already a challenge in the case of land animals, but it is even more difficult when it comes to aquatic animals; for while the analysis of movement in the air is difficult, it is even harder to carry it out in the water. Marey succeeded in making cinematographic recordings of all sea creatures, from the biggest fish (sharks, skates, eels, etc.) to the smallest (sea urchins, etc.). I had the opportunity to complete these studies through some beautiful cinematographic shots of various marine animals that I took at the aquarium in Naples, and which I intend to publish soon in biology journals. 2 In general, we can say that if an animal’s motor response, occurring spontaneously or through stimulation, is so small that it cannot be analyzed by means of graphical representation (reflex time, the type of movement, etc.), or if we cannot attach the animal to a restraining device because it would cause a change in response to the stimulus, then it is absolutely essential to enlist the aid of the cinematograph, as everyone realizes. And even in those cases in which the direct inscription of movement is possible through graphical registration on a blackened cylinder, the cinematographic method would offer a confirmation of the graphic method. In this way, one could see whether the latter corresponds to the truth or not, with the result that both methods are able to supplement one another. The naturalist, the explorer, and the biologist will find an indispensable tool in the cinematograph whenever they wish to bring back evidence, as we may call it, from their travels—evidence of what they saw and observed in terms of customs and habits of people and animals that might someday disappear. This is perhaps the only method necessary in order to study the lifestyle and the habits of various animals, whether they are now kept in a zoo or are observed in the wild. [. . .] Drawings and schemes of a particular movement are not always useful and often have very little value, particularly if they were influenced and altered by the imagination of the observer; therefore, in many cases they do not show us reality. My view, according to the arguments detailed above, is that the cinematograph is a no less indispensable tool for biologists and for doctors than the microscope and photography. No doubt, one could easily obtain stereoscopic cinematography with the help of the ordinary cinematograph—namely, by attaching special lenses that allow the perspective and the dimensions of the object to emerge. But even further: we would achieve a huge advance if we could also reproduce the colors of the depicted objects; movement, stereoscopy, and color would then show us the true reality of the things being observed. Considering the great progress that investigations conducted with microscopes and now with the ultramicroscope have made in recent years, it seemed obvious to use the cinematograph with these instruments. The first studies and applications in this direction were carried out in the physiological laboratory of Professor François-Franck in Paris.3 There, Dr. Henri obtained microcinematographic recordings of Brownian motion (that is, the elementary movements of newly organized matter),4 as well as sap from a rubber tree, whose motion, relative speed, and direction he was thus able to determine. A

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

525

systematic study of these colloidal substances via the cinematograph will teach us new facts in areas that were little known or completely unexplored up to now. Thus we see what an enormous field of biological and medical science will be opened up to us through this new tool. [. . .] Through the invention of the ultramicroscope, which allows for the lateral illumination of objects, our access to the world of bacteria has been expanded. With a microscope, it was possible to observe only the carcasses of microorganisms and many other elements of cells since the objects were observed through slides and therefore had to be stained if they themselves were very transparent; but the coloring meant death for the organism. In contrast, no coloring is necessary with the ultramicroscope: one is not observing something dead but instead something living, and since the bodies themselves light up, they shine on a black background. Ultramicroscopic specimens appear like so many dots in the starry sky. However, while the microscopic specimens are perfectly stable, which makes them well-suited for studying, the ultramicroscopic specimens are volatile by nature and cannot be preserved. Recently at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, Comandon wanted to give ultramicroscopic specimens a certain level of stability, looking to photograph them for the purposes of study.5 But even a photograph was able to record only one moment within the life of a microorganism or an element of a cell, not the different phases of its life, which would have been so interesting to obtain. Comandon remembered the aforementioned studies by Henri, and it occurred to him to use the cinematograph along with the ultramicroscope, which he managed to do. Specifically, he used it as an extension of the microscope and introduced strong light sources (a lamp of 30 amperes or the sun reflected through a heliostat); in this way, he succeeded in making a cinematographic recording of everything that is visible at ordinary levels of magnification under the ultramicroscope. He obtained the film frames at intervals of 1/32nd of a second, as with normal cinematic recordings. The images were then projected onto a wall and further enlarged to a point where human red blood cells, which have a diameter of 7–8µm,6 reached a diameter of more than 15 cm, a magnification of 20,000–30,000 times the normal diameter. In this way, Comandon was able to follow the development of certain pathogenic protozoa (trypanosomes and spirochetes) in the blood. Using the same method, one could also follow with extraordinary accuracy the path that the hematozoon of malaria takes between the mosquito and a human. Cinematography extended to include the microscope and the ultramicroscope is not only important for the lecturer due to its ability to record the life of such small creatures, nor does it merely offer satisfaction for scientific curiosity; it is also of incomparable use for the popularization of science. Since we are able to follow the development of a certain organism, we will also be able to fully explore its biology (reproduction, relationship to the fluids surrounding it); these observations are so important that biology, the medical sciences as a whole, and also hygiene will greatly benefit from them. My remarks have no doubt shown how great these advantages are and what benefits the different applications of the cinematograph could provide for us. Notes 1. A pioneer of chronophotography in the late nineteenth century, Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) devoted much of his work to studying animal locomotion. 2. Original footnote: Zoologische Jahrbücher. Abt. f. allg. Zoologie und Physiologie d. Tiere. Vol. 30, 1911f. 3. Charles Émile François-Franck (1849–1921) was at the Collège de France. Franck also published the book L’Oeuvre de E.-J. Marey in 1905. 4. Building on François-Franck’s work, Victor Henri (1872–1940) published Étude des mouvements browniens (Study of Brownian movements) in 1907. Named after the Scottish botanist Robert Brown

526

Configurations of a Medium

(1773–1858), Brownian motion is the movement of microscopic particles when suspended in a liquid or gaseous fluid. In 1905, shortly before the present article was written, Albert Einstein demonstrated that the particles’ motion resulted from water molecules, which in turn confirmed the existence of atoms. 5. Jean Comandon (1877–1970) was a French physician and pioneer of microcinematography. He began working for Pathé Frères in October 1909, directing a number of films on microorganisms. 6. µm is the abbreviation for a micrometer, or one millionth of a meter.

235 LEONHARD BIRNBAUM The Cultural Mission of the Cinematograph First published as “Die Kulturmission des Kinematographen,” in Der deutsche Kaiser im Film, ed. Paul Klebinder (Berlin: Paul Klebinder, 1912), 76–80. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The following discussion, originally published in Der deutsche Kaiser im Film alongside texts by Arno Arndt (no. 11), Franz Goerke (no. 34), J. Landau (no. 35), and Paul Klebinder (no. 108), offers a good sense of the discursive background from which the Kulturfilm would emerge as a form of popular education after World War I. Like the authors of several other articles in this chapter, Leonhard Birnbaum addresses the uses of cinematography in the realms of science, education, and social welfare, and he also grapples with questions of infrastructure and distribution, and emphasizes the need to integrate film archiving into existing institutional networks beyond cinema circuits.

Approximately twelve years have passed since the invention of “living photography” became popular and began to conquer the globe. Our childhood amusement with pictures painted onto disks or cylinders displaying individual phases of movement became a meaningful experiment the moment that we succeeded in using photographic methods to capture snapshots in quick succession, separating motional processes into numerous individual phases and thereby analyzing movement. Just as the inhabitants of a mountain village might intercept a mountain stream and divert it in order to use its water for all manner of purposes, humankind has made a dash for this new invention. First came the directors of vaudeville and similar performances, who wanted to use the cinematograph to provide their audience with the fastest and most accurate reports on all kinds of current events. But soon, there were stirrings everywhere: natural scientists and doctors came, visual artists and poets, economists and teachers; they all wanted to draw from this wellspring—to make the new invention serve their purposes. Cinematography owes its unforeseen and rapid development to the fact that its inventors and friends forged the right path to success: to paraphrase Goethe, by offering much, they were able to bring something to people at every level of society.1 Only thus could they solve the difficult problem of profitability, and no one who has any concept of economic issues will reproach the men of cinematography on these grounds. This was the only way to enable the use of the invention for purposes that, at the time, were far from the masses’ imagination; and if cinema has now become a large industry, and cinematographic films an international commodity, it is due entirely to entertainment fi lms, which allowed the educational ones also to achieve increasing distribution and popularity.

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

527

Today, no self-respecting large cinema could afford to exclude educational fi lms on natural history, geography, or professional life in numerous industries for fear of incurring the displeasure of their regular audience. This is the case in Germany at least, as we can state with joyful satisfaction; this is also true, incidentally, for the small theaters that are largely attended by members of the proletariat, which have been given the rather ugly nickname Kintopp. Alongside this popular education, which still plays a subsidiary role, cinematography has also been used widely for numerous educational purposes in recent years, not only in high schools but in elementary schools as well. Can we imagine anything more interesting, informative, and entertaining than the manifold recordings of the plant and animal kingdoms? How would it ever have been possible to observe even domestic animals like our songbirds, which we are all very familiar with, in their natural environments in the same way that fi lm does? Let alone the marvelous recordings that renowned academics were able to make of fish and amphibians in the calm settings of aquariums and terrariums, from which science has gathered information about numerous heretofore-unknown qualities of these animals. Research is not the only area to have achieved such interesting and scientifically significant results with the help of the cinematograph! We have been able to shine a light—equally bright for laypeople and for researchers— on the most intimate problems of biology, which were shrouded in deepest darkness until now. This includes, for example, the fertilization of an animal’s egg by sperm, and the entire process of egg and cell development that this act initiates, up through the animal’s earliest developmental stages. It goes without saying how meaningful it is for science to have exact knowledge of these processes. If medical science, via the observational material delivered by biologists, can find new approaches to the organization of embryology, it has already made direct use of the cinematograph in other areas. Typical operations, normal and pathological conditions of bodily movement, changes in internal organs shown on X-rays, the microscopic movements of bacteria—the cinematograph is capable of visualizing all these processes, so vital for medicine, in an almost unbelievable manner. If a professor can show his students the gait of someone suffering from tabes dorsalis (locomotor ataxia) in a cinematographic film, as is already happening today, he has no need for the invalid himself. This relieves the professor of a frequently occurring problem of inadequate materials, and the invalid, for whom nothing is so unpleasant as being used for demonstrative purposes, can be left in peace. There is also a range of symptoms that are so unusual that some students will never see them in a patient throughout their entire course of study. In this area, the presentation of cinematographic images has addressed a real lack. Furthermore, in connection with advanced X-ray technology, it is possible to demonstrate the movements of the most important organs in animal and human bodies to an unlimited number of spectators; with the aid of the cinematograph, the analysis of gait, eye movements, breathing, and blood circulation can also be shown with impressive clarity. Thence came the idea to undertake the systematic creation of such instructional material. There are efforts to equip state-run medical schools with cinematographic recording and playing devices, and to make the resulting films available to all educational institutions through a suitable central office, just as Dr. Meißner of Berlin suggested some time ago in the Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung.

528

Configurations of a Medium

In this way, the central office would obtain a cinematographic archive of first-class, truly educational recordings. Similar film archives would also be extremely significant for the study of cultural history.2 Let us imagine that the cinematograph had already reached an age of a hundred years, so that we could see moving pictures from the good old days! What a vivid picture a single filmstrip could offer us—how much more it could offer than numerous books produced by laborious research! What revelations a street picture from the Biedermeier era, for example, could offer about life and work in a small town of the time. It would show us not only clothing and shoes, but also the way people walked in them—societal forms and the manners in which people moved around on the street. In the same way, methodically executed recordings of the present state of our streets, squares, children’s games, social forms, and transportation systems will be extremely valuable material for later generations. To capture an entire generation’s development in moving images and thus to be able to convey it to ensuing ages is an enterprise whose cultural-historical significance could be placed alongside Gutenberg’s invention. Even mathematics, so dry in itself, has made the cinematograph its willing servant. For in the cinema, everything develops as it does in natural growth; this enables academics to present in a rapid, coherent sequence the entire chain of relationships between mathematical figures in combination, and thereby to depict the development of osculation points and midpoints in particular curves. Cinematic instruction is no less meaningful for strategic education. In this case, movements of troops are demonstrated on “living maps” by mounting a clock in one corner of the map, which indicates the time required for the execution of a given operation. The cinematograph would also be excellently suited to provide troops preparing to be sent from the homeland to a distant colony or an enemy state with a picture of the nature of unknown lands and their inhabitants, by presenting a few characteristic scenes. Like science and research, social welfare also benefits from the cinematograph, and at this point we cannot heedlessly brush aside an event that took place a year ago in the large auditorium at the Kaiserin-Friedrich-Haus für ärztliche Fortbildung [Empress Frederick Institute for Advanced Medical Education] in Berlin.3 There, a cinematographic recording was presented that ought to attract the attention of the many thousands of people who currently have an interest in social welfare in all areas of public life. Namely, they showed a film, created with the participation of artists, doctors, and social-policy makers, that enabled the cinematographic presentation of social charity work in dramatic form. By means of this film, which was later distributed all over the world, the spectator was given informative insights into the world of social work, which was previously familiar only to an increasingly small subset of the general audience. In this way, it was effectively possible to interest the general public in taking part in the struggle against extreme poverty. Even if it is impossible to exhaust the subject of the cinematograph’s cultural mission in a relatively informal discussion, we can still conclude from the aforementioned facts that cinema has already achieved such enormous and irreplaceable significance in the general development of contemporary humanity that we must be willing to overlook its comparatively minor aesthetic flaws. Only malevolence or foolishness can deny the cultural mission of the cinematograph.

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

529

Notes 1. The paraphrase is from part 1 of Faust: “He that gives much, gives something to all classes.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 73. 2. This paragraph appears to be a variation of a paragraph from the 1908 article on film archives by Ludwig Brauner, which is included in chapter 3, no. 31. 3. Built between 1904 and 1906, the Kaiserin-Friedrich-Haus was named after Empress Victoria (1840–1901), wife of Emperor Frederick III.

236 ANONYMOUS Cinema in the Light of Medicine First published as “Das Kino in ärztlicher Beleuchtung,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 318 (January 29, 1913). Translated by Michael Cowan.

If, as Friedrich Kittler (drawing on Hans Blumenberg) has argued, technical media helped to overcome the “postulate of visibility” with their discovery of forces operating beyond the threshold of normal vision, those same media also generated an immense desire to transform invisible events into images for human observation. Perhaps no type of film captured this desire more forcefully than the X-ray film, which exemplified a very different program of rendering man “visible” from that espoused by Béla Balázs. With its ability to visualize the interior of the body and its movements on-screen, X-ray cinematography was of interest above all to doctors and physiologists. The Scottish doctor John Macintyre completed experiments in X-ray cinematography as early as March 1896. The following text is from the introduction to a series of statements on the cinema by prominent doctors, commissioned by Der Kinematograph. Published at the height of the cinema reform movement, the piece was partly intended to counter fears that the cinema posed a threat to public hygiene. Among the respondents was the Tübingen neurologist and cinema reformer Robert Gaupp (see text no. 94).

Every day, the cinematograph further reveals what valuable services it can render to science in countless different contexts. But the cinematograph has proven especially important for medical science. As the modern means of illustration, the cinematograph—in connection with the pictures made possible through X-rays—offers an impression of the degree to which internal medicine, above all, has recently been enriched and perfected. How often we used to express the wish, in earnest or jest, that the doctor could see inside his ill patient—and now he can do just that! The unimaginable has come to pass. In addition, the doctor can now project a living, moving image of what he himself sees before hundreds of people attending his lecture. This would seem like a fairy tale, had modern technology not already accustomed us to so many miraculous things. Today, doctors use X-ray cinematography to observe the activity of the human stomach and intestines in their most intimate functions. When, with the addition of a little bismuth, food is rendered impenetrable to X-rays, its shadow stands out sharply against the gray intestinal tracts, so that it can be followed throughout the entire digestive process. How much more pleasant is an examination performed in this way for patients in comparison with the traditional stomach probe! And how much more quickly and accurately does it lead the doctor performing the examination to his goal than the methods of feeling, tapping, and listening

530

Configurations of a Medium

from the exterior. These perfected modern apparatuses also offer useful and characteristic images of less easily accessible organs, such as the lungs and the diseases affecting them. Dr. Köhler in Wiesbaden has even succeeded, in a few cases, in capturing the appendix on film,1 a feat of particular difficulty given this organ’s location within the body. In this way, many illnesses can be diagnosed flawlessly and—most important of all—in good time. In the stomach, one can distinguish agglomerations of cancerous growth; in the intestines, it is easy to observe knots, constrictions, the much-feared duodenal ulcer, the position of the large intestine, and more. The effects of various laxatives can be tested for their differences. One sees how, during the digestion of food, the carbohydrates pass through the small intestine most quickly, followed by the somewhat slower proteins and the fats in last place. Even the layman can imagine what sorts of future prospects are opened up by these new possibilities for observation. Thus, among other things, the heartbeat has recently been recorded on film. At first, with the help of electricity, photographers managed to take photographs with a shudder speed of 1/500th of a second, a speed sufficient to retain the heartbeat on the photographic plate. But even these images were insufficient, since they could not reproduce movement. This last stage has now been reached through cinematography, which makes it possible to record moving X-ray images of all internal organs. Doctors have thus managed to photograph not only the beating activity of the heart, but also the breathing activity of the lungs and the digestive activity of the stomach. The significance of this improvement of X-ray procedures for medicine is obvious. Through such advancements, medical science arms itself with ever more refined weapons against those insidious enemies of mankind, the agents of disease, and one of these valuable weapons is cinematography, the usefulness of which all medical experts accordingly recognize. Note 1. Alban Köhler (1874–1947) was a pioneering German radiologist.

237 JULIUS PINSCHEWER Film Advertising First published as “Filmreklame,” in Seidels Reklame 1, no. 8 (August 1913), 243–46. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Though advertising film dates back to the earliest days of the cinema, it found its first theorist in Julius Pinschewer (1883–1961). A pioneer of the genre, who also created one of the first film companies dedicated exclusively to advertising, Pinschewer would work in propaganda production during World War I and would go on to collaborate with experimental filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann, Lotte Reiniger, and Guido Seeber in the 1920s before continuing his career in Switzerland after 1933. In this article, one of his first published statements on film advertising, Pinschewer argues for the efficacy of the movie theater as a space in which companies could reach a wider number of potential consumers than newspapers and other media could.

Today we live not only under the sign of circulating traffic but also under the sign of the unwinding filmstrip. Cinematography has developed by leaps and bounds, especially during the past four years; like books and newspapers, it now represents a powerful force in modern life.

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

531

As a means of entertainment, cinematography occupies an important position. At the end of last year, the B. Z. am Mittag published statistics showing that, on some days of the week, the cinematographic theaters of Berlin receive as many as 350,000 visitors, a number seven times greater than the combined visitors to all other theaters, variety halls, circus venues, and similar establishments in the city. Since the publication of that study, moreover, the cinematographic theaters of Berlin have made considerable gains. For education and reporting as well, film is proving more and more useful. Recently, it has even begun to play a role as a tool of research, and ever more people see in film the expression of a new art—the art of movement. Today, the most important forum for cinematography everywhere is the movie theater. Its programs can usefully be compared to a living newspaper. Its “newsreels” report the “latest events of the day” (often before the actual newspapers) from every country in the world; its “hits” show us more or less artistic renditions of novels; its “images of nature” offer more or less interesting material from “science and industry,” and so on. It thus stood to reason that cinematographic theater programs should also include an advertising section, which one finds today in every newspaper. This idea proved to be both natural and correct, for the addition of advertising was welcomed not only by the business community but also by film audiences. The advantages of cinematographic advertising or film advertising in movie theaters are evident. Film allows manufacturers or salesmen to express things formerly conveyed through lifeless texts or drawings in a living and very striking manner. In this way, film offers trade and industry an important tool not only for impressive informational advertising [Aufklärungsreklame] but also for powerful reminders of a product [Erinnerungsreklame]. Film is able to show how soap produces frothy foam, how chocolate tastes, what fi ne work the sewing machine produces, how to use a preserving pot, how elegantly clothing fits a living body, or how neatly a clever machine can pack up a piece of food, and so on. Film can demonstrate the use and effects of luxury goods, of foodstuffs, of home utensils, of machines and apparatuses of all sorts, of products from each and every industrial branch—all in a vivid manner that is easy to grasp. Film advertising is especially appropriate for those products that enter into circulation under a particular brand or for products that form a “class unto themselves” on account of their character and origin, available for a fixed price everywhere at all times. But it is less appropriate for articles from mail-order companies, since the company address first needs to be made known to customers, the articles are only temporarily available, and the prices fluctuate. Thus department stores, for instance, when advertising their clearance sales, will continue to depend primarily on other means of advertising than film. Through artistic composition, the amusing or informative content of advertising films can make a deep impression on spectators while avoiding the bad aftertaste that typically adheres to other forms of advertising for the simple reason that they are less interesting. Using reports from its representatives, a global company undertook a statistical study examining 1,000 visits to approximately 600 theaters. The results showed that in 90 percent of cases, spectators greeted the company’s advertising films with open applause. The same study showed that the theaters in question, assuming they are fully active for eight months of the year, accommodate on average 400 people per day. From these numbers it follows that the total visitors per year for all 600 theaters combined comes to about 58 million. The costs of film advertising for the company in question amounted to a fraction of a cent per person, a small sacrifice when one considers that the unique cinematographic demonstration in all cases leaves a much deeper impression than, for example, the informational content of a corresponding newspaper advertisement. For this reason,

532

Configurations of a Medium

cinema advertising does not need to be repeated as frequently as product advertising in the newspaper or on the outdoor advertising pillar. When an advertising film is projected in the course of a film program, every visitor in the theater notices it and follows its content with excitement and interest, for, as one can observe, the projection of an advertising film always meets with approval among spectators, who often even break out in applause. The size of cinematographic theaters varies from 150 to 1,500 seats per theater, the rate from 1,500 to 15,000 visitors per week. Depending on the character and standing of the theater, the audience includes members of all social classes. As the above-cited study showed, among the audiences of the 600 sample theaters, the upper- and lower-middle classes and the upper strata far outweighed the working classes. One may further assume that approximately 90 percent of cinematographic theaters are constructed in residential neighborhoods and are patronized by families and regular guests. The remaining theaters are located in commercial areas. For the most part, their patrons consist of passers-by and people from other parts of town. In general, patrons are recruited from among people whose understanding depends more on external sense perceptions and who consequently take less interest in reading books and newspapers or listening to spoken words than in the more easily graspable representations of film. This is why women of every age and standing are particularly drawn to movie theaters. Patrons also consist—particularly in cinematographic theaters of lower standing—of people who lack the sufficient means or education to enjoy books and newspapers and who cannot afford the admission to operas, stage theaters, and such. For this reason, film advertising represents a valuable supplement to newspaper advertising, since it also appeals to circles that newspaper advertising can reach only sparingly or not at all. The more the film industry creates interesting and artistically valuable products, the more movie theaters—and with them film advertising—will grow in importance.

238 BRUNO TAUT Artistic Film Program First published as “Künstlerisches Filmprogramm,” in Das hohe Ufer 2, no. 5–6 (1920), 86–88. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Bruno Taut (1880–1938) was a prominent architect, city planner, and representative of the Neues Bauen movement, perhaps best known for his Glass Pavilion at the 1914 Cologne Werkbund Exhibition. (The structure’s kaleidoscopic color effects find an echo here in his proposal to create kaleidoscopic films.) After World War I, Taut propagated visions of utopia and of the dissolution of cities in Alpine Architektur (1919) and Die Auflösung der Städte (1920). In the following text, he outlines a program for “artistic film” that includes scientific, instructional, and abstract films (and notably excludes fictional films). Taut’s categories look forward to many prominent themes of Weimar Kulturfilms, including science films such as Blumenwunder (The miracle of flowers, 1926) and films of artists at work such as the Schaffende Hände (Productive hands, 1923–26)

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

533

series made by Hans Cürlis (see text no. 245) at the Institut für Kulturforschung. The text also suggests the perceived affinities between Kulturfilm and avant-garde experimentation. Das hohe Ufer (1919–20) was a short-lived avant-garde monthly that also published articles by Walter Gropius and Hans Poelzig, among others.

The achievements we might expect from fi lm in the realm of art can essentially be divided into three groups. Of course, the effects of the various groups will overlap and complement one another; for example, cleverly presented educational films always afford opportunities for artistic enjoyment, and on the other hand, film as an independent artistic creation also functions educationally. The three groups would be 1. Films that are generally exhilarating and stimulate artistic fantasy 2. Educational films for the purposes of instruction in crafts, general arts, and architecture 3. Film as an independent work of art First group:

This would consist of films to be produced and—inasmuch as they have already been made—chosen from the entire area of the natural sciences. They should be produced not from the standpoint of scientific and purely objective interest but rather with an eye for the artistic beauty of natural forms, their growth, and so on, and of the image. Examples: Crystallizations in ice, snow, rocks, and the like. The growth of plants from the seeds to the leaves to the entire tree. Zoological scenes with particular emphasis on the beauty of animal forms and their movement. Use of time lapse. Second group:

Films showing the origin and development of artistic and high-quality artisanal works. The hands of good craftsmen will be filmed as they produce a beautiful piece. Examples: A silversmith as he forges a beautiful ring, an engraver at work, a maker of fine lace, a stained-glass artist who is painting and molding the leading, among others. We see the pieces emerge, they are turned around, and so on, and then they will be held up next to a poorly constructed piece that merely imitates good artistic form. Such films will show clearly the difference between true and false quality, good and bad ceramics, smithery, and the like, with the benefit of convincing spectators that, in spite of its higher production costs, a good piece (e.g., the work of the Werkbund) is at bottom less costly than a bad one. The same principle can be applied to purely artistic works: woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs, and other works. Architecture: Film shots of buildings and groups of buildings, in which the camera wanders all around them, approaches them, shows the details more closely, and finally goes inside. Students of architecture and laypeople alike will thereby achieve a vivid idea of the essence of architecture. They will free themselves from the pictorial concepts bred into them by the tradition of perspectival drawings and learn to understand the building as a unified organism, seeing how it developed from the requirements of its specific function, its milieu, and so on. The significance of details, from the fittings to the furniture, will become graspable within their total context. Examples: Shots of a housing development: first wandering through the streets, then walking around individual buildings, and finally entering individual apartments. Similarly, films of factories at work, schools being used, train stations, churches, crematoria, theaters, and other buildings. Theaters should be filmed during performances, showing both the stage and off-stage area, which would illustrate how strong the connections are

534

Configurations of a Medium

between the building’s architecture and the drama. The shots could be supplemented with cross-sectional drawings and animated representations. The same principle applies to entire cities: Danzig, Goslar, and others, first seen from an airplane, then a car ride in the city, then individual buildings as mentioned earlier—in short: a complete tour of the city. Bad aspects, such as tenement neighborhoods and wretched hovels, should also be shown. Dance and gymnastics: Film recordings of dance schools with representations of teaching methods, the use of time lapse for examining various methods. Comparing the shots of animals with the time lapse as done in the first group. Third group:

The film artwork: a. Dancing with music as a result of dance and gymnastics school. The extension of the latter as film pantomime. Here is an important means of artistically influencing the film drama as it has existed up to now, in which speech and writing interfere since words are completely alien to film. b. Pantomime without human forms. Fantastic decors in motion. Architectural drama and similar phenomena (see my architecture play Der Weltbaumeister [The world builder]).1 Combination with symphonic music. c. “The mobile image.” A translation of abstract painting onto film such that it shows an image whose forms are in constant motion. Productions based on drawings by artists, technically similar to the silly comic animations that cinemas show today. d. The kaleidoscope. Films shot directly into a kaleidoscope. Apparatuses designed for unmediated kaleidoscope projections have the advantage of accurately reproducing colors, but they are expensive and, if the projected image exceeds a certain size (1.2 meters), it becomes unclear and blurry. Skilled hand-coloring might perhaps compensate for the lack of colors, and this also goes for (b) and (c). But the black-and-white image would also suffice. The kaleidoscope can have extraordinary artistic effects when the case filling is made by an artist (see the glass house at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition of 1914). Note 1. Comprising twenty-eight drawings and music, Der Weltbaumeister was Taut’s self-described “architectural drama for symphonic music,” completed in 1919.

239 WILHELM VON LEDEBUR Cinematography in the Service of the Police First published as “Die Kinematographie im Dienste der Polizei,” in Die Polizei: Zeitschrift für das gesamte Polizei- und Kriminalwesen mit Einschluß der Landjägerei 18, no. 12 (September 20, 1921), 248–49. Translated by Michael Cowan.

In Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), a group of rioters is forced to confront their own involvement in a mass crime when a film projector is brought into the courtroom. Fifteen years earlier, this article from a criminological trade journal already explored the potentials of cinema—still held under suspicion by conservatives such as Wilhelm Stapel (see chapter 7, no. 103)—as a tool of surveillance and juridical evidence. Published two

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

535

years after the ratifi cation of the Weimar Constitution, the text is still laden with memories of recent communist uprisings. Wilhelm von Ledebur (1859–1930) was a Prussian politician and government official who had served as Landrat (chief executive) of the Lübbecke district from 1895 to 1917.

As is well known, photography has long been a tool in the service of the police; it constitutes an indispensable aid for identifying and searching for criminals, and it has proven very useful in the collecting of all sorts of clues. Today, one cannot imagine the police in a civilized country performing its job successfully without the aid of photography. Hopefully, the time is near when cinematography as well will count among the technological resources of the German police—and this not simply in isolated instances but as a general rule. Even if, for reasons of financial speculation, film still functions mostly as a medium of leisure and entertainment, more and more people are nonetheless recognizing that it can also render invaluable services in the domains of science and practical life. Along with my personal experience of the disturbances of 1919, the recent communist revolt—which the swift intervention of our police managed to squash, but which unfortunately could repeat itself at any moment—led me to pursue the question of whether the police might benefit from cinematography. I arrived at an unequivocally positive conclusion for three reasons. (1) Films made by police “in the field” during social disturbances will constitute an important means of deterrence, while also providing evidence and helping in criminal manhunts. (2) The scientific police film offers an invaluable tool for the training of police officers and guards. (3) Warning films made by or in consultation with the police can help to enlighten the public about the great dangers posed by career criminals. These thoughts are not completely new. For years, the leader of the Berlin police records department, Dr. Hans Schneickert, has been promoting crime awareness films in speeches and publications.1 On the other hand, as far as I am aware, the police have never had films made during social disturbances in Germany. Among the rare writings in this domain, a short news item contributed by Schneikert to Gross’s Archiv (volume 41, page 354) deserves to be quoted here: 2 In their coverage of the recent disturbances and riots carried out by wine growers in France, the newspapers report that on April 12 (1911), just as the revolt in Champagne had reached its height, a series of films was made in Ain (in the Marne department), which showed with absolute precision and clarity the savage acts of plundering committed during the wine growers’ revolt. The public prosecutor in Reims then showed these films to eyewitnesses from the scene of the revolt, which allowed the ringleaders and the guilty plunderers to be identified and immediately arrested. In addition, some of the people already being held in custody, who had denied their participation in the illegal revolt up to then, were found guilty when they were recognized in the cinematographic images [. . .] There should be no useful technological tool that is not employed in the service of the police, whether it be permanently acquired as a piece of equipment or secured through contractual loan. The cinematographic camera is one such tool. At the beginning of my remarks, I characterized film recorded by the police as a deterrent, a source of evidence, and a tool of identification. I believe that cameras can offer a certain locally effective form of deterrence and that they can function a bit like the muzzle of a machine gun when aimed threateningly at rebellious subjects. However this is true only once a film successfully

536

Configurations of a Medium

used in court proceedings has demonstrated and made known the formidable evidentiary power of this apparatus. The example from France shows that film can play a significant role in investigations and court proceedings. One should not underestimate the impression that completely objective images can make on professional and lay judges, on the accused, and on witnesses. And here I would also point to the important questions of testimonial psychology. Even in the most typical trial of a career criminal, the key witnesses are under enormous pressure because they fear a violent revenge on the part of the accused, especially when we are dealing with women, children, or people lacking natural courage. They are aware that the condemned criminal might take revenge on them after serving his often all-tooshort prison sentence. This fear of stating the truth is especially intense when those on trial are participants in communist disturbances. In this case, the accused often consist of men who would not hesitate before committing any act of violence; these fanatical personalities, committed to the destruction of our entire bourgeois society, are members of a powerful organization with branches throughout Germany and will employ even the most reprehensible means to reach their ends. Among their ranks dwell the most dangerous career criminals; they compensate for their losses by storming jails and prisons; Russia supplies them with money, weapons, and human material. The havoc wrought by such elements in Russia, Hungary, and parts of Germany cannot but convince anyone who has become the object of their wrath that he or she must fear a vendetta. This unfortunate influence on witnesses is only strengthened by the fact that they often have to testify against persons from their own towns, for example, in the case of looting; if they come from a small town, it is obvious that a true testimony can bring with it a whole host of unpleasant consequences for them. Terror in every form, whether expressed in acts of violence or harassment, threatens proper legal investigations principally through the direct and indirect influencing of witnesses. For this reason, witness statements are often murky and subjective in trials dealing with revolts. Of course, this fact is attributable not only to fear of revenge but also to a host of other psychological factors. In addition to confessions and testimonies, a watertight chain of evidence is also extremely valuable. For this reason, I consider it an ideal form of evidentiary proof when, to the extent possible, one can show a film during the main proceedings that links the crime with the criminal, the witnesses, and the entire milieu. How much easier and more accurately one can then arrive at a judgment; how much more quickly the accused and the witnesses will tell the truth; how greatly the witness’s memory will improve; how much clearer an idea the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney will have of the entire scene and sequence of events constituting the object of the trial! Through the objective testimony of film, the image of the crime— which today can be reconstituted only with great effort through endless witness accounts and in legal proceedings often lasting for weeks—will be available to judges with a significant savings of time and money. Here, the pause mechanism recently invented for projectors, along with slow-motion technology, will prove its necessity once again. I am only saying, of course, that such factors allow us to imagine a significant simplification of trial proceedings. That incriminating films could help in investigations carried out by the police and public prosecutors is obvious enough. Good film images can also aid in manhunts, just as normal photographs of a suspect being pursued by the police figure prominently on the wanted posters. Reproductions of the film portrait or of the entire film can be made available to all police authorities. One can easily imagine a situation in which a film would show the image of a criminal long sought by the police for his involvement in a street fight, a demonstration, acts of looting, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, or general street rioting. Establishing his pres-

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

537

ence at the time and place of the action would already be a worthwhile endeavor, and from the type of action he can be seen carrying out on the film, from the people with whom he interacts, and from his physical appearance, one could then draw important conclusions that would help in the hunt. In this connection, we should also point out that wanted posters offering rewards for the capture of the suspect and showing a few of his pictures blown up to a large scale could feasibly be inserted into the advertising section of a cinema show. Through fixed contracts with large cinema companies, the police could assure that this tool for manhunts be employed alongside others in especially difficult cases or with particularly dangerous criminals. Insofar as policemen are not themselves outfitted with the necessary camera equipment, there are two ways to acquire film recordings. The first is by making an announcement, after a crime has been committed, that the police will buy any films or photographs shot at the crime scene. As is well known, our filmmakers and photographers are always hard at work wherever something is “happening” and rarely worry about the dangers. Among other photographs from the rebellion in Central Germany contained in issue 14 of Die Woche,3 there is one in which a number of photographers can be seen attempting to sneak up on a communist hideout. They don’t appear to be under fire, for the only thing causing them to bend over is the weight of their unwieldy cameras. The other way to acquire film recordings is to contract professional filmmakers and photographers who would be sent into action as social disturbances arise. Both methods could also be combined since it will often be to our advantage to introduce as evidence all usable photographic and fi lmic materials related to the criminal actions in question. Notes 1. Schneickert (1876–1944) was a prolific author of books on criminology and the head of the records department of the Berlin police. 2. The Austrian criminologist Hans Gross (1847–1915) founded the Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik [Archive for Criminology] in 1898 and was its editor. 3. Die Woche (1899–1944) was a weekly illustrated paper published by the August Scherl Verlag.

240 ARTHUR LASSALLY Film Advertising and Advertising Films First published as “Filmreklame und Reklamefilme,” in Die Reklame, no. 142 (1921), 425–26. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Despite pioneering articles by Julius Pinschewer (see no. 237), it was not until the 1920s that advertising trade literature began to engage with film on a broad basis. The following article from Die Reklame, the offi cial organ of the Verein Deutscher Reklamefachleute (Association of German Advertising Experts), shows how closely ideas of advertising distribution were bound up with efforts to extend film projection beyond the cinema. Arthur Lassally was an engineer and frequent contributor to discussions on the use of film in industry and promotion. In addition to authoring several books, including Bild und Film im Dienste der Technik (Photo and film in the service of technology, 1919), he also produced and directed numerous industrial and promotional films during the Weimar era for products ranging from socks and felt hats to church bells.

538

Configurations of a Medium

The eye’s perceptual capacity is based partly on its sensitivity to colors and partly on its sensitivity to movement. Every poster artist knows how important color is to the efficacy of his own advertising designs. When designing posters and advertising inserts, artists also use movement to enhance the effects of their advertisements, be it through “dynamic lines” or through the direct representation of processes of movement to the extent possible in a static image. Shop-window decorators also occasionally use moving objects to attract attention. But in comparison to these modest suggestions of movement, the introduction of cinematographic images into advertising technologies opens up entirely new perspectives! Where and to what ends can one employ film advertising? What should publicity films look like? [. . .] The precondition for advertising film to achieve its full effect is finding the form of distribution that best suits the advertising goal. There are four basic types of film distribution: the cinema theater, public advertising screens, special film projectors for shop floors, and the suitcase projectors of traveling salesmen. It is only by historical convention that I place the cinema at the top of this list. Although it was the only form to develop and spread up to now—that is, before the invention of daylight film screens1—the cinema theater is inferior to the three other possibilities in every respect. In and of itself, the value of film advertising in the theater is limited. Theater owners can commit only a tiny fraction of the time available for their programs to film advertisers, and thus advertising films must remain extremely short, namely 30 to 50 meters ( = 1½ to 2½ minutes). In addition, the constituencies that see these films are far too diverse, making it impossible to isolate more or less coherent groups. For this reason, theaters are appropriate only for advertising films that address the most general public. These advertisements do well in the cinema because great masses of people from all social classes regularly visit cinemas today, and also because no other means can approximate the ability of films in the cinema to force the spectator to concentrate on the advertisement. Whether they like it or not, cinemagoers are served a dose of advertising films between two regularly programmed features. Hence they have to watch these films, and they will watch them as long as there is no other possibility for momentary distraction—unless of course they intentionally avoid the film’s effects by closing their eyes. Public advertising screens obviously cannot enforce the same concentration of attention. Nonetheless, in comparison to the immobile poster, which quickly becomes familiar and therefore ceases to be noticed, film projections offer the attraction of movement. This is true even in projections of alternating still images, but all the more so when film transforms these images into a living poster. In this regard, not only the factor “movement” but also the factor “color” can be used to stimulate attention. Undoubtedly, the powerful effects of publicity films shown in shops will soon be recognized in their full significance. The salesman who can forgo long-winded descriptions and show customers the production of his commodities using a home movie system in his office will, through this simple means of communication, conclude his transaction in the shortest time possible. But especially when the projection can occur in well-lit rooms without any special requirements, this process will become commonplace. Film also has a future in shop windows as a means of attracting the attention of passers-by. Publicity film can be used successfully not only within commercial businesses but also beyond their walls by traveling salesmen. Small, portable apparatuses, weighing only a few kilograms and specially designed for this purpose, have long existed in America. Such apparatuses are cropping up in Germany, and one Berlin company even offers a cinema for product demonstrations equipped with a daylight screen. Now that we have seen how diverse film advertising can be according to purpose and distribution method, it is obvious that the respective advertising films should be adapted to each individual type of use. We have already seen that films addressed to the “cinema

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

539

public” should be short and of general interest if they are to be accepted into film programs and also to have any effect. We must also extend this requirement of brevity to all projections of advertising films in public spaces, since experience shows—and particularly given the novelty of film— that passers-by will watch every advertising film two to three times. In this case, longer fi lms will lead to mass tie-ups and traffic congestion, which—beyond the other inconveniences—defeat the purpose of the advertisement: for the point is not to entertain the masses but rather communicate a message to as many people as possible in a particularly vivid form. On the other hand, publicity films projected in the store or via traveling suitcase projectors should be as detailed as necessary for the precise understanding of the process being represented. If we compare public projections of advertising films aimed at a mass audience with private projections intended for individual customers, we can say that narrative and trick films are best suited to the former category, while nature and industrial films are appropriate to the latter one. But here we should not think of those “images of nature and industry” typically shown in cinemas, but rather of genuine representations of an industrial type, which produce a very particular genre of fi lm fully unsuitable for the movie theater. These films should be made by specialized companies, so that they don’t produce the kinds of caricatures one sometimes sees in the cinema. Note 1. The daylight screen (Tageslichtwand), versions of which were introduced around 1919 by the Petra electromechanical company and the Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft, allowed for the projection of film in illuminated settings. It made possible the kinds of projection devices Lassally mentions, including the “film cabinet” (Filmschrank), a rear-projection device for showing short films on a loop, which was used in exhibitions and shop floors.

241 EDGAR BEYFUSS School and Film First published as “Schule und Film,” in Edgar Beyfuss and Alex Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin: Carl P. Chryselius’scher Verlag, 1924), 64–71; here 66–67. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Director of Ufa’s Kulturabteilung (Cultural Division), Edgar Beyfuss (1893–1936) was also the coeditor of the most comprehensive book on the Kulturfilm (1924), from which the following three articles are taken (nos. 241, 242, 243). Beyfuss was a passionate exponent of educational film and ran the Filmunterrichts-Organisation (Organization for Film Education) at Ufa, which distributed educational films to German schools. Incidentally, he also moderated the famous Absoluter Film matinee in 1925 (see chapter 14, no. 205), and he would go on to direct several cross-sectional montage films in the vein of Albrecht Viktor Blum (see chapter 3, no. 45).

Let us stick to standard lesson plans for the time being, those things that are compulsory for the teacher, the material that he is required to cover with his class according to a specified curriculum, such as natural history, geography, and so on. Can you imagine a more ideal visual medium than film, which can show an animal in its natural environment and illustrate how it moves from the very first moments of life through all of its stages of development? I doubt it! Consider this small practical example. When talking about the

540

Configurations of a Medium

stag beetle, what teacher would be able to show his pupils more than a few illustrations from Schmeil,1 a few stylized hanging pictures, or—at best—a stag beetle splayed out with pins after having been suffocated by gasoline fumes? He can only describe it for his pupils or have them read about it in books: where the animal lives, how it lives, how it develops, and how it struggles with its natural enemies. Film can depict all of this in a vivid way. It is the same with many other examples from this and other subjects, such as geography. No other teaching aid could depict the life and activities of foreign cities or an exotic people’s customs, practices, dance festivals, and religious practices as clearly and obviously as can a film recorded on location. Furthermore, the schoolteacher is not merely responsible for imparting the bare minimum of the material that has been assigned. Excursions, trips to factories, and other similar activities also have a place in the school’s “curriculum.” A teacher should give his pupils the opportunity during school hours to become familiar with all of the factors that, taken together, define the life of a civilized country. And think of the difficulties that can be associated with a visit to a printing press, an engineering works, or something similar! In this case, too, film is the best and most expedient substitute for real life. But it cannot be stressed enough that the educational film can never take on the role of the teacher and is itself never in a position to educate students. It is simply a teaching aid. It is up to the teacher to make the best use of it by preparing students for the film presentation, organizing follow-up activities, working through what was shown, and so on. It would be unfair to educational film, however, to consider this the full extent of its pedagogical qualities. With regard to what has been mentioned thus far, fi lm is a simple conveyer of information; its sense and purpose come from that which it depicts, the content of its images. But the educational film can be so much more. It is precisely film’s unique character—that which makes its use so difficult and which is often held up as its disadvantage—that is one its primary assets. Using an educational film as a teaching aid is admittedly much more difficult than using other forms of teaching aids such as a globe, a preserved animal specimen, or a postcard that can be passed from hand to hand. Let us speak of the ideal case, which has so far been unrealizable in Germany due to economic factors and which looks to be unlikely even in the coming decades. In this ideal case, every German school would possess a small projector and an array of copies of the most important films, which can be reused each year. The whole matter would then be markedly much simpler. As soon as there is an opportunity in the lesson plan to use a film, the teacher will lead his pupils into the screening room, which need not be any larger than a classroom, will run the film through the projector, or perhaps just the part he needs, and proceed to give his lesson thanks to these flickering images. Note 1. Otto Schmeil (1860–1943) was the author of several standard works in biology, zoology, and botany.

242 ULRICH KAYSER Industrial Films First published as “Industriefilme,” in Edgar Beyfuss and Alex Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin: Carl P. Chryselius’scher Verlag, 1924), 157–59; here 157–58. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

541

The “industrial film”—which can be traced back at least as far as the Westinghouse Works series (1904) by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company—was a genre that showed industrial production processes in order to promote an industry, a manufacturer, or a particular product. Ulrich Kayser (1899–1977) was the head of technical production in the Ufa Cultural Division, where he also directed several industrial films, including Ein modernes Hüttenwerk (A modern smelting works, 1922) for the Linke-Hofmann-Lauchhammer company. In this article, published in Beyfuss and Alex Kossowky’s Kulturfilmbuch, Kayser argues that industrial films should appeal to audiences beyond the experts in the particular field shown.

Of the thousands of people going about their daily lives all over the civilized world, who can say that he has ever—as an observer, artist, or poet—walked through a large industrial plant; that he has ever felt the rhythm of labor, felt it in the surging of people all working to the same beat with their steeled arms; that in the glistening, glittering, glowing steel he recognized how living material moaned and groaned under human violation; that he experienced the great, endless souls of the newly formed machines that are otherwise believed to be dead! There can be only a few! Such factory work is itself a work of poetry, full of living power and grandeur! Film, in the hands of master artists, is a means, a path to let the language of such a factory speak to thousands, to millions of people! Where are these artists? I have seen films that resembled the dead skeletons of such factories, picture-postcard albums, series of disconnected images of people, without meaning, without any common thread to follow a single idea through the series of images. This is why people generally refer to industrial films as “boring” and “only for specialists,” and this is why they have no effect on the masses. For it is not machines themselves that are effective but rather their meaning, their relationship to their environment, their personal connection with humankind. Can the mass appeal of a film ever be based only on the fate of people? Can the material itself, brought to life by a masterful hand, not have the same effect? But the problem here is the same as with educational reform. All reform is useless if we do not first reform the teachers. Industrial filmmakers, who are tellingly called “production managers” rather than “directors,” should disappear entirely from the studios of Kulturfilm. The work should be done by directors! Specialized directors with sharp eyes and great technical skill. When people say that an industrial Kulturfilm is easier to make than a large feature film, this betrays ignorance of film’s potentials. It is all just a question of “how.” [. . .] There are people who, at the sight of an open-hearth furnace being tapped, when the glowing mass of steel pours into the crucible, calculate how many hectoliters of material are flowing and what great sums of capital must be invested in a single such furnace. But others simply stand there astonished, as though witnessing a deeply stirring natural process. I call for the latter. I demand that directors, even of industrial films, be artists first and foremost.

243 EUGEN R. SCHLESINGER Kulturfilm and Cinema First published as “Kulturfilm und Kino,” in Edgar Beyfuss and Alex Kossowsky, eds., Das Kulturfilmbuch (Berlin: Carl P. Chryselius’scher Verlag, 1924), 333–35. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

542

Configurations of a Medium As Beyfuss and Kossowsky’s 383-page book attests, Kulturfilm was a highly malleable term. Defined at the broadest level (as in the article by Hans Cürlis in this chapter, no. 245), it could include any film contributing to popular education. A somewhat narrower definition equated it with the kind of educational and scientific shorts described here, which were shown in cinemas during the supporting program (alongside advertisements and newsreels) before the main feature. Eugen R. Schlesinger was the director of Ufa’s Theater-Verwaltung (Theater Management Division).

Kulturfilm—by rights, every fi lm should be made with enough culture that it can be labeled a Kulturfilm. Immediately after being established, Ufa launched its Kulturabteilung [Cultural Division] as the first institution of its kind in German film production; it wanted to use this label to make a clear distinction between entertainment film production and works produced by this newly created department, which would be used primarily for educational and instructional purposes. What, after all, is culture? The culture of a people is the sum of its scientific, moral, and artistic treasures. Thus, if the original intention to produce educational and instructional films in this department should be fulfilled, the label would be incorrect. Nevertheless, the label Kulturfilm is appropriate insofar as these films actually bring a certain “culture” to the programs and supporting programs of the movie theaters. Earlier supporting programs generally comprised a short comedy and a so-called scene from life [Naturaufnahme]. These so-called scenes from life were, to the extent that they were shot in cities, almost all produced with no regard for historical or urban development and with no sense for artistic and visual impact in landscape shots. Interesting and vivid images of animals large and small were almost totally absent. In this area, Ufa’s Cultural Division, along with similar departments in various other studios, has been extraordinarily beneficial. While in earlier days, so-called scenes from life were put into the program only as filler or as a break for the musical accompaniment, the current products of the Kulturfilm industry offer a valuable enrichment of the program. In the large theaters, audiences frequently applaud fi lms of urban scenes such as München [Munich], slow-motion films such as Was das Auge nicht sieht [What the eye doesn’t see], animal films like Tiergärten des Meeres [Zoos of the sea] (all productions of Ufa’s Cultural Division), Katzenbilder [Cat pictures] (Decla-Bioskop), and so on.1 These films also—to offer another example—meet with extraordinary approval in Ufa’s onboard cinemas [Bordkinos], 2 where the international audiences express their desire for repeated viewings. What admirable, patient, and detailed work is on display in the animal films by Lola Kreutzberg (Lo-Zoo-Filme) and Baron von Dungern (Decla-Bioskop)!3 The “industrial film,” which was once decried by audiences as boring and was indeed produced without a proper understanding of moviegoers’ receptiveness and perceptivity, has—through years of hard work—become an interesting fixture in the cinema program. The StahlFilm and the Lauchhammer-Film of Ufa’s Cultural Division or the Krupp-Film by Deulig show the manufacturing process at the workplaces in a logical, systematically composed sequence.4 “Animated film,” which was once relegated to a small role in so-called newsreels or to short advertisements, has also been improved and extended by cultural film producers. The same goes for the “fairy-tale film,” which has successfully earned lively interest among people on all sides—for example, Der kleine Muck [Little Muck], Tischlein deck’ Dich [Table, set yourself; Ufa], or silhouette fairy-tale films like Kalif Storch [Caliph Stork; Colonna] and Aschenbrödel [Cinderella; Institut für Kulturforschung], among others.5

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

543

Ultimately, on account of the hard and dedicated work of Kulturfilm producers, these films can now even compete with “feature films” in some cases; when shown as “hits”— that is, as the main attraction in the program—they can play before full houses in the movie theaters. We have only to remember the extraordinary success of Kulturfilms such as Der Rhein in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart [The Rhine past and present], the SteinachFilm, Horrido, and the like.6 Thus, in an entertaining, easily comprehensible fashion—free of all pedantic overtures—the spectator is made familiar with delicately observed occurrences from the plant and animal worlds, from industry and the arts; he becomes acquainted with interesting phenomena and processes, which he would heedlessly pass by if it weren’t for the Kulturfilm. Slow-motion and time-lapse recordings—the newest achievements in cinematographic recording technology—enable an unprecedentedly vivid presentation of life and work processes. We can surely claim that a large circle of people who regarded old cinema programs with indifference or even hostility have been won over by the addition of Kulturfi lms to the program and have become regular visitors to movie theaters. However, we must strive to prevent these films from creating the impression, either through their composition or through their intertitles, that there is a teacher standing behind a podium who—raising his index fi ngers to emphasize his declarations— seeks to impart a lesson to spectators. For even if the goal of the so-called Kulturfilm is a certain education of the audience, its form must absolutely remain that of entertainment! The same goes for films with a lecturer, which are featured more and more in the cinemas—sometimes as part of regular programming, but mostly in special presentations, in the early afternoon or on Sunday mornings. In these cases, the lecturer must absolutely avoid dry or pedantic presentations and explain even the most unwieldy of material in a plain and simple way, indeed spicing it up with humor if at all possible. We must always assume that the audience wants to be entertained and will tolerate learning only if it is also amusing. Under these conditions, any director of a modern film theater who wants to provide his audience with a diverse and well thought-out program will be obliged to make quality Kulturfilms a permanent part of his program, and he will be happy to do so. Notes 1. Schlesinger here refers to München (1922, dir. Walther Zürn), Was das Auge nicht sieht (1923), In den Tiergärten des Meeres (1923, dir. Ulrich K. T. Schulz), and Natur im Film: Katzenbilder (1922, dir. Friedrich Erstling). 2. The Bordkino was a cinema in passenger steamships for long journeys. Ufa initiated it in 1923 with the ocean liner SS Albert Ballin. See also Schlesinger’s article “Ufa-Bord-Kino” in Ufa-Magazin 2, no. 14 (April 1–7, 1927). 3. Lola Kreutzberg (1887–1966) and Adolph von Dungern were both directors of Kulturfilms. An explorer, writer, and photographer, Kreutzberg also had her own production company, which produced dozens of Kulturfilms in the late 1920s and early 1930s, mostly focused on animal life and on customs in Bali and India. Dungern was the director of Decla-Bioskop’s Wissenschaftliche Abteilung (Scientific Department) and a proponent of the biological film as a means of instruction. 4. The Stahl-Film (Edelstahl [1922]) and the Lauchhammer-Film (Ein modernes Hüttenwerk [1922]) are two films directed by Ulrich Kayser, author of the previous text (no. 242). Deulig’s Krupp-Film is a two-part short film from 1917, Ein Tag bei Krupp (1917). 5. The fairy-tale films referenced are Wilhelm Prager’s Der kleine Muck (1921) and Tischlein deck dich (1921), Ernst Mathias Schumacher’s Kalif Storch (1923), and Lotte Reiniger’s Aschenputtel (1923). 6. Schlesinger invokes Walther Zürn’s Der Rhein in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1922), Nicholas Kaufmann and Curt Thomalla’s Der Steinach-Film (1923), and Johannes Meyer’s Horrido (1924).

544

Configurations of a Medium

244 DIETRICH W. DREYER The Trick Film First published as “Der Trickfilm,” in Die Reklame 20 (June 1927), 439. Translated Alex H. Bush.

Though animation might have been marginalized in feature film production by the 1920s, there was a great deal of interest in such techniques for industrial and advertising film. Julius Pinschewer’s advertisements used nearly every kind of animation, from stop motion to silhouette animation to drawn caricature. The following short piece by the engineer and specialist of ship travel films Dietrich W. Dreyer (1887–1961) extolls animation for its capacity to visualize complex industrial processes.

Trick films, whether drawn animation or photographic, play a very significant role in the execution of effective promotional films today. They are the only way to show processes of nature, machines, statistics, and the like that would otherwise remain hidden to the eye. Precisely these shots, strewn throughout the film, are of particular interest to audiences. People enjoy being educated in this way and sharing the knowledge they have gained. The word-of-mouth advertising that is accomplished through this is valuable and has long-lasting effects. The design and execution of such trick films is a domain unto itself, which demands an extraordinary amount of experience. In the Norddeutscher Lloyd film Das schaffende Amerika [Productive America],1 such trick sequences help to demonstrate the regulation of traffic in large American cities so clearly that everyone receives a precise orientation in railroad and subway engineering, as well as the street traffic of New York. Even well-known film motifs, such as Niagara Falls, awaken particular interest when a trick film shows how these giant waterfalls are constantly caving in and consuming themselves, such that in fifty thousand years there will be no more Niagara Falls. Of particular interest is a presentation of the effect of the Treaty of Versailles on Europe, which has surrounded itself with tariff walls to such an extent that the economy is suffering acutely. This stands in contrast to the United States, whose vast trading territory has no traffic limitations, trade obstacles, customs barriers, and the like. In the Bechstein film Vom Werden eines Flügels [How a grand piano is made], 2 trick films show the genesis of sounds, the effect and the structure of a soundboard, things of the utmost importance that could never be explained by simple film shots. With the aid of drawn animation, a film about refuse recycling by Musag AG in Cologne explains the sorting of household rubbish and its extensive further processing.3 I hope these few examples will show what the trick film can and should accomplish. Without this useful tool of the film industry, modern promotional films would hardly be conceivable. Notes 1. Dreyer refers to his own travel documentary Das schaffende Amerika (1927). The title presented to the censors was “From Bremen to America by Express Train and Ocean Liner.” Norddeutscher Lloyd was a shipping company based in Bremen. 2. Vom Werden eines Flügels (1926) was a forty-minute film produced by Döring-Film. Set at the C. Bechstein piano factory in Berlin, the film was intended to stimulate interest in the piano and thus serve the piano-manufacturing industry. 3. Musag Köln was a promotional short directed by Harry Hasso. Musag stands for Müll- und Schlackenverwertungsanlagen AG (Slag and Waste Processing Plants, Inc.).

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

545

245 HANS CÜRLIS Film Is Promotion First published as “Film ist Werbung,” in Film-Kurier (August 11, 1929). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Hans Cürlis (1889–1982) was a towering figure in the German Kulturfilm scene. He served as director of the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for Cultural Research) and chairman of the Bund deutscher Lehr- und Kulturfilmhersteller (Union of German Educational and Cultural Filmmakers), and he remained a key advocate for animation. Both Lotte Reiniger and Berthold Bartosch were involved with the Institut für Kulturforschung, which also maintained an archive of educational films for schools. In addition, Cürlis directed and produced dozens of cultural and promotional films, including several propaganda films against the Treaty of Versailles, a series of short films on artists under the title Schaffende Hände (Productive hands; begun 1923), and Die Weltgeschichte als Kolonialgeschichte (World history as colonial history, 1926). The following selection is from a speech he delivered at the 1929 World Advertising Congress in Berlin, in which advertising film received special attention (including a retrospective of Julius Pinschewer’s work).

Kulturfilm is an umbrella term for all films that intend to impart knowledge. The other category is the narrative film [Spielfilm], which is incomparably superior in terms of business. It embodies the actual feature film industry. However, the boundaries constantly overlap. There are pure narrative films that get qualified as educational films, and Kulturfilms with extensive narrative plots. If Kulturfilm designates a genre, promotional film [Werbefilm] indicates a function. The promotional film forms, as it were, one flank—the economically stronger one— while educational film forms the other. We can designate the undisguised advertising film and the pure research film as the outermost poles. In between, there is a huge variety of films that have found their labels, which experts can use to categorize them. While the economic reach of the promotional film stretches far into the educational film, the cultural idea of the educational film casts its shadow into the furthest reaches of the promotional film. Indeed, one could argue that serious German filmmakers are constantly trying to lend an educational character to promotional films: that is, to impart knowledge about things to the spectator. It is thus no coincidence that in Germany, an educational filmmaker and a promotional filmmaker are most often one and the same person. The Weltreklamekongress [World Advertising Congress] recognized this by entrusting the Bund deutscher Lehrund Kulturfilmhersteller with its own specialty group to oversee the production and screening of promotional films at the Congress. The deeper reasons for the strong bond between promotional films and Kulturfilms and the lack of a parallel connection in other areas of promotional advertising lie in the different requirements that are unique to film. Film is promotion par excellence. This is the secret of the worldwide success that made fi lm the entertainment form of the masses in a few short years, regardless of race or education but also regardless of quality. Film is promotion first and foremost because it attracts the eye. You cannot help but look at it. It does not have to be the plot that grabs you, but the fact that there is a plot, that something is happening with light and darkness, does not let you go. Just try closing your eyes during a film screening sometime. It is easier to put down even the most exciting book.

546

Configurations of a Medium

Film has done so much to promote the mentality of the country that controls 94 percent of the world film market that the masses experience many of their feelings, as it were, with the nerves of North Americans. It thus comes as no surprise that film is also consciously used as a form of promotion. It seems far more remarkable that it has not been employed for explicit promotional work to a much greater extent. The reasons for this, however, are quickly discovered. A film is not actually present until it is screened. Once it is there, its promotional value is directly related to how many times it is screened. In standard cinema screenings, possibilities are very limited by running time. And this is where advertising film secured its place years ago. Screening opportunities still need to be created. And promotional films will increase in number proportionally to the increase in screening opportunities. In Germany, every kind of promotional fi lm is well-developed, and there are top-rate productions in each and every genre. Most importantly, serious educational fi lmmakers must possess more than simply knowledge about cinema; they also need the skill to accurately judge what can be represented clearly and unambiguously, what could be interesting to the spectator, and what methods they should choose in order to fully awaken these interests. It is therefore not enough to have a camera or to send out a cameraman in order to shoot footage. The timing of every promotional film must also be determined in advance, and experience is a valuable commodity in this process. Unfortunately, the small and large production companies made many mistakes in the area of promotional film until they recognized that one cannot promise more than can be delivered. The commissioning clients, for their part, were also not entirely free of blame when they made impossible demands or failed to understand the nature of film. Even the pure advertising film, which lacks an educational element and is only supposed to sell something—it usually ends up as a short film in the advertising section of cinema programs—demands an understanding of the object and elevated artistic taste. Serious filmmakers do everything they can to accommodate the various requirements. The members of the Lehrfilmbund [Educational Film Union] believe that the connection between educational and promotional film is beneficial to both parties and both types of fi lm: the business-minded approach of the advertising professional is good for the educational filmmaker, and the more scientific approach of the educational fi lmmaker is good for the promotional film producer. Those of us who make Kulturfilms are proud to be able to make our knowledge available to businesspeople. We can see the extent to which this has already happened most clearly in the statistic that in Germany, almost as many meters of educational and promotional film have been developed in the last few years as the industry has produced in narrative film. We hope that more and more business sectors will become convinced of the limitless potential for development of promotional film.

246 KARL NIKOLAUS Advertising Film and Its Psychological Effects First published as “Der Werbefilm und seine psychologische Wirkung,” in Die Reklame 25 (September 1932), 503–4. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Film as Knowledge and Persuasion

547

Julius Pinschewer’s 1913 article on advertising film in this chapter (no. 237) was concerned above all with questions of financing and distribution. By the time Karl Nikolaus wrote the following article for Die Reklame in 1932, both advertising film and advertising psychology had evolved into full-blown industries, with over eighty companies producing advertising fi lms in Germany alone. At this point, mass psychology had become a staple component of advertising theory—a fact that made the cinema, with its particular relation to crowd psychology (see chapter 8, no. 109), a natural advertising medium. Nikolaus’s motto for the advertising object, “You need not believe me as long as you love me,” offers a counterpart to the theory of “film illusion” espoused by the editors of Mein Film (chapter 10, no. 151). The motto could still form the basis of much product advertising today.

Advertising, as it is understood today, consists largely in the psychological influencing of consumers, which can be intensified to the point of mass suggestion and assumes this form in many cases. This goes without saying in an era such as the present, in which masses have become an unavoidable fact of life, and not only in the economic sense. If we wish to say something about the psychological effects of a particular form of advertising—namely, advertising film—we must first of all be clear about the psychic disposition of the person we wish to influence. Modern man’s inner spiritual makeup, his ability and willingness to receive advertising impressions, is the first—and one might even say the only—factor that should guide us. It might seem natural to work with the concept of collectivism, but since collectivism is only just beginning to become a practical reality, since it is not predictable and not clearly visible, we must start out from individuals as they appear on average—that is to say, inasmuch as they experience themselves as a public. Here advertising film has an advantage over nearly every other form of advertising. To wit, skepticism diminishes as the size of a human crowd increases. And since advertising fi lms shown in cinemas are always perceived by a crowd of individuals experiencing themselves as a public, these films immediately enjoy a more sympathetic reception than, for example, that which an individual reader of newspapers would typically bring to the written word. A solitary person is always more skeptical, more reserved, and cooler than a person in a group. The saying “So many men, so many minds”1 is one whose longevity is based more on tradition than on accuracy. For the bigger a crowd becomes, the more dominating is the sense of the mass, the leveling sense of being one mind. Every statesman and every politician knows this, and when calculating the psychological effects of advertising fi lm on spectators, we must follow laws that are close to those of mass psychology. The title of a well-known book reads Urlaub vom Ich [Vacation from the self]. 2 As a rule, this is precisely what cinemagoers seek out: a vacation from the self. We want to forget the hardships of daily life for a few hours; we want to become anonymous and, as spectators undistinguished by individual traits, relax in the company of average men. The dark room, the comfortable seat, the enticing music, that feeling—always a bit festive—of joining many other people in the same action, and in particular, the state of passivity so rarely accorded to modern man: all of this comes together to place us in a psychic state of pure contemplation. By what means can advertising film exert a psychological influence on spectators who have been thus prepared? If the advertising film expert subscribed to the maxim that everything has two sides, he would quickly come up short here. For him, everything has an infinite number of sides. From these unlimited possibilities for representing an object and selling it, he should seek out the one harboring the most vivid psychological stimulations:

548

Configurations of a Medium

aesthetic charm, humor, surprise, and the appearance of objectivity. We write “appearance” of objectivity, for a representation that is truly objective in a pure sense can have no psychological effect. In that case, where would the effect come from? When an object shown in film or in real life seems to exert a psychological effect, this effect can have its origin only in emanations that we attribute, or can attribute, to the object. Based on this fact alone, we have already surpassed the purely objective representation of the object. And here, we must ground our explanation of the advertising film’s psychological effects more deeply if we wish to offer at least an indication of its connection to the totality of modern economic life. Nothing dulls man’s senses more than purely materialist demands. The crude formula do ut des (I give so that you will give) is far too weak a foundation to bear the entire structure of man’s psychological needs. It is simply a fact that human beings are characterized by psychological reactions, even—and especially—in the era of advanced commercialism. The psychological effect of advertising film is not achieved by disguising the exhortation to purchase with more or less skill. That would be a superficial view of things. Rather, the advertising fi lm itself, through the wealth of its fi lmic and artistic techniques, transforms the simple demand to purchase something into a psychological emphasis on the object itself. Advertising experts have long recognized that nothing can be achieved by means of straightforward praise for an object. More than even men of the church, they can justifiably complain about modern man’s increasing “disbelief.” But they find a solution in the advertising film, which functions according to the motto You need not believe me as long you love me.3 This soft inner affection for the propaganda object, which the advertising film awakens in spectators, is the decisive factor. It is an exciting sensation for anyone to see a sober object or some element of practical life combined with a witty dialogue, a beautiful piece of music, or a charming animated drawing designed by an artist’s hand—or to see how an object is produced from start to finish and how it is used in the most diverse situations. This type of advertising exerts a particular effect—a psychological effect, which is always the best way to arouse people’s interest. Notes 1. A reference to the Latin phrase quot capita tot sensus, commonly attributed to Terence and Horace. 2. The author is most likely referring to Paul Keller’s 1915 novel Ferien vom Ich. 3. Nikolaus here plays on the Latin phrase oderint dum metuant (let them hate, as long as they fear), which is attributed to the poet Lucius Accius and later became Caligula’s motto.

SEVENTEEN

SOUND WAVES

247 ANONYMOUS How Singing Pictures (Sound Pictures) Are Made First published as “Wie singende Bilder (Tonbilder) entstehen,” in Der Kinematograph, no. 65 (March 25, 1908). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The traditional division of film history into silent and sound eras has obscured the nearcontemporaneous emergence of sound and motion picture technologies at the fin de siècle. As Tom Gunning notes, Edison turned to the Kinetoscope shortly after introducing a perfected version of the phonograph in the late 1880s, famously stating, “I wanted to do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”1 If the concomitant splitting of the human senses of hearing and vision produced uncanny effects—with disembodied voices emanating from the phonograph and silent bodies appearing on-screen—it was met by repeated efforts to reunite the voice and body and thus to restore wholeness and autonomy to the modern subject. One such effort was initiated by Oskar Messter, an inventor and pioneer of German cinema during its first decades. Although Messter had introduced his Biophon apparatus for coupling the film projector and gramophone already in 1903, so-called Tonbilder (literally, “sound pictures”) would not be fully popularized until four years later, when they came to dominate his company’s production. Between 1907 and 1909, Messters Projektion produced some 450 “singing, talking, music-making photographs,” marking a notable early attempt to synchronize mechanically recorded and reproduced sounds and moving images.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a recording session of moving and singing images (a Biophon recording of opera scenes) in the studio of Messters Projektion GmbH, Berlin, whose description is bound to be of interest to some of your readers. Only by observing such recordings in person can we get a sense of the complicated work, effort, and cost they entail. It is hard for a layman to understand the difficulty of even gathering the artists necessary for a large opera scene at a specific time on a particular date. It was a rainy January day when I took the elevator to the large studio on the fifth floor of the factory building at Friedrichstrasse 16, whose lower floors house the offices, storage space, and workshops of this world-renowned company. Preparations for the recording had begun early in the morning: the scenic decorations for the relevant opera or operetta, which had been painted in Messter’s own studios, were put up, the lighting tested, the cameras prepared. Electricians and photographers, camera operators, and lighting technicians bustled about. Because the winter light was insufficient, thirty large mercury lamps (Cooper-Hewitt) cast light onto the stage from the soffits, wings, and

549

550

Configurations of a Medium

proscenium, bathing the scene in a magical glow. Meanwhile, it was 10:00 a.m., and the artists were gradually arriving; this time, they were from the Theater des Westens.2 Ten women and ten men from the chorus, then the soloists, and finally the prima donna, followed by her maid. Workers carried in huge baskets full of costumes, props, and so forth. The performers went to their dressing rooms, of which there were four. Hairdressers and costumers were in full form; in these studios, one could almost believe that one had entered into the kingdom of masque, the real theater. Around 11:00 a.m. everything was ready: Mr. Kutzner, the regular director of Monti’s Operetta Ensemble, was making his last adjustments, and the entire staff hurried to their places. As I explain in more detail below, the singing and orchestral accompaniment had already been recorded by gramophone a few days earlier. After a brief rehearsal, the coupling device patented by Messters Projektion was switched on, and the cinematographic recording of the scene began. Careful attention is necessary, for the tiniest error can render the recording useless. The thaumatograph records twenty individual images per second, or 1,200 per minute.3 Tenminute-long sound pictures are not unusual today; these, then, are made up of 12,000 individual images. Thus every 12,000th part of the total duration of the audio track on the record must correspond to an image, in both recording and projection. After a few exciting minutes, the recording was complete (it consisted of scenes from The Bird Seller [Der Vogelhändler]); 4 sound and image, song and movement accorded magnificently; the recording was successful. The soloists, Miss Obermaier and Mr. Matzner, were in excellent form, the chorus fresh and lively. The gentlemen returned to their dressing rooms to change, and after a half hour the stage was set with charming rococo scenery (also from The Bird Seller). The entire process was repeated, once again successfully from start to finish. Meanwhile, it was 1:00 p.m., and I left the studio totally satisfied. The performers went to the cashier to receive their jingling wages, or often a three-digit check, for their collaboration; for some specialists and stars of the stage, the amount even reaches into four figures. Over the course of a year, the company spends many thousands on honorariums for performers. That said, there are also companies that use extras to pose for scenes based on records by great artists, thereby saving a lot of money; but Messter’s recordings are exclusively originals. The film used for the recording, about 35 cm wide, will now be wound up on large drums in a darkroom and developed like every other photographic recording, fixed, washed, and dried. Of course, a positive (diapositive) must be produced, which requires a contact process between the finished negative and a chloro-silver positive film inside a specially designed copying machine. Regarding the production of stereophonic records, current technology requires that the person be recorded in the immediate vicinity of the horn. It thus follows that it is still impossible to record an entire scene where people act, sing, or speak both phonically and cinematographically at the same time. Unfortunately, this process must still be divided. First, the artists sing for the discs, whereby the tempo and so on must be controlled in view of the scene that will later be created. Once the record, whose production I cannot describe in more detail here, is finished, the artists’ voices are played back to them on a special gramophone, which is precisely synchronized—that is, it runs at the speed of a cinematographic camera. The actors attempt to follow the gramophone’s rhythm as closely as possible, while the cinematograph photographs their movements, including those of their lips. Thanks to the precise construction of the recording and projection machines, a disruptive difference between sound and image is nearly out of the question for skilled artists. Once all procedures are fi nished, the opera scene will be shown in its perfect naturalism at one of Messter’s Biophon theaters in Berlin, Cologne, Barmen, Wiesbaden, or elsewhere, or it will be sold to Vienna, St. Petersburg, or Constantinople. Audiences will take delight in the performance without considering the efforts and costs of the recording of such “sing-

Sound Waves

551

ing pictures.” The latter are quite interesting, but they have a melancholy air when they include artists who have died, and whom we believe to see and hear, brought back to life before us. Notes 1. Tom Gunning, “Doing for the Eye What the Phonograph Does for the Ear,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, eds. Rick Altman and Richard Abel (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001), 13–31. 2. Founded in 1896, the Theater des Westens was one of Berlin’s premier theaters for operas and operettas. 3. Messter and Georg Betz trademarked the term thaumatograph in 1897, and this camera was featured in Messter’s first catalog of the same year. 4. Der Vogelhändler is an operetta by Carl Zeller that premiered in 1891.

248 HERBERT JHERING The Acoustic Film First published as “Der akustische Film,” in Berliner Börsen-Courier, no. 439 (September 19, 1922). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

If, as André Bazin argued in “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946), the inventors of film envisioned it as “a total and complete representation of reality,”1 early-twentieth-century film theorists often sought to dispel this association, highlighting instead the artistic possibilities of the new medium. As the following text demonstrates, however, the advent of sound film technology provoked renewed concerns, with many regarding the “talking film” as a mere “reproduced reality.” Herbert Jhering’s text was published shortly after the first public screening of short films employing the Tri-Ergon sound-onfilm system; the screening took place at Berlin’s Alhambra Theater on September 17, 1922, and was attended by approximately a thousand people. A regular contributor to the Berliner Börsen-Courier, Jhering was one of the most prominent theater and film critics of the Weimar era. See also his texts in chapters 11 and 18 of this volume, nos. 172 and 267.

The tragedy of all technological invention is that it can be surpassed and made obsolete by further technology. (If the Greeks had already possessed film, it would no longer exist today, because it would have been poisoned by its own perfection. Greek drama lives on. For art cannot be surpassed; it only rearranges itself with the vicissitudes of time.) Once we succeeded in making fi lm speak—and we saw on Sunday at the Alhambra that we have succeeded—film ceased to exist. Once we succeed in addressing the early imperfections of this invention—and there is no doubt that we will succeed— we will have taken the most dangerous step toward the mechanization of artistic-intellectual expression. How did the silent fi lm [Bewegungsfi lm] overcome mechanics? By extracting its effects from the mechanical. It creatively reinterpreted the laws of photographic movement and transferred the necessity for brevity onto the human body. The immediacy and sensual presence that physical expression loses in photography are compensated for by gains in elasticity, tempo, and precision. Dynamic shifts and leaping rhythm take the place of organic fullness. But the voice has no new value to oppose to mechanization. The

552

Configurations of a Medium

voice has its timbre, which is lost in reproduction. It has tone, which—because it is already designed and selected—can come across. But even then, it is just a potent reproduction, never an independent expression. The talking film is dangerous not only because it mechanizes the most soulful and intellectual of human gifts—the word—but also because it overturns the laws of film that developed along with the cinema. It negates precisely what silent film had achieved in order to overcome mechanization: abbreviation, rhythm. For it forces actors to move in conjunction with the word. The talking film is nothing more than reproduced reality. The silent film, with its unique laws, stands alongside reality as something new. The invention itself—by Hans Vogt, Dr. Josef Engl, and Joseph Massolle—is admirable. 2 For it reproduces image and sound simultaneously, because image and sound have been simultaneously recorded. Sound waves travel in the same way as light waves: thus, we hear people’s steps, every bell, every moving chair. The fact that incidental noises get recorded, that all voices sound as if plagued by speech impediments, that the image itself is often blurry may be explained by the early stage of the invention. But it would be awful if this invention were used in the cinema. As a reproduction of reality, it should be used only scientifically. We can film entire theater productions visually and acoustically for posterity—literature scholars are already excited. We can capture instrumental and choral concerts—music historians are sensing new doctoral theses. We can save the bodies and sounds of endangered species for museums—zoologists are overjoyed. But this invention has very dangerous potential for the development of film. It signifies a new attack on theater and art. The talking film is the phenomenal invention of a spirit that is erasing itself through its newest refinement and that is using its entire fortune only to fashion deadly weapons against itself. Notes 1. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 20. 2. The system was named Tri-Ergon (literally, “the work of three”) on account of its three inventors: Vogt, Engl, and Massolle. The rights for Tri-Ergon were ultimately sold to William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation on July 5, 1927.

249 HEINRICH STROBEL Film and Music: On the Experiments in Baden-Baden First published as “Film und Musik: Zu den Baden-Badener Versuchen,” in Melos: Zeitschrift für Musik 7, no. 7 (July 1928), 343–47. Translated by Tara Hottman.

The sound-on-film system was only one among many technological approaches to synchronizing sound and images, as the following essay shows. Heinrich Strobel (1898–1970) was a prominent musicologist and proponent of modern music who published a biography of Paul Hindemith in 1928. This essay is taken from a special issue of Melos on the festival Deutsche Kammermusik Baden-Baden (German Chamber Music Baden-Baden). The annual festival, which provided a forum for composers such as Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Weill, also featured experimental film music in the late 1920s. (Arnold Schoenberg, for his part, would compose Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene [Accompaniment to a film scene], op. 34 for an imaginary film in

Sound Waves

553

1929–30, commissioned by the German publishing house Heinrichshofen.) In critiquing anachronistic techniques commonly used in film accompaniment, Strobel’s text also anticipates arguments from Composing for the Films (1947) by Hanns Eisler and Theodor W. Adorno.

It did not take long to realize that the purely optical effect of film required an acoustic complement. The excessive strain placed entirely on the viewer’s eye by the rapid sequence of images must have a correlate in a simultaneous, auditory impression. The stronger the dynamic movement of film is, the more it demands to be underscored by acoustically perceptible elements. Given the extraordinarily rapid development of film, it was understandable that people initially gave little thought to the structural and stylistic requirements of the accompanying music. They had enough to do with the cinematic requirements. Back then, there could be no doubt: music played a thoroughly subordinate role in the cinema. Soon the rule was established: the best and most appropriate music is that which stands out the least, which merely traces the visual sensations acoustically in a clever way. First, people made do with an improvised piano accompaniment. Later, when the cinemas grew into large theaters and the intensity and tone of piano sound were no longer adequate, they turned to orchestras. Around this time, the practice of dramatic music was in full bloom in the opera, which they understandably could take as the most obvious model. Moreover, even in the musical drama, the feeling for the organic autonomy of music was already so far gone that people saw the highest goal as providing mere “background music” for the dramatic events on the stage. Music was reduced to the lowest servant. This practice was adopted by movie theaters and very quickly developed. The milieu or the emotional dynamic of the plot formed the basis for the musical illustration—as this new method became known—of film. Opera, concert, and salon music are enlisted to the same degree for illustration. The result is a mosaiclike coexistence of musical numbers, whose temporal boundary is determined by the particular duration of the film scene; this produces a sort of potpourri comprising all music from the last one hundred and fifty years, in which, without further ado, Mozart is placed next to some coffeehouse tearjerker if the cinema library considers it particularly suitable. This is the bible of the film musician. Here sensations of pain and ecstasies of love, raging storms and innocence-filled idylls are carefully categorized for practice. Depending on skill and taste, the illustrator assembles the background music from the thousands of musical numbers in the collections of cinematic music. One cannot deny that the best film illustrators do this with great artistic tact. They also long ago gave up the practice of sounding out every detail of the film narrative and instead attempt to use music to unite a series of consecutive scenes that contribute to the same emotional curve. In this way, the illustration gains unity in certain cases, but its potpourri-like character, its lack of style—precisely the shortcoming of this method—remains. It is significant that outstanding practitioners of film illustration, like Hans Erdmann and Giuseppe Becce in their handbook of film music,1 openly concede the hybrid nature, the aesthetic impossibility of the illustrative principle. Indeed, they call the illustrator a “bastard fathered by Apollo in a moment of weakness.” The inadequacy of musical film illustration led to the relatively early awareness that original music must be written for particularly valuable works of film. (This is not possible for the average film, at least not for now, due to the large number of films and the frequent program changes.) Original music is a major improvement. But since, to date, it is overwhelmingly composed by musicians who come from the practice of illustrating, it is basically no different from the usual musical accompaniment. It is dramatic background music performed by an experienced practitioner in the imitative style of late Romanticism, in which, depending on ability, more modern elements are interwoven. Here we

554

Configurations of a Medium

come to the main objection to dramatic illustration. An important film of our day, like Chaplin’s The Circus or Eisenstein’s Potemkin, is a product of the twentieth century. It is, in contrast to dramatic or musical theater, a work of art created from the specific conditions of its genre, the sign of an age advancing towards new forms of artistic expression through the triumph of technology. But background music is a rudiment of a practice inherited from the previous century, which was imported into film for external reasons, although it actually does not suit film. Good film and bad musical drama, a mechanical process and outdated emotional subjectivity, are coupled together. Film, a means of precise recording down to the smallest movement, is inalterable. But the music is compiled by each conductor anew, according to his sole discretion, and it varies constantly, even within a single performance, according to the conductor’s “disposition.” It follows the film in its details or its main lines, but where absolute precision of the image and sound is required, there always remains an inaccuracy, all the more so since people still forgo the use of reliable sychronometers. For the orchestra is directed by a human being, but a mechanical strip runs through the camera. The more autonomous a film is—here one could think of Ruttmann’s Berlin film2—the stronger you will feel the tension with the illustrative music, regardless of whether it is compiled or was written as original music. Based on these findings, young musicians were commissioned already last year to create original pieces of film music for Baden-Baden. For today’s musicians, the rejection of the illustrative principle is a matter of course. They depart sharply from the musical drama of the nineteenth century and strive for absolute composition. When composing music for film, they also strive at all costs to preserve the autonomy of their art. On the contrary, they may run the risk of overestimating the role of music in relation to the film. This, of course, brings little gain; we would then have, at best, a decent or even valuable piece of music that forces itself unduly into the foreground. The musician must always keep in mind that he plays a minor role in the cinema. It is important to write music that accommodates and underscores the dynamic and formal structure of the image sequence; the music should unfold its material organically, yet be flexible and variable enough to remain in a constant relationship with the image and in particular to highlight certain striking scenic moments. For these first attempts, the composers understandably chose antinaturalistic films, which lent themselves to some extent to the musical arrangement. For the expert musician will only gradually come to recognize the specific demands of film music. That absolute music can be combined with cinematic demands was demonstrated last year by Paul Hindemith, who submitted a composition for an animated film of Felix the Cat. This piece was written for a mechanical organ. The optical-mechanical sequence is matched by an acoustic-mechanical counterpart. An obvious choice, you might say. And yet the film practitioners have not made use of it. The mechanical linkage of the filmstrip to the music strip allows for absolute simultaneity. A particular image and the musical phrase composed for it now truly occur at the exact same moment. The mechanical roll of music can be reproduced and distributed with the filmstrip. A huge amount of unnecessary musical effort is spared. The awkward contrast between the human-operated cinematic apparatus and its necessary accompaniment through an orchestra, which is often greater in number than the average municipal theater ensemble, is automatically eliminated. Of course, they will be able to utilize the mechanical instrument only for short films. Due to its relatively few options of sound and tone, it fatigues the audience in the long run. Will we then turn back to the orchestra? Here, too, there is a more promising way out: the sound film. It records the image and music at the same time, thereby allowing for completely synchronous reproduction. Certainly this invention is still in the early stages. But there is no doubt that it will come to artistic fruition in the foreseeable future. Then, as far as we can tell today, the union of film and music will be satisfactorily resolved.

Sound Waves

555

We are still far away from the fulfillment of an important artistic requirement of this union—the film industry has not yet realized that it is in no way a matter of indifference what kind of music is played during a film of high artistic value. For them, the practice of illustration is a fixed dogma. Modern music and film production do not work in harmony. Only the film industry could take Edmund Meisel, who ruined the Berlin film through his music, for a creative modern composer. Diligent and deliberate work can alone change these conditions. Film, as a phenomenon of our time, also requires music of the times: asserting this realization is an important task of modern music, which strives everywhere to emerge from its isolation and to become the expression of a community. In the cinema, the listener could, almost unconsciously, be educated in a new musical attitude. But in pointing this out, we touch on the central sociological problem of film in general. An investigation of that problem reaches well beyond the scope of the questions posed here. Suffice it to say that Baden-Baden is, for the time being, the most important outpost for artistic and contemporary film music. For this year’s event, they fortunately also solicited the practitioners of illustration from the Film-Musik-Union. The latter are represented in the program by Wolfgang Zeller, who composed the music for the magic scenes of the silhouette animation film Achmed by Lotte Reiniger. He is presenting compositions for an orchestra of approximately nine musicians, as are Ernst Toch and Walter Gronostay, 3 who both wrote music for Felix the Cat animations. A composition for the mechanical piano by Paul Hindemith will be performed with the film Rebellion of the Objects by Hans Richter.4 For this performance, a new synchronizer by the Welte Company in Freiburg will be used. Otherwise, the simultaneity of images and music will be achieved by K. R. Blum’s synchronometer. Only the practitioner Zeller will regulate time using a pocket watch, whose reliability in this case is naturally highly contestable. Notes 1. Strobel is referring to Giuseppe Becce and Hans Erdmann, Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik (Berlin: Schlesinger’sche Buch- und Musikhandlung, 1927). See also Becce’s text in chapter 15 of this volume (no. 231). 2. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) featured a score by Edmund Meisel. See also Meisel’s essay later in this chapter (no. 259) and Ruttmann’s articles in chapter 14 (nos. 201, 207, 208, 213) and also directly following this text (no. 250). 3. Ernst Toch was an Austrian composer who composed music for Hans Richter’s Filmstudie (Film Study, 1928) and would go on to write the music for several narrative films in England and the United States. See Walter Gronostay’s text later in this chapter (no. 256). 4. Strobel is likely referring to Richter’s 1928 film Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts before Breakfast).

250 WALTER RUTTMANN Principles of the Sound Film First published as “Prinzipielles zum Tonfilm,” in Reichsfilmblatt, no. 35 (September 1, 1928). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

The famous “Statement on Sound” by Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov from August 5, 1928, had called for the “contrapuntal use of sound vis-àvis the visual fragment of montage.”1 Appearing less than a month later, Ruttmann’s text—the first of multiple articles he published on sound film in late 1928—likewise invoked counterpoint between optical and acoustic tracks as “the basis of all sound film

556

Configurations of a Medium design.” Ruttmann and Eisenstein would both attend the International Congress of Independent Cinema in La Sarraz, Switzerland, in September 1929, where sound would also be a point of discussion. A slightly abridged version of the following article appeared as “Eine neue Situation” in the Vossische Zeitung on August 31, 1928.

Sound film is the talk of the town. Sound film ruffles feathers, excites discussion, and has endured premature judgments, both hostile and enthusiastic. The fact is that for all practical purposes, there is little to say, but for artistic purposes, great possibilities abound. Every era has had its different camps, and every camp has its shouters. About ten years ago, when people began to produce serious films after cinema’s twenty-year gestation period, no one wanted to believe it. Rigid guidelines were put in place that refused to recognize a mechanical process as an art. Today we have proven that an industry can, despite its “purely mechanical production process,” produce artistic output. Even today, there are people who in all seriousness proclaim that fi lms cannot be art. To retort is unnecessary. International fi lms provide evidence enough—by any account, a beginning has been achieved, even if a solid line of development is still lacking. But has the first half of the twentieth century offered any such lines in the areas of literature, painting, or music? Here, too, one could justly use the same authority to establish vague claims. It did not take long to traverse the path leading from the Kintopp to visual art. Sound film, whose technological and constructive challenges have now been solved, is beginning its artistic development. It would be utterly wrong to see it as a simple augmentation of silent film. It is not sound film’s task to give voice to silent film. It must be clear from the outset that its laws have almost nothing to do with those of soundless film. A completely new situation is evolving here. Moving-image photography is being coupled with photographed sound. The whole artistic secret of sound film consists in the coupling of these two photographed elements in such a way as to create something new: namely, the activity that grows from the opposition between image and sound. Counterpoint, opticalacoustic counterpoint, must be the basis of all sound fi lm design. The battle between image and sound, their play with each other, their temporary fusion, which dissolves again to enable further oppositional relations—these are the possibilities. In conclusion, let it be said: the sound film problem can never imply an enhancement or degradation of silent film, nor can it solve the problems of silent film or replace it. Sound film points in a new direction, and it will prove its merit. Note 1. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound,” in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1988), 234.

251 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Sound-Image Film: On the Presentation in Frankfurt’s Gloria-Palast First published as “Tonbildfilm: Zur Vorführung im Frankfurter Gloria-Palast,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (October 12, 1928). Translated by Nicholas Baer.

Sound Waves

557

The transition to sound often provoked refl ections on the beginnings of film history—a mode of recollection enacted in the recursive structure of the following essay, which both begins and ends with invocations of memory. Siegfried Kracauer here reviews two of the earliest German sound films: Walter Ruttmann’s advertising film Deutscher Rundfunk (German Radio, also known as Tönende Welle) and Max Mack’s Ein Tag Film (A day of film); they premiered in Berlin in August and September 1928, respectively. Kracauer’s discussion of memory, Bergsonian durée, and the drive toward comprehensive representation extends arguments from his famous “Photography” essay from October 28, 1927.

The presentation of two talking films, which took place yesterday for the first time in Frankfurt, brought the early years of cinematography back to mind. Back then, when one saw strange poses and disjointed fragments portrayed, one did not sense the kind of development of which film art would one day be capable. It is likewise so today. After the featured experiments, no one can gauge, even approximately, what the sound-image film will mean to us again later, once the invention is technically perfected and aesthetically imbued. Some news about the Tri-Ergon system has already found its way into the public.1 To the layman, it seems like high wizardry. He is left bowing his head when he is shown the sound strip running next to the filmstrip, for the former, like a spectrum, consists of nothing but individual bars. 2 The narrow bar is, according to the experts’ judgment, a photo of sound waves, into which it is again reconverted. A transformation eleven times over is apparently necessary for the entire metamorphosis. Insiders will know exactly. At any rate, the esotericism of technology today already surpasses that of the Eleusinian mysteries. It would be wrong to evaluate Deutscher Rundfunk, the sound-image film created by Walter Ruttmann with the Tri-Ergon system, as an artistic composition. It is an interesting, promising experiment and, considering the system’s current status, can be little more. All the same, one may object that it handles its task of reproducing as many sounds as possible in a pretty senseless way. Ruttmann gives glimpses into the major German broadcasting stations, illustrates some of their services, and seeks at the same time to cover the prominent characteristics of their regions. A collection that consists partially of audio picture-postcards recalls radio programs in its edifying colorfulness and, despite the resistance of the individual pieces to fusion, is assembled into an artificial unity. Ruttmann would have done better, much better, to leave the miscellany next to each other, without any transition, instead of subordinating it, as he did in the Berlin film, 3 to a literary idea foreign to the images—an idea that does not possess the necessary cohesive force in an optical medium. There is unfortunately too much at the acoustic level, as well, and the composing is even worse: namely, that of Edmund Meisel, whose music accompanies the film for long stretches. In some regards, it reminds one of a conveyor belt and seems to have been manufactured by the kilometer. Its addition to the film is annoying above all because it is absolutely superfluous in a sound-image fi lm; when, for instance, a waterfall appears on the screen, no one wants to hear music other than that of the rushing falls. Excluding these errors, there remain short segments that, like a fairy tale, fill one with wonder. In them, fairy-tale dreams are also realized. A harbor with ships, and the sirens begin to blare; one sees and hears it all at once. In the station, a train rushes off, an old lady calls out “Auf Wiedersehen.” People speak as their lips move, the machines grate, and the sea lions snort and snarl. Life repeats itself in image and sound; whatever was comes up again and again.

558

Configurations of a Medium

The second film, Ein Tag Film, is a sketch with Paul Graetz in the main role. It contains a few scenes of moderate drollery in a film studio. Although the sound reproductions are still deficient in many ways, the one-act film confirms the feasibility of the new principle. In an aesthetic regard it is of course more dubious than the mosaic of the first film, since, by contrast, it does not primarily re-create spontaneous sounds but rather compels figures to speak who could also perform silently. This is an added achievement, whose problematic nature consists in the fact that it expands the film narrative to a necessarily deficient copy of a theater piece. It would like to give the illusion of corporeality and at best achieves seemingly living waxworks. It seeks to envision an occurrence that has its real form only in three-dimensional fullness. But, as the Ruttmann film shows, the possibilities of the sound-image film lie far more in the representation and forming of a reality that was heard through no earlier media— that reality that has never had a say on stage. To deliver the involuntary roar of the street for intervention in our world is reserved for the new technical system exactly as it had been reserved for previous film technology to make the life of lights and shadows accessible to our consciousness. It would be a futile ploy to simply repeat the existence [Dasein] that has already been handled aesthetically; the sound-image fi lm will first obtain its actual significance when it renders accessible existence previously unknown, the sound and clamor around us that has never yet communicated with the visual impressions and has invariably escaped the senses. Parenthetically: The sound-image film is for now the last link in the chain of those powerful inventions that, with blind certainty and as if directed by a secret will, push toward the complete representation of human reality. Through the sound-image film, it would be possible, in principle, to wrest life in its totality from transience and to consign it to the eternity of the image. Of course, not life as such but only the side of life that presents itself in space. It is associated with the measurable, the chronological time that Bergson separates from nonmeasurable time, which cannot be illustrated in space and in which, to put it plainly, our experiences [Erlebnisse] fall.4 Proust wants to evoke their contents, and only them, when he embarks on the search for lost time. The human reality preserved in the sound-image film corresponds so little to that intended by Proust that the two are more mutually exclusive than complementary. Not one of the occurrences belonging to the time of experience [Erlebniszeit] allows itself to be filmed, and no film is able to place such an occurrence in the order of the time of experience. It almost appears as if people lose their nonillustratable, intensive lives to the extent that they are able to capture the extensive spatial life. If that were so, technology would have prevailed over people, and the three-dimensional person would have fully converged with the person on-screen. Man will be lord over technology only when he preserves the life that appears not to the lens of the camera, but to memory alone. Notes 1. On the Tri-Ergon system, see note 1 in Jhering, “The Acoustic Film,” no. 248. 2. Kracauer invokes Sprossenschrift, an optical means of recording sound that was developed by the Austrian inventor Heinrich Stefan Peschka. The sound is registered on the filmstrip as horizontal bars of varying lengths and shades of gray. 3. Kracauer had reviewed Berlin: Symphony of a Great City in the Frank furter Zeitung one year earlier, on November 17, 1927. 4. In works such as “Time and Free Will” (1889) and Creative Evolution (1907), Henri Bergson had distinguished between a measurable, spatially represented time and a felt, experienced time or duration (durée). Bergson’s philosophy of time was important for many modernist writers and artists, including Marcel Proust.

Sound Waves

559

252 BÉLA BALÁZS A Conviction: An Initial View of a New Art Form’s Perspectives and Limitations First published as “Eine Überzeugung: Perspektiven und Schranken des ersten Ausblicks nach einer neuen Kunst,” in Filmtechnik 9 (April 27, 1929), 162–64. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Appearing in a special issue of Filmtechnik that sought to provide “a first overview of the uncharted territory of sound film,” Béla Balázs’s article envisages the development of a sound film art that would train moviegoers’ sense of hearing. Extending aesthetic possibilities that he had outlined in Visible Man (see chapter 15, no. 222), Balázs here conceives of the “acoustic close-up,” among other techniques. His article was published approximately six weeks after the premiere of one of the first “full-length” sound films in Germany: Walter Ruttmann’s Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World, March 12, 1929). Although the film had generated great interest, it was largely panned for its paltry use of synchronized sound and its overreliance on a score by Edmund Meisel.

It still rasps and gurgles and stammers, but it is certainly on its way—that great new art form. The technical possibilities are here, those that conjure it into being and those that inspire it. In art, the means are always first to appear, and then one looks for an end toward which to use them. (The spoon precedes the soup.) First comes the instrument, and then music is composed for it. Language’s appearance allows things to be said. It was not the painters who invented paint. And the cinematograph had already long been in existence by the time they discovered the particular world that could be depicted with it. The possibility of sound film will also open an unknown realm of life and give shape to it, even if we do not yet know exactly how. And our faith depends on this certainty, not on technical achievements. For if this new type of film simply wanted to speak, sing, and make music, like theater has done for centuries, then even in its most perfect form it would remain a means of reproduction and proliferation and would never amount to a new art form. But if a new discovery in art is important and significant, then it will unmask that which had hitherto been masked. Masked before our eyes—or before our ears. Silent, purely optical fi lm did this when it came into its own as a separate art, by showing us things that could not be seen onstage. It showed what lies beyond human dialogue: the visible, moving environment, the face of things and of nature. Now, sound film (and speaking is the least important and perhaps most disruptive aspect of it) ought to and will discover our acoustic environment, the voices of things, the intimate language of objects and of nature. It will discover everything that talks beyond our human dialogues, that contributes to life’s grand conversation and continuously influences our thinking and feeling in a profound way, without our even noticing: from the roar of the surf and the din of the factory to the monotonous melody of autumnal rain on the darkened windowpanes and the creaking of the floorboards in the lonely parlor. Sensitive, lyrical poets have on occasion described these meaningful voices. Now they are to be depicted. Film is taking over a realm of lyrical poetry. The radio play has never managed this. For we know so little of the more intimate sounds of things and of nature that we do not recognize them without also simultaneously seeing their image. And explanations ruin the mood. But sound fi lm can and indeed will educate our sense of hearing just as optical film has trained our eyes. Up

560

Configurations of a Medium

until now, we have heard the sounds of daily life as nothing more than incoherent noise, as a chaotic racket, like an unmusical person listens to an orchestra. At best he picks out the loudest, the leading melody. The rest is blurred in a formless and therefore tiresome clamor. Sound film will teach us to listen more intensely. It will teach us to read the score of the multipart orchestra of life. And we will recognize the particular vocal character of individual things as a revelation of exceptional life. They say that “art is redemption from chaos.” Now, sound film can and will redeem us from the chaos of noise. Because it will capture it as expression—as meaning and sense. Sound film will become a true art form only when it can isolate these individual sounds and bring them closer to us, when it can cut between acoustic close-ups and can compose montages of sound—namely, when the director of the optical film is able to lead our eyes. Because it is then that he will underline, point out, emphasize individual things and thereby validate his subjective viewpoint. Then he will no longer need to let the world’s noise pass over himself and his camera like some deadened mass of sound but will be capable of intervening, of giving this noise shape and meaning. He will converse with the voices of things themselves. This is of course where the essential problems of the sound image arise, and these were already theoretically foreseeable during the very first experiments. I have already mentioned the first problem. It is the recognizability of sound. There is hardly anything that even a half-civilized person cannot immediately recognize and distinguish upon seeing its image. But if he hears just its sound, he is rarely certain. A hunter can distinguish sounds in the forest; a worker, those in his factory. He would recognize their meaning. But the general public does not have this acoustic experience and education. When a film presents a long shot with several objects in the frame, the sound oftentimes cannot be immediately placed—that is, not connected with the object from which it issues. This also has to do with the fact that we lack the certainty and exactitude in acoustic perspective that we have in optical perspective. By that, I mean that we cannot judge with any precision from which direction or distance the sound is coming, as we can do when we are presented with visual cues. For this reason, motion must be used simultaneously to make conspicuous that object which is meant to produce an effect by means of its sound. With the eye’s attention engaged, the ear is provoked into listening more closely. But even this presents difficulties when attempted in a long shot. This has to do with the nature of the difference between optical space and acoustic space. I can easily differentiate those things in space that I see next to one another, for example. Visual impressions do not blend together. When I hear several sounds together, though, they blend into a general noise. I would need perfect pitch to be able to tell them all apart. But to hear their position in the shared space in the same way that I can see their position is—for now—practically impossible. (I say “for now” because I believe sound fi lm will nurture the audience’s ability to differentiate.) It should therefore be assumed that each new sound will have to be matched with a close-up shot for the audience member to be able to position it with any certainty. And then it will perhaps remain attached to the object in a subsequent long shot. This “attachment” of the sound presents thoroughly peculiar problems by virtue of the fact that the sound comes from a fixed and unmovable speaker, whereas the images themselves move. A sound’s approach or retreat can be convincingly represented by making it louder and clearer or softer and more indistinct. But if I cannot see the object that is moving in

Sound Waves

561

some particular direction, I am left unable to determine, in the absence of further information, whether the sound might be a loud one that happens to appear softer because of its distance or a quieter tone that is nearby. This too requires special visual cues. The sound that issues from the fixed speaker, and therefore always comes from the same place, simply cannot follow the picture that moves straight across the space of the screen. Imagine I have realized that there is sound coming from the moving lips of a singer standing in the left corner of the screen. If he then moves to the right side of the screen, regardless of how wide he opens his mouth or how forcefully he uses his vocal instrument, the sound will not move to the right side with him. The acoustic image stays where it is, sliding off from the visual image, and what we are left with in the end is a ventriloquial effect. You hear the sound coming from an entirely different place than where you see the source. Without really knowing why, the audience experiences a sense of unease resulting from this general confusion of impressions. Given today’s technology of fixed speakers, of unmovable sources of sound, the objects that are these sources cannot be moved across the screen—not without intercutting! The sound can be placed anew only once the object appears on the other side of the screen in another close-up after an intermediate image. The following example demonstrates how difficult editing can be for sound films. A violinist in close-up. The movement of his fi ngers and the bow perfectly match the rhythm of the playing. Then the shot changes. A close-up of the fingers. Though their movement continues to match the rhythm, you feel as if there has been a slip, a gap somewhere! That is because you have identified the visual image with the rhythmic one. A new shot demands a new rhythm! These cuts should be made only when the melody also changes the rhythm, and the caesura in the music perfectly matches the cut in the visual scene. Most importantly, the visual shot should never be changed without a corresponding change in the sound! The difference between the speed of light and that of sound will also present real technical difficulties. These are apparent already at the time of recording. The sound always lags behind when telephotographic shots are taken. But even when the film is projected, the back rows in a large space frequently experience an undesirable syncopated, staggering sound. But solutions to these and many other technical problems will certainly be found once we have theoretically determined what it is exactly that needs solving. Technical solutions by themselves, however, are not enough to elevate sound film to a new, independent art form. The script is of supreme importance! It is not just those things that have been depicted visually in film for some time that must now become audible. The writing and shooting of acoustic fi lm must have the special nature of the effects of sound at their heart. It should not only be “more natural” than the optical film, it must also show another side to nature, and it must let it be heard. I furthermore believe that the acoustic aspects of this new type of film must not be relegated to serving as simple accompaniment. In order to fully exploit their possible effects, sounds themselves must become decisive motifs in the film’s plot. For example, music has understandably been an essentially nonfilmic motif in film up to this point, although images of the audience listening silently offered some of the most beautiful and pure studies in mimic expression. But such scenes always had to portray an effect without the cause. When it comes to sound film, though, the Pied Piper of Hamelin would be a good subject, for example. Music, or sound generally, as a dramatic motif, as the event. But that will come with time.

562

Configurations of a Medium

253 ERNST HUGO CORRELL The Nature and Value of Sound Film First published as “Wesen und Wert des Tonfilms,” in Ufa Feuilleton 2, no. 22 (May 30, 1929), 1–3. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

“Sound film was a revolution in film aesthetics,” as Friedrich Kittler has noted in Optical Media, especially insofar as it “required an absolutely fixed recording and playback speed for film images.”1 The following text from 1929 discusses how sound technology would indeed transform all aspects of film production, distribution, and exhibition— from necessitating a definitive screenplay to standardizing the frame rate in all theaters. Ernst Hugo Correll (1882–1942) was a German film producer, head of Phoebus Film, and chairman of the Verband der Filmindustriellen (Association of Film Industrialists). In 1928, he became director of production at Ufa and helped the studio make the successful transition to sound film.

The film industry’s transition from silent film to sound film will cause a revolution in operational methods, whose scope even the experts only recently understood. No leg of production, not even the shortest, will remain unchanged. It starts with the screenplay. Until now, a screenplay was only the basis for a director’s work in the studio. It was common enough for a director to have a sudden idea during shooting that would change entire sequences in the screenplay. It was just as common for the composition of the film to depart significantly from the screenplay during editing and titling. In the future, this will be impossible. A sound film can neither be altered during shooting nor pared down by editing; any change to a completed screenplay would mean a discontinuity or disruption of the film’s score. Stopwatches and metronomes will be very important for the production of sound films. The length of each individual shot must be completely synced with the accompanying music. Director, screenwriter, composer, and cameraman have to agree about the length and manner of every setup during the production of the screenplay. The most efficient and dramatically effective form absolutely must be found before the pages leave the table. All this requires a considerably longer lead time for a sound film production. The architect, too, must relearn his craft. Future films will no longer depend solely on the visual effect of the sets. Instead, much more must be done to account for acoustics, which make certain materials impossible for a set designer to use. It goes without saying that studios will have to be reorganized to accommodate soundproof sets. In the future, casting will have to be based on different factors. We will need thorough tests to establish which vocal pitches are best suited to being rendered through a microphone. Film crews will become significantly larger. The composer or bandleader will be extremely active in preparations for sound films. The screenwriter’s position will change to the extent that in film, words play a similar role to the one they have had in the theater. In the studio, new crew members include the acoustician or sound producer, who will direct sound from the booth. Of course, the visual director will eventually be able to manage sound effects by wearing headphones and carrying a keyboard that controls the microphone. The most drastic change will be to the shooting process. Directors must cease providing extensive cues to actors while they are filming. Instead, directing must be carried out in complete silence. This will require a significant lengthening of the rehearsal period.

Sound Waves

563

Film actors must get used to practicing with nearly artistic precision. Needless to say, just like stage actors, they will have to memorize their roles meticulously. In fact, the stage actor has an advantage over the film actor, who must work without a prompter. More than ever before, entire scenes will have to play out without interruption. Until now, close-ups have been the only way to indicate what was important in a scene. In many cases, the acoustic effect of the spoken word will make optical emphasis via closeup obsolete. A powerful artistic potential, hitherto unknown to film and theater alike, resides in sound film’s ability to show someone reacting to a noise or a voice that the viewer can hear at the same time. Outdoor shooting will create even greater difficulties in the future. Mobile sound film equipment will not be appropriate to every situation. It will fail if the ambient noise on location is louder than the sound being made for the film. As in radio, we will have to create artificial sound effects in the studio for these scenes. Sound will not undermine film’s internationality; in fact, it will elevate it. Music and sound are on equal footing among all peoples. Films containing only spoken word, of course, will become a purely national affair. But fi lms that combine sound and speaking will continue to be shown and understood in all countries. The unimportant moments of dialogue can be filmed in two versions: one silent, and one speaking. The important moments of dialogue will be filmed in all major world languages. Sound film will not, as its few opponents maintain, become filmed theater. Rather, it will go down its own specific path, which leads to a brand new art, the art of sound film. Audiences in smaller cities will greet the introduction of sound film with particularly sincere delight. Musical accompaniment will no longer be at the hands of a third-class pianist. The most beautiful voices and best speaking actors in the world will be heard even in small towns. And finally: in all screenings, sound film must be exhibited at the exact rate of 24 frames per second. Until now, the exhibition rate was discretionary. Sometimes shows were even presented at rates of 32–34 frames per second. Actors’ movements appeared to be so quick and agitated as to make the plot incomprehensible. Sound film will put a forcible end to this practice. All in all, the German film industry is set to take on a difficult task. German audiences will soon see an important development in film, whose scope is difficult to imagine in theory. Only practice can convince us—but that will happen soon, and decisively. Note 1. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 200.

254 GEORG WILHELM PABST Reality of Sound Film First published as “Realität des Tonfilms,” in Film-Kurier, Sondernummer [special issue]: “Zehn Jahre FilmKurier“ (June 1, 1929). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Despite the early efforts documented at the beginning of this chapter, the German film industry was relatively slow in adapting to sound technology, with only eight sound films among the 183 German features produced in 1929. That year, it was an American

564

Configurations of a Medium production—Lloyd Bacon’s The Singing Fool (1928), starring Al Jolson—that was the first fully synchronized sound film screened in Germany, opening in Berlin’s GloriaPalast on June 3. Published just two days earlier (in the tenth-anniversary issue of FilmKurier), G. W. Pabst’s text discusses the promise and possibilities of sound film, based on his impressions of productions viewed abroad. In 1929, Pabst completed Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl), and Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palu; codirected with Arnold Fanck). His first sound film, Westfront 1918, would premiere a year later, on May 23, 1930.

The ten-year anniversary of Film-Kurier falls during the greatest transformation in film history. We hope, we wish, we demand that on the path to this transformation, the journal will be a faithful compass and advisor for film arts. I am referring to the transformation caused by the implementation of sound film. A few years ago, I wrote a letter to a Berlin newspaper about the “utopian idea that the perfected film, i.e., the three-dimensional film in color and sound, will annihilate the theater.” I was more than skeptical; I wrote: “Sound and words will only bring unsustainable half-measures to a self-contained art form that is in its liveliest stage of development. Current films are not trying to show the cacophony of a city street, but rather to render optical impressions. Dialogue is not important, but rather the atmosphere of faces and movement. Should film tempo be bound to the clumsiness of the spoken word, and the internationality of human gestures forced back into linguistically determined national boundaries? I still stand by the silent black-and-white film.” But a caveat made its way into that text! “Like so many technical inventions, what was magic yesterday is today merely a gimmick and tomorrow may become a vital necessity.” My caveat rather than my skepticism has been borne out. I was in London, where I saw sound films—by which I mean films that completely reproduce human speech along with all other sounds—that have not yet come to Germany. I am talking about absolute accuracy, and in fact I believe that the silent film is already done for and the theater has ten years left. We loved the “silent film”; we still love it, grateful for everything it gave us—we love it as we love our teachers. It taught us to see! It introduced us to the rich nuances of the world in a way completely unknown to untrained eyes. Because we had to form things optically, we learned to see. But the silent film had limits. Just as the theater is confined by its size, the silent film is constrained by the primitiveness of preverbal emotions and the unambiguousness of things that can only be seen. Ever since the sound film has learned to reproduce human voices and environments completely, as in Broadway Melody,1 it can transcend the limitations and constraints of both theater and silent film. Its perfect realism vitiates every technical misgiving. Sound film complements the poignancy of the visible with the magic of the word. It forges such a strong connection between the two that it can escape even the bonds of national-linguistic specificity—perhaps it is even a step on the way to creating a universal world language. Note 1. An American musical, The Broadway Melody (1929) was the first sound film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. It also included a Technicolor sequence.

Sound Waves

565

255 CARL HOFFMANN Problems of the Camera First published as “Probleme der Kamera,” in Film-Kurier, no. 153 (June 29, 1929). Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

While German cinema had gained renown in the 1920s for its stylized mise-en-scène, visual mode of storytelling, and extraordinary camera movements (see chapter 15), these distinguishing features seemed untenable with the conversion to sound. In the following article, Carl Hoffmann (1885–1947)—a prominent cinematographer who had worked on films with Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, and Richard Oswald, among other directors—discusses how the transition to sound would affect the mobility of the camera. Hoffmann’s first sound films, including Gustav Ucicky’s Das Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci (The Flute Concert of Sanssouci), would be released in 1930.

The problems one associates with the camera are also the problems faced by film as a whole, for it is generally the camerawork that gives visual expression to the dramaturgic concept. Film is visual. The image is addressed to the eyes. To make a somewhat bold comparison, one could say that the camera translates the dramatist’s language into that of the eyes. In spite of the tremendous development of the film industry in America, one must recognize that the development of artistic filmmaking took place in Germany, which also deserves the lion’s share of credit for having generally improved the artistic quality of filmic art. Thanks to its vast financial resources, America was in the fortunate position of being able to stunningly showcase the advances made in film, enabling a full appreciation thereof. From its very beginnings, cinema followed the sacred principle that the camera must remain as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar. We have seen this rule increasingly relaxed over the past ten years, and now the camera is maneuverable in such a way that it is nearly impossible to exert any restraint over it. The camera slides, lifts itself up, floats, and slips into every nook and cranny, which enhances its ability to serve the film’s narrative. Were one to shoot a film today according to the old principles of cinematography, the audience would take the result to be an ancient artifact. And we may not have even yet reached the limits of the camera’s maneuverability, in spite of the tremendous freedom of movement enjoyed by today’s recording devices. I can even imagine that the motion and placement of the camera will one day be further developed in a way to convey the director’s vision so clearly that intertitles will become obsolete. But there is no space to go into this in any more detail here. And so now we hear the cry: Silent film is dead, long live the sound film! Does that now mean that the advances made with respect to the camera in the last twenty years will be relegated to the dustbin? Should the camera become as rigid again as it was in the earliest days of film? Of course not! There is absolutely no reason to move backwards. The camera is instead charged with marrying, so to speak, the visual elements via cinematography with the acoustic and spoken elements of sound film. From what we have witnessed thus far, the camera is trapped inside a soundproof box. The poor camera! Will we have to say goodbye to your gracious movements, the lively and irresistible leaps you have performed for us? Have you been condemned anew to those chains from which you freed yourself just ten years ago? Not to worry. For, thankfully, the situation will not be as bad as all that. German cinematography, which always enjoyed a stellar reputation the world over for its work in top

566

Configurations of a Medium

German films and which often forged new paths, will without a doubt dedicate itself absolutely to keeping the sound film camera free from these threatening shackles. The German cameraman, formed as he is by his artistic mindset, will not rest until he has discovered the ways and means to achieve this. Under no circumstances will he allow the camera’s art to be reduced to some set and fixed craft. He will do everything possible to avoid sound film emerging as the cuckoo’s egg in the nightingale’s nest of cinematographic art.

256 WALTER GRONOSTAY Possibilities for the Use of Music in Sound Film First published as “Die Möglichkeiten der Musikanwendung im Tonfilm,” in Melos: Zeitschrift für Musik 8, no. 7 (July 1929), 317–18. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

If, as David Bordwell has claimed, film theorists in the first half of the twentieth century often invoked Wagnerian Musikdrama in forging a “musical analogy,”1 the following article argues that Wagner’s very ideals needed to be rethought in an age of sound film and of what Theodor W. Adorno would later call “the radio symphony.” A student of Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Gronostay (1906–1937) was a composer known for his work in film, writing the music for Hans Richter’s early sound short Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich (Everything turns, everything revolves, 1929) and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938). The journal Melos was an important forum for discussions of modern music and its relation to the other arts.

The new challenges facing music—by radio, sound film, and so on—have had such a sudden impact that it would be impossible for the ideals established by Wagner concerning the relation between music and the other arts not to have been laid to rest long ago. In order to satisfy the postulates of our era on the one hand, while not consigning ourselves to haphazard experimentation on the other, it is necessary to clarify music’s relationship to the other arts as they arise on a case-by-case basis, such that we can extrapolate at least a few maxims for practical application. Sound film, which is the subject of the present essay, allows music and filmic events to be related to one another in three possible ways. 1. Retention of the old illustrative practice

The use of music in this case—heretofore the only way in which anyone has used music in film at all—arises from a plight unique to silent film. For in every movie theater, the discrepancy between organized visuals and disorganized acoustics—if the film is playing without musical accompaniment—is unpleasantly obvious to every spectator. All sorts of random noises—the clapping of chairs, the audience’s comings and goings, rustling paper, whispering, and so on—confront the well-formed image sequence with a distracting factor that awkwardly disrupts its potential to make an impression. Thus people sought a tool to help organize the space not only visually but also acoustically by accompanying films with music whose tempo and character are as appropriate as possible to the filmstrip. 2. The events of the film motivate music

Here, the possibility for musical expression is determined by the scenic situation. We hear music only when a singer or orchestra is visible. The other acoustic portions of such a

Sound Waves

567

fi lm would likely be made up mostly of speaking scenes and, above all, organized sounds. 2 In this case, we might hope that such an employment of music in film would lead contemporary opera techniques ad absurdum. For musical expression in the sense of a piece composed according to purely musical laws would necessarily lead to a standstill in the plot and thus the progression of the film. Thus it directly contradicts the laws of film, which—just as in the theater—demand visual movement above all else. The only way to get over this hurdle would be through an extremely intensive arrangement of close-ups, as in the film The Passion of Joan of Arc. The director would have to employ a “facial muscle montage,” so to speak. 3. Music motivates the events of the film

This extremely promising avenue has as yet hardly been explored, with the exception of an optical Bewegungsspiel [play of movement] by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack.3 Here, as in ballet, the visual movement would grow out of the rhythms and tensions of the music. There have, in fact, already been attempts of a purely filmic nature to replace rational story logic with a purely constructive, rhythmic movement impulse: films by Hans Richter, Man Ray, Picabia, and others. The screenplay for this type of film would have to be conceived in collaboration with a musician, who—once every meter has been definitively determined—would complete the composition before shooting begins. The fi nished music would be played during shooting, and the visual events would follow its progression. These three possibilities for the use of music in sound film have been described here with a view toward their distinctions. It is also conceivable that, in practice, a combination of all three could be used in a single film. In principle, however, they represent the only possibilities that exist for music to figure in sound film. Notes 1. See David Bordwell, “The Musical Analogy,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 141–56; and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 251–70. 2. Original footnote (translated): See the essay “Technik der Geräuschanwendung im Tonfilm” [Techniques for the use of noise in sound film], which will appear in the August issue of Form. 3. Gronostay is likely referring to Hirschfeld-Mack’s Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (Reflected color-light play). A version of the work was shown as part of the “absolute film” matinee in 1925 in Berlin.

257 ERWIN PISCATOR Sound Film Friend and Foe First published as “Tonfilm Freund und Feind,” in Die Literatur 32, no. 6 (1929–30), 381–82. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Whereas Walter Gronostay’s text (no. 256) reconsidered the relationship between music and film in light of technological changes, the following article addresses the shifting status of theater vis-à-vis cinema in the sound era. One of the best-known stage directors in the Weimar Republic, Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) was a collaborator with Bertolt Brecht and a leading exponent of epic theater. He worked on several films as a scriptwriter, producer, and director, and became legendary for incorporating film footage into his Marxist stage productions of the 1920s. Piscator’s essay “Das Theater

568

Configurations of a Medium unserer Zeit” (1927) had also theorized the relationship between film and theater; they were connected, he wrote, “not out of sensationalism or gimmickry, but rather with the intention of illustrating the totality of a political worldview.”1

Some say that theater is dead. That there will be nothing but sound film in the future. Sound film allows us to create an optical and acoustic image of the world that is adequate to reality or, by virtue of its artistic composition, even surpasses it. Others retort that this composite art, or rather antithesis of art, this impure art, this absurd, gramophone-like reproduction of sounds and voices will never occupy any significant place in artistic life. So-called experts said the same thing thirty years ago of the first experiments in film (to say nothing of those grandmothers who, unable to halt the automobile’s triumphal success, refused to their dying day to ever ride in one). Furthermore, thirty years ago people confused the medium of film with the significance that it can have! That significance assumes . . . ! Assumes, namely, that there is a definitive direction, that a path opens up, that people are present who understand that this is only a means to something greater. What the intellectual custodians of film delivered to the public were essentially dime novels. Since that time, film’s ability to create real “art” has been proven to us by some astounding examples. A specifically filmic intuition does exist, and it has its origins in the optical. And we will see those who had haughtily retreated to their pure art, ceding earlier film to industry or to the disdained plebs, red-faced with embarrassment, as we have on so many occasions before. Curious how experience teaches some people nothing. And so it will be with sound film, too. It would be foolish to proclaim that it will be the sole form of art. There is no one and only form of art. Whether brush, pen, chisel, or musical note, visual or acoustic, the medium is always subordinate to that which is to be said, and that which is to be said also defines the form in which it can best be expressed. A sculptor will answer the question of “how” differently than a literary author would; an auteur in sound film (I mean both the screenwriter and director) will produce a different result than would the creator of a silent film. I believe my varied performances have amply demonstrated the degree to which we are compelled to seek out new forms of expression. And I have been accused on many occasions of using unsuitable—some would say inartistic—means, such as when I brought fi lm into the theater. I have explained time and again that there are no principles in art in any aesthetic sense of the term, especially not these days when the boundaries and overlaps have become so fluid and diverse. This may be a transitional phase, or it may be a more permanent characteristic, given how new subject areas are made ever more accessible to art. My experiments were, in light of the realities of that time, as close to sound film as one could get. One could actually say that they were, to a large extent, experiments undertaken in the direction of sound film. And I believe there are indeed tremendous opportunities for development in sound film, just as I believe that these same opportunities also exist in theater. It will not be any different with sound film. We cannot predict the ways in which it will develop. Sound film, to a far greater degree than silent film, has the ability to truly exhaust the material’s potential, to give it definitive shape, to explore it more deeply—both the dialogue and the accompanying text, whether narrative, summarizing, or pedagogical (didactic). The significance of sound (natural tone) and of music is so great that music could, for the first time, now be allowed to objectively develop in optical, concretely imaginable ways. In a short amount of time, sound film has set its own rules. It is unrealistic at this point to debate the medium’s value or lack thereof. And any debate about the longevity of the medium’s current form is unnecessary, since new developments will continue to improve it or even surpass it at some future point. Congruence with time creates unique

Sound Waves

569

works of art. If this happens with architecture, painting, and theater, then why not with sound film? For this reason alone, sound film is tremendously valuable because it is a medium, like silent film before it, that has provoked revolutionary development from within and that furthermore affects all related art forms in a revolutionary way. Of course, no “medium” by itself is responsible for revolutionary effects; this is rather a result of the content, the spirit, and the concept (a sound film operetta does not make for a revolution). But the products of imagination continuously give rise to new, variable forms of expression, and this is where their value can be found. The more universal a medium is, the more fantastical (in a film, a fly can be portrayed to be as large as an elephant, and similar effects are possible with sound). So much more can be said in a way that is more powerful, simple, illustrative, persuasive, and varied in terms of movement, tone, color, magnification, and reduction. It can even become qualitative propaganda, just like the radio broadcasting that spans the globe. But it can just as easily be a means for spreading truth rather than lies. The value or lack of value in the use of an artistic medium is determined solely by the person who possesses it and by the types of intellectual conceptions of the world that are meant to be conveyed by it. Friend or foe: that is decided solely on the basis of how it is applied, how it is used. Its initial misuse as a tool to further expand the entertainment industry’s reach is unfortunate, but not of principal importance. In fact, this phase can be seen as initially contributing to stimulating the medium’s development, inasmuch as technical experimentation is still involved. The industry uses every medium with the aim of fully exploiting it, and this may mean running it into the ground over the course of many years (by producing things of inferior quality where superior work would have brought the same desired return: money!). And so we are left with but only one rallying cry: Let us enlist this artistic medium fully alongside all the others! Let us make it worth all the agitation it has caused! Note 1. “Das Theater unserer Zeit,” in Erwin Piscator, Aufsätze, Reden, Gespräche, ed. Ludwig Hoffmann (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1968), 23–24.

258 RUDOLF ARNHEIM A Commentary on the Crisis Facing Montage First published as “Beitrag zur Krise der Montage,” in Filmtechnik 6 (February 22, 1930), 9–11. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Among film critics and theorists of the Weimar era, perhaps none was more famously skeptical of sound film than Rudolf Arnheim. Already on October 16, 1928, Arnheim had published an essay (“Der tönende Film”) in Die Weltbühne arguing that with the advent of sound film technology, “film art abdicates its hard-won place back to the good old peepshow.”1 In the following essay written a year and a half later, Arnheim calls for nonsynchronized montage instead of the simple reproduction of opticalacoustic phenomena (recalling Ruttmann’s text earlier in this chapter). While arguing against naturalist aesthetics, Arnheim nonetheless uses a scene from Wilhelm Thiele’s Liebeswalzer (Waltz of love, 1930) as a negative example of efforts to decouple film’s sound and image tracks.

570

Configurations of a Medium

Is sound film simply recorded theater and as such subject to the artistic laws that govern theater? Or is sound nothing more than a decorative and complementary supplement to silent film, such that the artistic principles developed with regard to silent film over the past decades continue to be valid in their original form even now that film has a voice? Or, finally, is sound film an art form in its own right, one that will have to create its own artistic laws? Now that a sufficient number of sound films have been made, we are no longer faced with the question of whether sound film will prevail, but rather what kind of sound film we prefer. What enthusiasts proclaim to be the art of sound film is in reality nothing more than a modernized, comfortable form of theater. The fact that the entire world must now serve as scenery or that Australia and the Reeperbahn can bewitchingly come to life on-screen may, from a certain vantage point, be seen as a sign of progress, but it is not at all a fundamental one! And now we can include sounds from reality—the rattling of machines, the hum of giant crowds, birds’ twittering, the roar of the sea—as sound effects. We are no longer reduced to using drums, peas, and sheet metal backstage to approximate the sound of stormy weather. This is technology in perfected form. But while it marks an expansion of the material at our disposal and a much-improved verisimilitude in depicting nature, it is no new form of art. The laws of every art form are determined by the materials used to produce that form’s artworks. Therefore one must commit to thoroughly investigating the characteristic features of the material used in sound film if the goal is to assess sound film’s specific artistic potential. What is significantly unique about sound film is that the optical and acoustic aspects are not recorded together in one unified process but rather separately by two different devices, and then these are only artificially matched. Synchronization is a pitiful middleman. The challenges involved in synchronization, which our technicians must successfully meet if their work is to emulate reality, clearly indicate that this artificial welding together of image and sound to produce a unitary effect is something against which the material of sound film itself rebels. It must rebel because the process is antithetical to its very character. We can find examples from all forms of dramatic art and from every time period in which people have attempted to use the material of whatever art form to create illusory, exact replicas of reality. And we see too how the material, by dint of its very character, resists this attempted enslavement, with the result that works of art have value precisely because they are not identical to the model on which they were based. Michelangelo wanted to craft human figures to look just as they do in reality, and Cézanne sought to perfectly capture the French landscape. But Michelangelo’s David is not as strikingly life-like as a figure at a wax museum, and Cézanne’s landscape is not as true in form to nature as a realistically done stage set. This is because the artist’s hands were guided not only by the model that inspired them but also by certain demands stemming from the character of the material: marble and oil paints seek their own satisfaction. The vast majority of sound films produced thus far have held themselves to false naturalist ideals. Instead of truly engaging with the unique characteristics of the material, by which I mean the different roots of image and sound, and utilizing these to achieve particular effects, creators of sound fi lm have instead put great effort into erasing these unique characteristics. They have attempted instead to reproduce reality as if image and sound were created in a unitary process. Sound film’s status as a unique art form will remain unsettled as long as work continues in this direction. While the material involved in making sound film has its own particular characteristics, this does not mean that these characteristics necessarily lend themselves to artistic effects. It is up to the artist to prove that. But until this road has been traveled, there is simply nothing we can do. Pudovkin

Sound Waves

571

once said something in complete harmony with what I have been discussing here, something that the majority of people working in sound film would surely find absurd but that is an insightful comment all the same: “The future of sound film lies in nonsynchronized montage.”2 Those who remain unconvinced that sound film should be considered its own art form will be all the more interested to see experiments thus described by producers: “Now this is what sound film is about!” Some of these effects were attempted, for example, in Wilhelm Thiele’s Waltz of Love,3 produced by Pommer-Produktion. Some of them, as a matter of fact, consciously attempted to distance themselves from the naturalist ideal, just as we have been advocating here. The only question is whether they were successful. There is a small balcony in the ballroom of the Lauenburg castle from which one may observe what is taking place below on the parquet. A broadcast reporter is standing in front of his microphone on this balcony, relaying the events of the reception ceremony taking place in the hall below. The recording device is right in front of the reporter. You see him up close and his voice is correspondingly loud. After a while, there is a cut and the recording device is now below in the hall, directly facing the throne. The sound track, however, has not been cut in the same way, and the reporter’s voice continues uninterrupted and at exactly the same volume, even though he is no longer to be seen. (Alternating optical images underlaid with an unchanging, continuous “sound carpet.”) The effect produced is not at all naturalistic. What is impossible in life is made possible by means of the sound film, technically possible—but artistically as well? And psychologically? Here, the creators of Waltz of Love made use of a very well-known principle of form. In this, a connection is created between two successive scenes by means of something characteristic from the first scene appearing again in the second. The context in which it appears in both scenes is completely different, but it feels organic to both. This principle plays a fundamental role in all areas of human creativity, from the psychology of the “eureka moment” in science to that of the joke, and it is used frequently in sound film. If the image of a clock’s swinging pendulum, for example, cross-fades into a swing moving back and forth, the shared pendular motion acts as the link between the scenes. This commonality appears to be unforced because it does not in any way come across as contrived in either scene. The motif of movement is an organic part of each. And when the connection functions like this, it is completely fitting and is able to achieve the desired striking effect. But if you take a close look at the effect described above, you will find that the connecting aspect cannot in any way be described as unforced. It originates in the first scene and is then brutally imposed on the second! If you see the broadcast reporter right in front of you, it is understandable that his voice should be loud. If the picture then jumps 50 meters away down to the ballroom’s parquet while the reporter’s voice continues unabated at a loud volume, it is impossible to place the voice properly—it whirls about the space in a disturbing way. One feels compelled to begin searching the ballroom guests’ faces for the mouth belonging to the voice one hears. This type of cross-fading trick between successive scenes will be sufficiently elegant only in those cases where one can place the voice in the second scene as easily as one could in that first scene where the voice originated. (If there were, for example, a loudspeaker in the second scene from which the voice were emanating!) This possibility will arise only on exceedingly rare occasions, and it remains highly questionable whether the principle of montage that has been put to such magnificent use in silent film has a promising future in sound film. Because every acoustic aspect in sound film is localized within the respective image, you cannot simply uproot sounds and allow them to flutter about helplessly. This

572

Configurations of a Medium

complicates the question of accompanying music, as well. When spectators hear music, they all too frequently feel compelled to cast their eyes over the entire screen to find the musicians. This is especially the case in the waltz scene in Thiele’s film, where the viewer sees a music ensemble that then promptly disappears as the picture cuts to a different location where there are no musicians present. The music continues but is meant only to accentuate the action taking place in this new location. This principle of combining a continuous and uncut sound recording with a series of images involving a change of spaces is—at least theoretically—the quintessence of sound film. But practice has shown that this very same aspect offends viewers’ conceptions of space. Provided that technically advanced recording devices have been used, the illusion of space conveyed by sound film is incomparably more profound than that of silent film, because the latter is so much more abstract and allows for stylizations that are simply not possible in sound film. The bold practices of montage and superimposed images that did much to elevate the current art of film from the sideshow that it used to be can be applied to sound film only with the most severe limitations, if they can be applied at all. We are already witness to sound film’s degradation of the camera—which makers of silent films had transformed into a sovereign instrument for creating and giving shape to material—into nothing more than a simple recording device, a passive instrument for the preservation of real life going on around it. We have identified by means of one example the fundamental difficulties faced by attempts to surpass the simple reproduction of optical-acoustical occurrences and to instead create entirely new forms of sound film. Is sound film really nothing more than recorded theater? Its practitioners have as of yet been unable to prove otherwise. Notes 1. Rudolf Arnheim, “Sound Film,“ Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 30. 2. See, for example, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1929 essay “On the Principle of Sound in Film,” in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 264–67. 3. Liebeswalzer was one of many musicals starring the German “dream couple” Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey.

259 EDMUND MEISEL Experiences in Composing Music for Sound Films First published as “Erfahrung bei der musikalischen Arbeit am Tonfilm,” in Melos: Zeitschrift für Musik 9, no. 7 (July 1930), 312–13. Translated by Christopher M. Geissler.

Whereas several essays in this chapter strongly advocate a nonidentity of sound and image tracks, the following text indicates that the line between counterpoint and synchronization was not always sharply drawn. Commonly associated with montage aesthetics, Edmund Meisel here nonetheless outlines a mode of film scoring in which the music closely mimics the on-screen action—a mode more aligned with the “MickeyMousing” of Max Steiner and others in Hollywood. Meisel (1894–1930) was a prominent conductor, theater composer, and film composer of the 1920s, perhaps best known for his score for the German version of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), as well as his music for Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927).

Sound Waves

573

1.

No one today can seriously question the tremendous change that sound film has meant for the arts as a whole. Its impact can be felt in everything from film to theater of all types to concerts. The technical possibilities are prodigious, and these have been exploited thus far to only the most limited extent. My first practical work in sound film a year and a half ago at the German Tri-Ergon studio impressed upon me just how significant the collaboration required by sound film among director, engineers, production manager, and musicians is for the artistic quality of the whole.1 Because of financial constraints, there was unfortunately not as much time available for experimentation as I had hoped. But such an opportunity has been far more generously afforded me during the past fifteen months in England. 2 I have been able to try out all possible combinations in my daily collaboration with the sound engineers: for instance, recording the same piece several times with different instrumentation, or placing the instruments at varied distances from the microphone. Or recordings of dialogue with continuous musical accompaniment, or music used only during pauses in speech or to underscore individual words. An attempt at color music: for a scene set in a jail cell, the gradual opening of a door admits more and more light to the space as increasingly bright music keeps time with the rhythm of the door’s opening. Trying out rarely used instruments for sound effects (e.g., harpsichord, vibraphone). Using individual instruments to accompany particular characters’ speech. For example, an old misanthrope is fuming at his young secretary: the choleric staccato figurations of a forte trombone solo. The shy girl’s timid reply: piano legato oboe solo. Reverberations of the old man’s rage: the muted, croak-like burbling of the trombone, its diminuendo merging with the clattering of the typewriter to which the girl has fled with pizzicati steps. The old man rises clumsily to follow her, a heavy note accompanying each movement. Seated—first note. He lays his arm on the table as his eyes follow the girl—second note. He stands up—third note. He slams his fist on the table—fourth note. The notes progressively escalate. Sound editing synchronized with the image. Splicing together picture and the sound of various individual instruments with the help of instructive direction from the grips, more instruments, more and more until the entire orchestra is tutti! Wordless human voices invoked to accompany the visual depictions of mood, epitomizing states of mind, and so on. For what it’s worth, listeners found the laughter of a corpulent man accompanied by bassoon staccato especially amusing. 2.

So much for the possibilities of sound film. But in addition to color film, the so-called wide screen, which extends the screen into a veritable stage, has already made its appearance in English-speaking countries. And the next big thing alongside television will be stereoscopic fi lm. The screen becomes a stage that can be transmitted through the air into each and every home! It seems completely reasonable to believe that this art form will become the only one, or at the very least that no one will want to visit a provincial theater any more if he can watch and hear broadcasts of first-rate performances from the capital on his television. At any rate, the musician is faced with the pressing need to master acoustic technology. He must gain thorough familiarity with the microphone, the sound camera that has recently come into use, the variety of sound recordings, and the methods of imprinting used in the copying facilities—as well as dramaturgic qualities—in order to collaborate on a sound film script.

574

Configurations of a Medium

Notes 1. Meisel may be referring here to his work on Ruttmann’s Deutscher Rundfunk (1928), which was made in collaboration with Tri-Ergon Musik. See the Kracauer text in this chapter, no. 251. 2. Meisel had moved to London in November 1928 to work on sound films, and he also became involved with the London Film Society.

260 ALFRED DÖBLIN Only the Transformed Author Can Transform Film: A Conversation with Alfred Döblin First published as “Nur der veränderte Autor kann den Film verändern: Gespräch mit Alfred Döblin,” in Film-Kurier 12 (August 16, 1930). Translated by Michael Cowan.

The advent of sound film coincided with a “crisis of the novel,” to invoke the title of a 1930 essay by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s essay included a discussion of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which he noted for its principle of “montage”— one that “explodes the framework of the novel, bursts its limits stylistically and structurally, and clears the way for new, epic possibilities.”1 In theorizing a dynamic relationship between writing and film, Benjamin was anticipated by Döblin himself, who had published a programmatic essay in 1913 (“An Romanautoren und Ihre Kritiker: Berliner Programm”) calling on novelists to adopt a terse Kinostil (cinema style) characterized by “conciseness,” “precision,” “brevity,” and “an economy of words.”2 We here present the report of an interview with Döblin from 1930, where he revisits the question in relation to the authoring of screenplays for sound film. Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz was itself adapted into a sound film in 1931, for which he co-authored the screenplay.

Sound fi lm has brought about a new situation for fi lm authors, so that we are now faced with the question of who should write sound film manuscripts. Can authors of theater and novels play a role today, when words have accrued an entirely different significance? Alfred Döblin, the well-known author who penned the first epos of the big city with his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, understands the difficulties inherent in the question of authorship. He himself delved into the problem recently when Emil Jannings, before making The Blue Angel, considered taking the role of Franz Biberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Döblin takes a different position on film from that of most authors. That is to say, he sees the principal challenge not as one for film but rather for authors. “We must be clear,” he states, “about the demands that film makes of the author. I came to realize this above all during my conversations with Jannings about my novel. Completely new concepts became clear to me—the fact is that film is a formidable reality. And as Jannings spoke to me of the masses, of the repeated screenings of a film in a thousand different places, I suddenly knew that everything we had learned no longer applies here, that we must rethink our craft. “For in film, authors no longer have an overview of their audience. Books and plays have their isolated and limited audiences. They are published in print runs of ten thousand or twenty thousand. In the theater, critical successes also have long runs. But film knows no limits.

Sound Waves

575

“The author who turns to film must feel like someone who suddenly moves from a closed room into a vast open landscape or a large assembly.” Döblin locates the difficulty for authors in this shift: “It is hard to say whether the good and well-known authors will be able to keep up. For our literature, generally speaking, is not attuned to the masses; it is a literature for the propertied circles of the upper echelons. Cultural goods cannot simply be adapted into film.” Döblin believes that a new group of authors could arise. And there is perhaps also the possibility for authors to collaborate with filmmakers. But this would require a genuine and intense joint effort: “It is not enough simply to give the manuscript to the filmmaker and allow him to create whatever he wants. The author must work with the filmmaker and thus have someone who can open new vistas for him.” Döblin summarizes his argument thus: “Only a transformed author can transform film.” “Moreover,” he adds, “an author must possess the requisite breadth and range. That is, he must understand the importance of weighing each word, of delimiting its precise meaning, since it has a different dimension and a different value than it does in books and the theater.” Döblin emphasizes repeatedly the demands he places on words: “Words must assume the character of a fresco. They must be deeper than they were previously, and they must stand more firmly.” And he speaks of the watertight word, the stable and concrete word. “Everything sounds different in the cinema, as I have been able to observe. People laugh at completely different places than those intended by the author. All of this must be taken into account.” Is it possible to film Berlin Alexanderplatz? Döblin believes that it is, since this novel already resides at another social level and can, therefore, be made accessible to the masses of filmgoers. His new play Ehe und Kapital [Marriage and capital], which Piscator plans to stage, also lends itself to filmic adaptation. In our conversation, Döblin also addresses the demands that a transformed author might make of film: “Film must deal with relevant cultural topics, intervene in social affairs. The producer should not be afraid of the real. His first thought should not always be: ‘That’s impossible’ or ‘I can’t sell that abroad.’ He must be willing to take chances. “He can work with the author, but only with the transformed author.” Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, “The Crisis of the Novel,” Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1: 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 301. 2. Alfred Döblin, “An Romanautoren und Ihre Kritiker: Berliner Programm,” Der Sturm 4, no. 158–159 (May 1913): 17–18.

261 FILM-KURIER Fritz Lang: Problems in Sound Film Design: Moving Away from Naturalism First published as “Probleme der Tonfilmgestaltung: Los vom Naturalismus,” in Film-Kurier 13, no. 3 (January 5, 1931). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

576

Configurations of a Medium Although Fritz Lang was the last prominent German director to make the transition to sound, his contributions to sound film aesthetics were enduring. M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) not only extended expressionist principles into the era of sound cinema but also directly thematized acoustics within the filmic narrative itself— whether in the defining whistle of a serial killer or in the “acousmatic presence” (Chion) behind a curtain. The following summary of an interview with Lang appeared around the time that the director was finishing M, which premiered in Berlin on May 11, 1931. Like previous texts in this chapter by Walter Ruttmann (no. 250) and Rudolf Arnheim (no. 258), Lang’s statements counter the association of sound technology with increasing realism. In this regard, he resists longstanding efforts to resynchronize the voice and body, lending a long afterlife to the uncanny splitting introduced by media technologies in the late nineteenth century.

According to Fritz Lang, there exist various small opportunities for the beginnings of a sound film dramaturgy that brings with it a certain “moralism” in the nonidentity of sound and image. The fact that the ear cannot even recognize sounds unless they have been made familiar by habituation already imbues sonic backgrounds with a certain unrealism. For example, once when Lang was on a walk, he believed he heard the gurgling of an intermittent garden sprinkler, and when he got closer, it turned out to be . . . the crackle of burning wood. Moreover, the imperfect technological options themselves contribute another kind of tonal unreality: only very rarely do natural sounds produce an identical copy of the original event in the recording apparatus; they are replaced with sounds created artificially given the technological possibilities, which do not resemble the intended sound in their origin but nonetheless produce that sound in the end. Together, perhaps these two elements—the ear’s gift for fantasy and the contortions of technology—can produce a “sound language” in isolated cases. Lang does not believe that a generalized sound symbolism is attainable. The spoken word will remain as an unavoidable factor of realism, and even of the theatrical stage. For this reason, it will frequently be difficult to translate image montages into sonic form, for sound spreads as a spherical wave identical on all sides; no sound “shot” can change the imprint of a sonic expression—whereas the visual can be approached from many different angles, and creates a different impression each time. Only in specific instances will a sonic climax that is identical to the image progression be possible with sound montage; for example, when depicting a strike. As its outbreak approaches, the soundtrack will pass from the individual people still deliberating over the strike to sounds from human masses and machine noises, constantly getting louder— this sound will also be laid over the images of the deliberations—and finally to ever louder, no longer identifiable tonal forms, which will obscure all speech, all the details of the proceedings, and lead, at the moment of the strike’s outbreak, to an explosive climax, then suddenly break off in order to demonstrate that the workers are at rest. This would be an example of the small, occasional opportunities that exist for sonic symbolism. A rejection of absolute identity between image and sound, which could perhaps be called the “unreality” of sound film, has the same goal of all art: to create the greatest possible room for the spectator’s imagination, which in any case is shut off when the sound is reduced to “only” speech. Here, perhaps, lies the path to a new dramaturgy, which would bring in external noises only if they are related to the action. For example, we hear the bang of a door only

Sound Waves

577

when it is important to the story; now he is outside, we learn, without having to see an image. Steps become audible only when, for example, another person is waiting for someone and the moment of arrival is absolutely indispensable for the progression of the plot. Or an entire scene could be concentrated on one face whose movements evoke reactions to events that are only audible. For the moment, these are small ways to extract a certain unreality from the unimaginative sameness of image and sound, an unreality that will once again force the spectator to do imaginative work rather than laying out everything for him in advance. Whether a more general sound symbolism, a distinctive design system for sound, can come from this dramaturgical divergence between sound and image cannot be predicted at the present moment.

EIGHTEEN

TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

262 MAX MACK The Conquest of the Third Dimension First published as “Die Eroberung der dritten Dimension,” in B.Z. am Mittag 38, no. 131 (June 8, 1914). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Film was never only an art but always also a technology—or more precisely a site of multiple intersecting technologies, as can be seen in texts throughout this volume. Refl ections on the promise of cinema often thus focused on film technologies’ potentials and imagined futures. Besides sound (see chapter 17), questions of three-dimensionality, color, and wireless transmission recurred with particular frequency. Already in 1909, Der Kinematograph ran an article titled “Der Kinematograph der Zukunft” predicting that future audiences would no longer go to the cinematograph but to the “Chromoplastokinophonograph,” an apparatus for producing moving images in sound, color, and “plastic” depth.1 Though once largely relegated to the margins of film historiography, such technological imaginaries have gained new relevance today as scholars grapple with the potentials of our own “new” media. Accordingly, this final chapter brings together various refl ections on film technologies: their multilayered histories and possible futures, their relation to aesthetics, and their intersections with other media. In the text below, Max Mack (1884–1973)—one of Germany’s most prolific directors, with over one hundred films to his credit—discusses an early technique for producing the illusion of three-dimensionality. As Katharina Loew points out, the technology can be seen as a precursor to our own hologram projections, while the process of filming actors before a black backdrop and projecting their images in front of theatrical scenery evokes the use of green screens and digital compositing.2 Such 3-D film technologies had many precedents, most obviously stereoscopic devices but also fog projections and the kind of theatrical “ghost illusions” referenced by Mack below.

When the question of the future of film arises, it is easy to play the prophet, because everyone can see what film is lacking: the fullness of physicality. And this future vista is now coming into view: we are about to conquer the third dimension. Step by step, film has struggled to achieve the illusion of reality. First it brought photography to life, overcame flickering, and then sought to learn nature’s colors. It even gained independence from natural laws: it replaced sunlight with high-wattage bulbs, directors built in-studio seaside resorts in the middle of winter, and miniature villas on high pedestals were burned to the ground. Sound film was invented, and lifeless, shad578

Technology and the Future of the Past

579

owy entities obtained speech. But they still lacked bodies, as film stuck to moving photography. Now this peak, too, has been summited. These inventions, which show film three-dimensionally, are called Alabastra, Fantomo, and Fantasia. The secret is so simple—as simple as all great things. The spectator no longer looks directly at the film. Instead, a reflective panel is inserted at an acute angle between the audience and the projection. This mysterious panel is installed before the theatrical stage so skillfully that it remains invisible to the spectator. The panel reflects moving photography, and its particular angle creates the illusion of three-dimensionality. There are certainly thousands of other things to consider, but they are the inventor’s secret. One of the central difficulties, of course, is shooting. Subjects have to be arranged in front of a black curtain, in the brightest costumes possible, for the photography to achieve maximum sharpness. But above all else, bright costumes make it possible to project the figures into every possible setting, because the black background in the photograph appears only as empty air. Recently, people have been trying to shoot three-dimensional films in outdoor settings by inverting the concept and building an all-black room for the exhibition into which the film is then projected. Soon we will be looking through the glass panel at the billowing sea, bloody battles, and all the blithe and wild adventures of film. Here, too, Akiva ben Joseph was right.3 L’Arronge used a similar method to create the ghost of Richard III in his production at the Deutsches Theater.4 The white-painted ghosts moved over a black curtain in the trap, creating reflections in a diagonally inclined glass panel that encompassed the entire stage. Only with the refinements of technology, the system has become much more complex. But even the reflective panel is just a crutch that eventually will be overcome. Once films can be made stereoscopically, three-dimensional effects will become much more realistic and tangible. And if the development of color photography can keep up, reality will experience the truest copy that is technically possible. Not even sighs of love will be missing—sound film holds everything ready. And the screenwriters’ and directors’ boldest dreams, which leave reality far behind, will play out before our eyes in all the richness of life: a new land of unlimited possibilities is looming before us. Notes 1. Georg Korf, “Der Kinematograph der Zukunft,” Der Kinematograph, no. 131 (June 9, 1909), n.p. 2. Katharina Loew, “Tangible Specters: 3-D Cinema in the 1910s,” Film Criticism 3, no. 1 (2013): 87–116. 3. Akiva ben Joseph (a.k.a. Rabbi Akiva) was a rabbinic sage (ca. 50–135 ce). According to legend, he communed with the dead. 4. Adolph L’Arronge founded the Deutsches Theater, which he also directed between 1883 and 1894.

263 MAX SKLADANOWSKY The Prehistory of the Bioskop and Its First Public Demonstration on November 1, 1895 First published as “Die Vorgeschichte des Bioskops und die erste öffentliche Darstellung desselben am 1. November 1895,” in Der Kinematograph (June 14, 1916). Translated by Tara Hottman.

580

Configurations of a Medium Though the Lumière brothers are generally credited with the first public film screening on December 28, 1895, they were actually preceded by the showmen and inventors Max Skladanowsky (1863–1939) and his younger brother Emil, who unveiled their Bioskop projection device in the Wintergarten variety theatre on November 1 of the same year. One could also point to earlier instances such as Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Théâtre optique, which projected animated images stored on glass plates in 1892. As Janelle Blankenship has pointed out, the Skladanowsky projector also recalled the alternating mechanisms of magic lantern projectors. It is perhaps a sign of the circuitous routes and multiple temporalities of technological history that Sklanadowsky himself turned to flipbooks after his unwieldy device had been relegated to the shadows by the Lumières’ Cinématographe and successive projectors. For another retrospective look at early cinema technology, see Siegfried Kracauer’s article at the end of this chapter (no. 278).

In 1891 I first began to work on my “Bioskop.” It was important to me to replace the unnatural movements in the projected images of that time with natural actions. Photography seemed to me to be the most suitable means for this purpose. In my free time I first constructed a camera that would make it possible for me to record series of people in motion on long fi lmstrips. Unfortunately the results were unsatisfactory. The next year I returned to my experiments, this time with better success. For this purpose I used Eastman negative film, which at that time was available in long reels, and I cut it into matching strips. The intermittently effective camera still used unperforated film; the images were at times out of focus, and it was not until later that I was successful at producing impeccable series of images. In 1894 I was able to set about creating a projector for the exhibition of such series. In doing so I again encountered great difficulties. In this initial, primitive projector I created then, the film continuously slid past the projection lens. The aperture plate that had to be coupled to it was equipped only for small sections. Therefore the images on the projection screen appeared very dark and out of focus. The second apparatus was like that of today’s cinema in which the image is motionless during projection and the film first advances when the aperture plate covers the light source. Because at the time I had recorded only eight to ten images per second, the flickering during the projection was so strong that I also gave up on this attempt. I created a third projector for this purpose the next year that proved itself able to project nonfl ickering images, even when less than eight images per second were projected. It was the double apparatus of the Bioskop that projected alternate images and thereby kept the screen uniformly illuminated. However, now the recorded images had to be separately copied onto two film loops, the odd-numbered images from a continuous shoot onto one and the even-numbered onto the other. Because the thin Eastman negative film constantly tore and there was not yet a strong positive film at this time, I developed diapositive emulsion on large celluloid plates, cut them into matching strips, spliced them together, and thus obtained a long film strip whose edges I additionally furnished with metal eyelets after the copying process in order to prevent them from tearing. During projection, the pegs of the intermittently running transfer wheels fit into these eyelets. The directors of the Wintergarten in Berlin, Dorn and Baron,1 who had heard about my experiments, appeared one July day in 1895 at the laboratory in Pankow on Berliner Strasse 27

Technology and the Future of the Past

581

(today there is a large cinema in the building, with the heading above the program: “The birthplace of living pictures”), and engaged me immediately for the coming winter season. Since prior to this I had not been able to exhibit my Bioskop anywhere, the first official public demonstration of cinema took place on November 1, 1895, in the Wintergarten in Berlin. Yielding to the wishes of some friends, I had had a patent issued for my Bioskop only shortly before. The next year, at the beginning of January 1896, the second public demonstration of cinema took place in Paris (Lumière), 2 followed by the third example, almost a year after me, by Edison in New York. Since my first film reels were very primitive and did not last long, I also gave up this type of projection in order to turn my attention to the manufacture of flip books, many millions of copies of which I spread across the entire world. Now over twenty years have gone by since the first demonstration of the Bioskop, and it is beginning to become historical; that is why I am breaking my previous silence by giving the above explanation. Notes 1. Franz Dorn and Julius Baron had taken over Wintergarten in 1886, transforming it into a variety theater. 2. The Lumière screening in fact took place on December 28, 1895.

264 HEINZ MICHAELIS Art and Technology in Film Originally published as “Kunst und Technik im Film,” in Film-Kurier 5, no. 10 (January 12, 1923), 1. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

For intellectuals grounded in an idealist tradition, fi lm posed a dilemma as a “technological art”—a term that seemed oxymoronic insofar as art was supposed to provide access to the immaterial realm. The titles of early film-theoretical books such as Walter Bloem’s Die Seele des Lichtspiels (The Soul of the Moving Picture, 1922) and Béla Balázs’s Der Geist des Films (The Spirit of Film, 1930) suggest a broader project of attributing spiritual dimensions to a mechanical mass medium. In this article, Heinz Michaelis, a regular contributor to Film-Kurier, expresses an oft-noted dissatisfaction with the dominance of technology—”the apparatus”—in filmic production and posits the goal of cinematography as that of “bring[ing] technology into realms that were almost entirely reserved for art.”

The strength of film, the source of its exceptional position, lies in its ability to be an image of life. Films that capture the essential manifestations of reality, while excluding all superfluous trappings, represent the most perfect examples of the form and are thus artistic films. This resolves all profound discussions that have already been carried on by the mystics of film theory about the paths and goals of artistic film. If it seems that the ultimate aim of film proclaimed here is relatively easy to achieve, its path to perfection is more treacherous than for the fine arts, poetry, or music. For better or for worse, film is inextricably bound to an enemy with whom it has to struggle in

582

Configurations of a Medium

order to win the freedom it needs to develop. This opponent is the apparatus. In the old arts, which look back on a thousand-year tradition, development took place in such a way that the artist first looked for a form of expression in order to shape an experience. The technology was created and cultivated in an ardent struggle with the material, such that the artwork could be forged in a form appropriate to it. Film developed in the opposite order. In this case, technology comes at the beginning of development. The apparatus is the tyrant that conquers mind and soul in order to overwhelmingly reveal its own power and glory. The egoism of the technician prevents film from doing what its essence demands: to realistically depict simple human destinies, which unsettle or delight us with their inherent tragedy or comedy. It is thus fi rst necessary to disrupt the absolutism of technology and bend it to the will of mind and soul. Only once this happens will we progress from film manuscripts to film poetry. Presently, poets shy away from film, for their pride resists the prospect of serving as a tool of film technicians so that the latter can prove to the world “how far they have come.”1 Just as in theater, technology in film must be subordinated to the ultimate aim: to serve the work. But the despotism of technology is not the only thing that is still preventing film from fulfilling the calling of the form in many ways. The director, too, who must frequently resolve technical problems and therefore sometimes—not always—feels allied with the technician, often has the view that fi lm direction is an end in itself. With this approach, however, film reaches a dead end. Gradually, the recognition is dawning that the era of grand pageantry in film, where masses are deployed for their own sake, has come to an end. Gradually, we are coming to realize that masses, insofar as they are used in fi lm at all, cannot be the instrument that a directorial strategist uses to distinguish himself in garish tones but rather must serve the concept as a whole. Likewise, individual actors must not be given an opportunity to perform a series of numbers that neatly demonstrate their individual abilities, as though they were circus players. In short, the various, often contradictory individual wills that often characterize current films must be subordinated to the collective will that arises from the essence of the work itself. And these individual factors will learn that their creative forces are most effective when they are integrated into the work as a whole rather than released out of an individual will to power. Many people who currently work in film still lack the proper respect for the work as a whole. They all commit idolatry to their own artistic ego. It is this cult of Astarte, which unhesitatingly sacrifices artistic works to the Moloch of vanity, that must be overcome. For respect and humility before an idea are the roots of all artistic creation. The most basic motivation behind the invention of cinematography may have been the desire to bring technology into realms that were almost entirely reserved for art. In a sense, the apparatus was crying out to be endowed with a soul. Now, however, technology should not try to replace art but should be content to refine its methods ever more subtly in order to prepare the way for the still-nascent artistic film. Only if technology—in the broadest sense of the word—remains mindful of this, its most essential task, can we achieve film culture. Note 1. Michaelis here plays on a phrase spoken by the scholar Wagner in part 1 of Goethe’s Faust: “Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht, / Und wie wir’s dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht” (To see what wise men, who lived long ago, believed, / Till we at last have all the highest aims achieved). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 108–9.

Technology and the Future of the Past

583

265 BÉLA BALÁZS The Color Film First published as “Der Farbenfilm,” in Der Tag, no. 307 (October 5, 1923), 8. Translated by Nicholas Baer.

By the 1920s, there were several systems for projecting films in color. In this article, the screening of Wilhelm Thiele’s Fiat lux (1923)—which used Emil Leyde’s additive process to project frames in three primary colors in rapid succession—provided Béla Balázs with an occasion to refl ect on the future of film as a technology and an art form. Underscoring the productive role of the spectator’s eye in synthesizing color impressions, Balázs concluded that, no matter how much film technology develops toward the reproduction of nature, there will always be a space for aesthetic interventions. Balázs had reviewed Thiele’s film in Der Tag (“Der farbige Film”) three days before publishing the extended discussion here. He would repurpose this text one year later in Visible Man (“Welcome to the Color Film”), only to revise many of these claims in The Spirit of Film (1930), in a section entitled “Color Film and Other Possibilities.”

“Eureka!” we can exclaim, for we, too, have finally beheld the sea—the sea in its eternally changing play of original, bluish-green colors, with the white foam that splashes over the reddish-brown reefs of the surf. Our march toward the colorful sea on film took longer than Xenophon’s Anabasis, for as long as there has been any form of photography, color photography was our goal. Now Emil Leyde has invented color cinematography, even before the problem of ordinary color photography was solved. The explanation for this lies in the nature of the invention, that of the so-called additive procedure. The three primary colors are photographed separately out of nature’s mixed color image and produce a red image, yellow image, and blue image. With ordinary photography, these partial images would have to be copied onto one another and thus mixed again, which has not succeeded as of yet. With film, however, one does not need to copy them onto one another. They remain next to each other, like the little snapshots of ordinary film, and their impression coalesces in one’s eye into the mixed colors of the original through quick succession (just as, in ordinary fi lm, the still snapshots coalesce into continued movement). The press screening in the Eos-Kino failed due to an incidental technical mishap (which was only possible because of a less incidental Viennese sloppiness). However, we had the opportunity to see a good presentation of color film and have to conclude: the invention is here. The joyous excitement that seizes one has various sources. It is partly the naïve pride of victory adopted by contemporaries in a civilization. “We can already fly,” everyone feels—even those who haven’t yet flown. “We already have color film.” The first reports of such inventions sound like triumphant war dispatches from the front line of technological civilization. Aside from that, it is a unique pleasure to see colorful, beautiful nature. For the time being, it is not an artistic pleasure but rather the same pleasure in nature that one has when looking into the country from genuine mountain heights. Is that not enough of a pleasure? Why then split hairs over aesthetic concerns as well? Because to think [Denken] and have second thoughts [Bedenken] is also a pleasure and will not disrupt what has already been achieved. If one is inclined to quibble, one can still observe the following small imperfections in Leydean color film. The images have a soft, generally reddish tinge, especially the skin tones. The images still flicker a little, just like gray-toned film originally did. For a very trained eye, the values shift a bit, because not all colors appear with exactly the same

584

Configurations of a Medium

intensity. That’s about it, though one has the distinct feeling that it will be a very short time before these small defects are also remedied. Our aesthetic concerns do not arise from this. On the contrary: The perfect color film is that which makes us pensive. For trueness to nature is not always advantageous to art. No one would claim that waxwork figures (which are so true to nature that one says “pardon” when touching them) are more artistic than white marble statues or reddish-brown bronze figures. Art indeed consists in reduction, and perhaps the gray tones of ordinary film provided the possibility for an artistic style. We know very well that such concerns cannot hinder the development of film, which is dictated by the development of technology. They indeed shouldn’t hinder it at all. Even with our aesthetic concerns, we can be confident that there are also paintings that are great art despite their colors. The use of colors does not yet mandate an absolute, slavish imitation of nature. If cinematography ever attains a colorful trueness to nature, it will again become untrue to nature on a higher level. We are thus not afraid.

266 S. E. BASTIAN The Telefilm First published as “Der Telefilm,” in Film-Kurier, no. 86 (April 13, 1925). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Though the first public television channel in Germany would not see the light of day until 1935, television technology was already being developed in the mid-1920s following the emergence of German radio stations and successful experiments in wireless image transmission. One could read reports of various experiments, including the first public demonstrations of televised moving images by John Logie Baird in a London department store on March 25, 1925, as well as similar experiments in Germany by August Karolus. Published two weeks after Baird’s demonstrations, the following article from Film-Kurier imagines various futures for a medium that would combine the moving images of fi lm with the simultaneity (“liveness”) of radio transmission. Even at this early stage, one can see very different imaginaries at work depending on whether film is understood as a medium of storage or transmission.

If the prophet has never been worth much in his own land, his business has never been particularly popular either. Of the millions of prophecies that went unfulfilled, the few that have come true rise up like table reefs from the sea, and prophesying has thus become a dangerous thing to do. False prophets have always avoided disgracing themselves before coming generations through a premature departure into the beyond. The writer of these lines, too, will likely have no opportunity to test his premonitions, although this is a man who—as reported—has not yet reached those years that we somewhat sympathetically, somewhat maliciously, refer to as “golden.” Already today, physicists are trying to explain still-undefi ned forces like electricity, heat, light, radio waves, and X-radiation as derivations from a common elemental force, just as in chemistry there is a tendency to reduce all elements to a single matter. Indeed, some go so far as to claim that force and matter cannot be distinguished from each other in their elemental connections. Once again, theory has rushed ahead of praxis. The visionary has often inspired the engineer to find practical realizations of premonitions.

Technology and the Future of the Past

585

The relationship between magnetism and electricity, a hypothesis at first, generated a revolution in the field of power production in the form of the dynamo. We would never have extracted nitrogen from the air if we had not known that it was there. The Zeppelin is a fulfillment of Jules Verne’s dream.1 The task, then, will essentially be to transmit light in the same way that we now transmit radio waves. Of course, we will not then simply be able to see what is happening on the other side of the world, just as we cannot hear radio transmissions with our bare ears. We will need to create auxiliary media similar to the radio receiver. For example, let us assume we want to watch something that is happening in America. We will have to capture the received image of this event, amplify it, and define its spatial scope. We will conjure it onto a screen, or we will have a glass screen in our office where, depending on the light-wave frequencies, we can watch a procession in Rome or a ship launch in New York. By that point, people will have long since climbed Mount Everest, but perhaps we will then be interested in the elegant activities of the luxury hotels that will have been built on the highest point of the earth’s surface. Perhaps the telefilm will no longer even be a film. It will certainly not be a flickering strip that rolls through a black box, its little images enlarged and projected onto a screen in an auditorium. It will become simpler or more complicated, but in any case a completely different construction. A light antenna will capture the images and transmit them to the glass screen on one’s desk. We will not hear anything; for a long time we will not hear, but only see, until human intellect has also solved this mystery and we can follow a British Parliament session. Then, perhaps, there will even be a time when we invisible spectators can express our approval when a speaker says something that we like—or the other way around. But why must we always seize upon political visions? Are there not much more promising prospects to be found in a more pleasant domain? The young man searching for “the one” among his limited circle of a few million compatriots will be able to easily establish a connection with a young woman in Sydney, and she—ah, she—will blush softly on the glass screen as she nods in agreement, or not, for the eternal flickering of love will roll past technological achievements, and I almost fear that the telefilm would be more likely to increase the number of heartbreaks. But our good old film will live on. At that point, the artistic claims of dramatic film will no longer be a matter of controversy. By then the clean break will long since have been achieved, and we will not experience discussions at coffeehouse tables over where the boundary lies between a common article of daily life and a cult. From the mists of the antiquity that was our present time, the god of the machine will emerge. And it will be a good old god on whose altar we gladly and joyfully make sacrifices. Note 1. On the Zeppelin, see Brauner in chapter 3, no. 31, note 3.

267 HERBERT JHERING Film and Radio First published as “Film und Radio,” in Berliner Börsen-Courier (April 28, 1925). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

586

Configurations of a Medium If film had become “historical” by the 1920s (as the article by Max Skladanowsky in this chapter, no. 263, suggests), it was still a young enough medium to serve as a point of reference for thinking about other emergent media technologies, in particular radio. In this article, the theater critic Herbert Jhering discusses the need to adapt literature to the acoustic specificities of radio, just as film directors had learned to shape narratives according to the optical conditions of film technology over the preceding decades. The first German radio broadcast was conducted from the Vox-Haus in Berlin on October 29, 1923. Regional broadcasting stations in major cities soon followed, and the first radio play—Hans Flesch’s Zauberei auf dem Sender: Versuch einer Rundfunkgroteske (Magic on the air: An attempt at a radio comedy)—was broadcast on October 24, 1924. See other essays by Jhering in chapters 11 and 17, nos. 172, 248.

When the phenomenal technological invention of film caught on, people were quick to realize that it could not be a question of photographing theater. That it could not be a question of taking a work composed of acoustic and visual elements and making it onesided, robbing it of its acoustic conditions and leaving the optical ones. Rather, it was a question of understanding the optical conditions as a new set of laws, as a call to restructure the material by exclusively visual standards. It wasn’t enough just to leave out the acoustic; it had to be recreated along optical lines. Meaning: a good film uses optical logic and optical rhythm, creating such a coherent visual language that it can be heard through the eyes. We only have to think about the best American films to confirm this impression. We don’t hear a film when an actor moves his mouth as though to speak but rather when his movements make us forget speech entirely. This idea has long been widely accepted in film. Not only for filmed plays but also in film versions of lyrical dramas. Faust on film does not mean photographing Goethe’s work but rather producing an entirely new arrangement of the material, based on different elements. Now another extraordinary innovation is about to usher in a new epoch: radio. Radio operates exclusively by acoustic means, the way cinema does by optical ones. Like cinema, radio transmits works of art. But this is also the difference: cinema no longer simply transmits works of art but rather creates new ones to suit its own capacities. Radio still communicates works of art as it does news, sports, and election results. In cinema, the part of the program that reports actualities begins to separate itself from the expressive part. But radio—whose invention is even more revolutionary, more comprehensive—still cannot surpass the simple conveying of information. It cannot yet know that if it is going to offer works of art at all, these works of art must be rearranged according to acoustic considerations, just as films were around optical ones. Ultimately, then, one cannot communicate Goethe’s Faust through the radio at all. A Faust drama would have to be rewritten for the radio, following a different logic, a distinct rhythmic configuration. We will see Radio-Faust with our ears once it is no longer communicated through Goethe’s words, which address all the senses, but rather has been acoustically recomposed in a new form, whose laws are yet undiscovered.

268 KURT WEILL Possibilities for Absolute Radio Art First published as “Möglichkeiten absoluter Radiokunst,” in Der deutsche Rundfunk 3, no. 26 (June 28, 1925), 1625–28; here 1625–27. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Technology and the Future of the Past

587

Famous above all for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht and later successes on Broadway, the modernist composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950) was also a passionate proponent of radio. Between 1924 and 1929, he contributed regular reviews and articles to Der deutsche Rundfunk, the first radio trade journal in Germany. Like Herbert Jhering in the previous article (no. 267), Weill here asks how the new technology of radio might lead to a medium-specific art form analogous to recent developments in film—in this case, “absolute film” (see chapter 14).

A few weeks ago, an association of young Berlin artists, the November Group, held a public demonstration of experiments that—although begun elsewhere and long ago— produced conclusive results here for the first time. In one of the large Ufa theaters, an illustrious audience of scientists, intellectuals, artists, and critics gathered to see the latest achievements in absolute film.1 This event offers a new occasion to probe the oft-repeated and oft-misunderstood comparison between film and radio more deeply. If we approach these two powerful technological accomplishments as mere entertainment institutions, then the points of comparison are obvious. Both draw their sustenance from sources external to their proper domain: film from theater and the variety stage, radio from music and speech. Considered from an economic standpoint, both place a new stamp on old forms of popular entertainment, offering a kind of new and more amusing journalism. But both film and radio also possess their own values, values belonging entirely to them, which can grow into specific art forms through steady development. A new art can arise only when a new technology has become a matter of course. That is, the new art brings with it the technical innovations it requires as finished accomplishments. The skydome was already present when naturalist theater needed it. 2 Clarinets were already invented when Mozart inaugurated a new era of orchestral music. Technology awaits its application in art, which itself cannot be dependent upon material conditions. An initial example of this can be found in quarter-tone music.3 Today, the quarter-tone system, still in its initial stages, is exploited merely as a technology. Only after many generations, when the sound of quarter tone has become a familiar concept, will it lead to a genuine form of art. When film first appeared, people fumbled around for new possibilities. At first, it was used for cheap sensationalism. The early Sherlock Holmes detective films from America, along with the sentimental love stories from Paris, catered to the basest instincts. After that, film was modeled on literature with the adaptation of plays and novels of all sorts and all languages. Nature served as a backdrop, and filmmakers combed through different countries in their search for new sensational scenery. Problems of life, science, and politics were introduced. Finally, people began to recognize the proper paths and particular possibilities of these films, a recognition that took two forms. First, film was used to continue and perfect the naturalism of the stage; the precise depiction of real life passed from literature to film, whose technological possibilities are limitless. The most intense manifestation of this form can perhaps be seen in the brutal realism of great historical films. But then people recognized the other goal of film in the representation of fantastic, mysterious, and supernatural phenomena, something only possible by means of tricks created in film studios. Dr. Caligari, Sumurun, and the dream sequence in Chaplin’s The Kid are some of the finest productions issuing from this tendency. In each case, however, film had to be pleasantly entertaining or at best educational. The first concept of a genuinely autonomous film art came from American slapstick, which offers the wittiest combination of both tendencies. Here, film could possess its own means of expression, its own tempo, and its own dynamic. A few Parisian painters (e.g., Léger) relinquished plot, subject, and inner coherence altogether to create films that conveyed the marvelous

588

Configurations of a Medium

confusion of thoughts and impressions in the mind of a modern city dweller.4 Such films can touch on tragedy when, in the manner of Chaplin’s poignant comedies, a lonely straw hat appears in the midst of raging boulevards and speeding trains. For German filmmakers such as Ruttmann and Eggeling, the efforts to create an autonomous film art led to complete abstraction. Here, a geometrical “theme” is proposed and then rearranged in every possible configuration according to musical laws. This ever-changing sequence of purely optical compositions, this contrapuntal combination of lines and circles, which culminates with the addition of color as the most expressive component—all of this might well awaken the external impression of a musical composition, but it produces only the outline and contours of music. It can offer an expression, but it misses the thing it is supposed to express: the spiritual dimension, the inner melody. This failure to convey the essential element makes absolute film into a decorative art. But even as such, absolute film has its legitimacy. It is not difficult to predict that radio will undergo a similar development. The only difference is that, in this case, there is a much more pronounced dependency on other arts. Considered as an entertainment medium, radio is, for the moment, just another institution used for transmitting great works of music and literature. It is also significant as a site of education for millions of people hungry for knowledge. As an art form, however, it has a more quantitative than qualitative significance for the time being. Radio has already achieved an immeasurable feat by bringing art to the masses, helping existing art to extend its reach to the widest circles, and broadcasting not only the great works of music and theater but also their masterful performances into the homes of rich and poor alike. People are also beginning to represent nature acoustically: London stations broadcast the song of nightingales and the waves of rivers to England’s coasts.5 As in the case of film, such developments will lead to a strict separation between radio and other institutions of art, which still experience radio as a competitor. The arts will then shed certain domains of their total repertory, whose transmission will be the sole purview of microphones. Here again, this will naturally apply to phenomena whose representation is particularly well supported or even made possible by the achievements of radio transmission. In all likelihood, this stage will involve only works for which the invisibility of the entire apparatus plays an important role, works that absolutely require a cancellation of the eye’s activity. This problem is already receiving attention in the area of radio drama. There are calls to completely separate the radio play from traditional theater, to develop it as an art oriented according to its own laws and the specific goals of the broadcasting studio. In the area of music as well, radio will come to occupy a particular space all its own—probably through the gradual disappearance of stars and an emphasis on intimate, private musical practices. But alongside these developments, radio technology will also be perfected—and this less at the level of the receiving apparatus than in the studio. We would be setting our sights too low if we simply sought to achieve faithful transmissions of musical compositions or recitals. All of the innovations in film—the constant change of scenery, the simultaneity of two events, the tempo of real life as well as the accelerated tempo of slapstick, the marionette-like plausibility of trick films, as well as the possibility of following a line from its origin through its transformation into other forms—must find acoustical equivalents that can be realized through the microphone. Just as film has enriched the means of optical expression, so radio must extend the possibilities for acoustical expression in unexpected directions. We need to invent “acoustic slow motion”—as well as many other things. And all of this could then lead to an absolute radio art. The difficulty for absolute film consists in the fact that our organs of sight are so used to linking perceptions to ideas stemming from nature and life that they cannot assimilate a purely “melodic” art. Even in painting, expressionism—which followed similar goals—failed in the last instance because viewers, and in some cases painters themselves, all too readily understood these abstract domains as symbols of some event. In music and

Technology and the Future of the Past

589

speech, this danger is eliminated. The dilettantish idea that a listener should “think of something” when listening to a piece of music, that the enjoyment of music depends on some dramatic or idyllic associations, has been disproven in practice time and again. The uneducated public, unburdened by prejudice, will always experience music as music, as that magical confluence of melodies and harmonies that is illuminated by the inner experience of the artist like a nighttime forest under the bright light of a silver moon. It is not hard to imagine that the tones and rhythms of music might be enriched by new sounds, sounds from other spheres: calls of human and animal voices, voices of nature, the sound of billowing winds, rushing water, and rustling trees—and an entire army of new, unheard-of sounds that the microphone could produce artificially when sound waves are raised or lowered, superimposed or woven together, swept away and born anew. The most important point, once again, is this: such an opus should not produce an atmospheric image, not a symphony of nature through the realistic utilization of existing means, but an absolute and spiritual work of art that hovers above the earth. Such a work would have the same goal as all true art: to offer beauty and, through beauty, to improve humanity and make it indifferent to the petty things in life. Notes 1. On the matinee “Der absolute Film,” see chapter 14, no. 205. 2. Replacing conventional backdrops, the sky-dome (Kuppelhorizont) was introduced by Mariano Fortuny in 1902 as a three-dimensional dome horizon made of silk and plaster that could reflect and diffuse light, thus achieving natural lighting effects. 3. The quarter-tone system, which divides an octave into twenty-four notes rather than twelve, generated much interest in modernist music circles in the early twentieth century. 4. Weill is likely referring to Ballet mécanique by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, which was screened as part of the “Absoluter Film” matinee in 1925. 5. On May 19, 1924, the BBC broadcast the cellist Beatrice Harrison playing in a Surrey garden as a nightingale sang along. The broadcast was a sensation, and the station received over fifty thousand enthusiastic letters from listeners. Following the initial experiment, the outdoor broadcast became a yearly BBC event that lasted until 1942.

269 EUGEN SCHÜFFTAN My Process Originally published as “Mein Verfahren,” in Kinotechnische Rundschau des Film-Kurier 6, no. 24 (November 18, 1926). Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Perhaps no special effects technique from the Weimar period is better known or more widely discussed than Eugen Schüfftan’s mirror technique for creating imaginary backdrops. The use of mirrors has a long history in optical illusions, from Renaissance perspective to theatrical ghost effects and beyond. In this interview, conducted shortly before the premiere of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Schüfftan (1893–1977) emphasizes the economic considerations that help to drive and shape technological invention.

“Originally a painter, I have been working on inventions for nearly sixteen years. Among other things, I first came into contact with film through a projector with an infinite loop, which I constructed during the war but was unfortunately unable to launch. After the war, I drew several animated films. Over the course of their production,

590

Configurations of a Medium

which required the use of models, I came to my first mirror in 1919, which was followed by four or so improved versions. I too can sing of the inventor’s sufferings,1 of the hostilities encountered by each new object and of the difficulties caused by film producers in the making of films that pursue new paths.” “Even American producers?” “You know, of course, that I have made a deal with Universal, according to which this company in America will apply and further develop my process, and that I therefore spent over a year in Hollywood. I was able to observe a few things there and had to conclude that contemporary American producers may think extraordinarily economically but are still much more open-minded about promising innovations than their German counterparts. In spite of a certain resistance that met my invention at first, many American directors turned to it because they had previously balked at the very idea of shooting objects from a distance of 20 meters, and they made as much use as they could of glass painting and model sets. In my opinion, the technology of film in itself, which has gained a large potential for expansion in my process—especially in the areas of fantasy and fairy tale—will progress only with the increasing artistic demands that audiences are making of film. Strange as it may sound, I have at least noticed over there that even the audiences of small cinemas are growing tired of kitsch and Wild West films. And I believe that in time, cinemagoers all over the world will begin to demand not only entertainment but also artistic standards and quality. But these are both absolutely dependent on technological progress.” “And does your process really mean such large savings when compared with conventional shooting methods?” “Certainly. Of course, there are still no screenplays that are tailor-made for my process, thus providing the best possibilities for application, but even in the films that were just made, use of my process more than paid for itself. If you consider that the photography, the materials, the rental fees for the apparatus, the mirror, and the license cost only a total of 1,000 marks per day, and that it can be used to film the interior of the Cologne Cathedral or the street Unter den Linden, you will be able to infer that in purely financial terms, my process offers great advantages on top of its possibilities for artistic expression. But it should always remain in the background of the final cinematic product, simply a technological tool, for in my opinion, the best film technology is that which no one notices.” Note 1. The “sufferings of the inventor” is a reference to Balzac’s Les souffrances de l’inventeur, part 3 of his Illusions perdues (1837–43).

270 ARTHUR KORN Why We Still Do Not Have Television: Possibilities of Electric Television First published as “Warum wir noch immer nicht fernsehen: Möglichkeiten des elektrischen Fernsehens,” in Uhu 5, no. 6 (March 1929), 62–66. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Technology and the Future of the Past

591

Arthur Korn (1870–1945) was an inventor who played an important role in the development of the fax machine, wireless photography, and early television. Among other “firsts,” he is credited with the earliest successful transmission of a photograph across the Atlantic Ocean (of Pope Pius XI in 1923). His systems for wireless photo transmission were used widely in journalism and by the German police.

Let us imagine that we are sitting in a movie theater; daily events are presented to us, moving naturally across the screen, perhaps even as a sound film with all its sounds and noises; in that case, a lecturer provides accompanying explanations. The lecturer suddenly tells us: “What you are now going to see on the screen is not an ordinary fi lm projection, shot on location and reproduced here; rather, the impressions of light here on the screen are being generated by a projector that is telegraphically connected to the place where the event is happening.” If the operator at the place of transmission uses the proper devices to transmit images—like those we might see on the focusing screen of a photo camera—with enough speed to be presented in a cinema at the point of reception, we speak of television. If he first creates a fi lm and then transmits the fi lm’s individual images fast enough, we are dealing with telecinema. Given the proper equipment, photographs can be sent by wire or even wirelessly; little pieces of the image (image elements) are scanned from the radio transmitter by a socalled photoelectric cell,1 which sends telegraphic signals, determined by the light intensity of the scanned image elements, to the receiver, which releases light signals that are assembled to reconstruct the image. Hence, telecinema is also technologically possible. After the development of amplifying tubes, which any amateur radio operator will recognize from tube receivers, there are also no more technological obstacles blocking television. But it is a long way from technological capacity to practically viable methods, and it is good to push back against the grand illusions that are sometimes nourished by publicity articles, because disappointments can lead to backlash, damaging the thriving technological development of image telegraphy. In fact, telecinema—we will exclude television for the time being, as it is still further behind—requires that the methods of electric telephotography be accelerated to the point where an image can be transmitted in one tenth of a second or faster. A picture that can be broken down into approximately 500,000 image elements and transmitted wirelessly in one minute contains about as many details as the pictures that we are generally used to seeing in the cinema. In the best of cases, it is possible to reduce the transmission time of such an image to twenty-five seconds; thus, to create television from such detailed images, the fastest possible transmission speed now available would have to be increased by a factor of 250. Today, this would be possible using 250 signal carriers, for example, which is both cost-prohibitive and organizationally infeasible. Hence, if we want to demonstrate a television device made from affordable materials, the only remaining option is to limit ourselves to pictures with a relatively small number of image elements, around 2,000 per picture. Of course, these would be very simple pictures, facial profiles whose similarity to the original could be recognized only with great difficulty. But interest in such televisual demonstrations has proven extraordinarily widespread; therefore, various inventors have put together demo-devices for this sort of basic television. Last year in the United States, Bell Company went to great expense to arrange simple television demonstrations between New York and Washington, where people in Washington could see the head of Secretary of State Hoover, 2 who stood before a telephonic microphone in New York. A device designed by Karolus, which briefly appeared next to Mihály’s machine at Berlin’s FunkAusstellung [Radio Exhibition], 3 is set up to accommodate pictures with 10,000 image

592

Configurations of a Medium

elements, but it will certainly not work fast enough for long-distance transmissions as long as we continue to work with a single carrier wave. On the other hand, using multiple carrier waves is so expensive and difficult to organize that for the time being, commercial television is inconceivable in practical terms. Once the problem of telegraph speed has been addressed and we can perhaps transmit millions of image elements per second, commercial television machines will surely not be so basic; compared to these future devices, today’s demo-apparatuses will look like child’s play. Notes 1. The reference is to the selenium cell, a photoelectric cell that produces more or less electricity according to light exposure. 2. Herbert Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce (not Secretary of State) from 1921 to 1928, before becoming U.S. president in 1929. 3. August Karolus was another key figure in the development of wireless phototelegraphy and television in Germany. His Telefunken-Karolus-System was adopted by the German postal service in 1927 for the transmission of images between Berlin and Vienna. The Hungarian inventor Dénes von Mihály (1894–1953) presented his Telehor apparatus, which allowed for the transmission of 30-line images at the Berlin Radio Exhibition of 1928. The following year, he would unveil the first television camera. First held on December 4, 1924, the Große Deutsche Funkausstellung became an annual event.

271 LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY The Elements Once Again First published as “Noch einmal die Elemente,” in Filmtechnik (May 25, 1929), 217. Translated by Michael Cowan.

This article by László Moholy-Nagy takes up his concern with the specifi c artistic possibilities of different media technologies, as he had explored in his well-known book Painting, Photography, Film (1925). Moholy-Nagy’s view of film as one medium among others for kinetic light composition would find a realization of sorts the following year in his “experimental device for light painting” (Versuchsapparat zur Lichtmalerei) or, as he termed it, the light prop for an electric stage. For other articles by Moholy-Nagy, see chapter 14, nos. 206, 210.

Not so long ago painting still figured as the highest stage of optical composition. But the concept of “painting” is no longer comprehensive enough for people today, who have a completely new optical connection to the present. This is not because the painter—who typically possesses profound talent, creative work, and concentration—can make no important contribution to the productive forces of humanity. On the contrary, his person, or better yet his creative intensity, could once again become a lasting source of education and betterment, of enrichment and excitement, if he only dared to make the leap: to realize his expressive desires using the technological and scientific achievements, the apparatuses that are possible today. Up to now, all painting has consisted primarily in an engagement with color—that is, the capacity of a given material to reflect or absorb light in all the clarity of its material existence. But since we are now capable of using direct light instead of crudely material

Technology and the Future of the Past

593

pigment, we can work with the primary medium, the simplest and purest manifestation of itself, rather than a secondary, transformed one. Filmic work is one branch of optical composition, one of the more direct means of transposing light. Of course, film is not only a problem of light composition but also and simultaneously a problem of composing movement. And even this expansion does not exhaust the problem of film, since the concept of the filmic encompasses an entire series of elements. One can delimit these elements analytically and propose directives for their use, but ultimately everything is subordinate to the forms of light and movement. The factors preparing the way for a new light culture, which works with calculable and controllable differentiations, include above all the ultrasensitization of the photosensitive layer (new optics of recording), high-grade artificial light sources (reflectors, projectors, physical devices), and the polarization and interference of light. With the help of these factors and apparatuses, we are capable of creating light forms. We are still far from exploiting the conscious grasp of these forms and their hitherto unknown tensions in film, even though they could serve as the most sound basis for filmic quality. Still objects can be animated using light alone. Documents and psyche, objects and mimic expressions will be illuminated with the optical sensation of conscious light composition. Equal to the marvel of light is that of movement, which, before the advent of film, existed as a factor of composition only in dance. There is still no tradition for the application and mastery of movement. Through composition, it must evolve from its unarticulated primal state, its naked existence. This is also the reason why film as an art of movement has still attained only a relatively primitive stage. Our eyes are still untrained in the experience of different phases and trajectories of movement occurring simultaneously. In most cases, they experience the multiple phases within a sequence of movements not as an organic whole but as chaos. Thus most advances in this direction—regardless of their aesthetic value—will at first have a pedagogical impact. Beyond the development of these two broad areas of inquiry, the practice of film is also linked to other factors, which are contingent upon the work of scientists (physicists, chemists), technicians (architects, cameramen, projectionists), and directors (authors). The domains of recording lenses, photosensitivity, color film, stereoscopic film, sound film, projection formats, projection surfaces, curvatures, distorted surfaces, double surfaces, scrims, holes, projection technology, double projection, multiple apparatuses, light play, dissolves, acoustics, and montage—all of this must come together to form a synthesis: film (film effect).

272 ERICH GRAVE The Third Dimension First published as “Die dritte Dimension,” in Filmtechnik (July 20, 1929), 294. Translated by Erik Born.

594

Configurations of a Medium While many observers saw elements such as color and three-dimensionality as part of a trajectory of increasing realism with the ultimate aim of reproducing life (see the article by Frank Warschauer, no. 274), this was by no means the only perspective on film technology. In this article, German set designer Erich Grave (1891–1955) draws from the aesthetics of Schopenhauer and Wagner to argue that technological achievements in color and stereoscopy should not be used to reproduce an object (for example, a concert), thus reducing film to a mere means. Instead, Grave sees the development of film technologies as the precursor to forging an autonomous art form permitting the “dynamic analysis of space” and the intensification of emotion.

In the foreseeable future, we will most certainly have not only sound film but also stereoscopic film and color film. Technological shortcomings, which will be overcome in the short or long term, play no role in this observation. It will be possible, therefore, for a perfected piece of equipment to capture an event perceptible to our eyes and ears and, through a mechanical process, to replay it again before our very eyes as often as we like. One could easily imagine a theatrical performance in a good method of reproduction, an idea that is all the more justified given the prospects of wireless transmission. Such a development leads to the question: Will the reproduction of a play or an opera be so perfect that it artistically matches the original performance, although admittedly still without the feeling of a direct artistic experience? The production of a film has thus become a means to an end, and we can no longer speak of film art, since recordings will be only the method of reproducing a more or less artistic work. Thus the perfection of technology will apparently strangle film as art. This development is inevitable. Film is dead . . . Long live film! Freed from all compromises, the artistic film will finally be able to develop into an autonomous art with its own forms of expression that are unique to it. It will overcome the latent formal aspects of other arts. What we call “line,” “movement,” and “composition” in painting means breaking away from fixed forms—for which there are limits if these elements are to be comprehensible to the viewer. Music has attempted to make itself tangibly perceptible by borrowing from the visual arts. This is how opera came about—a musical art form that drew on acting, or at least stagecraft. Wagner, recognizing the inadequacy of such compromises, attempted to make the bound space of the stage more musical. The floating of the Rhine maidens, the sinking of the Rhine gold, the path to Gralsburg were all created in a conscious attempt to come closer to the rhythm, to the metaphysics of music. But even if, in the foreseeable future, we are able to reproduce Wagner’s scenarios without any technical flaws (through fi lm projection), opera—at least in its current form—will always remain a compromise among various arts, and it will never become a monolithic artwork. According to Richard Wagner: “The opera is an error; for in this form of art a means of expression (music) appears as the object, while the object of expression (the drama) appears only as a means.”1 What is missing here is a form of expression that connects drama (real art) and music (unreal art) and allows the two to merge together: This is the artistic interpretation of space. Until now, we have not had any art form that can dynamically master space, even though we have definitely had the feeling and the will for one. Both the material and the limits of the surface place constraints on the painter’s possibilities of expression. Sculpture and architecture certainly push forward into space, but they cannot detach themselves from the earth. Even in dance, the fact that the body is bound to the earth is an insurmountable law. (How wonderfully slow-motion shots solve that problem!)

Technology and the Future of the Past

595

Stereoscopic film will create a new art form through the dynamic analysis of space. Color film will give us the possibility of making voices and feelings more powerful with colors. Only experience can tell whether we will be able to proceed from colors as pigments based on the laws of color harmony. In the film of the future, objects (and colors) will not be static. It will be an art that, with the fewest technical constraints, will master space as a means of expression, an art that does not need to negate subjectivism in order to create emotional value, since it masters the mobility and modification of any object. The binding law behind all the means of expression emerging for this absolute film will be the musicality of space, which will make film into a unified artwork. To avoid any misunderstandings about the concept of musicality, I would like to quote Schopenhauer: “The relation of the colonnade to the plain wall is comparable to that which would exist between a scale ascending at regular intervals, and a tone ascending little by little without gradations from the same depth to the same height, which would produce a mere howl. For in one as in the other the material is the same, and the immense difference results only from the pure separation.”2 What Schopenhauer says about the aesthetics of architecture can also be applied to colors. The sound film will first be able to develop properly only when the film image has become stereoscopic. It is impossible to think of language and sound divorced from space. Up to now, sound waves have only vibrated in the auditorium and have not emanated from the film image, since it still appears to be two-dimensional. Sound negates the illusion of spatial depth that we now experience. Only time can tell how far it will be possible for coming films to present language in the form of sequential sentences; it is difficult to adapt language to the tempo of film. In any case, language will have to align itself to the dynamic of the whole work—using sound, tone, and noise as bridges in the process. The most radical potential for expression in coming film work will be stereoscopy, if one does not judge it only optically but along the lines I have tried to define here: as part of a collective art that should be included in the will to artistic expression and not merely as designing space in the conventional architectonic sense. Notes 1. Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama (1851), slightly modified by Grave. We borrow here the translation in Thomas Tapper and Percy Goetschius, Essentials in Music History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 297. The original Wagner passage is “der Irrtum in dem Kunstgenre der Oper bestand darin, daß ein Mittel des Ausdruckes (die Musik) zum Zwecke, der Zweck des Ausdruckes (das Drama) aber zum Mittel gemacht war.” 2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 412.

273 ERNST STEFFEN Telecinema in the Home First published as “Das Fernkino im Haus,” in Daheim: Ein deutsches Familienblatt 65, no. 23 (1929), 3–5. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

Like the article by Arthur Korn (no. 270), Ernst Steffen here sees television as a blend of film and radio technologies and distinguishes between live transmission (television) and the transmission of recorded material (telecinema). Steffen’s article focuses specifically

596

Configurations of a Medium on the impact such technologies might have on the domestic sphere. His musings on the possible combinations of television with the telephone anticipate subsequent video-phone systems such as the Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen first inaugurated in Germany in 1936, AT&T’s Picturephone system of the 1960s, or Skype today. But they also draw on earlier ideas such as the “telephonoscope,” which had been discussed since the invention of the telephone in the late 19th century. Daheim, which ran from 1864 to 1943, was an illustrated magazine for families in the vein of Die Gartenlaube.

Things we once had to go in search of are now coming to us in our homes. Anybody who wanted to hear music had to go to a concert hall; people who wanted to listen to a lecture by a famous man went to a lecture hall. We could experience various kinds of gatherings or festivities only by visiting them. All these efforts and many further ones have now been eliminated by radio. Through its loudspeaker, we hear the voices of the most renowned artists; we follow the progress of operas, operettas, and dramas; announcers come to the microphone in succession. We all experience great events in detail through the vivid descriptions provided by on-site correspondents. Radio knows no boundaries. Anyone who possesses a good receiver can access the most diverse pleasures from faraway places. But despite these many advantages, the radio is still missing something. Who among us has not wished not only to hear but also to see! It is certainly nice when a good announcer’s lively depiction allows us to experience a horse race at least in our imagination. But it would be even better if we could see the horses, their riders, and the audience for ourselves. We are charmed by an artist’s singing. But even the most majestic sound is improved by the sight of the performance and the facial expressions. That is why we wish to see the singer. There are many more such desires: how is the story executed on the radio stage? How does this or that maestro conduct? And so on, into infinity! The idea of “television” was born from these wishes. If we could transmit acoustic impressions, why shouldn’t we also be able to broadcast optical ones over great distances? Technology picked up on this idea. From the beginning, it was clear that there were two possibilities for its realization: We could either capture events live, in the moment that they transpired; if something was happening in one place, it would appear simultaneously everywhere in the broadcasting network. Or we could record the action first on a filmstrip. Then, instead of being shown to a limited audience on a cinema screen, the images could be sent into the distance. They could either appear in many theaters simultaneously, or anyone who possessed the right kind of receiver could watch them at home. If the images were transmitted live, it would be a case of pure “television.” If they were recorded on a filmstrip first, the result would be “telecinema.” The first case created an impression of immediacy, but one that was over as soon as the action ended in reality. In the second case, the recording had the advantage of being able to be played repeatedly, as often as desired: the event or the play was permanently fixed. Thus if actual television is like a radio broadcast of a song, which has already faded away in the very moment that it rings out toward our ears, telecinema is like a record, which picks up sound and preserves it for the future. Technologically, the paths to television and telecinema design are more or less the same. Enormous difficulties had to be overcome. Anyone who was interested in the subject understood that television and telecinema were really nothing more than accelerated phototelegraphy. We have known how to send images across wide distances, both by wire and wirelessly, for a long time now. But the transmission still demands a considerable amount of time. Television and telecinema will be possible only once an image can be tel-

Technology and the Future of the Past

597

egraphed so quickly that all its individual parts appear before our eyes simultaneously. One has to picture the image broken up into all its minute individual parts. One must imagine that a dense network of vertical and horizontal lines has been drawn through it. It looks like a wall, composed of individual bricks. These “building blocks,” these “photographic elements,” these “image points” are lined up one beside another. One is light, another is dark. Thus the “brightness values” have to be accurately rendered. Until now, we assumed that a face, for example, has to be broken down into ten thousand image elements in order to be recognizable by the receiver. The first television apparatuses were large and heavy; they looked like giant machines. Accordingly, they were exceedingly expensive. If “telecinema in the home” was to become a reality, it was necessary first and foremost to design a simple and cheap receiver, which would be affordable for the broader public. Furthermore, it was necessary to set it up in a way that would make it very easy to use. Finally, the possibility of transmitting images on a single frequency had to be taken into account. Under certain conditions, many image elements necessitate many frequencies, as they cannot be sent quickly enough on a single one when they travel in sequence. Dénes von Mihály, a radio technician in Berlin, has now discovered the solution to this problem.1 His receiver consists of a box with an opening in it. The image appears in this opening, which has a little funnel-shaped frame on it. The only purpose of this fixture is to block the light rays that would otherwise hit the image from the sides and weaken its appearance. You can also darken the room in order to prevent light from windows or lamps from getting in. But this is certainly not necessary. The image appears clearly even in bright lighting. A knob on the receiver can be used to turn on the machine. The viewer turns it until the image appears in the box opening. After that, no further settings or adjustment controls are necessary. The film rolls steadily for hours. The receiver can be connected to any radio receiver. Transmission requires only a single frequency, because, as we now know, 1,000 to 1,400 image elements are enough to receive a clear picture. The sender is just as simple as the receiver. It is made of two parts: one is a regular film projector, the device used to project images in quick succession onto the screens of movie theaters. The regular projector enlarges the images. In telecinema, they are scaled down through a system of optical lenses and cast not onto a screen but onto a transmitter. This contains a rotating disk with small holes along its edge. The light of a lamp is projected onto these holes. Hence one light ray goes through each hole. Numerous rays of light flit over the image and hit the image elements. It is just as though one were brushing over the image with a large number of paintbrushes. Rays of light that fall on dark image elements become darker, while the ones that strike lighter images stay lighter. Thus the light rays become transmitters for the brightness values. The light rays that have gone through the film are converted into electric currents of corresponding strength. Every brightness value corresponds to a specific current intensity. Then the currents are sent across distances either through wires or wirelessly. On the receiving end, they are converted back into light by being conducted through a lamp that shines on the opening of the receiver box. The images transmitted through Mihály’s receiver give reason to hope that cinema will soon be as common in the home as radio. We have indicated that transmission can be achieved through wires as well as through radio waves (that is, wirelessly). Today we have come far enough technologically that, generally speaking and within certain bounds, anything that can be sent by wire can also be sent wirelessly across long distances. In the future, perhaps our telephones will also have viewing openings or picture frames, where the person we are speaking with will appear. In business deals, for example, this will be a way for us to see prototypes or models from distant locations. We

598

Configurations of a Medium

will also be able to see the faces of faraway family and friends. Of course, some people, like those who now hurry to the television in their pajamas when their sleep has been disturbed, will be upset by this invention, because they will have to get properly dressed with coat and tie in order to make a good impression. Surely technology, in its wisdom and foresight, will bring devices that allow us to turn off the picture when we see fit. Note 1. On Mihály (1894–1953), see the text by Arthur Korn earlier in this chapter, no. 270.

274 FRANK WARSCHAUER A Glance into the Future First published as “Blick in die Zukunft,” in Filmtechnik (April 19, 1930), 12–14. Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi.

Myths of “total cinema” have recurred frequently throughout the history of the medium. André Bazin’s resistance to technological determinism notwithstanding, such visions were often premised on ideas about the inherent directionality of technological development. In this article for the journal Filmtechnik, the Berlin-based writer Frank Warschauer (1892–1940) sees the developments around sound film—the coupling of audio and visual reproduction as well as the looming economic convergence of film, record, and radio industries—as a sure sign that the cinema is en route to a “complete” reproduction of reality in hologram-like projections, replete with sound and color. Unlike Heinz Michaelis (no. 264), Warschauer argues that understanding this technological basis in reproduction is the prerequisite to any and all artistic use of the cinema. An early mentor of Bertolt Brecht, Warschauer wrote frequent articles on radio, film, and television. He was also a founding member of the Gesellschaft Neuer Film, whose 1928 screening of abstract films in Frankfurt is discussed by Siegfried Kracauer in chapter 14 (no. 209).

I.

We are not accustomed to glance into the future. Nor are we taught to do so. Formal education has obliged us to peer into the epochs of the past rather than to gaze forwards. Now we are paying the price. For the present time—more than any other time—demands foresight. The present is determined by tomorrow, not by yesterday. No history can help us to comprehend film; we need, instead, utopia. Not the utopia of an erratic, directionless fantasy, but rather a bold and precise calculation based on the data of our existing strengths. It is astonishing, bizarre, absurd how backwards we remain in this very science. For utopia can be a science. What will be may be predicted with reference to existing facts, just like the movement of the celestial bodies for hundreds and thousands of years. In America they have begun to study economic cycles, and it has been successful. What is decisive, however, is not determining economic cycles, but rather seeing future transformations to our world, transformations that follow from necessity and are determined by technology. [. . .]

Technology and the Future of the Past

599

II.

The path of technology is human destiny. The power to bring about decisive transformations along this path will be the creative mission of humanity for this coming age. The path of technology: one need take only a glance. Focus your telescope and seek to recognize the end point of this road. Only then does the present achieve its own significance as a preliminary stop on the road to overall development. The color sound film surely leaves much to be desired. But this is meaningful exactly as a symptom of a technological, collective will. Where does all this lead? It leads to the complete, true-to-life reproduction of all processes of reality. It is silly to see color sound film as the symptom of a movement similar to naturalism in the arts. That is reproduction. Here, all the powers of the human mind are being enlisted to achieve an utterly successful reproduction. Film in its current form is in this sense merely a beginning. Soon film will represent reality in its totality: in color, sound, space, and eventually full dimensionality. It will no longer offer the imitation of physicality on a two-dimensional screen but the consummate representation of the physical in space itself. In this way, humans, landscapes, and events will be projected onto layers of air so that they appear almost lifelike, with every sign of the real, save its materiality. One will be able to walk around them and see from the side in a profile or from the rear. The future of the film—or the technology of phantoms. Even the most sophisticated of objections will be powerless against the demonic power of such a technological wonder. And this complete reproduction will, of course, be easy to attain anywhere by means of the boundless conquest of space through broadcasting. Surely we anticipate all of this—we speak of technical possibilities and impossibilities. But we must also accept this final stage as an outright certainty—regard it attentively as that coming, fateful necessity that is the prerequisite to spiritual and artistic endeavors. Only then will we find relative peace in the turbulence of the present and know what can truly come to pass in the moment—and what cannot. Only then will we lose our fear of the next technological step. [. . .] IV.

Technological development means structural transformations, shifts in the balance of power. It provides the key to the events that are now unfolding. The film industry is crumbling. It has fulfilled its function. Its task lay in a special area—that of a purely optical reproduction, which can no longer exist as an end to itself. The film industry is crumbling—or it will find a new and transformed basis on which it joins forces with the industry of acoustic reproduction. One throne is abandoned, another occupied. One must know where the new ruling power is seated. This is most apparent in America, where mighty cartels are already assembling themselves over all forms of reproducing reality. There, talking films are closely affiliated with records and broadcasting. Already an immensely strong and far-reaching syndicate is developing between all interested parties; its impact reaches far afield into apparently distant sectors. There is a close connection between the Radio Corporation of America (the largest broadcasting group), the record industry (the Victor group, called Electrola in Germany), the electricity cartel—which has the prospect of becoming a global cartel (General Electric and Westinghouse)—and the sound film (Warner Brothers). A giant power complex that has further connections to the automobile industry (General Motors), and also possesses a natural tendency to bring into its sphere of influence all manifestations of musical and theatrical events which do not already appear in technological reproduction. This power conglomerate is already evident in the fact that Warner Brothers exerts a decisive influence over seven of the largest music publishing houses in America.

600

Configurations of a Medium

What does this all mean? That global cartels are emerging in the place of relatively weak individual industries, and that these are the power relations with which innovation must reckon.1 [. . .] V.

Utopia, the contemplation of technologically necessary development, leads inexorably to the question of where today’s creators must stand: where they will find the leverage to achieve creativity, which factors and accumulations of power they will be faced with. This contemplation is a constant undertaking. We have offered only a few approaches to such contemplation here. One thing, however, is certain: The machine gets bigger, gaining tremendously in its power and global influence. The individual is powerless against it. Consolidation, organization is not a mechanical process; it is an intellectual endeavor that engenders the conditions for productive future activity. If one needed a further confirmation of the urgency for those involved in film to consolidate their forces, it would be this: a glance into the future. Note 1. See also volume 1 of Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, first published in 1930, where the industrialist Arnheim states: “In its present form, cinematography may not look like much, but once the big interests get involved—the electrochemicals, say, or the chromochemical concerns—you are likely to see a surging development in just a few decades, which nothing can stop. Every known means of raising and intensifying production will be brought into play.” Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Vintage, 1996), 704.

275 H. BAER The Color Film First published as “Der Buntfilm,” in Das Kunstblatt 14, no. 7 (July 1930), 220. Translated by Alex H. Bush.

For much of the history of film, the use of color conveyed qualities of spectacle—as in many film musicals—rather than realism. (In the tradition of documentary photography, realism was most often associated with black and white.) This article, written for a highbrow art journal, situates color film within a long history of ornamentation, which the author lambasts as a cheap attraction (a “temptation for the eyes”) catering to “primitive” audiences. The author’s hope that the avant-garde might reject color for more “serious” pursuits might seem surprising given the widespread experimentation with color design by filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger. Rudolf Arnheim would quote this text by H. Baer in his essay “The Complete Film” (1933), included in later editions of Film as Art.

First, fi lm captured shadows on celluloid, then sound; now it is reaching toward color. Graphic art (which includes photography) has concerned itself with color time and again. The oldest woodcuts, block books, were painted by hand. The black plate was joined by a second, colorful one—in Dürer’s portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler, in Hans Baldung’s work.1 Burgkmair produced that glorious sheet depicting an armored knight in

Technology and the Future of the Past

601

black, silver, and gold. 2 In the eighteenth century came multicolor printing of etchings. In the following century, Daumier’s and Gavarni’s lithographs were colored by hand.3 In graphic arts, colors are sometimes attractions, usually detours, rarely an enhancement of artistic techniques. Graphics lose their essence: the colorful play between black and white. Only once has color printing produced great art: in Japanese color woodcuts and, inspired by them, the lithography of Toulouse-Lautrec. Japanese drawing abstains from the representation of light and shadow; it spreads its figures across flat surfaces; it is a stranger to aerial perspective and the increased opacity that comes with additional distance. Thus, in its graphic outlines, it can create an arrangement of colorful surfaces without needing to express spatial relations through refraction. Color penetrates graphic arts as a heightened temptation for the eye. Primitives, in particular, are not satisfied with black or white. Children, peasants, and indigenous peoples want color in its most enhanced state: colorfulness. But the audiences sitting in front of film screens are the primitives of large cities. This is why film is grasping after colorfulness. It promises a new attraction. With their blacks and whites, graphic arts have the same reality as painting with its colors. Like the illustrator’s line, the colors of painting are tools of artistic expression, not a reflection of nature. Sculpture, which has abstained from ornamental painting since the Renaissance, has not become less real for it. In terms of its naturalism, film has nothing to gain from coloration: it will lose its reality. Using color filters, the color fi lm takes two or three colors from phenomena. The apparatus is bound to local colors that the painter is free to disregard. But the local colors are real only in space, for color does not cling to things such that it can be drawn out of them. It changes depending on proximity and distance, brightness and dimness, bodily forms, surface materials. It looks different on smooth, rough, or shiny surfaces. Photography follows these shifts using gradations of light and dark; color photography can produce only a crude abstraction of it. It has certain possibilities as long as the object stays level and the number of colors is limited (in image reproduction, for example). If the object expands into the physio-spatial realm, color photography must fail. Photography and its gloss, focus, and shading, are exhausted by random colorfulness. The images in color film are dull and blurry, just like a color postcard. We do not dare attempt the appearance of reality with this unrefined technology. We provide a set whose color scheme and construction correspond to the limitations of the process. (The first color film was a revue.) The object must be customized for the lens of the color film camera. Rather than an excerpt from nature (which suits the artistic possibilities of photography), there is an interior designer’s arrangement. Rather than filmic work, awful reproductions of bad theater. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if “Cilly Green” runs across the screen in black and white or blue and orange.4 100 percent sound, 100 percent color, 100 percent kitsch—no matter what mixture this German film confection concocts of military colorfulness, martial noise, and insincerity of feeling. But perhaps the color film will bring with it a necessary separation. Chaplin, who rejected sound, will also refuse color fi lm, and the avant-garde in Europe will follow him. Notes 1. Albrecht Dürer’s portrait of Ulrich Varnbüler is from 1522. Baldung (ca. 1485–1545) was a disciple of Dürer.

602

Configurations of a Medium

2. Hans Burgkmair (1473–1531) was a German painter and woodcutter. 3. The lithographs are by the French artists Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) and Paul Gavarni (1804–1866). 4. “Cilly Green” refers to a popular 1929 Hollywood musical, Sally, which opened in Germany under the title Cilly in 1930. The story of an orphaned dancer who becomes a Broadway star, Sally premiered in two-strip Technicolor but was also shown in black and white with some color footage.

276 RUDOLF ARNHEIM Radio-Film First published as “Der Rundfunkfilm,” in Film als Kunst (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1932); reprinted in Film als Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 271–72. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Whereas the other articles on television included in this chapter strike an optimistic tone in their hopes for the emerging medium, Rudolf Arnheim’s discussion of what he called “radio-film” evinces darker forebodings in its concern about the potential monopoly power of a central broadcasting agency to “decide what is performed and what is not.” It might be tempting to read Arnheim’s text retrospectively as a prescient prediction of Nazi media policies, but Arnheim makes no mention of the rising tide of fascism in his discussion of the effects of centralization on quality. It is also important to note that all of the texts on television presented here touched on possible (and some actual) futures of the medium. This essay appeared in the original edition of Film als Kunst and was included in the 1933 British translation but was left out of later English-language versions.

Since the technical problems of television are currently being tackled with great zeal and success, we can expect to see fi lms distributed via radio in the near future. At that point, it will be possible to screen films transmitted from a central station in hundreds of theaters simultaneously, or even in the private homes of “listeners.” This would not change much in terms of aesthetics, but it would significantly alter the practical state of film production. In connection to these questions, the following lines recently appeared in a trade journal: “We will need to reach an agreement concerning the extent to which fi lms should be produced for such centralized broadcasts, since the costs of a live performance in the studio could easily be recouped by such a wide distribution.” Here too, in other words, film is in danger. In a practical sense, film is theater for the people: since theater is too expensive, the people go to the cinema. But as soon as theater becomes less expensive to produce than fi lm, the producers will put their efforts into theater. And if we recall our previous observations on the coming development of film, then we must indeed concede that it would be pointless to use radio for broadcasting complete films. One could simply skip the act of recording and perform the film—that is, the theatrical play—live before the radio apparatus. This is all the more true since, in most cases, no more than a single performance of the same film (play) will be necessary or possible if the central station has a monopoly! In our current radio industry, radio dramas are generally played on several different stations. But if centralization becomes a fact, then a given radio drama will of course be broadcast only once, and since it is cheaper to maintain a single station than twenty, this centralization will probably come to pass.

Technology and the Future of the Past

603

No doubt, centralization goes against the interests of art in many respects. Recently, Ernst Krenek brought up this point during a discussion of the so-called opera film:1 He [Krenek] believes that the plans for centralization will only reinforce the mania for excellence and intensify the dreadful cult of prominent artists. He rightly emphasizes that nothing is less desirable for German art than the centralization of radio in Berlin. It might be the case that the lack of centralization in Germany means less tradition. But the German character, in order to develop its particular nature, requires above all a variety of local and provincial initiatives and developmental opportunities. A single body will have the power to decide what is performed and what is not, and the result will be an appalling uniformization of offerings. True, one could then force the masses to hear only good radio plays and see only good films, since monopolies allow one to dictate what products are available to consumers. But as already stated, it makes no sense, given the current cultural level of the masses, to offer them only first-rate art. Today, we cannot foresee whether an extreme monopoly in the broadcasting of films will come to pass. Perhaps individual screenings will still exist alongside broadcasts, just as music today is still played in concert halls as well as on radio. What is certain is that we will see a vigorous standardization of all cultural needs, and there is reason to fear that this standard will not be high in the domain of art. Whether or not those who understand and appreciate good art will still fi nd some way to satisfy their needs, whether or not good artists will find opportunities for work are questions we cannot yet answer today. The future of film will be determined by the future economics and politics, and it is not within the purview of the present book to predict the latter. How film fares will depend on how we fare. Note 1. On the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek (1900–1991), see also the text by Fritz Giese in chapter 12, no. 181, note 6.

277 BERNHARD DIEBOLD The Future of Mickey Mouse (Theory of Animation as a New Cinema Art) Originally delivered as a lecture on Frankfurter Radio on June 16, 1932. First published as “Die Zukunft der Micky-Maus (Theorie des Trickfilms, als einer neuen Kinokunst),” in Christian Kiening and Heinrich Adolf, eds., Der absolute Film: Dokumente der Medienavantgarde (1912–1936) (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2012), 300–4. Translated by Michael Cowan.

Contrary to some dire predictions (as in the article by Alex Strasser in chapter 14, no. 217), experimental film did not die out with the coming of sound. Oskar Fischinger, whom Diebold had acquainted with Walter Ruttmann’s work in the early 1920s, went on to develop a signature type of abstract animation synchronized to musical recordings, which would attract the attention of Disney Studios. In the following radio lecture, Diebold—recalling his earlier writings on film as “visual music”—takes Mickey Mouse and Fischinger’s work as starting points to speculate about the future forms of

604

Configurations of a Medium art that might emerge from the “technological possibility” of animated painting in the era of sound film. Predicting what he calls “symphoties” (literally, symphonies of light), Diebold reimagines the space of the cinema as a dome in which multiple projectors would allow filmic images to interact in “counterpoint” above the audience. Diebold’s hypothetical dome might seem prescient of contemporary experiments in immersive cinema, but such experiments also draw on familiar practices in Renaissance painting (Diebold himself cites the example of Michelangelo’s dome painting The Last Judgment). He might also have been inspired by experiments closer to home; Alexander László’s Farblichtkonzert (Color Light Concert) combined live music with color projections to create a symphony of light and color, which was sometimes projected onto domes (for example in performances at the GeSoLei trade fair in Düsseldorf in 1926), and Fischinger’s own Raumlichtkunst (Space Light Art), a series of cinematic concerts performed in various German venues in the late 1920s, used multiple 35-mm projectors to create an immersive environment of sound, colors, and forms. See also Diebold’s texts in chapters 13 and 14, nos. 189, 202. On the German reception of Mickey Mouse, see Walter Benjamin’s text in chapter 12 (no. 185).

You all know the American figure Mickey Mouse, that graceful and humorous animal from the world of film, who experiences a wealth of adventures in rapid tempo and with understated music. Despite his mouse-like form, Mickey’s expressions and gestures mimic those of a human being—or rather a human performer in the circus who is, for a few minutes, utterly removed from the serious concerns of life. “Art,” Schiller tells us, “is cheerful,”1 and Mickey Mouse is art. Indeed, of all the socalled film art produced to date, it represents the highest artistic form, as I will explain in what follows. Perhaps you find my praise for Mickey Mouse greatly overstated when compared to the great directorial works such as Potemkin and The Passion of Joan of Arc. But Mickey Mouse merits this higher ranking on principle, not merely on account of the entertainment it offers to the eyes. For Mickey Mouse is only the latest and most popular exponent of the wider art of drawn animation—that is, of the type of animation that encompasses filmic advertising, Felix the Cat, the silhouette films of Lotte Reiniger, and the absolute films of Ruttmann and Fischinger, no less than by Mickey himself. Animation, thus understood, is by all means a higher artistic form than naturalistic fi lm based on photography. For the filmic image thus obtained in no way resembles the “photographed nature” or “photographed theater” offered by a conventional fi lm. Rather, the image is produced by the hand of a sovereign artist, whose pencil allows him to rule over the form of his creations with complete autonomy. He is in no way dependent upon the natural appearance of actors or landscapes. Rather, like the great painters, he is free to create and shape all existing objects according his imagination. The artist and creator of Felix the Cat or Mickey Mouse can no longer be compared with the director of a traditional film. For the film director, who is today the real master of the film, and next to whom the so-called screenwriter with his manuscript plays a subordinate role—this director of conventional films does not reign sovereign over the form of his Willy Fritsches or Lilian Harveys. While he might be able to modify their appearance through makeup or costume, he can never stylize them into an ideal painterly form. Even the most impressively dressed actor shown in a photograph is, beside a portrait that a painter like Kokoschka might make of him, still only a naturalistic civilian. He still has not attained the full status of style—and that means art!—in the way that even the ugliest maid in a Rembrandt painting becomes an artistic image and symbolic person through Rembrandt’s stylistic composition. Like the theater director, the film director is

Technology and the Future of the Past

605

and remains fundamentally a mere servant and helper of the creative author or artist. He arranges existing objects with great talent before the photographic lens. He sets them into exciting movement with great taste and artistic rhythm. He chooses the best and most favorable situations for images of reality. He seeks out the most appropriate actors and molds them to his arrangement through music, makeup, and movement. A great deal of artistic imagination goes into this art of composition and montage. The art of the director often approaches the realms of high art but only as composition and dynamics. As far as the elements of the action—the people, the landscapes, and the animals—are concerned, on the other hand, the director remains a photographer. He is not an artist of the first order. And as long as the cinema sees its greatest masters only in talented directors, film cannot become an artwork of the first order. It is rather like a drama that owes more to its director than to its author. For just as in poetry, painting, and music, so here too, great art demands a fully sovereign genius, one who forms the elements of the film single-handedly, as does the creator of Mickey Mouse. This is why Mickey Mouse is in principle—and despite his ridiculous diminutive status—a sublime pioneer of cinema as great art. For the animation artist no longer works as a director with preformed natural material and existing chess pieces. The animation artist enjoys that freedom to create human and animal forms anew like Prometheus. Our Mickey Mouse does not resemble any existing mouse in this world. Never could an actual mouse be trained to display such humor and such a resemblance to humans that we would experience the same gleeful pleasure we get from the fictional-drawn Mickey. Or take the humorous human figures from advertising films, which seem to have flown out from Wilhelm Busch’s ingenious picture books to become “living paintings.”2 And now, with this technological possibility and practical basis in mind, exert your imagination a bit further: you can see how the same pencil might draw not only comic personalities from everyday life or circus clowns but also the serious pathos of monumental paintings. What would stop a painter with the talent of Slevogt or Botticelli from repeating his linear figures in a thousand images of movement and bringing them to life, 3 exactly like Mickey Mouse? Imagine—to take one hypothetical example— Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, its tremendous energies of potential movement in suspension now dissolved into actual kinetic movements of energy. Such movements would far surpass the imagination of painters of static objects and figures. For the resulting image would become less important than the resulting movement: the animated dance of these painted figures. Imagine—as another example—Botticelli’s Birth of Venus set into motion. First the sea, where the contours of dancing waves ripple up into frothy forms, until the woman born of foam emerges from the beautiful bubbly mass. Trees sway in rhythmical oscillations, birds flap their wings, butterflies dance, and pieces of fruit grow visibly to giant proportions. The Graces float into the image to cover the nude goddess with their robe full of folds. And the stars circle around like dancing ornaments. This example is taken from a well-known painting, but the new film art would have to work with new forms, gleaned from the imagination of the present. The new genius of this new art would need to find his own style for a new art of mobile “graphics,” a graphic art that would find its most forceful expression less in the static image (in the position of the painterly pose) than in the movements of dance. But since all artistic phenomena occurring in time as movement demand a structured and clearly marked rhythm—in order to organize the temporal flow—this new graphic art will have to maintain an intimate connection to the rhythmical power of music. All time-based art requires a foundation in sound. Poetry as a time-based art requires the verse as its music to structure the flow of time. Similarly, the dancer cannot dance

606

Configurations of a Medium

correctly unless music divides up time (the flow of time) in a pleasant way, lending it a temporal regularity, be it only through the striking of a gong. Every art of movement that lays claim to form and style needs music for its rhythmical emphasis and guidance. For music masters time. A spatial art such as stylized animated film must rely on music in order to unfold in time, because the passage of time must also find its temporal stylization (which is achieved by notes). Early silent film, too, was always accompanied by music, since movement without audible rhythm appears paralyzed. Imagine the racing Mickey Mouse without his musical gallop and his jazz accompaniment—he would be like a scampering ghost, a far cry from the joyful dance that Mickey performs with the musical accompaniment. Indeed, we see that this new art of movement in painted film is fundamentally a musical dance. Music plays an essential role, and this art of animation can be characterized less as painting in motion or painted dance than as painted music, as music for the eyes,4 as sound painting or musical graphic art—or let us say as musographics [Musographik]. But you all know that music cannot represent spatial objects on its own. The neoromantic music of R. Wagner or R. Strauss might be able to offer stylized sonic representations of fire, water, and rushing wind, but the so-called absolute music, from Bach to Beethoven, as well as the most modern music does not represent natural objects. Rather, their musical themes are like geometric ornaments. And the movement of these ornaments constitutes a kind of spiritual imitation of our feelings. The great works of classical music did not imitate the sounds of nature but rather danced in beautiful sound ornaments, whose movement led to melodies and to polyphonic arrangements. In analogy to this absolute music of beautiful form—the Wagner opponent Hanslick called it a “dance of ornaments” in distinction to Wagnerian tone painting!5 —one could imagine an absolute animated film that would represent the tonal ornaments of music through visible and graphic ornaments of the moving film. In truth, such absolute musographics are not simply an idea but have already found their realization in the experiments of Ruttmann and Fischinger. Fischinger, the young artist from Frankfurt, recently achieved great success in Berlin’s Kamera with a study based on Rubinstein’s “Lichtertanz” [Torch dance],6 which is currently being shown in two Ufa cinemas in Frankfurt. Already in 1916, long before such visible experiments, I presented the idea and the theory of drawn film, in both its figurative and absolute form (also in the Frank furter Zeitung).7 Ruttmann constructed his film more according to cubist principles: squares, circles, and jagged surfaces interacted with one another as friendly or antagonistic principles— not unlike the masculine and feminine motifs in Beethoven’s music. With much greater imagination, Fischinger created music less with surface forms than with lines, and the gracefulness of his movement patterns—his colorful melodies, his angular counterpoints, his asymmetrical confrontations—succeeded for the first time in turning musographics— that is, musical painting or drawn music—into a genuine artistic enjoyment. But these examples are only a modest beginning and still far removed from the final goal of this musical painting, just as music itself took thousands of years to achieve its great artistic form, when the monotone chanting of priests developed into a Missa Solemnis.8 In the case of film, we will also have to be patient for a hundred years. Mickey Mouse, too, is an initial example, a mere template for a potentially great art of fi lm. Its fulfi llment will lie in the future. Where people once spoke mockingly of a “music of the future” [Zukunftsmusik], 9 we may now hope to see a “future cinema.” Compared to painting, the cinema up to now has been naturalist. But one day, it will achieve a formal classicism in its expression. In comparison to poetry, it has as yet shown only individual and naturalistic people, but it will one day provide general types. The cinema has operated as a form of prose, often producing magnificent prose such as Potemkin, but it will one day speak in an elevated language, in optical verses. A century

Technology and the Future of the Past

607

from now, we will perhaps find ourselves in a giant dome with a white ceiling. We will lie upon wide seats and look upwards. A half dozen apparatuses will project their images into the dome in overlapping counterpoint, each image shown in a different color. One projector will show only clouds and stars, another the earth, water, and animals. A third projector will show angels, devils, and humanity in whatever form the artist sees and paints them in. Rather than symphonies, we will see “symphoties” [Symphotieen]: concerts of images and themes.10 Just as music was a subsidiary art centuries ago and only gradually attained the status of a great and divine art—the youngest of the great arts—so film will once be valued as a serious divine art, as soon as it gains autonomy from all content to produce sovereign form. Then the state will found public film theaters and film academies, and the film industry, in addition to profit-driven productions, will discover its idealism and its cultural mission. (After all, book publishers printed Hölderlin and Spinoza alongside profitable romance novels). But one thing is still needed: the great genius of film. The film machine awaits its great genius, just as earlier forms of the piano such as the thin harpsichord had to wait for Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Thus the director’s film is awaiting the doubly talented artist of light and music—a Richard Wagner of animation. It awaits a truly great symphoty of film, whose first and courageous precursors we see in Fischinger’s ornamental dance and in the little Mickey Mouse. Notes 1. The quote is from the prologue to Schiller’s Wallenstein (1798): “Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst.” 2. On the nineteenth-century satirical poet and illustrator Wilhelm Busch, see the text by Hans Pander in chapter 15, no. 221, note 1. 3. Max Slevogt (1868–1932) was a German impressionist artist. 4. See Diebold’s “A New Art: Film’s Music for the Eyes” in chapter 14, no. 202. 5. On the music critic Eduard Hanslick, see Diebold’s text in chapter 14, no. 202, note 5. 6. The Kamera was a cinema on Berlin’s Unter den Linden. The study based on Rubenstein’s “Lichtertanz” is Hans Fischinger’s Study No. 12 (1932). 7. See Diebold’s “Expressionism and Cinema,” excerpted in chapter 13, no. 189. 8. Missa Solemnis is Beethoven’s famous Mass in D Major, op. 123, composed between 1819 and 1823. 9. A satirical term used to refer to Richard Wagner’s music beginning in the 1850s. The term is often attributed to composer Louis Spohr and to the music critic Ludwig Bischoff (playing on the title of Wagner’s The Artwork of the Future). 10. Diebold’s neologism Symphotie is a playful variation on Symphonie, in which the root for sound (phon-) is replaced by the root for light (phot-).

278 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER On the Border of Yesterday: On the Berlin Film and Photo Exhibition First published as “An der Grenze des Gestern: Zur Berliner Film- und Photo-Schau,” in Frankfurter Zeitung (July 12, 1932). Translated by Michael Cowan.

In the following text, Siegfried Kracauer reviews a “Film und Foto” exhibition that had opened in Berlin on July 2, 1932. The exhibition featured screenwriter Eduard Andrés’s collection of historical film materials as well as the private archives of several actors and filmmakers, including Fritz Lang, Max Mack, and Harry Piel. Recalling his essay on

608

Configurations of a Medium photography from 1927, Kracauer uses the occasion to remark on the ambivalence of film’s relation to history: while old films seem to preserve only “unessential phenomena,” now comically removed from their living context, they also remind us more deeply of “the demise of each and every present.” Like photos, film can serve both vain attempts to overcome temporality through “mechanized immortality” (see chapter 3, no. 35) and a deeper realization of the essential transience of worldly life. Surveying the obsolete technologies on display, Kracauer refl ects on the profound contingency of film history, even as he reaffirms his hope in the promise of cinema, whose “exquisite apparatus” of moving image projection “cannot have been created in vain.” Cinema’s rich technological past opens for him the vast, not-yet-realized potentiality of the medium’s future.

A group of shops in the Joachimsthaler Straße has just inaugurated a permanent exhibition of film and photography, which brings together a wealth of material the likes of which have never been seen. The organizers have compiled documents, images, and specimens stretching from the earliest days of photography and fi lm down to the present. They afford a nearly seamless overview of a development in which we participated so fully that we could not previously detach it from ourselves. Through this collection, the life we unreflectively lived comes into view for the first time and confronts us as something external. And, as we survey the exhibition, we recognize—not without a certain shudder—how the present sinks into the past bit by bit, and how the past continues to reverberate within the present. The exhibition rooms are reminiscent of fairground booths. All the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with photos, interspersed by glaring outdoor posters. Other factors also contribute to the impression of fairground magic. The exhibition remains open late into the night; in one room, disguised as an old Kintopp from the outlying neighborhoods, forgotten films and new ones are shown; the shop-window decorations look like the visual incarnation of a barrel-organ melody; the ticket price is so low that the open shop-door no longer feels like an insurmountable barrier. In short, the street is drawn deep into the display, whose most secret recesses seem as if created for passers-by. Whether the sense of improvisation that prevails here was intended by the organizers or simply due to a lack of funds, it perfectly corresponds in either case to the ostensible object of the exhibition. These images would suffocate in the bright and elegant halls of museums, and this not only on account of their origin and significance. If they would be out of place in such a setting, it is also because they have not yet become fully historical. Their place is on the border of yesterday, where one can only improvise. For in the twilight of this border area, contours become blurred and the murmur of lived existence bleeds over into the terrains only recently vacated. From the earliest days of photography, we have the picture of a window by Niépce,1 who worked from 1816 to 1830 and was the forerunner of Daguerre. The photo, printed on specially prepared paper coated in bitumen, will not endure much longer. The image already shows cracks and fissures, and the figure threatens to recede back into the monotone ground from which its creator had lured it forth. It must have been an incomparable joy for him to freeze all things otherwise fated to die. One can still see the window clearly with its frame and stone sill—a wretched window on some Parisian house. But precisely the insignificance of the subject illustrates the intention of the first photographs. They were doubtlessly driven by the mission of acknowledging the temporality of a world whose time was running out. And the emotion that overcomes today’s observer at the sight of the yellowing paper can be explained by the fact that this photo, in contrast to most modern ones, strives to save fading appearances without eternalizing them to the

Technology and the Future of the Past

609

point of tedium. By bringing a fleeting phenomenon to a miraculous standstill for the sake of probing its possible meanings, the old photo reminds us of the original vocation of photographic technology, whose later beneficiaries have long been content to meaninglessly stave off the evaporation of unessential phenomena. The beginnings of film: a zoetrope is there for spinning, and little picture booklets, which one can flip through quickly with one’s finger like a deck of cards, produce artless scenes. “You won’t believe what happens,” reads the title of one such booklet, and this statement is designed to arouse the curiosity of fairground visitors. In amusement parks, one still finds those Biofix devices from the old days making their exaggerated promises to greedy patrons with deep pockets. 2 The entire beginnings of fi lm production are immersed in an air of fairground booths. This is the atmosphere in which the Max Skladanowsky’s experiments could thrive.3 And just as the crude equipment employed by this inventor already contained a wealth of possibilities that would later be elaborated, so too the spot on which he entered into this virgin territory was decisive for the future. The conditions under which a new development takes shape always exert an unforeseeable influence on its trajectory. The first narrative film in the world, created by Skladanowsky under the title Die Rache der Frau Schultze [The revenge of Frau Schultze],4 is a kind of street ballad, whose images are accompanied by verses such as this: Evenings as the clock strikes ten Frau Schultze lies in bed, but then The neighbor working at his—song Blasts his trumpet all night long.5 It is also telling that the vengeful Frau Schultze was played by a circus acrobat. The films from that time all serve to illustrate the melodies of stage balladeers or to visualize themes drawn from sensational literature. The same compulsion that drove technicians to design the apparatus also led them to motifs lurking beneath official literature. The world into which they advanced was that of popular amusements, of adventure stories created and consumed at a primitive level, of ten-cent brochures one finds in the semipublic spaces of stationery shops and courtyards. But if this world was the first to be conquered by film, that can only mean that film has its place there. And indeed, film would later celebrate its greatest victories precisely as a creation of the street, as a means of conveying those indestructible great themes that manifest themselves more clearly in show tents than in so-called literature, forming the pleasures of the uneducated or the wise. The comedies of Chaplin, which display the indelible sign of film’s lineage, are at once its fulfillment. The Fallen Woman’s Vengeance: A Moral Story in Four Acts.6 This is the title of a jaded old film with Hans Albers in the role of a sinister seducer.7 His locks of hair still bounce in all their glory, and his vanity is still innocent like the heroes of novels for housemaids. Today, Albers tries to embody the popular figure that he perhaps really was in his greener days, but he falls short. The kitsch he once represented had a popular appeal that meant something; the nature he mimes today in the interest of his popularity is kitsch. One image from this film is telling. The heroine, pistol in hand (and apparently already fallen), stands in her luxurious family parlor before an easel painting of the seducer clad in tails. The intertitle expresses her feelings as follows: “I once loved this man. But oh, how I loathe him today! I must kill him, even if only in an image!” The excitement conveyed by these words is nowhere visible on the heroine’s face; on the contrary, she gives the impression of someone completely uninvolved in the events. She fills the center of the room with the quiet composure of an exalted middle-class statue, and the calm that prevents any emotion from swelling up in her breast corresponds perfectly to the

610

Configurations of a Medium

indifference with which she holds the revolver. The murder weapon might as well be an empty matchbox that she will set down in the next moment, so tenuous is its relation to the fallen woman and the tails. But what of the tragic words? The footage demonstrates that at the time of their writing, the space subsequently conquered by film had not yet come into view. The parlor is a modified stage set; the roles are played by theater actors who cannot speak; the furniture comes from the prop room; and the camera is afraid to move. During the time of this preliminary phase, people and objects belong neither to the theater, where they can make themselves understood, nor yet to that world that can be represented on the screen. These are ghosts who operate at dawn and whose language is not ours. Their gestures appear to give the lie to their words. Their stillness is agitation, and their pistols shoot into emptiness. When the camera awakens from its fixedness, they will fade away. Many films from that bygone era are now simply comical. Not in the places where they try to be comical but rather, precisely at the heights of seriousness. In the middle of a graveyard scene, for example, which apparently forms the poignant conclusion to a dramatic plot, we find the kneeling Henny Porten alongside a well-dressed gentleman who would be at home in any Courths-Mahler novel.8 The commentary accompanying the image tells us No place on earth would I sooner crave, But here beside my family grave.9 There is not the slightest doubt that the grieving woman and the gentleman standing to the side are devastated. But the image still makes the audience laugh, and other less blatant scenes from old society dramas are similarly doomed to laughter. The comic effect issues from a certain transformation that has befallen these images. While they showed their original viewers only the content they intended, what they show viewers today is the peculiar and decaying milieu in which that content manifested itself as naïvely as if it were rooted there. We see not only the gentleman’s emotion but also his antiquated jacket, and we are forced to notice that Henny Porten’s sadness resides just beneath the outmoded shape of her hat. The emphasis of these images has shifted; the fashionable externalities, which previously disappeared, now come to the fore like cryptic writing. And instead of being swept up in the pathos that spoke from these images in their own time, our interest is aroused only by the comical contrast that exists between the images’ claims to pathos and the obsolete appearance of their protagonists. Since fi lm represents life as it appears more fully than any other form of art, its tasks perhaps include this one: to constantly call our attention to the questionable entanglement of fleeting time and feelings or passions that lay claim to permanence. To be sure, the sense of amusement provoked by recently outmoded filmstrips has a dark foundation. For the sight of clothing and gestures in which we still expressed ourselves only a short time ago recalls more generally the demise of each and every present. Undoubtedly, many athletic festivals, tragedies, and other sights we now encounter on the screen will soon create an impression no less comical than the couple beside the family grave. The only reality free from this comic effect is one that has become completely historical and no longer reaches over into our own, and the only contents to escape it are those possessing such overwhelming selfevidence and power that they conquer even their own ephemeral appearance. But where could such contents be found in today’s world? From the past, the exhibition then advances imperceptibly into the present. Still, a few stages of the cinema’s development do stand out. There’s the letter from Max Mack to Albert Bassermann, in which Bassermann—who had refused to work in film up

Technology and the Future of the Past

611

until that point—is successfully entreated to accept a role in the film Sein eigener Mörder [His own murderer].10 There are images of the first sets constructed in a film studio. There are also samples of films that introduced an important series or an influential technological innovation. But despite these faint signals, one never finds the threshold beyond which yesterday would be confined once and for all. Rather, one glides into the present without stopovers. The uncanny sensation of not knowing exactly when modern garments supplant the old ones is intensified by the awareness that, along with technological progress, the films themselves grow emptier. At the end of the exhibition, a new sound film camera has been set up, which compares with Skladanowsky’s clumsy Bioskop like an elegant automobile of today compares with a traditional Ford.11 But the films issuing from this streamlined and wonderfully constructed apparatus do not satisfy the hopes people once had for the future perfection of the originary model. On the contrary: the more they take on the character of industrial productions, the more hollow they ring, and the increasing technological know-how invested in these films appears to condition their decrease in substance. They turn good intentions on their head; they lift up sensationalism and thereby drag it down; they provide the populace with phony ideologies and spoil their content through decorations. Things did not have to be this way, but they turned out this way in actuality. The stroll through the exhibition resembles in every detail a slide into the abyss. One hope does, however, remain: the exquisite apparatus that produces these inane products. It cannot have been created in vain, and one day it will assume the function that corresponds to it in reality. To the foregoing observations, one could add that the copious material, presented here to exhibition visitors little by little, was provided by innumerable industry professionals. Directors opened their private archives, and film extras contributed valuable old photos. The exhibition company, which is donating a certain percentage of its gross profits to the welfare funds of some film associations, also plans to organize subsidiary exhibitions in other German cities. In the central exhibition, there are further plans to hold lectures on various topics and events pertaining to specialty areas. Notes 1. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) was one of the inventors of photography. Kracauer would seem to be referring to Point de vue du Gras (1826–1827), often credited as the earliest surviving photograph. Kracauer refers to the photo twice as being printed on paper, though the original image was printed on bitumen-coated pewter plate. It is likely that he saw a paper copy. 2. The Biofix device was a system for producing animated portraits of customers through flip books, thus offering, in the words of one British brochure, “immortality to everyone at a shilling a time.” Cited in Stephen Herbert, “Animated Portrait Photography,” History of Photography 13, no. 1 (1989), 69. 3. See the text by the showman and inventor Max Skladanowsky earlier in this chapter, no. 263. 4. The film in question is Eine Fliegenjagd oder die Rache der Frau Schultze (1905) by Max Skladanowsky. Whether this deserves the title of “first” narrative film is debatable. 5. In German the verse is Abends, wenn die Glocke zehn, Will Frau Schultze schlafen gehn, Ihr Herr Nachbar—componiert, Spielt Posaune und klaviert. 6. Kracauer refers to the film Die Rache der Gefallenen (1920). 7. On the actor Hans Albers, see Kracauer’s text in chapter 5, no. 77, note 3. 8. A likely reference to a Tonbild entitled Am Elterngrab (1907). Hedwig Courths-Mahler (1867–1950) was one of the most successful German authors of popular novels in the early twentieth-century. On Henny Porten, see chapter 10, nos. 143, 144. On Tonbilder, see chapter 17, no. 247. 9. These are lyrics from the German folk song “Die Rasenbank am Elterngrab.” The original text is “Der schönste Platz, den ich auf Erden hab’, / Das ist die Rasenbank am Elterngrab.”

612

Configurations of a Medium

10. Kracauer is presumably confusing Max Mack’s 1914 film Sein eigener Mörder with his 1913 film Der Andere, the first film in which Albert Bassermann, one of Germany’s premier stage actors at the time, agreed to appear on screen. Both films were variations on the Jekyll and Hyde narrative. Mack’s 1913 film also inaugurated the German Autorenfilm movement (see chapter 6, no. 79). 11. On the Bioskop, see the text by Max Skladanowsky earlier in this chapter, no. 263.

Bibliography

PRI M ARY SO U RC ES a. Documentations and Reprints in German

Albersmeier, Franz-Josef, ed. Texte zur Theorie des Films. 5th ed. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. Altenloh, Emilie. Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher. PhD diss., University of Heidelberg, 1913. Leipzig: Spamer, 1913. Jena: Diederichs, 1914. New ed. with critical essays edited by Andrea Haller, Martin Loiperdinger, and Heide Schlüpmann. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 2012. Andreas-Salomé, Lou. In der Schule bei Freud: Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912–1913. Edited by Ernest Pfeiffer. Zurich: Niehans, 1958. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film als Kunst. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1931. Reprint 3rd ed. with an afterword by Karl Prümm and contemporary reviews. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008. . Die Seele in der Silberschicht: Medientheoretische Texte: Photographie—Film—Rundfunk. Edited by Helmut H. Diederichs. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Aurich, Rolf, and Wolfgang Jacobsen, eds. Werkstatt Film: Selbstverständnis und Visionen von Filmleuten der zwanziger Jahre. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1998. , eds. Fritz Lang: “What makes him tick?” Notizbuch 1929–1934. Munich: Belleville, 2015. Balázs, Béla. Ein Baedeker der Seele und andere Feuilletons aus den Jahren 1920–1926. Edited by Hanno Loewy. Berlin: Das Arsenal, 2002. . Der Geist des Films. Halle an der Saale: W. Knapp, 1930. Reprint edition with an afterword by Hanno Loewy and contemporary reviews by Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001. . Schriften zum Film. Edited by Helmut H. Diederichs, Wolfgang Gersch, and Magda Nagy. 2 vols. Berlin: Henschel, 1982. . Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films. Vienna: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924. 4th ed. with an afterword by Helmut H. Diederichs and a contemporary review by Robert Musil. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. Medienästhetische Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Bertram, Alfred. Der Kinematograph in seinen Beziehungen zum Urheberrecht. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1914. Reprint ed. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2013. Birett, Herbert. Lichtspiele: Der [sic] Kino in Deutschland bis 1914. Munich: Q-Verlag, 1994. Bock, Hans-Michael, and Jürgen Berger, eds. Photo Casparius. Filmgeschichte in Bildern. Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1978. Bock, Hans-Michael, and Michael Töteberg, eds. Das Ufa-Buch. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1992.

613

614

Bibliography

Brecht, Bertolt. Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? Protokoll des Films und Materialien. Edited by Wolfgang Gersch and Werner Hecht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969. Brill, Olaf. Der Caligari-Komplex. Munich: Belleville, 2012. Brodnitz, Hanns. Kino intim: Eine vergessene Biographie. Teetz: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2005. Bulgakowa, Oksana. Eisenstein und Deutschland: Texte, Dokumente, Briefe. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1998. Cinegraph. FilmEuropa Babylon: Mehrsprachenversionen der 1930er Jahre in Europa. Munich: edition text & kritik, 2004. Diederichs, Helmut H., ed. Geschichte der Filmtheorie: Kunsttheoretische Texte von Méliès bis Arnheim. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Eisner, Lotte H., and Martje Grohmann. Ich hatte einst ein schönes Vaterland: Memoiren. Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1984. Eskildsen, Ute, and Jan-Christopher Horak, eds. Film und Foto der zwanziger Jahre: Eine Betrachtung der Internationalen Werkbundausstellung “Film und Foto” 1929. Stuttgart: Württembergischer Kunstverein, 1979. Ewers, Hanns Heinz. Der Zauberlehrling oder die Teufelsjäger. Munich: G. Müller, 1909. Reprint edition. Erftstadt: Area, 2005. Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek. Stationen der Moderne im Film I: Film und Foto. Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbunds, Stuttgart 1929: Rekonstruktion des Filmprogramms. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1988. . Stationen der Moderne im Film II: Texte, Manifeste, Pamphlete. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989. Gandert, Gero, ed. Der Film der Weimarer Republik 1929: Ein Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Kritik. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993. Gesellschaft der Freunde des vaterländischen Schul- und Erziehungswesens zu Hamburg. Bericht der Kommission für “Lebende Photographien” erstattet am 17. April 1907. Hamburg: Kampen, 1907. Reprint edition. Hamburg: Fläschner, 1980. Goergen, Jeanpaul. Hans Richter: Film ist Rhythmus. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 2003. . Walter Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989. Gregor, Erika, and Ulrich Gregor, eds. Jüdische Lebenswelten im Film. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1992. Güttinger, Fritz, ed. Kein Tag ohne Kino: Schriftsteller über den Stummfilm: Textsammlung. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt, 1984. , ed. Der Stummfilm im Zitat der Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1984. Haas, Willy. Der Kritiker als Mitproduzent: Texte zum Film 1920–1933. Edited by Wolfgang Jacobsen, Karl Prümm, and Benno Wenz. Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1991. Harms, Rudolf. Philosophie des Films: Seine ästhetischen und metaphysischen Grundlagen. Leipzig: Meiner, 1926. Reprint edition. Zurich: Verlag Hans Rohr, 1970. Hein, Birgit, and Wulf Herzogenrath, eds. Film als Film: 1910 bis heute: Vom Animationsfilm der zwanziger zum Filmenvironment der siebziger Jahre. Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1977. Hickethier, Knut, ed. Grenzgänger zwischen Theater und Kino: Schauspielerporträts aus dem Berlin der zwanziger Jahre. Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, 1986. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, Hans Helmut Prinzler, and Werner Sudendorf, eds. Film Museum Berlin. Berlin: Nicolai, 2000. Jhering, Herbert. Filmkritiker. Edited by Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2011. . Von Reinhardt bis Brecht: Eine Auswahl der Theaterkritiken von 1909–1932. Edited by Rolf Badenhausen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967. Jünger, Ernst. Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1932. Reprint edition. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2014. Kaes, Anton, ed. Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film: 1909–1929. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1978. Kettelhut, Erich. Der Schatten des Architekten. Edited by Werner Sudendorf. Munich: Belleville, 2009. Kiening, Christian, and Heinrich Adolf, eds. Der absolute Film: Dokumente der Medienavantgarde (1912–1936). Zurich: Chronos, 2012.

Bibliography

615

Kracauer, Siegfried. Kino: Essays, Studien, Glossen zum Film. Edited by Karsten Witte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. . Kleine Schriften zum Film: 3 Bände 1921–1961. Edited by Inka Mülder-Bach. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. Kreimeier, Klaus, ed. Zeitgenosse Chaplin. Berlin: Oberbaumverlag, 1978. Kühn, Gertraude, Karl Tümmler, and Walter Wimmer, eds. Film und revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland, 1918–1932: Dokumente und Materialien zur Entwicklung der Filmpoetik der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung und zu den Anfängen einer sozialistischen Filmkunst in Deutschland. 2 vols. Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1975. Kümmel, Albert, and Petra Löffler, eds. Medientheorie 1888–1933: Texte und Kommentare. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Kurtz, Rudolf. Expressionismus und Film. Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1926. Reprint edition with an afterword by Christian Kiening and Ulrich Johannes Beil. Zurich: Chronos, 2007. . Rudolf Kurtz: Essayist und Kritiker. Edited by Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2007. Langer, Resi. Rokoko und Kinotypen: Zwölf Gedichte und zwölf Episoden. Edited by Regina Nörtemann, Johanna Egger, and Jeanette Wiede. Göttingen: Wallenstein, 2014. Lorant, Stefan. Wir vom Film: Das Leben, Lieben, Leiden der Filmstars. Berlin: Theater- und Filmverlagsgesellschaft, 1928. Reprint edition. Munich: L. Kolf, 1986. Mayer, Carl, and Hans Janowitz. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari: Drehbuch von Carl Mayer und Hans Janowitz zu Robert Wienes Film von 1919–20. Edited by Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1995. Messter, Oskar. Messter Special-Catalog No. 32. Berlin: Messter, 1898. Reprint ed. Edited by Martin Loiperdinger with an afterword by Dietmar Linke. Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1995. Münsterberg, Hugo. Das Lichtspiel: Eine psychologische Studie (1916) und andere Schriften zum Kino. Edited and translated by Jörg Schweinitz. Vienna: SYNEMA, 1996. Pinthus, Kurt. Das Kinobuch. Leipzig: K. Wolff, 1914. Reprint ed. Zurich: Die Arche, 1963. Piscator, Erwin. Schriften. 2 vols. Edited by Ludwig Hoffmann. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1968. . Theater, Film, Politik: Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Ludwig Hoffmann. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1980. Prokop, Dieter, ed. Materialien zur Theorie des Films: Ästhetik, Soziologie, Politik. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971. Richter, Hans. Filmgegner von heute—Filmfreunde von morgen. Berlin: H. Reckendorf, 1929. Reprint ed. with a foreword by Walter Schobert. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981. Roth, Joseph. Drei Sensationen und zwei Katastrophen: Feuilletons zur Welt des Kinos. Edited by Helmut Peschina and Rainer-Joachim Siegel. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. Seeber, Guido. Der Trick film in seinen grundsätzlichen Möglichkeiten – eine praktische und theoretische Darstellung der photographischen Filmtricks. Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1927. Reprinted by Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt, 1979. Schrader, Bärbel. Der Fall Remarque: Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Dokumentation. Leipzig: Reclam, 1992. Schweinitz, Jörg, ed. Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1992. Siemsen, Hans. Hans Siemsen: Kritiker und Essayist. Edited by Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen. Vol. 15 of Film & Schrift. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2012. Stempel, Hans, and Martin Ripkens, eds. Das Kino im Kopf: Eine Anthologie. Zurich: Arche, 1984. Tannenbaum, Herbert. Der Filmtheoretiker Herbert Tannenbaum. Edited by Helmut H. Diederichs. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt, 1987. Witte, Karsten, ed. Theorie des Kinos. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Zeller, Bernhard, ed. Hätte ich das Kino! Die Schriftsteller und der Stummfilm. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1976. b. Film Books in German before 1933

Ackerknecht, Erwin. Das Lichtspiel im Dienste der Bildungspflege: Handbuch für Lichtspielreformer. Berlin: Weidmann, 1918. . Lichtspielfragen. Berlin: Weidmann, 1928. . Verzeichnis deutscher Fachschriften über Lichtspielwesen. 2nd ed. Berlin: Bildwart, 1930.

616

Bibliography

Andersen, Curt. Die deutsche Filmindustrie: Aufbau, Gliederung, Aufgaben und volkswirtschaftliche Bedeutung. Munich: C. I. C. Andersen, 1930. Angel, Ernst. Edison: Sein Leben und Erfinden. Berlin: E. Angel, 1926. Arnau, Frank, ed. Universal Filmlexikon, 1932. Berlin: Universal Filmlexikon, 1932. Bagier, Guido. Der kommende Film: Eine Abrechnung und eine Hoffnung. Was war? Was ist? Was wird? Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1928. Berliner Börsen-Zeitung. Der Feind im Land: Die Erscheinungsformen des Kulturbolschewismus im heutigen Deutschland. Berlin: Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 1932. Beyfuss, Edgar, and Alex Kossowsky, eds. Das Kulturfilmbuch. Berlin: C. P. Chryselius, 1924. Bloem, Walter. “Das Lichtspiel als Gegenstand der ästhetischen Kritik.” PhD diss., University of Tübingen, 1921. . Seele des Lichtspiels. Ein Bekenntnis zum Film. Leipzig: Grethlein, 1922. Boehmer, Henning von, and Helmut Reiz. Der Film in Wirtschaft und Recht: Seine Herstellung und Verwertung. Berlin: Carl Hezmanns Verlag, 1933. Brecht, Bertolt. Der Dreigroschenprozess: Ein soziologisches Experiment. Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1931. Brod, Max, and Rudolf Thomas. Liebe im Film. Giessen: Kindt & Bucher, 1930. Brunner, Karl. Der Kinematograph von heute—Eine Volksgefahr. Berlin: Vaterländischer Schriftenverband, 1913. . Das neue Lichtspielgesetz im Dienste der Film- und Jugendwohlfahrt. Berlin-Lichterfeld: Brandenburger Preßverband, 1920. Bucher, Edmund, and Albrecht Kindt, eds. Film-Photos wie noch nie. Giessen: Kindt & Bucher, 1929. Buchner, Hans. Im Banne des Films. Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1927. Burger, Erich. Charlie Chaplin: Bericht seines Lebens. Berlin: R. Mosse Buchverlag, 1928. Cohn-Wiener, Ernst. Vom griechischen Theater zum Kino. Munich: Holbein, 1920. Conradt, Walther. Kirche und Kinematograph: Eine Frage. Berlin: Walther, 1910. Cürlis, Hans. Vom deutschen Lehrfilm. Berlin: Bund deutscher Lehr- und Kulturfilmhersteller, 1930. Debries, Erwin. Hollywood wie es wirklich ist. Zurich: O. Füssli, 1930. Diebold, Bernhard. Anarchie im Drama. Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1921. Diehl, Oskar. Mimik im Film: Leitfaden für den praktischen Unterricht in der Filmschauspielkunst. Munich: Georg Müller, 1922. Diehle, H. Kino und Jugend. Warendorf: Schnell, 1913. Dupont, Ewald André. Wie ein Film geschrieben wird und wie man ihn verwertet. Berlin: Reinhold Kühn, 1919. Eckstein, Ernst. Deutsches Film- und Kinorecht. Mannheim, Berlin, and Leipzig: J. Bensheimer, 1924. Ehrenburg, Ilja. Die Traumfabrik: Chronik des Films. Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1931. Erdmann, Hans, and Giuseppe Becce. Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik. 2 vols. Berlin: Schlesinger’sche Buch- und Musikhandlung, 1927. Ernst, Georg, and Bernhard Marschall, eds. Film und Rundfunk: Zweiter Internationaler katholischer Filmkongress: Erster Internationaler katholischer Rundfunkkongress. Gesamtbericht. Munich: Verlag Leohaus, 1929. Fanck, Arnold. Stürme über dem Montblanc: Ein Filmbildbuch von Dr. Arnold Fanck, nach dem gleichnamigen Film. Basel: Concordia Verlag, 1931. Ferdinand, Franz, and Elsa Ferdinand-Bielitz. Wie werde ich Kino-Darsteller? Praktische Anleitung zum Selbststudium. Vienna: Regent-Film-Fabrik, 1916. Film-Kurier, Berlin. Das große Bilderbuch des Films. Berlin: Verlag Film-Kurier, 1924. Finger, Willy. Deutschkunde und Kinodrama: eine deutschkundlich-literarische Kampfschrift. BerlinBritz: Richters Druckerei, 1921. Flechtheim, Alfred, Wilhelm Graf Kielmannsegg, and Hermann von Wedderkop, eds. Der Querschnitt durch 1922: Marginalien der Galerie Flechtheim. Berlin: Galerie Alfred Flechtheim, 1922. Forch, Carl. Der Kinematograph und das sich bewegende Bild: Geschichte und technische Entwicklung der Kinematographie bis zur Gegenwart. Vienna: Hartleben, 1913. Foulon, Otto. Die Kunst des Lichtspiels. Aachen: Verlag Die Kuppel, 1924. Fuchsig, Heinrich. Rund um den Film: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Filmkunde. Vienna: Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1929.

Bibliography

617

Fülöp-Miller, René. Die Phantasiemaschine: Eine Saga der Gewinnsucht. Berlin: Zsolnay, 1931. Gad, Urban. Der Film: Seine Mittel, seine Ziele. Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1920. 2nd edition. Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921. Gaupp, Robert, and Konrad Lange. Der Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmittel. Munich: D. W. Callwey, 1912. Gemmert, Franz. Der Kinematograph. Projektionskunst. Leipzig: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1914. Goll, Yvan. Die Chapliniade: Eine Kinodichtung. With four illustrations by Fernand Léger. Dresden: R. Kaemmerer, 1920. Grau, Hermann. Technik und Film. Die Filmkamera im Dienst der Technik und Wissenschaft. Stuttgart: Franck, 1932. Gregor, Joseph. Das Zeitalter des Films. Vienna: Reinhold Buch- und Kunst-Verlag, 1932. , and René Fülöp-Miller. Das amerikanische Theater und Kino: Zwei kulturgeschichtliche Abhandlungen. Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag, 1931. Groth, Franz von der. Der Filmschriftsteller. Weimar: Weimarer Schriftsteller-Zeitung, 1919. Guttmann, Richard. Die Kinomenschheit: Versuch einer prinzipiellen Analyse. Vienna and Leipzig: Anzengruber-Verlag, 1916. Häfker, Hermann. Die Aufgaben der Kinematographie in diesem Kriege, 128. Dürerbund-Flugschrift zur Ausdruckskultur. Munich: Callwey, 1914. . Kino und Erdkunde. Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1914. . Der Kino und die Gebildeten: Wege zur Hebung des Kinowesens. Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1915. . Kino und Kunst. Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1913. Hellwig, Albert. Die Filmzensur: Eine rechtsdogmatische und rechtspolitische Erörterung. Berlin: W. V. Frankenstein, 1914. . Die Grundsätze der Filmzensur und der Reklamezensur nach den Entscheidungen der Oberprüfstelle. Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1923. . Kind und Kino. Langensalza: H. Beyer und Söhne, 1914. . Öffentliches Lichtspielrecht. Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1921. . Die Reform des Lichtspielrechts. Langensalza: H. Beyer, 1920. . Schundfilms: Ihr Wesen, ihre Gefahren und ihre Bekämpfung. Halle an der Saale: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1911. Henseleit, Felix, ed. Der Film und seine Welt: Reichsfilmblatt-Almanach 1933. Berlin: PhotokinoVerlag, 1933. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. Die Berührung der Sphären: Reden und Betrachtungen. Berlin: Fischer, 1931. Hoppe, Hans. Die Zukunft des Kino. Stettin: F. Hessenland, 1912. Hubert, Ali. Hollywood: Legende und Wirklichkeit. Introduction by Emil Jannings. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1930. Jäger, Ernst, ed. Das große Bilderbuch des Films. Berlin: Verlag Film-Kurier, 1926. Jason, Alexander. Der Film in Ziffern und Zahlen: Die Statistik der Lichtspielhäuser in Deutschland 1895–1925. Berlin: Deutsches Druck- und Verlagshaus, 1925. . Handbuch der Filmwirtschaft: Jahrgang 1930. Berlin: Verlag für Presse, Wirtschaft und Politik, 1930. Joachim, Hermann. Die kinematographische Projektion. Halle an der Saale: Knapp, 1928. Jolowicz, Ernst. Der Rundfunk: Eine psychologische Untersuchung. Berlin-Schöneberg: Hesse, 1932. Josetti Film Album. Berlin: Josetti Zigarettenfabrik, 1931. Kalbus, Oskar. Der deutsche Lehrfilm in der Wissenschaft und im Unterricht. Berlin: C. Heymann, 1922. . Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst. 1.Teil: Der stumme Film; 2. Teil: Der Tonfilm. AltonaBahrenfeld: Cigaretten-Bilderdienst, 1934. Kaufmann, Nicholas. Filmtechnik und Kultur. Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1931. Kerr, Alfred. Russische Filmkunst. Berlin-Charlottenburg: E. Pollak, 1927. Klebinder, Paul, ed. Der Deutsche Kaiser im Film. Berlin: Klebinder, 1912. . Kronprinzens im Film. Berlin: Klebinder, 1913. Kolb, Richard, and Heinrich Siekmeier, eds. Rundfunk und Film im Dienste nationaler Kultur. Düsseldorf: Friedrich Floeder, 1933.

618

Bibliography

Korn, Arthur. Elektrisches Fernsehen. Berlin: O. Salle, 1930. Künzel, Max. Wie werde ich Filmschauspieler, Filmschauspielerin? Zurich, Nuremberg, Prague, and Vienna: Wegweiser-Bibliothek, 1921. Lampe, Felix. Lichtbild und Film im Dienste von Volksbildung und Wissenschaft. Berlin: UFAHandelsgesellschaft, 1932. Lange, Konrad. Das Kino in Gegenwart und Zukunft. Stuttgart: Enke, 1920. . Nationale Kinoreform. Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1918. Langer, Resi. Kinotypen: Vor und hinter den Kulissen. Zwölf Kapitel aus der Kinderstube des Films. Hannover: Der Zweemann Verlag, 1919. Lassally, Arthur. Bild und Film im Dienste der Technik. Halle: W. Knapp, 1919. Lehmann, Hans. Die Kinematographie: ihre Grundlagen und ihre Anwendungen. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1911. Lemke, Hermann. Die Kinematographie der Gegenwart, Vergangenheit und Zukunft: Eine kulturgeschichtliche und industrielle Studie. Leipzig: Demme, 1912. Liesegang, Franz Paul. Handbuch der praktischen Kinematographie: Die verschiedenen KonstruktionsFormen des Kinematographen, die Darstellung der lebenden Lichtbilder sowie das kinematographische Aufnahme-Verfahren. Leipzig: Ed. Liesegang, 1908. . Das lebende Lichtbild: Entwicklung, Wesen und Bedeutung des Kinematographen. Leipzig: Liesegang, 1910. . Vom Geisterspiegel zum Kino: Vortrag zu einer Reihe von 66 größtenteils nach alten Quellenbildern sowie Originalzeichnungen hergestellten Lichtbildern. Düsseldorf: Ed. Liesegang, 1918. , Karl Kieser, and Osvaldo Polimanti. Wissenschaftliche Kinematographie, einschließlich der Reihenphotographie. Düsseldorf: Ed. Liesegang, 1920. Ligeti, Paul. Der Weg aus dem Chaos: Eine Deutung des Weltgeschehens aus dem Rhythmus der Kunstentwicklung. Munich: Callwey, 1931. Lipp, Herrmann. Führer durch das Wesen der Kinematographie. Berlin: Kühn, 1918. Mack, Max, ed. Die zappelnde Leinwand. Berlin: Eysler, 1916. Reprint edition. Berlin: Eysler, 1920. Mann, Heinrich. Sieben Jahre: Chronik der Gedanken und Vorgänge. Berlin: P. Zsolnay, 1929. Marbe, Karl. Theorie der kinematographischen Projektionen. Leipzig: Barth, 1910. Mierendorff, Carlo. Hätte ich das Kino! Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, 1920. Miketta, Hubert, ed. Das große Bilderbuch des Films. Berlin: Verlag Film-Kurier, 1928. Moreck, Curt. Sittengeschichte des Kinos. Dresden: Paul Aretz, 1926. Mühsam, Kurt. Film und Kino. Dessau: C. Dünnhaupt, 1927. , and Egon Jacobsohn. Lexikon des Films. Berlin: Lichtbildbühne, 1926. Müller-Sanders, Hans. Die Kinematographenzensur in Preussen. PhD diss., University of Heidelberg, 1912. Borna-Leipzig: Noske, 1912. Münzenberg, Willi. Erobert den Film! Winke aus der Praxis für die Praxis proletarischer Filmpropaganda. Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1925. Naumann, Friedrich. Die Kunst im Zeitalter der Maschine. Berlin-Schöneberg: Buchverlag der Hilfe, 1904. Noack, Victor. Der Kino: Etwas über sein Wesen und seine Bedeutung. Gautzsch bei Leipzig: Dietrich, 1913. Oberth, Hermann. Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1923. Olimsky, Fritz. Tendenzen der Filmwirtschaft und deren Auswirkung auf die Filmpresse. Berlin: Berliner Bösen-Zeitung, 1931. Ott, Richard. Die Organisation im Film- und Theaterbetrieb. Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1920. Otten, Max. Der Filmschauspieler. Berlin: Lichtbild-Bühne, 1918. Pabst, Rudolf, ed. Das deutsche Lichtspieltheater in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft. Berlin: Prismaverlag, 1926. Pander, Hans. Der Film-Operateur. Berlin: Hobbing, 1928. . Kinematographische Unterrichts-Kurse für Anfänger. Berlin: Union, 1928. Perlmann, Emil. Das Kino als modernes Volkstheater: Eine Entgegnung auf unberechtigte Angriffe. Berlin: Agitations-Komitee der kinematographischen Fachpresse zur Förderung der Lichtbildkunst, 1912. . Der Kulturwert des Kinematographen. Düsseldorf: E. Lintz, 1909. Petzet, Wolfgang. Verbotene Filme: Eine Streitschrift. Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1931.

Bibliography

619

Pfeiffer, Heinrich, ed. Das deutsche Lichtbild-Buch. Filmprobleme von gestern und heute. Berlin: Verlag August Scherl, 1924. Porges, Friedrich. Charlie Chaplin, der Vagabund der Welt: Ein Chaplin-Buch. Vienna: Mein-FilmVerlag, 1931. Porten, Henny. Wie ich wurde: Selbstbiographie von Henny Porten. Berlin: Volkskraft-Verlag, 1919. Vom “Kintopp” zum Tonfilm: Ein Stück miterlebter Filmgeschichte. Dresden: Reißner, 1932. Prels, Max. Kino. Leipzig and Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1919. Pudowkin, Wsewolod. Filmregie und Filmmanuskript. Translated by Georg and Nadja Friedland. Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbild-Bühne, 1928. Rath, Willy. Kino und Bühne. M. Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1913. Richter, Hans Hermann. Filmkritische Aufsätze. Zusammengestellt aus einzelnen Heften der Zeitschrift “Kino.” Berlin-Wilmersdorf: H. H. Richter, 1920. , ed. Filmstern 1922. Berlin-Wilmersdorf: H. H. Richter Verlag, 1921–22. . Der Spielfilm: Ansätze zu einer Dramaturgie des Films. Berlin: H. H. Richter, 1920. Rudenski, Dyk. Gestologie: Abhandlungen über die Physiologie und Psychologie des Ausdrucks. Berlin: Verlag der Hoboken-Presse, 1927. Samuleit, Paul, and Emil Borm. Der Kinematograph als Volks- und Jugendbildungsmittel: Vorträge und Verhandlungen der 42. Hauptversammlung der Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung. Berlin: Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung, 1912. Schamoni, Victor. Das Lichtspiel: Möglichkeiten des absoluten Films. PhD diss., University of Münster, 1926. Hamm: Reimann, 1926. Schliepmann, Hans. Lichtspieltheater: Eine Sammlung ausgeführter Kinohäuser in Gross-Berlin. Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1914. Schomburgk, Hans. Bwakukama: Fahrten und Forschungen mit Büchse und Film im unbekannten Afrika. Berlin: Deutsch Literarisches Institut, 1922. Schultze, Ernst. Der Kinematograph als Bildungsmittel: Eine kulturpolitische Untersuchung. Halle an der Saale: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1911. Seeber, Guido. Der praktische Kameramann. Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbild-Bühne, 1927. Seeger, Ernst. Reichslichtspielgesetz vom 12. Mai 1920. Berlin: C. Heymann, 1923. Sellmann, Adolf. Für und wider das Kino (mit Wortlaut des Kinogesetzes vom 12. Mai 1920). Schwelm: G. Meiners, 1928. . Der Kinematograph als Volkserzieher? Expanded ed. of a speech given on 14 November 1911 at the 6th General Assembly of the Westdeutscher Sittlichkeitsverein in Gelsenkirchen. Langensalza: H. Beyer, 1912. . Kino und Volksbildung. Mönchen-Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag, 1914. Serner, Walter. Letzte Lockerung. Hannover, Leipzig, Vienna, and Zurich: Steegemann, 1920. Siemsen, Hans. Charlie Chaplin. Leipzig: Feuer-Verlag, 1924. Stepun, Fedor. Theater und Kino. Berlin: Bühnenvolksbundverlag, 1932. Stindt, Georg Otto. Das Lichtspiel als Kunstform: Die Philosophie des Films, Regie, Dramaturgie und Schauspieltechnik. Bremerhaven: Atlantis-Verlag, 1924. Stricker, Eberhardt. Wert und Unwert des Kinematographen. Metz: Verlag des Vereins, 1913. Tannenbaum, Herbert. Kino und Theater. Munich: M. Steinebach, 1912. Taut, Bruno. Alpine Architektur. Hagen: Folkwang-Verlag, 1919. . Die Auflösung der Städte, oder, Die Erde, eine gute Wohnung, oder auch, Der Weg zur alpinen Architektur. Hagen: Folkwang-Verlag, 1920. Treuner, Hermann, ed. Filmkünstler: Wir über uns selbst. Berlin: Sibyllen Verlag, 1928. Ullmann, Kurt. Wege zu einer Filmkunst. Berlin: Falk, 1913. Verein Deutsche Wacht. Die Bedeutung des Films und Lichtbildes: Sieben Vorträge. Munich: Kellerer, 1917. Wesse, Curt. Großmacht Film: Das Geschöpf von Kunst und Technik. Berlin: Deutsche BuchGemeinschaft, 1928. Wolf-Czapek, K. W. Die Kinematographie: Wesen, Entstehung und Ziele des lebenden Bildes. Dresden: Union Deutsche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1908. Revised and expanded edition. Berlin: Union Deutsche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1911. Wolff, Artur. Denkschrift betreffend die Kinematographentheater, die durch ihr Überhandnehmen geschaffenen Missstände und Vorschläge zu einheitlichen gesetzlichen Massnahmen. Im Auftrage des Präsidiums des Deutschen Bühnenvereins. Berlin: Deutscher Bühnenverein, 1912.

620

Bibliography

Zaddach, Gerhard. Der literarische Film: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Lichtspielkunst. PhD diss., University of Breslau, 1929. Berlin: Deutsche Filmwoche, 1929. Zehder, Hugo, ed. Der Film von morgen. Berlin and Dresden: Rudolf Kaemmerer Verlag, 1923. Zimmerschied, Karl. Die deutsche Filmindustrie, ihre Entwicklung, Organisation und Stellung im deutschen Staats- und Wirtschaftsleben. Stuttgart: C. E. Poeschel, 1922. Zucker, Paul, and G. Otto Stindt. Lichtspielhäuser: Tonfilmtheater. Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1931. c. Major Film Journals in German before 1933

Arbeiterbühne und Film. Zentralorgan des Arbeiter-Theater-Bundes Deutschlands e.V. (1930–1931) Bild und Film. Zeitschrift für Lichtbilderei und Kinematographie (1912–1915) Der Bildwart. Blätter zur Volksbildung (1923–1934) Bühne und Film. Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Theater, Kino, Mode, Gesellschaft (1919–1922) Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung. Zentral-Organ für die gesamte Kinematographie (1907–1920) Der Film. Zeitschrift für die Gesamt-Interessen der Kinematographie (1916–1943) Film für Alle. Monatsschrift des Amateurfilmwesens. (1927–1944) Film-Kurier (1919–1945) Der Film Spiegel. Zeitschrift für Film und Bild. (1920–1933) Die Filmtechnik. Zeitschrift für alle künstlerischen, technischen und wirtschaftlichen Fragen des Filmwesens (1925–1943) Film und Lichtbild. Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche und technische Kinematographie und Projektion (1912–14) Film und Volk. Zeitschrift des Volksverbandes für Filmkunst (1928–1930) Filmwelt. Das Film- und Photo Magazin (1929–1941) Die Filmwelt. Illustrierte Kino Revue (1919–1925, Vienna) Die Filmwoche. Illustrierte Filmzeitschrift (1923–1943) Illustrierte Film-Woche. Zeitschrift für Filmfreunde (1913–1925) Illustrierter Film-Kurier (1919–1944, Berlin) Illustrierter Film-Kurier (1927–1938, Vienna) Der Kinematograph. Fachzeitschrift für gesamte Projektionskunst (1907–1935) Die Kinotechnik. Monatsschrift für die gesamte Wissenschaft und Technik der theoretischen und praktischen Kinematographie (1919–1943) Der Komet (1896–1901) Lichtbild-Bühne (LBB). Fachzeitschrift für das Interessengebiet der Kinematographen-TheaterPraxis (1908–1939) Mein Film. Illustrierte Film- und Kinorundschau (1926–1957, Vienna) Die neue Schaubühne. Monatshefte für Bühne, Drama und Film (1919–1925). Paimann’s Filmlisten. Wochenschrift für Lichtbildkritik. (1916–1965, Vienna) Reichsfilmblatt. Offizielles Organ des Reichsverbandes Deutscher Lichtspieltheaterbesitzer e.V. (1923–1935) Süddeutsche Filmzeitung. Wochenzeitschrift für das gesamte Lichtspielwesen (1922–1927) UFA—Feuilleton (1931–1934) UFA—Magazin. Illustrierte Filmrundschau (1926–1927) d. Early Film Theory in English Translation

Abel, Richard, ed. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Andeˇl, Jaroslav, and Petr Szczepanik, eds. Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908–1939. Prague: National Film Archive, 2008. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film. Translated by L. M. Sieveking and Ian F. D. Morrow. London: Faber & Faber, 1933. . Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. 50th anniversary reprint ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. . Film Essays and Criticism. Translated by Brenda Benthien. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Balázs, Béla. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Edited by Erica Carter and translated by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.

Bibliography

621

Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? 2 vols. 2nd ed. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Bean, Jennifer M., and Diane Negra, eds. A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. . Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Edited by Michael W. Jennings and translated by Edmund Jephcott and others. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. . The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin and translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and others. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. Bloem, Walter S. The Soul of the Moving Picture. Translated by Allen W. Porterfield. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924. Boyd Whyte, Ian, and David Frisby, eds. Metropolis Berlin: 1880–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Film and Radio. Edited and translated by Marc Silberman. London: Methuen, 2000. Budd, Mike, ed. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Edited by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. . Film Sense. Edited by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969. . Selected Works. 3 vols. Edited and translated by Richard Taylor. London and New York: I. B. Tauris; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Higson, Andrew, and Richard Maltby, eds. “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Kaes, Anton, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, eds. “The Cinematographic Archive: Selections from Early German Film Theory.” October 148 (2014): 27–38. Kaes, Anton, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Keller, Sarah, and Jason N. Paul, eds. Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Kracauer, Siegfried. Kracauer: Photographic Archive. Edited by Maria Zinfert. Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2014. . The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Edited and translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. . The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography. Edited by Philippe Despoix and Maria Zinfert and translated by Conor Joyce. Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2014. . The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany. Translated by Quintin Hoare. London: Verso, 1998. Lang, Fritz. Fritz Lang: Interviews. Edited by Barry Keith Grant. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2003. Lant, Antonia, and Ingrid Periz, eds. The Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. London: Verso, 2006. MacKenzie, Scott, ed. Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. McCormick, Richard W. and Alison Guenther-Pal, eds. German Essays on Film. New York: Continuum, 2004. Mertins, Detlef, and Michael W. Jennings, eds. G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010. Michelson, Annette, ed. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California, 1984.

622

Bibliography

Moholy-Nagy, László. Painting, Photography, Film. Translated by Janet Seligman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969. Musil, Robert. “Toward a New Aesthetic: Observations on a Dramaturgy of Film.” In Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, edited and translated by Burton Pike and David S. Luft, 193–207. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Rabinbach, Anson, and Sander L. Gilman, eds. The Third Reich Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California, 2013. Richter, Hans. The Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema. Edited by Jürgen Römhild and translated by Ben Brewster. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Roth, Joseph. What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933. Translated by Michael Hoffmann. New York: Norton, 2004. Semsel, George S., Xia Hong, and Hou Jianping, eds. Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era. New York: Praeger, 1990. Taylor, Richard, and Ian Christie, eds. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939. New York: Routledge, 1988. Tsivian, Yuri, ed. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Tucholsky, Kurt. Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches from the Weimar Republic. Translated by Cindy Opitz. New York: Berlinica, 2013. C RITI C A L STU D I ES a. Theoretical Works

Adorno, Theodor W. “Chaplin Times Two.” Translated by John MacKay. The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 57–61. . “The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer.” Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New German Critique 54 (1991): 159–77. . The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. . Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. . “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert and translated by Susan H. Gillespie, 251–70. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. . “Those Twenties.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated and with a preface by Henry W. Pickford, 41–48. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. . “Transparencies on Film.” Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. New German Critique 24–25 (1981–82): 199–205. Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture.” In Means without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 49–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Agard, Olivier. Kracauer: Le chiffonnier mélancolique. Paris: CNRS, 2010. Aitken, Ian. Lukácsian Film Theory and Cinema: A Study of Georg Lukács’ Writings on Film, 1913–71. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Albera, François, and Maria Tortajada, eds. Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. , eds. Cine-Dispositives. Essays in Epistemology across Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Amad, Paula. Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Andrew, J. Dudley. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Andriopoulos, Stefan. Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media. New York: Zone Books, 2013. . Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema. Translated by Peter Jansen and Stefan Andriopoulos. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. , and Bernhard J. Dotzler, eds. 1929: Beiträge zur Archäologie der Medien. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002.

Bibliography

623

Badiou, Alain. Cinema. London: Polity, 2013. Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. . “The Face of Garbo.” In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, 56–57. New York: Noonday Press, 1972. . “Leaving the Movie Theater.” In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 345–49. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Translated by Alan Williams. Film Quarterly 28.2 (1974): 39–47. Bean, Jennifer M., Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak, eds. Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Beckman, Karen, ed. Animating Film Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006. Bellour, Raymond. Between-the-Images. Translated by Allyn Hardyck. Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2013. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell with a foreword by Irwin Edman. New York: Modern Library, 1944. Bloch, Ernst, Heritage of our Times. Trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. (First published as Erbschaft dieser Zeit, 1935) . “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics.” Translated by Mark Ritter. New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22–38. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985. Bordwell, David. “The Musical Analogy.” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 141–56. . On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. . Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2007. , and Noël Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Braun, Marta, and Charles Keil. Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2012. Callahan, Vicki, ed. Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Campany, David, ed. The Cinematic. (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Cartright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Casetti, Francesco. Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity. Translated by Erin Larkin with Jennifer Pranolo. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. . “Italy’s Early Film ‘Theories’: Borders and Crossings.” In Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader, edited by Giorgio Bertellini, 275–84. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2013. . The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. . Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999. . “Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Changes in Objects.” CiNéMAS 17, no. 2–3 (Spring 2007): 33–45. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Charney, Leo. Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. , and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, and Thomas Keenan, eds. New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Cole, Andrew. The Birth of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

624

Bibliography

Cooper, Sarah. The Soul of Film Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Crafton, Donald. Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. . Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. . Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Despoix, Philippe, and Peter Schöttler. Siegfried Kracauer, penseur de l’histoire. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2006. Doane, Mary Ann. “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” differences 14.3 (2003): 89–111. . The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Dyer, Richard. Stars. New ed. London: BFI Publishing, 1998. Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Eisler, Hanns, and Theodor W. Adorno. Composing for the Films. Revised ed. with an introduction by Graham McCann. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1994. Elleström, Lars. Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Elsaesser, Thomas, ed. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: BFI Publishing, 1990. . “The New Film History as Media Archaeology.” CiNéMAS 14, nos. 2–3 (2004): 75–117. , and Malte Hagener. Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. New York: Routledge, 2010. Elwes, Catherine. Installation and the Moving Image. London: Wallflower Press, 2015. Engell, Lorenz. “Affinität, Eintrübung, Plastizität. Drei Figuren der Medialität aus der Sicht des Kinematographen.” In Was ist ein Medium?, edited by Stefan Münker and Alexander Roesler, 185–210. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008. Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Forrest, Tara. Politics of the Imagination: Benjamin, Kracauer, Kluge. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 1982. . “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986. Galili, Doron. “Intermedial Thought in Classical Film Theory: Balázs, Arnheim, and Benjamin on Film and Radio.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 88.4 (2013): 391–99. Gaudreault, André. The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems. Translated by Timothy Barnard. Montreal: caboose, 2012. Gaudreault, André, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo, eds. A Companion to Early Cinema. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age. Translated by Timothy Barnard. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Gilloch, Graeme. Siegfried Kracauer. London: Polity, 2015. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. , and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media, 1740–1915. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Godard, Jean-Luc. Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television. Translated by Timothy Barnard. Montreal: caboose, 2014. , and Youssef Ishaghpour. Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century. Translated by John Howe. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005.

Bibliography

625

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, and Michael Marrinan, eds. Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Wide Angle 6.2 (1986): 63–70. . “Doing for the Eye What the Phonograph Does for the Ear.” In The Sounds of Early Cinema, edited by Rick Altman and Richard Abel, 13–31. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001. . “To Scan A Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision.” Grey Room 26 (2007): 94–127. . “ ‘The Whole World within Reach.’ Travel Images Without Borders.” In Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff, 25–41. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. , Giovanna Fossati, Jonathon Rosen, and Joshua Yumibe, eds. Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, 362–402. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. . Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. . Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. . “Early Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 228–46. London: BFI Publishing, 1990. . “Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors: Potemkin and German Film Theory.” New German Critique 95 (2005): 162–79. Higgins, Scott, ed. Arnheim for Film and Media Studies. New York: Routledge, 2011. Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013. , and Jussi Parikka, eds. Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Hunter, Ian. “The History of Theory.” Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 78–112. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Kessler, Frank, Sabine Lenk, and Martin Loiperdinger, eds. Theorien zum frühen Kino. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 2003. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. . Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Edited by John Johnston. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997. . Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Translated by Anthony Enns. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010. Kluge, Alexander. Cinema Stories. Translated by Martin Brady and Helen Hughes. New York: New Directions, 2007. Koch, Gertrud. “Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things.” New German Critique 40 (1987): 167–77. . Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992. . “Face and Mass: Towards an Aesthetic of the Cross-Cut in Film.” New German Critique 95 (2005): 139–48. . Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction. Translated by Jeremy Gaines. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. , Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler, eds. Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 2012. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

626

Bibliography

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Edited by Leonardo Quaresima. Revised and expanded ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. . History: The Last Things before the Last. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995. . Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New ed. with an introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Laukötter, Anja, and Christian Bonah. “Moving Pictures and Medicine in the First Half of the 20th Century: Some Notes on International Historical Developments and the Potential of Medical Film Research.” Gesnerus 66 (2009): 121–46. Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. New York: Viking Press, 1960. Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. . Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Marcus, Laura. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Marks, Laura. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celia Britton, et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Moltke, Johannes von. “Out of the Past: Classical Film Theory.” Screen 55.3 (2014): 398–403. . “Theory of the Novel: The Literary Imagination of Classical Film Theory.” October 144 (2013): 49–72. Münker, Stefan and Alexander Roesler, eds. Was ist ein Medium?, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton, 1916. Noordegraaf, Julia, Cosetta G. Saba, Barbara Le Maître, and Vinzenz Hediger, eds. Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.” In Three Essays on Style, edited by Irving Lavin with a memoir by William S. Heckscher, 91–128. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995. . “Reflections on Historical Time.” Translated by Johanna Bauman. Critical Inquiry 30.4 (2004): 691–701. [The essay “Zum Problem der historischen Zeit” is from 1927.] Parikka, Jussi. Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses. New York: Lang, 2007. . A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. . What Is Media Archaeology? London: Polity, 2012. Pethö, Ágnes. Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Pias, Claus, Lorenz Engell, Oliver Fahle, Joseph Vogl, and Britta Neitzel, eds., Kursbuch Medienkultur: Die maßgeblichen Theorien von Brecht bis Baudrillard. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999. Pinder, Wilhelm. Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas. Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1926. Polonyi, Eszter. “Béla Balázs and the Eye of the Microscope.” Apertúra (Fall 2012): . Pomerance, Murray, and R. Barton Palmer, eds. Thinking in the Dark. Cinema, Theory, Practice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Punt, Michael. “Parallel Histories: Early Cinema and Digital Media.” Convergence 6 (2000): 62–76. Rajewsky, Irina O. Intermedialität. Stuttgart: UTB, 2002. Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006. . The Intervals of Cinema. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 2014.

Bibliography

627

Rees, A. L., Duncan White, Steven Ball, and David Curtis, eds. Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film. London: Tate, 2011. Rodowick, David Norman. Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. . Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Russell, Catherine. “New Media and Film History: Walter Benjamin and the Awakening of Cinema.” Cinema Journal 43.3 (2004): 81–85. Salt, Barry. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. 3rd ed. London: Starword, 2009. . Moving into Pictures. London: Starword, 2006. Schaub, Mirjam. Bilder aus dem off: zum philosophischen stand der kinotheorie. Weimar: VDA, 2005. Schlüpmann, Heide. Das innere Bild: Zu einem verlorenen Begriff der Seele. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2014. . Öffentliche Intimität: Die Theorie im Kino. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2002. . “Phenomenology of Film: On Siegfried Kracauer’s Writings of the 1920s.” New German Critique 40 (1987): 97–114. Schröter, Jens, ed. Handbuch Medienwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2014. Schulte, Christian. Walter Benjamins Medientheorie. Konstanz: UVK, 2005. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Shambu, Girish. The New Cinephilia. Kino-Agora 8. Montreal: caboose, 2014. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 11–19. Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Sommer, Gudrun, Vinzenz Hediger, and Oliver Fahle, eds. Orte filmischen Wissens: Filmkultur und Filmvermittlung im Zeitalter digitaler Netzwerke. Marburg: Schüren, 2011. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Strauven, Wanda, ed. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Streible, Dan, Devin Orgeron, and Marsha Orgeron, eds. Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Tedjasukmana, Chris. Mechanische Verlebendigung: Ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino. Paderborn: Fink, 2014. Traverso, Enzo. Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectuel nomade. Paris: La Découverte, 1994. Revised and expanded ed. Paris: La Découverte, 2006. Trifonova, Temenuga, ed. European Film Theory. London/New York: Routledge, 2008. Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. . The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. . “A Return to Classical Film Theory?” October 148 (2014): 3–26. Uricchio, William. “Historicizing Media in Transition.” In Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, 23–38. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Usai, Paolo Cherchi. Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age. London: BFI Publishing, 2001. Warburg, Aby. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Edited by Martin Warnke. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000. Wilke, Tobias. Medien der Unmittelbarkeit: Dingkonzepte und Wahrnehmungstechniken 1918–1939. Munich: Fink 2010. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Cultural Studies and German Media Theory.” In New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory, edited by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, 88–104. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

628

Bibliography

Zielinski, Siegfried. [. . . After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century. Translated by Gloria Custance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. . Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Translated by Gloria Custance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999. . Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. Zsuffa, Joseph. Béla Balázs: The Man and the Artist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. b. Secondary Literature

Aab, Vanessa. Kinematographische Zeitmontagen: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des Kinos. Marburg: Schüren, 2014. Abel, Richard. The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. , ed. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2005. Acland, Charles R., and Haidee Wasson, eds. Useful Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Agde, Günter. Flimmernde Versprechen: Geschichte des deutschen Werbefilms im Kino seit 1897. Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 1998. , and Alexander Schwarz, eds. Die rote Traumfabrik: Meschrabpom-Film und Prometheus (1921–1936). Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2012. Ames, Eric. Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Aping, Norbert. Charlie Chaplin in Deutschland: 1915–1924. Der Tramp kommt ins Kino. Marburg: Schüren, 2014. Asendorf, Christoph. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Ashkenazi, Ofer. Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Askari, Kaveh. Making Movies into Art: Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood. London: BFI Publishing, 2015. , Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, eds. Performing New Media, 1890–1915. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2014. Aurich, Rolf. Mosaikarbeit. Gerhard Lamprecht und die Welt der Filmarchive. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2013. , and Ralf Forster, eds. Wie der Film unsterblich wurde: Vorakademische Filmwissenschaft in Deutschland. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2015. Baer, Nicholas. “Die Nibelungen,” in 33rd Pordenone Silent Film Festival Catalogue / Le Giomate del Cinema Muto 33 Catalogo (Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli, 2014), 134–138. . “Historical Turns: On Caligari, Kracauer, and New Film History.” In Film and History: Producing and Experiencing History in Moving Images and Sound, edited by Delia González de Reufels, Rasmus Greiner, and Winfried Pauleit, 153–64. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2015. . “Metaphysics of Finitude: Der müde Tod and the Crisis of Historicism.” In A Companion to Fritz Lang, edited by Joe McElhaney, 141–60. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. . “The Rebirth of a Nation: Cinema, Herzlian Zionism, and Emotion in Jewish History,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 59 (2014): 233–248. Bareither, Christoph, Kurt Beals, Michael Cowan, Paul Dobryden, Karin Fest, Klaus MüllerRichter, and Birgit Nemec, eds. Hans Richters Rhythmus 21: Schlüsselfilm der Moderne. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2012. Barlow, John D. German Expressionist Film. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Bathrick, David, Thomas Elsaesser, and Miriam Hansen, eds. “Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory.” New German Critique 40 (1987). Bathrick, David, Andreas Huyssen, and Eric Rentschler, eds. “Miriam Hansen: Cinema, Experience, and the Public Sphere.” Special issue, New German Critique 122 (2014). Bathrick, David, and Eric Rentschler, eds. “Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture.” New German Critique 51 (1990). Belach, Helga. Henny Porten: Der erste deutsche Filmstar 1890–1960. Berlin: Haude & Spener, 1986. , and Wolfgang Jacobsen, eds. Slapstick & Co.: Frühe Filmkomödien/Early Comedies. Berlin: Argon, 1995.

Bibliography

629

Belke, Ingrid, and Irina Renz, eds. Siegfried Kracauer 1889–1966. Marbacher Magazin 47 (1988). Benson, Timothy O., ed. Hans Richter: Encounters. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Berg-Ganschow, Uta, and Wolfgang Jacobsen, eds. Film, Stadt, Kino, Berlin. Berlin: Argon, 1987. Berger, Jürgen. Erobert den Film! Proletariat und Film in der Weimarer Republik. Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst; Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1977. Bergfelder, Tim, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, eds. The German Cinema Book. London: BFI Publishing, 2002. Betz, Connie, Julia Pattis, Rainer Rother, eds. Ästhetik der Schatten. Filmisches Licht 1915–1950. Marburg: Schüren, 2014. Birett, Herbert. Das Filmangebot in Deutschland, 1895–1911. Munich: Filmbuchverlag Winterberg, 1991. Bitomsky, Hartmut. “Das goldene Zeitalter der Kinematographie.” Filmkritik 20.9 (1976): 393–459. Blankenship, Janelle. “ ‘Film-Symphonie vom Leben und Sterben der Blumen’: Plant Rhythm and Time-Lapse Vision in Das Blumenwunder.” Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques 16 (2010): 83–103. . “Futurist Fantasies: Lukács’s Early Essay ‘Thoughts Toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema.’ ” Polygraph 13 (2001): 21–36. . “To attract/to alternate? The Skladanowsky Experiment.” Cinema & Cie: International Film Studies Journal 9 (2007): 61–79. Blumenthal-Barby, Martin, ed. The Place of Politics in German Film. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014 Bock, Hans-Michael, ed. CineGraph—Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1984. , and Tim Bergfelder, eds. The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. , and Wolfgang Jacobsen, eds. Recherche: Film. Quellen und Methoden der Filmforschung. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997. Boeger, Peter. Architektur der Lichtspieltheater in Berlin: Bauten und Projekte 1919–1930. Berlin: Arenhövel, 1993. Bohn, Anna. Denkmal Film: Band 1: Der Film als Kulturerbe; Band 2: Kulturlexikon Filmerbe. Cologne: Böhlau, 2013. Botar, Oliver A. Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014. Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Brinckmann, Christine Noll. “Experimentalfilm, 1920–2003.” In Geschichte des deutschen Films, ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Helmut Prinzler. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003, 461–96. Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Büttner, Elisabeth, and Christian Dewald. Das tägliche Brennen: Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Films von den Anfängen bis 1945. Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 2002. Calhoon, Kenneth S., ed. Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. Ceram, C. W. Eine Archäologie des Kinos. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965. Choe, Steve. Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Coates, Paul. The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cowan, Michael. “The Ambivalence of Ornament: Silhouette Advertisements in Print and Film in Early Twentieth-Century Germany.” Screen 36.4 (2013), 784–809. . “Bewegungskunst.” In Hans Richters Rhythmus 21: Schlüsselfilm der Moderne, ed. Christoph Bareither et al., 58–73. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2012. . Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. . “From the Astonished Spectator to the Spectator in Movement: Exhibition Advertisements in 1920s Germany and Austria.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 23:1 (2014), 2–29

630

Bibliography

. “Moving Picture Puzzles: Training Perception in the Weimar ‘Rebus’ Films.” Screen 51 (2010), 197–218. . “Taking It to the Street: Screening the Advertising Film in the Weimar Republic.” Screen 54.4 (2013): 463–79. . Technology’s Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism. London: IGRS Books, University of London, 2012. . “Theater and Cinema in the ‘Age of Nervousness’: Der Andere by Paul Lindau (1893) and Max Mack (1913).” Cinéma & Cie 5 (2004): 65–91. . Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde, Advertising, Modernity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. Cowan, Michael and Barbara Hales, eds. Moving Pictures, Moving Bodies: Dance in Early German Cinema. Special issue. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 46.3 (2010). Cowan, Michael and Kai Sicks, eds. Leibhaftige Moderne: Körper in Kunst und Massenmedien 1918–1933. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005. Curtis, Scott. The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. . “The Taste of a Nation: Training the Senses and Sensibility of Cinema Audiences in Imperial Germany.” Film History 6.4 (1994): 445–69. Dähne, Chris. Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Diederichs, Helmut H. Anfänge deutscher Filmkritik. Stuttgart: Robert Fischer and Uwe Wiedleroither, 1986. . “Frühgeschichte deutscher Filmtheorie: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg.” Habilitationschrift. Universität Frankfurt, 1996. . “The Origins of the Autorenfilm.” In Before Caligari: German Cinema 1895–1920, edited by Usai and Cordelli, 380–97. Dewald, Christian and Werner Schwarz, eds. Prater Kino Welt: Der Wiener Prater und die Geschichte des Kinos. Vienna: Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2005. Distelmeyer, Jan, ed. Babylon in Film Europa: Mehrsprachen-Versionen der 1930er Jahre. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2006. , ed. Tonfilmfrieden/Tonfilmkrieg. Die Geschichte der Tobis vom Technik-Syndikat zum Staatskonzern. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. Dobryden, Paul. “Cinema as Environment: The Emergence of German Film Culture.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014. Döge, Ulrich. Kulturfilm als Aufgabe: Hans Cürlis (1889–1982). Berlin: Cinegraph Babelsberg, 2005. Dorgerloh, Annette, and Marcus Becker, eds. Preußen aus Celluloid: Friedrich II im Film. Berlin: Jaron, 2012. Drehmel, Jan, Kristina Jaspers, and Steffen Vogt, eds. Wagner Kino: Spuren und Wirkungen Richard Wagners in der Filmkunst. Hamburg: Junius, 2013. Drössler, Stefan. “Ernst Lubitsch and EFA.” Film History 21.3 (2009): 208–28. Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Translated by Roger Greaves. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Elder, R. Bruce. Harmony + Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. Elsaesser, Thomas. Filmgeschichte und frühes Kino: Archäologie eines Medienwandels. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2002. . Metropolis. London: British Film Institute, 2000. , ed. A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996. . Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2000. , and Michael Wedel, eds. The BFI Companion to German Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, 1999. , eds. Kino der Kaiserzeit: Zwischen Tradition und Moderne. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2002. Elswit, Kate. Watching Weimar Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Esser, Michael, ed. Gleissende Schatten: Kamerapioniere der zwanziger Jahre. Berlin: Henschel, 1994.

Bibliography

631

Fahle, Oliver. Jenseits des Bildes. Poetik des französischen Films der zwanziger Jahre. Mainz: Bender, 2000. Filmblatt. Edited by Philipp Stiasny. Berlin: CineGraph Babelsberg. FilmGeschichte. Edited by Hans Helmut Prinzler and Helga Belach. Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek, 1991–2005. Film-Kurier-Index 1919–. Edited by CineGraph Hamburgisches Centrum für Filmforschung and Deutsche Kinemathek. Hamburg: CineGraph, 1991. Finney, Gail, ed. Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Fisher, Jaimey, ed. Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and its Deviations. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. , and Barbara Mennel, eds. Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010. Fitsch, Daniel. Georg Simmel im Kino: Die Soziologie des frühen Films und das Abenteuer der Moderne. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Foster, Stephen, ed. Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998. Frohne, Ursula and Lilian Haberer, eds., Kinematographische Räume: Installationsästhetik in Film und Kunst. Munich: Fink, 2012. Fuhrmann, Wolfgang. Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. Ganeva, Mila. Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918–1933. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. Garncarz, Joseph. Hollywood in Deutschland: Zur Internationalisierung der Kinokultur 1925–1990. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2013. . Maßlose Unterhaltung: Zur Etablierung des Films in Deutschland 1896–1914. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2010. . Wechselnde Vorlieben: Über die Filmpräferenzen der Europäer 1896–1939. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2015. , and Annemone Ligensa, eds. The Cinema of Germany. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2012. Gaycken, Oliver. Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Gemünden, Gerd, and Mary R. Desjardins, eds. Dietrich Icon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Gemünden, Gerd, and Johannes von Moltke, eds. Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Göktürk, Deniz. Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur- und mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerika-Texten 1912–1920. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998. Gordon, Mel. The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Depravity. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2006. Graf, Rüdiger. Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. Grafe, Frieda. Licht aus Berlin: Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau und weiteres zum Kino der Weimarer Republik. Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 2003. Grob, Norbert. Fritz Lang: Ich bin ein Augenmensch. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 2014. Guerin, Frances. A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000. . “Literary Appropriation and Translation in Early Cinema: Adapting Gerhart Hauptmann’s Atlantis in 1913.” In True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, edited by Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 41–57.

632

Bibliography

, and Katharina Loew. “Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon.” In A Companion to Fritz Lang, edited by Joe McElhaney, 554–86. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. Hagener, Malte. The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. . Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Hake, Sabine. “Chaplin Reception in Weimar Germany.” New German Critique 51 (1990): 87–111. . The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. . German National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. . “Girls and Crisis—The Other Side of Diversion.” New German Critique 40 (1987): 147–64. . Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Hall, Sara H. “Moving Images and the Policing of Public Space in Berlin around 1920.” German Studies Review 21.2 (2008): 285–302. Hanisch, Michael. Auf den Spuren der Filmgeschichte: Berliner Schauplätze. Berlin: Henschel, 1991. Hans, Anjeana K. Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. Hardt, Ursula. From Caligari to California: Erich Pommer’s Life in the International Film Wars. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996. Harris, Stefanie. Mediating Modernity: German Literature and the “New” Media, 1895–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Hartmann, Britta. Aller Anfang: Zur Initialphase des Spielfilms. Marburg: Schüren, 2009. Hediger, Vinzenz, and Patrick Vonderau, eds. Filmische Mittel, industrielle Zwecke: Das Werk des Industriefilms. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2007. , eds. Films That Work. Industrial Films and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Heller, Heinz-Bernd. Literarische Intelligenz und Film: Zu Veränderungen der ästhetischen Theorie und Praxis unter dem Eindruck des Films 1910–1930 in Deutschland. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985. Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Herrmann, Sylvio. Die Entwicklung des Kinos zum Massenkonsumgut: Vom Deutschen Kaiserreich bis zur Weimarer Republik. Saarbrücken: AV Akademikerverlag, 2012. Hesse, Sebastian. Kamera-Auge und Spürnase: Der Detektiv im frühen deutschen Kino. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2003. Hoefert, Sigfrid. Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1996. Horak, Jan-Christopher, ed. Berge, Licht und Traum: Dr. Arnold Fanck und der deutsche Bergfilm. Munich: Bruckmann, 1997. . “Three Penny Opera: Brecht vs. Pabst.” Jump Cut 15 (1977): 17, 20–21. Hoormann, Anne. Lichtspiele: Zur Medienreflexion der Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik. Munich: W. Fink, 2003. Hübel, Anke J. Big Bigger Cinema: Film- und Kinomarketing in Deutschland (1910–1933). Marburg: Schüren, 2011. Isenberg, Noah, ed. Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Jacobsen, Wolfgang, ed. Babelsberg: Ein Filmstudio 1912–1992. Berlin: Argon, 1992. , ed. G. W. Pabst. Berlin: Argon, 1997. . Zeit und Welt: Gerhard Lamprecht und seine Filme. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2013. , and Werner Sudendorf, eds. Metropolis: A Cinematic Laboratory for Modern Architecture. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2000. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. . “The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer.” Salmagundi no. 31/32 (Fall 1975-Winter 1976): 49–106.

Bibliography

633

Jean, Yaron. “The Soundmindedness of the Great War: Viewing History through Auditory Lenses.” In Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction, edited by Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Miller Hill, 51–63. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Jossé, Harald. Die Entstehung des Tonfilms: Beitrag zu einer faktorenorientierten Mediengeschichtsschreibung. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1984. Jung, Uli, ed. Der deutsche Film: Aspekte seiner Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1993. , and Walter Schatzberg, eds. Filmkultur zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik: Beiträge zu einer internationalen Konferenz vom 15. bis 18. Juni 1989 in Luxemburg. Munich and New York: K. G. Saur, 1992. . Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999. Kabatek, Wolfgang. Imagerie des Anderen im Weimarer Kino. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2003. Kaes, Anton. “The Absolute Film.” In Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, edited by Leah Dickerman, 346–49. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. . “The Debate about Cinema: Charting a Controversy (1909–1929).” New German Critique 40 (1987): 7–33. . M. London: BFI Publishing, 2000. . “On Miriam Hansen’s Cinema and Experience.” Art Forum (December 2012): 84–85. . Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. . “Siegfried Kracauer: Film Historian in Exile.” In “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York, edited by Eckhart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel, 236–69. New York: De Gruyter Verlag, 2012. . “Weimar Cinema: The Predicament of Modernity.” In European Cinema, edited by Elizabeth Ezra, 59–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kapczynski, Jennifer M., and Michael D. Richardson, eds. A New History of German Cinema. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Kardish, Laurence, ed. Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Kasten, Jürgen. Der expressionistische Film: Abgefilmtes Theater oder avantgardistisches Erzählkino?: Eine stil-, produktions- und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Münster: MAkS Publikationen, 1990. Kaul, Walter, ed. Caligari und Caligarismus. Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek, 1970. Keiner, Reinhold. Hanns Heinz Ewers und der phantastische Film. Hildesheim: Olms, 1988. Kessler, Frank, Sabine Lenk, and Martin Loiperdinger, eds. KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films. 15 vols. Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1992–2006. Kester, Bernadette. Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919–1933). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003. Kilchenstein, Gabriele. Frühe Filmzensur in Deutschland: Eine vergleichende Studie zur Prüfungspraxis in Berlin und München (1906–1914). Munich: Schaudig & Ledig, 1997. Killen, Andreas. Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Klaus, Ulrich J., ed. Deutsche Tonfilme. 1929–1945. 15 volumes. Berlin: U.J. Klaus Verlag, 1988–2006. Kleinhans, Bernd. “Der schärfste Ersatz für die Wirklichkeit”: Die Geschichte der Kinowochenschau. St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2013. Koebner, Thomas, ed. Diesseits der “Dämonischen Leinwand”: Neue Perspektiven auf das späte Weimarer Kino. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. Koepnick, Lutz. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. . Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007.

634

Bibliography

Köhler, Kristina. “Vom Tanz ‘im’ Film zum ‘tänzerischen’ Film: Theoriegeschichtliche Skizze zu einem Forschungsfeld zwischen den Disziplinen.” Medienwissenschaft / Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere 140 (2012): 1–10. Korte, Helmut, ed. Film und Realität in der Weimarer Republik: mit Analysen der Filme Kuhle Wampe und Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück. Munich and Vienna: C. Hanser, 1978. . Der Spielfilm und das Ende der Weimarer Republik: Ein rezeptionshistorischer Versuch. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998. Krause, Marcus, and Nicolas Pethes, eds. Mr. Münsterberg und Dr. Hyde: Zur Filmgeschichte des Menschenexperiments. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. Krause, Ulrich. Realität der Weimarer Republik: Gewalt und Kriminalität in deutschen Filmen der “Goldenen Zwanziger.” Saarbrücken: VDM Müller, 2007. Kreimeier, Klaus. Traum und Exzess: Die Kulturgeschichte des frühen Kinos. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2011. . The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945. Translated by Robert and Rita Kimber. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Kuzniar, Alice A. The Queer German Cinema. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Lamprecht, Gerhard. Deutsche Stummfilme 1903–1931 (10 vols.). Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek, 1967–1970). Lange, Jasmin. Der deutsche Buchhandel und der Siegeszug der Kinematographie 1895–1933: Reaktionen und strategische Konsequenzen. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2010. Laqua, Carsten. Wie Micky unter die Nazis fiel: Walt Disney und Deutschland. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1992. Lenk, Sabine. Théâtre contre Cinéma: Die Diskussion um Kino und Theater vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Frankreich. Münster: MakS Publikationen, 1989. Levin, Tom. “From Dialectical to Normative Specificity: Reading Lukács on Film.” New German Critique 40 (1987): 35–61. Ligensa, Annemone, and Klaus Kreimeier, eds. Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Loew, Katharina. “The Spirit of Technology: Early German Thinking about Film.” New German Critique 122 (2014): 125–44. . “Tangible Specters: 3-D Cinema in the 1910s.” Film Criticism 3.1 (2013): 87–116. . “Techno-romanticism: Special Effects in German Fantastic Films of the Silent Era.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011. Loewy, Hanno. Béla Balázs: Märchen, Ritual und Film. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2003. Löffler, Petra. Verteilte Aufmerksamkeit: Eine Mediengeschichte der Zerstreuung. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014. Loiperdinger, Martin. Film & Schokolade: Stollwercks Geschäfte mit lebenden Bildern. Frankfurt am Main.: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1999. , ed. Oskar Messter: Filmpionier der Kaiserzeit. Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1994. , ed. Travelling Cinema in Europe: Sources and Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld/ Roter Stern, 2008. , and Uli Jung, eds. Importing Asta Nielsen: The International Film Star in the Making, 1910–1914. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2013. Maase, Kaspar. Die Kinder der Massenkultur: Kontroversen um Schmutz und Schund seit dem Kaiserreich. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2012. Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Translated and edited by Richard Crangle. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. McCormick, Richard. Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity.” New York: Palgrave, 2001. McElligott, Anthony. The German Urban Experience: Modernity and Crisis, 1900–1945. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Minden, Michael, and Holger Bachmann, eds. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. Moltke, Johannes von, and Kristy Rawson, eds. Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Monaco, Paul. Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties. New York: Elsevier, 1976. Mühl-Benninghaus, Wolfgang. Das Ringen um den Tonfilm: Strategien der Elektro- und der Filmindustrie in den 20er und 30er Jahren. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1999.

Bibliography

635

. Vom Augusterlebnis zur UFA-Gründung: Der deutsche Film im 1. Weltkrieg. Berlin: Avinus, 2004. Mülder-Bach, Inka. “Der Cineast als Ethnograph: Zur Prosa Siegfried Kracauers.” In Die (k)alte Sachlichkeit: Herkunft und Wirkungen eines Konzepts, edited by Moritz Bassler and Ewout van der Knaap, 73–84. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. . “Cinematic Ethnology: Siegfried Kracauer’s The White Collar Masses.” New Left Review 226 (1997): 41–56. . Siegfried Kracauer, Grenzgänger zwischen Theorie und Literatur: Seine frühen Schriften 1913–1933. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985. . “Der Umschlag der Negativität: Zur Verschränkung von Phänomenologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und Filmästhetik in Siegfried Kracauers Metaphorik der ‘Oberfläche.’ ” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift 61.2 (1987): 359–73. Müller, Corinna. Frühe deutsche Kinematographie: Formale, wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklungen, 1907–1912. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994. . Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm. Munich: Fink, 2003. , and Harro Segeberg, eds. Kinoöffentlichkeit (1895–1920): Entstehung—Etablierung— Differenzierung. Marburg: Schüren, 2008. Murray, Bruce Arthur. Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Nagl, Tobias. Die unheimliche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2009. Nowak, Kai. Projektionen der Moral: Filmskandale in der Weimarer Republik. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. Oksiloff, Assenka. Picturing the Primitive. Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Omasta, Michael, Brigitte Mayr, and Christian Cargnelli, eds. Carl Mayer: Scenar(t)ist: Ein Script von ihm war schon ein Film. Vienna: SYNEMA, 2003. Osten, Philipp. “Emotion, Medizin und Volksbelehrung: Die Entstehung des deutschen Kulturfilms,” Gesnerus 66 (2009): 67–102. Otte, Marline. Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment 1890–1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Panofsky, Walter. Die Geburt des Films, ein Stück Kulturgeschichte: Versuch einer zeitgeschichtlichen Darstellung des Lichtspiels in seinen Anfangsjahren. Würzburg-Aumühle: K. Triltsch, 1940. Petersen, Klaus. Zensur in der Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1995. Petrie, Graham. Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America, 1922–1931. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Petro, Patrice. Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. . Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Petzold, Dominik. Der Kaiser und das Kino: Herrschaftsinszenierung, Populärkultur und Filmpropaganda im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011. Peucker, Brigitte. Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Plummer, Thomas G, ed. Film and Politics in the Weimar Republic. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982. Prawer, S. S. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. Preschl, Claudia. Lachende Körper: Komikerinnen im Kino der 1910er Jahre. Vienna: Synema– Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2008. Prinzler, Hans Helmut. Chronik des deutschen Films, 1895–1994. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. , ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: Ein Melancholiker des Films. Translations by Karin Messlinger and Vera Thomas. Berlin: Bertz, 2003. . Sirens and Sinners: A Visual History of Weimar Film, 1918–1933. Translated by David H. Wilson. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013. , Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Anton Kaes, eds. Geschichte des deutschen Films. Updated and expanded 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004.

636

Bibliography

Quaresima, Leonardo. “Dichter heraus! The Autorenfilm and German Cinema of the 1910s,” Griffithiana no. 38–39 (1990): 101–20. , ed. Walter Ruttman: cinema, pittura, ars acustica. Calliano, Italy: Manfrini Editori, 1994. Reichert, Ramón. Im Kino der Humanwissenschaften: Studien zur Medialisierung wissenschaftlichen Wissens. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. Rentschler, Eric, ed. The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. , ed. German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations. New York: Methuen, 1986. . The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Reuveni, Gideon. Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany Before 1933. Translated by Ruth Morris. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. Roberts, Ian. German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2008. Robinson, David. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. London: British Film Institute, 1997. Rogowski, Christian, ed. The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Rössler, Patrick. Die Sprache des Stummfilms: Deutsche Filmpublizistik der Weimarer Jahre. Gera: Druckhaus Gera, 2006. Ross, Corey. Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Rotha, Paul. The Film till Now: A Survey of the Cinema. New ed. with an additional section by Richard Griffith. London: Spring Books, 1967. Rother, Rainer. “The Experience of the First World War and the German Film.” In The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to the Present, edited by Michael Paris, 217–46. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000. , and Peter Mänz, eds. Wenn ich sonntags in mein Kino geh’. Ton—Film—Musik 1929–1933. Bönen: Kettler, 2008. Rutz, Gerd P. Darstellungen von Film in literarischen Fiktionen der zwanziger und dreissiger Jahre. Münster: LIT, 2000. Saekel, Ursula. Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik—Ein Medium der “Amerikanisierung”? Deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011. Sannwald, Daniela, ed. Rot für Gefahr, Feuer and Liebe: Frühe deutsche Stummfilme. Berlin: Henschel, 1995. Sattelmacher, Anja. Zoo-Schauen: Vexierbilder einer frühen Kinogeschichte. Göttingen: Optimus Verlag, 2010. Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Schenk, Irmbert. Kino und Modernisierung: Von der Avantgarde zum Videoclip. Marburg: Schüren, 2008. Scheunemann, Dietrich, ed. Expressionist Film—New Perspectives. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003. Schlüpmann, Heide. The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema. Translated by Inga Pollmann. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010. , Karola Gramann, Eric de Kuyper, Sabine Nessel, and Michael Wedel, eds. Asta Nielsen. 2 vols. Vienna: verlag filmarchiv austria, 2009. Schönemann, Heide. Fritz Lang: Filmbilder, Vorbilder. Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992. . Paul Wegener: Frühe Moderne im Film. Stuttgart and London: Alex Menges, 2003. Schönfeld, Christiane, ed. Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. , and Hermann Rasche, eds. Processes of Transposition: German Literature and Film. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. Schweinitz, Jörg. Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory. Translated by Laura Schleussner. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Segeberg, Harro, ed. Mediengeschichte des Films. 8 vols. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1996–2012. Silberman, Marc. German Cinema: Texts in Context. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Steinitz, David. Geschichte der deutschen Filmkritik. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2015.

Bibliography

637

Stiasny, Philipp. Das Kino und der Krieg: Deutschland 1914–1929. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2009. Stratenwerth, Irene, and Hermann Simon, eds. Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt. Berlin: Henschel, 2004. Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–34. London: BFI Publishing, 1985. . Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. . “ ‘Im Anfang war . . .’: Some Links between German Fantasy Films of the Teens and the Twenties.” In Before Caligari, ed. Usai and Cordelli, 138–61. Toepfer, Karl. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Tsivian, Yuri. Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Usai, Paolo Cherchi, and Lorenzo Cordelli, eds. Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895–1920. Pordenone, Italy: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’immagine, 1990. Valck, Marijke de, and Malte Hagener, eds. Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Vasey, Ruth. The World according to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997. Väliaho, Pasi. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema ca. 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. von Keitz, Ursula. Im Schatten des Gesetzes: Schwangerschaftskonflikt und Reproduktion im deutschsprachigen Film 1918–1933. Marburg: Schüren. 2005. Wahl, Chris. Multiple Language Versions Made in Babelsberg: Ufa’s International Strategy, 1929–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Wallach, Kerry. “Escape Artistry: Elisabeth Bergner and Jewish Disappearance in Der träumende Mund (Czinner, 1932).” German Studies Review 38.1 (February 2015): 17–34. Ward, Janet. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Wedel, Michael. Der deutsche Musik film: Archäologie eines Genres, 1914–1945. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2007. . Filmgeschichte als Krisengeschichte: Schnitte und Spuren durch den deutschen Film. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Weinstein, Valerie. “Anti-Semitism or Jewish ‘Camp’? Ernst Lubitsch’s Shoe Palace Pinkus (1916) and Meyer from Berlin (1918).” German Life and Letters 59.1 (2006): 101–121. Wilkening, Anke. Filmgeschichte und Filmüberlieferung: die Versionen von Fritz Langs ‘Spione,’ 1928. Berlin: CineGraph Babelsberg, 2010. Wilmesmeier, Holger. Deutsche Avantgarde und Film: Die Filmmatinee ‘Der absolute Film’ (3. und 10. Mai 1925). Münster: Lit, 1994. Yumibe, Joshua. Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Zglinicki, Friedrich von. Die Wege der Traumfabrik. Berlin: Transit, 1986. Ziegler, Reiner. Kunst und Architektur im Kulturfilm 1919–1945. Konstanz: UVK, 2003. Zimmermann, Peter, ed. Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. Zimmermann, Yvonne, ed. Schaufenster Schweiz: Dokumentarische Gebrauchsfilme 1896–1964. Zurich: Limmat, 2011. Zischler, Hanns. Kafka Goes to the Movies. Translated by Susan H. Gillespie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. D I G ITAL RESO U RC ES a. Early Film Materials

Europa Film Treasures: http://cinema.arte.tv/de/magazin/europa-film-treasures European Film Gateway: http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/ Internet Moving Image Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/movies Lost Films: https://www.lost-films.eu/ Monoskop Media Library: http://monoskop.org/Media_library

638

Bibliography

b. Online Databases

Filmportal: http://filmportal.de The German Early Cinema Database: http://www.earlycinema.uni-koeln.de/ German Film History before 1920: http://www.kinematographie.de/FZS.htm Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org Internet Movie Database: www.imdb.com Lantern—Media History Digital Library: http://lantern.mediahist.org Museum of the Moving Image Research Guide: http://www.movingimagesource.us/research/guide/102 Pordenone Silent Film Festival Database: http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/ed_precedenti/screenings_db.html Projektarchiv des Deutschen Filminstituts: http://deutsches-filminstitut.de/projekte-festivals/projektarchiv/ Siegen Cinema Databases: http://fk615.221b.de/siegen/start/show/index.php?language=en Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/helios/Welcome.html Virtuelle Fachbibliothek—Medien Bühne Film: http://www.medien-buehne-film.de/ ZEFYS—Zeitungsinformationssystem: http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ Zeitschriftendatenbank: http://dispatch.opac.d-nb.de/LNG=DU/DB=1.1/ c. Journals, Blogs, Organizations

The Bioscope Blog: http://thebioscope.net/ Cinemetrics: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php David Bordwell: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/ The Dead Media Project: http://www.deadmedia.org/ Deutsche Filmgeschichte: http://www.filmhistoriker.de Deutsche Kinemathek Archive: https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/archive/filmarchiv/allgemein Deutsches Filminstitut’s Filmmuseum: http://deutsches-filminstitut.de/filmmuseum/ CineGraph: Daten, Fakten und Hintergründe zur Geschichte des deutschsprachigen Films: http://www.cinegraph.de/ DigiZeitschriften: http://www.digizeitschriften.de/zeitschriften/ Domitor Early Cinema Resources: http://www.domitor.org/resources/resource.html Early Cinema: An Introduction to Early Cinema: http://www.earlycinema.com/index.html FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives): http://www.fiafnet.org/uk/publications/fdbo.html Filmarchiv Austria: http://filmarchiv.at/ Filmarchives Online: http://www.filmarchives-online.eu/ Film History by Decade: http://www.filmsite.org/pre20sintro.html Film und Geschichte: http://www.filmundgeschichte.de/ Film History Journal: http://www.jstor.org/page/journal/filmhistory/about.html Filmwissenschaftliche Zeitschriften: http://www.film.uzh.ch/bibliothek/zeitschriften.html Filmzeitschriften im Textarchiv des Deutschen Filminstituts: http://deutsches-filminstitut.de/archive-bibliothek/bibliothek-textarchiv/filmzeitschriften/ From Kinema to Caligari (Reconceiving Early German Expressionist Cinema): Sources: http://beforecaligari.org/sources/ Hans Helmut Prinzler: http://www.hhprinzler.de/ Der Kinematograph: http://www.medienwissenschaft.hu-berlin.de/Filmtheorie/kinematograph KINtop Archive (1992–2006): https://www.uni-trier.de/index.php?id=23578 Media History Digital Library: http://mediahistoryproject.org/ Moving Image Archive News: http://www.movingimagearchivenews.org/articles/ The Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories: http://filmtheories.org/ Projekt Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ Weimar Studies Network: http://weimarstudies.wordpress.com/

Readers will fi nd a fuller and updated list of online materials on our website: www.thepromiseofcinema.com.

Credits

Copyright permissions are listed below, keyed by document number as listed in the contents and the text. Texts in public domain do not appear below nor do anonymous texts or texts whose rights holders could not be identified or located, despite great efforts. The editors and publisher apologize in advance for any unintended omissions and errors, which they will seek to correct in future printings. 2. Used with permission of Eva Hoffe, Tel Aviv. 20. Copyright © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. 26. Reproduced by kind permission of The Estate of Lotte H. Eisner. 30. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 32. Copyright © Berthold Viertel-Nachlassverwaltung, Marbach/Germany. 41. Copyright © Thomas Sessler Verlag, Vienna. 42. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 45. Used with permission of Thomas Tode. 58. Reproduced by kind permission of The Estate of Lotte H. Eisner. 59. Copyright © Thomas Sessler Verlag, Vienna. 61. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 74. Used with permission of Deutsche Schillergesellschaft/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. 77. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 81. Used with permission of Deutsche Schillergesellschaft/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. 86. Used with permission of Deutsche Schillergesellschaft/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. 89. Used with permission of Nicola Lubitsch. 90. Used with permission of Thomas Sessler Verlag, Vienna. 124. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 126. Copyright © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. 127. Used with permission of Eric S. Pommer for the heirs of Erich Pommer. 132. Used with permission of Nicola Lubitsch. 142. Used with permission of Eric S. Pommer for the heirs of Erich Pommer. 144. Used with permission of Deutsche Schillergesellschaft/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. 147. Copyright © Valentina Lert & Peter S. Lert (Mohrbooks AG Literary Agency, Zurich). 154. Used with permission of Eva Hoffe. 155. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 156. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 159. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 161. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 162. Used with permission of The Estate of Lotte H. Eisner. 171. Used with permission of Marc Silverman and Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 172. Used with permission of Helga Königshof. 174. Used with permission of Janelle Blankenship and Polygraph. 177. Used with permission of Deutsche Schillergesellschaft/Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. 178. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 179. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 182. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 183. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 184. Used with permission of John McKay, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 185. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 188. Used with permission of Henry Lowell Carrigan and Northwestern University Press for English language rights. 197. Used with permission of Brenda Benthien. 203. Used with permission of the Hans Richter Estate. 205. Used with permission of Margaret Nettinga. 206. Copyright © Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Copyright © 2014 Artists

639

640

Credits

Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 209. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 210. Used with permission of the Artists Rights Society. 211. Used with permission of Primrose Film Productions, Munich. 212. Used with permission of Hans Richter Estate. 214. Used with permission of the Hans Richter Estate. 216. Used with permission of the Estate of Lotte H. Eisner. 218. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 223. Used with permission of Thomas Sessler Verlag. 228. Used with permission of Thomas Sessler Verlag. 248. Used with permission of Helga Königshof. 251. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. 258. Used with permission of Margaret Nettinga. 267. Used with permission of Helga Königstein. 268. Used with permission of Dave Stein/Kurt Weill Foundation. 271. Copyright © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 276. Used with permission of Margaret Nettinga. 278. Copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

Index

3-D, 7, 578, 579n2. See also stereoscopic film; three-dimensionality 3 Penny Opera, The (film; 1931), 372, 375. See also Threepenny Opera, The A., A., 368–69 Abel, Alfred, 296 Abel, Richard, 2n4, 551n1 Abnormitäten- und Biographentheater (Berlin, Germany), 177n2 Abraham, Karl, 443 Abseits vom Glück (film; 1916), 319n3 “absolute dance”, 453 “‘Absolute’ Fashion, The” (Ruttmann), 464–65 absolute Film, Der (ed. Kiening and Adolf), 603 “Absolute Film, The” (Arnheim), 459–61 “absolute film” movement, 6, 363n1; Absoluter Film matinee (1925), 459–61, 467n1, 539, 567n3, 589n4; Arnheim on, 459–61; Balázs on, 362; expressionist film and, 441, 442; MoholyNagy on, 469–70; radio art and, 586–89; Ruttmann on, 464–65 “absolute radio art”, 586–89 “Abstract Film: On the Screening by the Gesellschaft Neuer Film” (Kracauer), 465–67 abstract film, 450, 452, 459n1, 465–67, 468, 532, 598 abstraction, 77, 79, 123, 133, 159, 173, 363, 387, 465, 470, 478, 492, 572; in animation, 450–52, 457–59, 459n1, 464, 603; in art, 455, 465, 534; in film, 129, 196, 458, 492, 588; in photography, 601 Absturz, Der (film; 1923), 303, 304n5, 506, 508n2 academics, 159–60, 234, 397, 528 Achtet die Armen (film), 150, 151n3 Ackerknecht, Erwin, 7n17, 277n3 “acoustic close-ups”, 517–18, 559–61 acoustic effects, 106, 143, 174, 313, 395–96, 516, 519, 553–57, 568, 569–73, 576, 586–88, 593, 596, 599

“Acoustic Film, The” (Jhering), 551–52 Acres, Birt, 33 acrobats, 33, 37, 159, 289, 324, 396, 609 Action française, 297n4 actors. See cinephilia; film actors; stage actors; stars; star system Adolf, Heinrich, 603 Adorno, Theodor W.: 392; Composing for the Films, 553; correspondence with Benjamin, 403; “The Curious Realist”, 176; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 220, 344, 409; exile of, following Nazi takeover, 402; The Jargon of Authenticity, 275; “Kierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin”, 401–2; Minima Moralia, 220; “On Jazz”, 247; on “radio symphony”, 566, 567n1; “Transparencies on Film”, 402, 482 adventure films, 55, 56–58, 336, 429, 513 adventure novels, 56, 57 Adventures of Prince Achmed, The (film; 1926), 470, 555 advertising: American materialism and, 298; box office statistics and, 301; film advertising papers, 230; film and growth of, 291; film companies devoted to, 530; film criticism replaced by, 411; film posters, 168–69, 236–37; Nikolaus on psychological effects of, 546–48; Pinschewer on movie theaters as site for, 530–32; propaganda films and, 279; psychology of, 547; quality and, 410; Ruttmann and, 463, 464; silhouette films used in, 470; stardom and, 317; World Advertising Congress (Berlin; 1929), 545. See also advertising films; propaganda; propaganda films “Advertising Film and Its Psychological Effects” (Nikolaus), 546–48 advertising films, 168–69, 277, 463, 464, 530–32, 535–37, 537–39, 544–45, 546–48, 557, 605

641

642

Index

Aeroscope, 504 aesthetic categories, 2, 196 aesthetic education, 9, 130–34, 217, 226–27 aesthetic idealism, 174 aesthetic realism, 436 aesthetics: avant-garde movement and rethinking of, 450–52; film aesthetics, 482; theater vs. cinema, 377–81. See also silent film aesthetics Africa: adventure films set in, 55; cinema and ethographic studies of, 48–49, 55–56; German colonies in, 48, 55–56 “Africa and Film” (Schomburgk), 55–56 “Afterword to Caligari“ (Reimann), 438–40 “Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid” (Grempe), 230–32 “Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid: A Response” (“Roland”), 232–34 “Against the Ban on the Remarque Film” (Tucholsky), 286–87 “Age of the World Picture, The” (Heidegger), 64 Ägyptische Helena, Die (opera; Strauss), 398 airplanes, 34, 35, 53, 91, 248, 259, 405 Akiva ben Joseph, 579, 579n3 Aktion, Die (journal), 42, 219–22 Albers, Hans, 177, 177n4, 345, 347, 609 Albert Ballin, SS (steamship), 543n2 Albes, Emil, 161n3, 161n4 Alexandrov, Grigori, 555 Alhambra Theater (Berlin, Germany), 551 alienation, 293, 362, 390, 403 “All about Film Stars” (Kracauer), 344–46 Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League), 242n1, 276 Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich (film; 1929), 566 Allgemeine Rundschau (journal), 287n3 Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik, 515 All Quiet on the Western Front (film; 1930), 251, 284–87, 305, 310 “All Quiet on the Western Front: On the Remarque Sound Film” (Kracauer), 284–86 Alpine Architektur (Taut), 532 Alraune (film; 1928), 447 Alte Fritz, Der (film; 1927), 355n1 Altenberg, Peter, 26, 28n2, 181n3 Altenloh, Emilie, 156–61, 172, 175 Altes Museum (Berlin, Germany), 129 amateur film, 9, 43, 52, 106, 111, 170, 294, 329–30, 360n1, 503, 520–21, 591 Amateur Film League, 489 Am Elterngrab (Tonbild; 1907), 611n8 American cinema, 212n6; ambivalent reception of, 288; American lifestyle in, 295; animated films, 471, 603–7; Disney productions, 403; European cinema vs., 288–89; famous actors in, 289; Freund on rhythm in, 511; German bans on, 288, 290n6, 293; global cultural/economic domination of, 301–4, 309; historical spectacles, 296; naturalism of, 511; popularity of, in Germany, 392; slapstick, 479, 587; sound films, 563–64; worldwide market for, 288

“American Cinema” (C. Goll), 53, 288–90 American film industry: cartels in, 599–600; expansion of, 302, 565; German dealings with, 297–98; Laemmle as unofficial spokesperson for, 305; Ufa vs., 348 Americanisms, 252, 440 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 541 American women, 303, 304n4 Amundsen, Roald, 399, 400n5 amusement, 14, 16, 43–44, 150, 153, 191, 221–22, 274, 280, 376, 380, 421, 427, 526 amusement parks, 10, 609–10 Anabasis (Xenophon), 583 Anarchie im Drama (Diebold), 415 Anbruch, Der (journal), 434 Andél, Jaroslav, 2n4 Andere, Der (The Other; film; 1913), 111n4, 185, 186n4, 189n1, 428, 433n2, 612n10 Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others; film; 1919), 240–41, 242n3 Andersen, Hans Christian, 114n3 Andra, Fern, 289, 290n8, 349 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 38–39, 240n2, 443 Andrés, Eduard, 607 Angel, Ernst, 73n4, 365n1, 424–26 animal films, 72, 504–5, 542 animated films: abstract, 450–52, 457–59, 459n1, 464; advertising films, 544; cartoons, 403; early experiments in, 92n2; expressionist, 421; imagined futures of, 603–7; Kulturfilms, 542; music in, 171–72, 554; objects in, 193; Ruttmann and, 463; Schüfftan process and, 589–90; shorts, 196n2, 479; silhouette films, 470–71; of space travel, 62 animation, 9, 92n2, 218, 450, 452, 457, 459n1, 463–64, 470–71, 534, 544–45, 555, 603–607 “Anita Berber: The Representative of a Generation” (Feld), 337–38 Anna Boleyn (film; 1920), 296 Anna Christie (film; 1930), 146, 146n3 Anna Christie (O’Neill), 146n3 Anna Karenina (film; 1927), 344n6 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 344n6 “Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik” (Musil), 323 Anschütz, Ottomar, 446, 447n4 Antarctic expedition films, 58–60, 60nn1–2, 495 anthropomorphism, 80 Antigone (Sophocles), 203n2 anti-Semitism, 235–36, 240–42 Antithese (electroacoustic music composition; Kagel), 482 Apollo Theater (Berlin, Germany), 168 Apoxyomenos, 490, 492n3 Aragon, Louis, 400n3 Arbeiterbühne (journal), 361 Arbeiterbühne und Film (journal), 368–69. See also Film und Volk (journal) Arbeiter-Illustrierte (workers’ newspaper), 360, 361 Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 8, 267, 403

Index

architecture, 50, 101, 190, 210, 220–21, 239, 297n9, 393, 418, 453, 456–57, 569, 594–95; aesthetics of, 595; expressionist, 487n2; as “frozen music”, 398, 398n8; silent film aesthetics and, 499–501, 533 “Architecture in Film” (Leni), 499–501 archival sources, 7, 7n17. See also film archives Archive for Criminology (ed. Gross), 535, 537n2 Archiv für Pädagogik (pedagogical journal), 50 Argonauten, Die (journal), 482–85 Aristotle, 32, 388 Arlésienne, L’ (film; 1908), 183n1 arme Heinrich, Der (Hartmann von Aue), 398n1 Arnau, Frank, 314–16 Arndt, Arlo, 33–35 Arnheim, Rudolf, 1, 2; “The Absolute Film”, 459–61; “A Commentary on the Crisis Facing Montage”, 568–72; “The Complete Film”, 600; “Dr. Caligari redivivus”, 439; Enciclopedia del cinema, 447; exile of, following Nazi takeover, 5; Film as Art, 485, 600, 602–3; as film critic, 3; on German cinema potentialities, 1; influences on, 79; “Die Seele in der Silberschicht”, 459 Arnim, Achim von, 380 Arp, Jean (Hans), 406 Arras, Battle of (1917), 275n1 Arsenal (film; 1928), 519n3 Art, L’ (Gsell), 119n2 “Art and Cinema in War” (Gaulke), 271–73 “Art and Literature in Cinema” (Lichtbild-Bühne special issue), 87 “Art and Technology in Film” (Michaelis), 581–82 art films (Kunstfilme), 87, 101–2, 103n2, 117, 130–34, 375, 397, 474 art galleries, 233–34 “Artistic Film Program” (Taut), 532–34 artists, 318 art museums, 105, 106, 160, 233–34 “Art of Mimic Expression in Film, The” (Lang), 22, 141–42 art pour l’art, l’, 360, 464–65 art(s), 209; in the age of the masses, 409; cinema and definition/functions of, 4, 6; cinematography as, 10, 190, 191–92; as collective enterprise, 54, 174–75, 305, 356–58, 372–73, 475, 582, 595, 599; commerce and, 474–75; dehumanization of, 415; dynamization of, 52–54, 415–20; films based on, 15n4; film technology and, 581–82; graphic, 600–601; life as imitator of, 178, 181n1; “neutral”, 367–68; 19th-century definitions of, 410; politics and, 367; transcendental vs. practical definitions of, 456 Arts Committee for Dance, 139 “Artwork”. See Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” Artwork of the Future (Wagner), 607n8 Aschenputtel (a.k.a. Aschenbrödel; film; 1923), 542, 543n5 Aschinger (Berlin, Germany), 28n1 Ascona, 139

643

Askania Werke AG (Berlin, Germany), 61n2 Aslan, Raoul, 343–44 Asphaltpflanze, Die (film; 1911), 158, 161n3 Assassinat du duc de Guise, L’ (film; 1908), 183n1 Association for Image Use, 130 Association for the Protection of German Film Manufacturers (Schutzverband der Filmfabriken Deutschlands), 277, 278–79 Association of Film Industrialists, 562 Association of German Advertising Experts, 537 Association of German Film Manufacturers (Vereinigung Deutscher Filmfabrikanten e.V.), 240 Assommoir, L’ (Zola), 24, 25n7 athletics, 33–35, 72, 108, 127–30, 374 Atlantis (film; 1913), 119n1, 204, 206n1 Atlantis (Hauptmann), 119n1, 205, 206n1 atmosphere, 57, 210, 229, 263, 343, 383, 418, 423, 425, 463, 477, 493–94, 500, 564, 609; authentic, 63; artificial, 342; Balázs on, 497; of fairytale, 401; in film theaters, 156, 367, 381, 386; modulations of, 113 attractions, 15, 40, 43, 45, 64, 114, 154, 404, 430; as central for working women, 157; “cinema of attractions” (Gunning), 154, 426; global dimension of, 300–301; of color film, 600–601; of erotic/sexual/sensual pleasures, 125, 128–29, 167, 221, 332; of film stars, 125; of Kulturfilm, 543; of movement, 508, 538; of physicality 112; of Sedan panorama, 271; of shock, 149. See also thrills; modernity; modern urban life Auber, Daniel, 29, 30n2 Auch Einer (Vischer), 25n4 audience, cinema and imagination of, 185, 219–20, 221–22; future of, 578–79; mass, 25, 31, 183, 207, 256, 381, 393, 405, 539. See also avant-garde film; sound film; spectatorship; working-class cinema Aufgaben der Kinematographie in diesem Kriege, Die (Häfker), 51 Aufklärungsfilme, 240–42, 242n2, 430, 433n4 Auflösung der Städte, Die (Taut), 532 Auftakt, Der (music journal), 395–98 August Scherl Verlag, 537n3 August Wilhelm (Prince of Prussia), 18, 20n3 Aumont, Jacques, 492 “aura”, 377 Aus der Kinderstube des Zoos (film), 348 Ausdruckstanz, 134, 141n3, 403n2 Ausfahrt der Chinakrieger von Bremerhaven mit der Straßburg am 31.7.1900 (film; 1900), 503 Aus meinem Leben (Goethe), 219n1 Außenberg, Julius, 463 Austria, 8, 259, 269n4, 322, 328–30 Austria-Hungary, 258–59 Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office), 284, 286n1 auteur. See authorship authorship, 54, 109, 165, 268, 269n4, 372–374, 394, 399, 427, 470, 499, 568, 574–75, 605

644

Index

“Autobiography” (Altenberg), 28n2 autographs, 344, 346 automobile races, 34–35 automobiles, 327–28 Autorenfilm, 6, 192; cinema gentrification attempted through, 178; emergence of, 38n1, 154; first, 189n1, 433n2, 612n10; Kinematograph assessment of, 182–83; opposition to, 184; Student of Prague (1913) as, 188–89, 206; theater vs. cinema and, 154, 178 “Autorenfilm and Its Assessment, The” (anon.), 182–83 avant-garde film: “absolute film”, 459–61, 464–65; abstract animation, 457–59; abstract film, 465–67; art of movement (Bewegungskunst) and, 454–57; audience for, 452, 459, 461, 467–68, 472–73, 480, 486; Bauhaus experimental film, 461–63; Berlin (1927), 463–64; Diebold and discussions of, 415; Kino-Eye, 476–77; Kracauer’s critique of, 465–67; silhouette film, 470–71; temporal painting in, 450–52; as visual music, 452–54. See also avant-garde movement “Avant-Garde for the Masses” (Eisner), 478 “Avant-Garde in the Realm of the Possible” (Richter), 475–76 avant-garde movement: art/commerce relationship and, 474–75; color design and, 600; color film and, 601; Eisner on connection with the masses, 478; emergence of, 8; film industry and, 6, 450, 461–63, 472–74; French/Dutch, 474–75, 480; Gesellschaft Neuer Film, 465–67; journals, 118, 119n8, 533; Kulturfilms and, 533; lighting design as Lichtgestaltung, 487; nonproductive filmmaking and, 457–59; post-WWI emergence of, 450; rethinking of aesthetics for, 450–52; Richter on film potential and, 475–76; Russian films and, 472–74; sound technology and end of, 478–81. See also “absolute film” movement; avant-garde film Avenarius, Ferdinand, 226 Awakening Sphinx, The (Die erwachende Sphinx; film; 1927), 61, 61n3 Babbitt (Lewis), 356n2 Babies sehen dich an (film), 348 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 606 Bacon, Lloyd, 564 Baeck, Leo, 391 Baer, H., 600–602 Baeumler, Alfred A., 381–84 Bagier, Guido, 465 Bahr, Hermann, 416, 417, 419n3, 419n12 Baird, John Logie, 584 Baker, Josephine, 334, 335n3 Balázs, Béla, 2, 3, 4; on Antarctic expedition films, 58–60; “The Close-Up”, 492–98; “The Color Film”, 583–84; “A Conviction”, 559–61; “The Educational Values of Film Art”, 130–34; exile of, following Nazi takeover, 5; on Fanck mountain films, 68–70; “Farewell to Silent

Film”, 517–19; film and dance as viewed by, 108; on film as universal language, 508; as film critic, 3; “Filmtradition und Filmzukunft” (lecture; 1926), 505; “Film Works for Us!”, 362–63; on German cinema potentialities, 3; influence of, 340; influences on, 115, 192; on Nielsen’s eroticism, 342; objects on film as viewed by, 327; “Only Stars!”, 325–27; “Productive and Reproductive Film Art”, 505–8; “The Revolutionary Cinema”, 351–53; The Spirit of Film, 362, 492, 517; stars as viewed by, 325–27, 337; “Where Is the Sound Film Archive?”, 105–7; writings of, 20, 22, 58. See also Visible Man or the Culture of Film (Balázs) Baldung, Hans, 600, 601n1 Ball, Hugo, 139 ballad, popular, 184–86 Ballet mécanique (Léger and Murphy), 459, 472, 589n4 Ballets Russes, 186n2 Ballhaus-Anna (film; 1911), 228, 230n1 Balzac, Honoré de, 288, 290n3, 590n1 Bamberg, Carl, 61n2 Bamberg-Askania camera, 61, 61n2 Bambergwerke (Berlin, Germany), 61n2 Bancroft, George, 307, 308n4 barbarism, 403 Barber of Seville, The (Rossini), 29 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules Amédée, 380, 381n2 Barn Dance, The (animated film; 1929), 403 Baron, Julius, 580–81 Barrymore, John, 146n2 Barthes, Roland, 98, 144, 169 Bartosch, Berthold, 545 “Basic Principles of the Art of Movement” (Richter), 454–57 Bassermann, Albert, 194; acting talents of, 113; Autorenfilm and, 182; correspondence with Mack, 610–11; in Erdgeist (1923), 124n1; in The Other (1913), 111n4, 189n1, 428, 433n2, 611, 612n10; silent film aesthetics and, 486; as stage actor in film, 111, 111n4, 188, 189n1, 610–11 Bastian, S. E., 584–85 Bataille, Henry, 288, 290n1 Battle of the Somme, The (film; 1916), 268, 269nn1–2 Battleship Potemkin (film; 1925), 604; Balázs on, 507; Benjamin on, 356–359; camerawork in, 507; controversy over, 353–59; German distributor of, 367; German version, 572; Kracauer on, 353–355; as model of political filmmaking, 365, 472; music in, 554, 572; production of, 371; as propaganda film, 251; prose style in, 606; Schmitz on, 355–356; success of, 351, 360; as theater, 446 Baudelaire, Charles, 341, 344n4 Bauhaus, 404, 461–63, 462–63n1, 470, 499n1 Baum, Vicki, 144, 327–28 Baumeister, Willi, 459, 459n3 Bäumer, Eduard, 78–81, 90

Index

Bavaria, 173, 294 Bavarian Soviet Republic, 365 Bavarian State Film Company, 477 Bayerische Landesfilmbühne (Bavarian State Film Company), 477 Bazeilles (France), crypt at, 89, 89n1 Bazin, André, 2, 86, 98, 424, 551, 598 BBC, 589n5 Beaumarchais, Pierre, 411, 412n3 Beaumont, Étienne de, 466 Becce, Giuseppe, 515–17, 553 Becher, Johannes R., 360, 361n6 Bechstein piano factory (Berlin, Germany), 544, 544n2 Beckmann, Friedrich, 402, 402n3 Beery, Wallace, 307, 308n4 Beethoven (a.k.a. Der Märtyrer seines Herzens; film; 1918), 433n5 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 323n6, 417, 420n20, 430, 433n5, 483, 484, 506, 606, 607n8 Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Schoenberg), 552–53 “Behind My Camera: New Possibilities for Shooting Film” (Freund), 509–11 Behne, Adolf, 392–94, 399, 404, 406n1, 457–59 Beim Tierdoktor (film), 348 Bei unseren Helden an der Somme (film; 1917), 269n2 “Béla Forgets the Scissors” (Eisenstein), 505 Belgium, 258, 274, 275n3 Bell, Monta, 136 Bell Telephone, 591 Beloved Rogue, The (film; 1927), 306 Belvedere Castle (Prague), 189 “Benefits of War for the Cinema, The” (Költsch), 266–67 Ben Hur (film; 1925), 445, 447n2 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 7, 8; The Arcades Project, 8, 267, 403; “Artwork”, 339, 377, 399, 403, 409; “Chaplin in Retrospect”, 398–400; correspondence with Adorno, 403; on “crisis of the novel”, 574; exile of, following Nazi takeover, 5; “Experience and Poverty”, 403; on German cinema potentialities, 4; “Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity”, 399; influences on, 79, 190, 267; “Mickey Mouse”, 403; Moscow Diary, 357; “optical unconscious,” concept of, 90, 403, 492; photography/death writings of, 98; on political tendencies in art, 367; “Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz”, 355, 356–59; as university student, 41n3; “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, 4, 77, 178, 339, 357, 377, 399, 403, 409 Berber, Anita, 123, 337–38 Berg des Schicksals, Der (film; 1924), 68, 97 Berger, Grete, 189 Bergkatze, Die (film; 1921), 319n1 Bergson, Henri, 79, 455, 557, 558n4 Berlin (Germany), 4, 23; All Quiet on the Western Front premiere in, 284; American film

645

premieres in, 316n1; assassinations in, 279; Autorenfilm premiere in, 188–89; censorship in, 185, 240; cinema attendance statistics, 42, 531; cinematograph first emerges in, 168; film censorship in, 235; film journals established in, 5; film portrayals of, 463–64; first permanent movie theater in, 168, 177, 177n2; as modern cultural center, 179; Pfemfert on soullessness of, 220–21; picture palaces in, 170–72; Sedan panorama in, 271–72, 273n2; Urania society in, 39n2, 79, 81, 82, 83; urban life in, 31; workingclass life in, 149–50; working-class movie theaters in, 161–63, 175–77 Berlin Alexanderplatz (Döblin), 149, 574, 575 Berlin Alexanderplatz (film; 1931), 574 Berlin censorship office, 235, 240, 284, 353 Berlin Conference (1884–1885), 48 Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (film; 1927): Kracauer’s critique of, 465, 557, 558n3; music in, 554, 555, 555n2, 572; quota agreements and, 479; Russian films and, 477; Ruttmann on production of, 463–64 Berliner Börsen-Courier (newspaper), 374–75, 436–38, 551–52, 585–86 Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (newspaper), 249 Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (newspaper), 319, 443–44 Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, 83, 84n4 Berliner Tageblatt, 64, 88–89, 152, 301 Berliner Theater, 268–69 Berliner Zeitung (newspaper), 297–98 Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (newspaper), 487–89, 531, 578–79 Berlin Film and Photo Exhibition (1932), 607–12 Berlin Philharmonic, 172n1 Berlin Radio Exhibition (1928), 591–92, 592n3 Berlin Secession, 404, 406 Berlin State Opera, 517n1 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. See Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt Bermann, Richard A. (Arnold Höllriegel), 199 Bernstein, Henri, 288, 290n1 Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio (ed. Silberman), 372 Betz, Georg, 551n3 Bewegungskunst (art of movement), 455 Beyfuss, Edgar, 210, 459–60, 461n1, 539–43 Biche au bois, La ( féerie production), 21 Biedermeier style, 406 Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer, Die (film; 1926), 504–5 Bildspielbund, 130 Bild und Film (journal): as cinema reform journal, 31, 51; “The Cinematograph as Modern Newspaper” (Stein), 49–51; contributors to, 51, 196, 204, 231; duration of, 204; establishment of, 31; “The New Illusion” (Scheller), 196–99; “The Onlookers of Life in the Cinema” (Rennert), 203–6; “Problems of the Film Drama” (Tannenbaum), 192–96; “The Secret of the Cinema” (Sellmann), 31–33; “Thrills in Film Drama and Elsewhere” (Forch), 35–38

646

Index

Bild- und Filmamt (Bufa; Office of Photography and Film), 269–71, 275n4, 276 Bild und Film im Dienste der Technik (Lassally), 537 Bildung (education), 9 Bildwart, Der (journal), 489–92 Biofix devices, 609, 611n2 Biograph-Theater (Berlin, Germany), 177n2, 427 biology, 86, 523–27, 540 Biophon-Theater-Lichtspiele (Berlin, Germany), 240–41 bioscope (Bioskop), 115, 116, 433n8, 579–80, 611 Bioskop films, 4 Bird Seller, The (opera; Zeller), 550, 551n3 Birnbaum, Leonhard, 526–29 Birth of Venus (painting; Botticelli), 605 Bischoff, Ludwig, 607n8 bisexuality, 337 Bismarck, Otto von, 89, 273n2, 296 Bizet, Georges, 29, 157, 484 Bizoykishen, Lala, 64 Blackmail (film; 1929), 344n2 Blankenship, Janelle, 580 Blass, Ernst, 482 Blätter des Deutschen Theaters (journal), 178–82 Blaubuch, Das (journal), 219–22 blaue Engel, Der (film; 1930), 70n2, 143–44, 314–15, 338–40, 342–43, 344n8, 574 blaue Licht, Das (film; 1932), 68, 134 Blaue Reiter, Der, 119n7, 416, 419n1 Bliokh, Yakov, 104n3 Bloch, Ernst, 8, 92, 130n3, 377, 482–85 Bloem, Walter, 300, 581 Blom, August, 119n1, 206n1, 226n1 Blondin, Charles, 37, 38n4 Blue Angel, The. See Der blaue Engel Blue Light, The. See Das blaue Licht Bluen, Georg, 290n8 Blum, Albrecht Viktor, 73n4, 103–4, 365n1, 369, 539 Blum, K. R., 555 Blumenberg, Hans, 529 Blumenwunder, Das (film; 1926), 532 Bock, Hans-Michael, 275 bodies in film, 4; acting style and, 108–11; Balázs on “aesthetic education” about, 130–34; body culture and, 108, 126–27, 133–34; dance and, 134–36, 139–41; eroticism, 122–24; film actors and “magic” of, 124–26; gestures, 108–11, 115–19; Kracauer on Garbo’s physiognomy, 144–46; mimic expression (Mimik), 119–22, 136–39, 141–42; nudity, 126–30; pantomime in theater vs. film, 111–14; sound technology and, 142–44 body culture, 108, 126–27, 129, 133–34 Boedeker, Justus Karl Edmund, 523n3 Bois-Reymond, René du, 92, 92n3 Bolshevism, 56, 99n1, 249–53 Bolten-Baeckers, Heinrich, 140, 141n1 Bombay Talkies, 253n3 Bomben auf Monte Carlo (film; 1931), 177n4

Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 361n6 books: as compared to film, 14, 22, 27, 131, 165, 170, 190, 200, 221, 349, 387–88, 392–94, 395, 427, 430, 434, 532, 540, 574 Bordkino, 542, 543n2 Bordwell, David, 566 Börne, Carl Ludwig, 85, 86n1 Bose, Modhu, 64 Botticelli, Sandro, 605 bourgeois films, 368 bourgeoisie: Battleship Potemkin controversy and, 355–56; cinema and moral panic of, 215; educated (Bildungsbürgertum), 149; Eggebrecht on American global hegemony and, 302–4; erotic films and, 167; European culture influenced by, 204; expressionism as alternative to, 426–33; individualism of, vs. modern “type”, 408–12; movie theaters attended by, 161–62, 163–64; newsreels and, 369; picture palaces as site of, 147; spiritual impoverishment of, 204–5 bourgeois individualism, 377 Brahm, Otto, 436, 438n1 Brahms, Johannes, 454n5 Braun, Otto, 286n2 Brauner, Ludwig, 74–77, 88, 529n2 Brecht, Bertolt, 2, 5, 372–74, 399, 403, 567, 587, 598 Breton, André, 400n3 Breuer, Robert, 444–47 Briand, Aristide, 321, 323n7 Bride of Messina, The (Schiller), 41 British film industry, 302 British Film Institute (London, England), 105 Broadway Melody, The (musical; 1929), 564, 564n1 Brockhaus Encyclopedia, 17, 20n1 Brod, Max, 15–17, 123, 199, 340–44 Broken Blossoms (film; 1919), 303, 304n7, 506, 508n2 Brown, Clarence, 146n3 Brown, Robert, 525n4 Brownian motion, cinematographic study of, 524–25, 525–26n4 Bruguière, Francis, 338n1 Brunner, Constantin (Arjeh Yehuda Wertheimer), 79, 80, 81nn5–6 Brunner, Karl, 235–38, 245, 246n2, 277n3 Bucher, Edmund, 64–66, 447–49, 470–71 Büchse der Pandora, Die (film; 1929), 564 Bufa. See Bild- und Filmamt (Bufa; Office of Photography and Film) Bullier, François, 25, 25n8 Bumke-Impekoven films, 88, 88n3, 193 Bund der Film-Amateure (Amateur Film League), 489 Bund deutscher Lehr- und Kulturfilmhersteller (Union of German Educational and Cultural Filmmakers), 545 Bund für Mutterschutz, 227 Burger, Erich, 64–66 Burger, Fritz, 416, 417–18, 419n2 Bürgerliche Bohème (Schmitz), 355

Index

Burgkmair, Hans, 600–601, 602n2 Burgtheater (Vienna, Austria-Hungary), 113, 114n1 Burgtheaterdeutsch, 114n1 burlesques, 348 Busch, Wilhelm, 25n6, 324, 325n1, 489, 492n1, 605 Butting, Max, 454, 454n7 C + M Cricks Martin, 161n4 cabaret, 28–29, 42, 166, 206, 267, 310 Cabaret Voltaire, 455 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (film; 1920): as applied art, 424–26; architecture in, 499, 500–501; Decla as producer of, 290; fantastic/supernatural as represented in, 587; film-theoretical debates over, 422–26, 444; Kurtz on limits of, 440–42; popularity of, in US, 307; premiere of, 415, 422, 447; Reimann on lessons for film industry, 438–40; rerelease of, 439; sound remake of, 436; spectatorship and artistic possibilities of, 211, 212; success of, 440; Veidt as actor in, 307 Cabiria (film; 1914), 296, 499 “caligarisme” discourse, 424 “Call for Art, The” (Häfker), 190–92 Calmettes, André, 183n1 Calvario (film; 1911), 161n4 camera: acquiring “nerves and imagination”, 517–18; on the battlefield, 264–281; expanding sensory experience, 80, 249; as gun, 60; lying 362–63, 476–77; magnifying, 81, 492; recording, 22, 29, 59, 74, 82, 88–89, 99, 103, 201, 469; revelatory, 340–41, 350; in sound film, 517–18; types and technologies of, 61, 90–92, 113, 133, 329–30, 504–5, 505–8, 509, 551n3; as the “true poet of film”, 206–07, 497; “unchained”, 503–5, 509–15 cameramen, 50, 61, 63, 72n1, 107, 129, 143, 252, 281, 446, 463–64, 505–507 camera movement, 7, 503–5, 509–15, 534, 565–66 camera theorists, 206 camerawork, 482, 487, 503, 512, 565 Campendonck, Heinrich, 418, 419n16 Canudo, Ricciotto, 508 Capellani, Albert, 183n1 capitalism: advanced, film emergence under conditions of, 147, 362–63; Brecht on cultural production under, 372–74; cinema reform movement and, 226–27; crisis of, 71; film distribution and, 224; German film industry and, 172–74; USA and, 298 Capitol Theater (Berlin, Germany), 516 Capitol Theatre (New York, NY, USA), 171 “Career of the Cinematograph, The” (anon.), 22–25 Carmen (Bizet), 29, 484 Carmen (film; 1918), 212 cartels, 599–600 Carter, Erica, 3n9 cartoons, 403, 471, 554, 603–7

647

Caruso, Enrico, 18, 85–86 Casablanca (film; 1942), 306 “Case of Dr. Fanck, The” (Balázs), 68–70 Casetti, Francesco, 3n7 casting, 562 Catalani, Angelica, 85, 86n4 Cat and the Canary, The (film; 1927), 499 Catholic Church, 31, 287 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 467, 479, 481n1 Cavell, Stanley, 377 Cendrars, Blaise, 424 censorship, 6; aesthetic, cinema reform advocacy for, 226, 243–46; All Quiet on the Western Front controversy, 284–87; of American films, 288, 290n6, 293; Aufklärungsfilme and, 241–42, 242n2; Battleship Potemkin controversy, 353–59; cinema-state relations and, 185, 254; of newsreels, 364, 365n1; political, Brecht’s opposition to, 373–74; post-WWI film industry and, 293; proletarian film potential and, 360; proposals to reduce, 283–84; reinstatement of, 242, 242n2, 244; of revolutionary cinema, 374–75; state/cinema relationship and, 269–71; visual pleasure (Schaulust) affected by, 43; of Volksverband für Filmkunst newsreel, 72, 73n4; during WWI, 269–71, 293 Central Censorship Board (Oberprüfungsstelle), 244, 247 Central Institute for Education and Teaching, 130 centralization, 602–3 Cézanne, Paul, 416, 418, 419n17, 455, 569 Chakrabarty, Sincouri, 64 Chaliapin, Feodor, 375 chamber play films. See Kammerspielfilms Chamisso, Adelbert von, 188, 189, 189n3 Chaney, Lon, 331 “Chaplin” (Benjamin), 399 Chaplin, Charlie, 64, 104, 172, 303, 332, 518; Adorno on, 401–2; Benjamin on, 398–400; Blum on films of, 104; Circus (1928), 290n6, 554; color films rejected by, 601; as director, 376; eroticism of, 343, 344; film education and, 334, 335; German actors compared to, 296; German censorship and, 290n6; Giese on everyday philosophy of, 397; Gold Rush (1925), 290n6, 448; Hitler juxtaposed with, 399; influences on, 189n5; The Kid (1921), 212n6, 290n6, 587; Kracauer on, 400–401, 467, 609; literary portrayals of, 53; Musil’s discovery of, 323–25; Pabst on, 376; Siemsen on, 296, 297; as sign of democratic modernity, 392, 394; slapstick films of, 290n6; sound films rejected by, 601; The Tramp (1916), 290n6; worldwide fame of, 288, 289 Chaplin, Syd, 172, 172n4 “Chaplin in Malibu” (Adorno), 402 “Chaplin in Old Films” (Kracauer), 400–401 “Chaplin in Retrospect” (Benjamin), 398–400 “Chaplin kommt an!” (Kracauer), 401 “Chaplin’s Triumph” (Kracauer), 401

648

Index

Charell, Eric, 315 “Charleston” (dance), 136 “Charleston in One Thousand Steps, The” (anon.), 136 Charley’s Aunt (film; 1925), 172, 172n3 Charlie Chaplin: Bericht seines Lebens (Burger), 64 Charlot (Soupault), 400n3 Cheat, The (film; 1915), 290n9 Cheese Mites (film; 1903), 222n3 Chion, Michel, 576 chorus girls, 395–98 Christa Hartungen (film; 1917), 319n3 “Chromoplastokinophonograph”, 578 chronophotography, 33, 79, 452n1, 523–26, 525n1 Cilly (film; 1930), 601, 602n4 ciné-clubs, 474. See also film societies “Cinedram, The” (Y. Goll), 52–4 cinegrams, 19 cinema, 279–81; advertising for, 168–69, 230, 236–37; ambivalent reception of, 202, 206–7; artists involved in, 318; athletics and, 33–35; automobiles in, 327–28; ballad compared to, 184–86; cultural mission of, 83, 526–29; demographic studies of, 172–74; documentary potential of, 51; educational potential of, 28, 29–30, 45–46, 51, 52, 86, 226–27; as escape from modern life, 164–66; ethical duty of, 96; future of, 433–36, 578; gentrification of, 151–53, 178, 186–88; illusionism in, 147–49, 196–99; institutionalization of, 7, 147, 317; interior appearance, 154–55; internationality of, 28, 29; kitsch as roots of, 178; mass appeal of, 108, 156, 190, 247–49; Nazi appropriation of, 5; pantomime vs., 195; physical health effects of, 234–35; professionalization of, 7; as public space, 147; social significance of, 54; sociological critique of, 247–49; “suggestive power” of, 223–26, 257–58; as “technological art”, 581–82; 30th anniversary of invention of, 301; as universal language, 508–9; use of term, 4, 23; workingclass, 231; writing and, 149. See also theater vs. cinema “Cinema” (Andreas-Salomé), 38–39 “Cinema” (Jesenská), 164–66 “Cinema” (Wolfram), 247–49 Cinema, The (Noack), 155–56 Cinema and Geography (Kino und Erdkunde; Häfker), 51–52, 68 cinema and sensory perception: cinema reform and, 215–19, 230–32; dream images, 20–21; Felke on cinema as “optical torture”, 234–35; illusion and, 45–47; innervation and, 30–31; Kientopp and, 13–15, 39–41; mass appeal and, 25–28; motion photography, 80–81; nervous thrills and, 5–6, 35–38; optical lure, 31–33; phenomenological excess, 15–20; psychological effects, 28–30; rapidity of images, 38–39; stimulation, 25, 37–38, 43–44, 149, 197, 224, 248, 263, 280, 283, 332, 388, 396–97, 406, 448; visual literacy through, 22; visual pleasure (Schaulust), 41–45; women and, 230–32

cinema and space conceptions, 4, 6; adventure films, 56–58; Antarctic expedition films, 58–60; artistic dynamization, 52–54; Bewegungskunst (art of movement), 454–57; body culture and, 108; ethnographic studies, 48–49, 55–56; geography and, 51–52; Indian fascination, 62–64; lunar flights, 62; newsreels and, 49–51, 66–67, 70–73; photographic flood, 64–66; photoplays and, 203; sound technology and, 66–67; travel films, 60–61; in US, 54 Cinema and the Educated Class (Häfker), 260–61 cinema and time conceptions, 4, 6; culturalhistorical immortalization, 84–86, 254–55; documentary films, 103–4; doppelgänger effect, 77–78, 336; film archive proposals, 74–77, 81–84, 99–102, 105–7; German Army Great General Staff film archives, 88–89; Lang on inviolable stylistic laws, 95–96; Lautensack on dual time conceptions in cinema, 86–88; motion photography, 78–81, 89–92; mountain films and, 97; music and, 92–94; newsreels and, 98–99; time-lapse photography, 97; Wolf on film’s documentary function, 94–95 “Cinema as Educator” (Pfemfert), 219–22 “Cinema Ballad, The” (Rauscher), 184–86 “Cinema Censorship” (Tucholsky), 243–46 “Cinema in the Light of Medicine” (Kinematograph article), 529–30 “Cinema on Münzstraße, The” (Kracauer), 175–76 cinema reform movement, 4, 30, 31, 50, 51, 156, 184, 190, 228, 231, 491, 529; aesthetic education called for, 226–27; censorship called for in, 215, 226, 240–42, 243–46; class/gender issues, 230–34; defined, 6; elitist assumptions behind, 381; emergence of, 8; film theory and, 4; journals, 31, 51; legacy of, 246–47; sexuality and cinema, 227–30, 240–42; trash films and, 222–23, 233–34, 381; tropes of, 247; Wolfram on modern spiritual bankruptcy and, 247–49; writers concerned with, 4, 45, 222–23, 226, 246, 261; during WWI, 50, 254. See also morality “Cinema’s Damaging Effects on Health” (Felke), 234–35 Cinema Stories (Kluge), 1 Cinémathèque Française (Paris, France), 105, 359 “cinematic man”, 238–40, 242 “Cinematic Mankind: Attempt at a Principal Analysis” (Guttmann), 238–40 cinematic psychology, 196, 197–99 cinematic realism, 271, 285, 436, 594, 600 “Cinematografia futurista, La” (Marinetti), 421n1 cinematograph: ambivalent reception of, 30, 84–85, 156; attractions of, 114; class identity and, 149; cost of, 14, 17, 383; cultural mission of, 526–29; dangers of, 223–26; emergence of, in Berlin, 168; Ernemann, 49; invention of, 87, 88; new “sensorium” of, 13–15; as shooting gallery, 259–60; use of term, 23 “Cinematograph, The” (Strobl), 25–28

Index

“Cinematograph and Crowd Psychology: A Sociopolitical Study” (Duenschmann), 256–58 “Cinematograph and Epistemology” (Bäumer), 78–81 “Cinematograph and Schoolchildren” (Kleibömer), 51, 215–19 “Cinematograph as Modern Newspaper, The” (Stein), 49–51 “Cinematograph as Shooting Gallery, The” (anon.), 259–60 “Cinematograph from an Ethical and Aesthetic Viewpoint, The” (Lange), 226–27 cinematographers. See cameramen “Cinematographic Archives” (Brauner), 74–77 “Cinematographic Theater” (Brod), 15–17 Cinématographie des microbes, La (film; 1909), 222n3 “Cinematograph in Evening Dress, The” (Berliner Tageblatt column), 152 “Cinematograph in the Service of Ethnography, The” (anon.), 48–49 cinematography: as art, 191–92, 236; Balázs on “productive” dimensions of, 505–8; chronophotography and, 452n1; microcinematography, 222n3; natural images from, 51–52; photography vs., 52, 191; printing vs., 387; as WWI “spiritual education”, 262–65 “Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry” (Hennes), 520–23 “Cinematography in the Service of the Police” (Ledebur), 534–37 cinephilia: amateur film in Vienna, 328–30; automobiles in films, 327–28; during Depression, 347–49; divas, 317–23; emergence of, 317; eroticism and, 340–44; fan magazines, 344–46; film as folk art, 330–33; film education and, 333–35; illusion and, 335–37; magazines, 333; Musil’s observations on, 323–25; selfdestructive star prototype, 337–38; star letters to fans, 338–40; star picture cards, 346n3, 349–50; star system, 325–27 Circus, The (film; 1928), 290n6, 401, 554 circus, 10, 36–38, 42–42, 71, 149, 219, 418–19, 432, 445, 487n2, 531, 582, 604–605, 609 City Girl (film; 1930), 308n5 City Lights (film; 1931), 401 Clair, René, 459, 479 class, 4, 53, 147, 152, 156–60, 176, 184, 192, 211, 231, 233, 287, 352, 357–58, 362, 369, 373, 387, 394, 427, 430. See also middle class, upper class, white-collar, working class classical film theory, 1, 2, 3n7, 8n21, 10 Claudi vom Geiserhof, Die (film; 1917), 319n3 Clauren, Heinrich, 229–30, 230n3 Clockwork Orange, A (film; 1971), 234 “Close-Up, The” (Balázs), 492–98 close-ups, 58, 108, 141–42, 333, 340–44, 363, 471–72, 478, 485, 492–97, 511, 513–14, 517–18, 559–61, 563, 567 “Clumsy Groom, The” (comic sketch), 27

649

coffeehouses, 165 Cohl, Émile, 196n2 Cohn, Alfred, 226n1 Cole, Andrew, 2n5 collectives, 372–73 collective unconscious, 256 Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914), 532 colonialism, 3, 4, 48–49, 52, 55–56, 293, 302, 528, 545, color/color technology: 7, 42, 44, 80, 83, 113–14, 116–17, 137, 148, 190, 195, 330, 420–21, 438, 446, 458, 488, 494, 524, 534, 538, 564, 569, 578–79; Baer on, 600–602; Balázs on, 583–84, 588, fashion and, 501–2; Hollywood and, 303; Kinemacolor, 221, 222n4; lack of, spectators and the imagining of, 148; nervous thrills and, 37; in painting, 592–93; Technicolor, 564n1, 602n4 color film: avant-garde movement and, 601; Chaplin’s refusal to appear in, 601; imagined futures of, 578, 583–84, 595; sound films, 573, 598–99 “Color Film, The” (Baer), 600–602 “Color Film, The” (Balázs), 583–84 Color Light Concert, 604 color printing, 601 Columbus, Christopher, 417 Comandon, Jean, 82, 84n1, 222n3, 525, 526n5 comedies, 110, 128, 141, 158, 167, 177, 202, 224–25, 267, 290, 317, 324, 360, 379, 383, 409, 411, 432, 583. See also laughter; slapstick comic sketches, 27 commercialism, 548 Commission for Regional Study (Kommission für Landeskunde), 49 commodification, 407–8 Communist Party, 361, 361n1, 535 “Complete Film, The” (Arnheim), 600 compilation films, 103–4 Composing for the Films (Eisler and Adorno), 553 Comte de Monte Cristo, Le (film; 1918), 433n6 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 23 conglomerates, 290–92 Congress of German Dancers (Essen, Germany; 1928), 139–41 conservatism, 92, 215, 219, 222, 241, 242, 247, 249–50, 504, 534 consumer culture, 4 continuity, 170, 243, 373, 379, 390, 418, 478, 486, 493 convergence, 9, 421, 598 “Conviction, A” (Balázs), 559–61 Cornel, Franc, 56–58 Corra, Bruno, 450 Correll, Ernst Hugo, 562–63 countercinema, 374 Count of Monte Christo, The (Dumas), 433n6 Count of Monte Christo, The (film; 1913), 430, 433n6 Courths-Mahler, Hedwig, 610, 611n8 Crary, Jonathan, 6, 13

650 Crawford, Joan, 146, 146n2 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 79 crime, 215, 223 crime dramas, 158 crime fiction, 23 Criminal Code, 185, 240 criminology, 534–37 Crowd, The (film; 1928), 519n2 Crowd, The (Le Bon), 256 crowd psychology, 256–58, 547 crystal formation, 80–81 cubism, 415–16, 418, 450, 606 “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces” (Kracauer), 171, 176 “cultural Bolshevism”, 249–53 cultural cinema, 239 “Cultural Mission of the Cinema, The” (Birnbaum), 526–29 cultural propaganda, 279–81 cultural reform, 226 “Curious Realist, The” (Adorno), 176 Cürlis, Hans, 533, 545–46 Currie, Barton W., 242 Czibulka, Alphons, 483, 485n3 Dadaism, 42, 139, 437, 455 Dagover, Lil, 144, 343, 424 Daguerre, Louis-Jaques-Mandé, 608 Daheim (illustrated family magazine), 595–98 Dalí, Salvador, 443 Dame, Die (magazine), 327–28, 338n1 Dammann, Gerhard, 88n3 Dämon Eifersucht (film; 1912), 163, 164n3 dance, 108, 134–36, 139–41, 396, 418 dance pantomime, 113 dance theory, 139 Danish films, 169n2, 206n1, 226n1, 230n1, 288 Dann schon lieber Lebertran (film; 1931), 349n1 Dante, 331, 378 Dark Angel, The (film; 1925), 304, 304n8 Dark Passage (film; 1947), 512 dark-studio shooting, 487 Daudet, Léon, 296, 297n4 Daumier, Honoré, 601, 602n3 Daves, Delmar, 512 David, Constantin, 345 David, Gertrud, 420–21 Davidson, Paul, 208 Dawison, Bogumil, 85, 86n4 daylight screens, 538, 539n1 Death of Tintagiles, The (Maeterlinck), 180, 182n5 Debrie Sept camera, 504–5, 505n2 Decarli, Bruno, 486 “Decay of Lying, The” (Wilde), 181n1 deception, 336 Decla-Bioskop, 542, 543n3 Decla-Film-Gesellschaft, 290 Decla Studio (Berlin-Weißensee, Germany), 422–24 Decroix, Charles, 109, 110, 111n2

Index

Deebs, Joe, 430 Delaunay, Robert, 418, 419n17 Del Colle, Ubaldo Maria, 161n4 Deleuze, Gilles, 377, 452n1, 492 “Delirious Camera, The” (Seeber), 503–5 Delluc, Louis, 508 Del Río, Dolores, 343, 344n9 Demenÿ, Georges, 33 Demeter, Karl, 172–74 DeMille, Cecil B., 288, 290n9, 349n5 Demi Vierges (film; 1919), 433n4 democratic tendencies, 28, 29, 392–94, 404, 405 democratization, 407–8 Demosthenes, 112 Depository of Historical Cinematography (Paris, France), 74 Derain, André, 455 Derrida, Jacques, 100 Descartes, René, 181n2 Dessoir, Ludwig, 85, 86n4 De Stijl (journal), 454–57, 455, 457n1, 459 De Stijl design movement, 455 Destiny (film; 1921). See müde Tod, Der “Destitution and Distraction: On the 1931–32 Ufa Productions” (Kracauer), 347–49 detective films, 587 Deutsch, Ernst, 318, 319n3, 343–44 Deutsche Bildwoche (Vienna, Austria), 103, 130–34, 134n1 Deutsche Bioskop, 111, 277, 290 Deutsche Frauen — Deutsche Treue (film; 1927), 344n12 Deutsche Kaiser im Film, Der (ed. Klebinder), 33–35, 81–86, 254–56, 526–29 Deutsche Kammermusik Baden-Baden, 552–55 Deutsche Lehrfilm in der Wissenschaft und im Unterricht, Der (Kalbus), 485 Deutsche Lichtbildbuch, Das (ed. Pfeiffer), 246–47, 298–300 Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft (DLG; German Motion Picture Company), 246, 274–75, 275n4, 276, 305, 305n1, 539n1, 542, 543n4 Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (German League for Human Rights), 286 Deutsche Mutoskop and Biograph, Inc., 277 Deutscher Ausschuß für Lichtspielreform (German Committee for Motion Picture Reform), 276, 277n3 Deutscher Rundfunk (film; 1928), 557, 573, 574n1 Deutsche Rundfunk, Der (journal), 586–89 Deutsche Rundschau (journal), 172–74 Deutscher Verband der Filmindustriellen (Association of Film Industrialists), 562 Deutscher Werkbund, 472, 477 Deutscher Wille (journal), 206. See also Kunstwart, Der (journal) Deutsches Theater (Berlin, Germany), 188, 335n1, 438n1, 447, 579, 579n4 Deutsches Volkstum (journal), 242–43, 247–49 Deutsche Tanzbühne, 139

Index

Deutsche Universal, 305 Deutsche Zeitung (newspaper), 240–41 Deutschlands Beruf (poem; Geibel), 297n10 Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP; German National People’s Party), 246n1 Devi, Seeta, 64 Devil’s Elixirs, The (Hoffmann), 25n5 Devrient, Karl August, 85, 86n4 Diaghilev, Sergei, 186n2 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno), 220, 344, 409 dialogue strips, 314 Dickens, Charles, 185, 186n3, 400 dictatorship, principle of, 393 Diebold, Bernhard (né Dreifus), 404, 415–20, 452–54, 603–7 Diederichs, Helmut H., 5n13 Diederichs-Verlag, 211, 212n3 Diehl, Oskar, 119–22 Dietrich, Marlene, 70n2, 143, 338–40, 342–43, 344n6, 345 Different from the Others. See Anders als die Andern digital technology, 578 “Dilemma” (anon.), 164n4 dilettantism, 169, 170 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 95 Dinesen, Robert, 58n2, 64n2 “Dionysos” (Döblin), 149 dioramas, 48 Dippel, Heinrich, 164n2 disenchantment, 384 Disney, Walt, 403 Disney Studios, 603 distraction, 57, 71, 196, 267; and perception, 44; as part of urban life, 4, 25, 196, 216, 538; as topic of contemporary media studies, 9; Benjamin on, 8; Guttmann on, 239–40; Kracauer on, 8, 171, 176, 347–49; Scheller on film as relaxation/ distraction, 196–99; masses searching for, 112, 153, 183, 232, 348, 397, 405; proletarian audiences and, 352. See also mass culture, masses, modernity, modern urban life “Diva, The” (Porten), 317–19 divas, 317–23 Doane, Mary Ann, 492 Döblin, Alfred, 8, 149–51, 176, 404, 406n1, 574–75 Doctrine of the Spiritual Elite and the Multitude (Brunner), 79, 81n6 “Documentary and Artistic Film” (Blum), 103–4 documentary cinema, 9, 51, 61, 94, 98, 103–04, 135n1, 212nn.4, 5, 266, 269n1, 365–66, 463, 469, 471–72, 477. See also Kulturfilm documentary photography, 600 Doesburg, Theo von, 459 Donatello, 122, 122n4 “Done with Hollywood” (“A. K.”), 309–11 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 29 “Doppelgänger, Der” (Rank), 449n4 doppelgänger, 77–78, 186n4, 189, 336, 448, 449n4 Döring, Theodor, 85, 86n4 Dorn, Franz, 580–81

651

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 288 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 351, 517, 519n3 Drachentöter, Der (dance pantomime; Laban), 140–41 Dramaturgische Blätter (journal), 111–14 “Dr. Caligari redivivus” (Arnheim), 439 Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (film; 1906), 380, 381n2 dreams: film as substitute for, 384–86; images of, in film, 20–21; interpretation of, in film, 443–44 Dreigroschenoper, Die (Brecht and Weill), 372–74 Drei-Minuten-Roman (H. Mann), 24, 25n3 Dreiteilige Farbensonatine (Hirschfeld-Mack), 459 Drei von der Tankstelle, Die (film; 1930), 314, 315, 346n2 Dresden (Germany), 99, 141n1 Dreyer, Dietrich W., 544, 544n1 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (film; 1931), 512 Dr. Mabuse (film series), 212, 296, 297n6, 576 Droste, Sebastian, 337, 338n1 drug abuse, 337 dubbing, 309, 310, 312–13 Dudow, Slatan, 374 Duell der Liebe (Hatvany), 308, 308n7 Duenschmann, Hermann, 256–58, 273 Dulac, Germaine, 74, 79 Dumas, Alexandre, 184–85, 186n3, 347, 433n6 Duncan, Martin, 222n3 Dungern, Adolph von, 542, 543n3 Dupont, E. A., 119n1, 323n1, 509 Durchbruch (journal), 252, 253n4 Dürer, Albrecht, 600, 601n1 Dürerbund, 226 Dürerbund-Flugschrift zur Ausdruckskultur, 262–65 Duse, Eleonora, 18, 20n2, 117, 119n4, 378 Dyer, Richard, 317 Dying Swan, The (film; 1905), 186n2 Dynamik der Großstadt (Moholy-Nagy), 462, 462–63n1 Eagleton, Terry, 2n4 “Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” (Hansen), 156 Earth (film; 1930), 371, 519n3 Eastman, George, 330n3 Ebert, Carl, 124n1 Ebert, Friedrich, 282, 282n3, 319, 320, 323nn2–5, 444 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 398n8 Edelstahl (film; 1922), 542, 543n4 Edelsteine (film; 1918), 319n3 Eden Cinema (Berlin, Germany), 427 Edison, Thomas, 16, 20, 74, 75, 220, 222, 227, 255, 394, 549, 581 Edison Cinema (Berlin, Germany), 427 Edison film, 521 Edison Film Company, 254 Edison: Sein Leben und Erfinden (Angel), 424 Edschmid, Kasimir, 426, 434

652

Index

education: “aesthetic”, 9, 130–34, 217, 226–27; cinema reform movement concerns about, 215–19; cinema’s potential for, 226–27; popular, 542 educational films, 43; “cinematic man” and, 239; expressionist film developments and, 421; film archive proposals and, 101; film censorship and, 217–19; Kulturfilms as, 103, 526–29; pedagogical qualities of, 539–40; scholarship on, 485; in Ufa production catalog, 348; worldwide distribution of, 20. See also Kulturfilm “Education of Moviegoers into a Theater Public, The” (Mellini), 151–53 EFA. See Europäische Film Allianz (EFA; European Film Alliance) “Effects of the Film Theater, The” (Baeumler), 381–84 Eggebrecht, Axel, 301–4 Eggeling, Viking, 53, 441, 455, 457n1, 458–59, 459n1, 466–67, 479, 588 Ehe und Kapital (Döblin), 575 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 469 Ehrenstein, Albert, 199 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 85, 86n2, 337n2 Eiko Film, Inc., 277 Eilenberg, Richard, 483, 485n3 Einstein, Albert, 62, 234, 331, 526n4 Eisenstein, Sergei, 351, 353, 354, 367, 371, 376n1, 505, 555, 556. See also Battleship Potemkin (film; 1925) Eisler, Hanns, 374, 552, 553 Eisner, Lotte H., 2, 498; “Avant-Garde for the Masses”, 478; exile of, following Nazi takeover, 5, 282; “Film and Dance Belong Together”, 139–41; as film critic, 3, 282; Indian film review of, 62–64; “The New Youth and Film”, 359–61 Ekel, Das (film; 1931), 349n1 Ekman, Gösta, 346 elections: 1912, 232n1; 1920, 323n4; 1930, 286n3 electricity, 220, 584–85 “electric snapshot photography”, 92 electrotachyscope, 447n4 Elegy for Theory (Rodowick), 2n6, 482 “Elements Once Again, The” (Moholy-Nagy), 592–93 Eleventh Year, The (film; 1928), 476 El Greco, 416 Elias, Julie, 501–3 “elimination of the self” (expressive technique), 119n4 Elisabeth of Bavaria, 77n5 Eljens, Olaf, 56 Elsaesser, Thomas, 5, 9 Elstree Studios (Hertfordshire, England), 312, 312n2 Emak Bakia (film), 466 Emelka, 369, 369n1 Emil und die Detektive (film; 1931), 253n4, 306, 349n1 Emmerich, Ferdinand, 56

Emperor and Galilean (Ibsen), 130, 130n3 Enciclopedia del cinema (Arnheim), 447 “End of Avant-Garde, The” (Strasser), 478–81 End of St. Petersburg, The (film; 1927), 364, 365n3, 376, 376n1 Enemy in the Country, The (brochure), 249–53 Engel, Johann Jakob, 122n1 Engl, Josef, 552, 552n2 England, 24, 34, 57 English Derby (Epsom, England), 34 Enter the Void (film; 2009), 512 Entr’acte (Clair and Picabia), 459, 460, 479 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 5 Epic Theater, 374, 399, 567 Epsom (England), 34 Epstein, Jean, 79, 141, 192, 327, 344n3, 479, 492 Erbin des Grafen von Monte Christo, Die (film; 1919), 433n6 Erdgeist (film; 1923), 122–24, 124n1, 303, 304n5 Erdgeist (Wedekind), 124n1 Erdmann, Hans, 553 Erinnerungen (Tirpitz), 297n3 Erler, Fritz, 21, 22n3 Ernemann, Heinrich, 49n4, 523n4 Ernemann cinematograph, 49, 521 Ernemann Company (Dresden, Germany), 89, 521, 523n4 Eroberung der Luft (Martin), 222n2 “Erotic Films” (Tucholsky), 166–67 eroticism, 122–24, 127, 166–67, 303, 340–44, 396 Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung (journal), 5, 50, 188–89 Erstes Morgenblatt (newspaper), 453 Erstling, Friedrich, 543n1 Esperanto, 33n4, 87, 212, 315, 362, 487. See also “universal language” Essen (Germany), 139–41 Eternal Dream, The (Der ewige Traum; film; 1934), 70n1 “Ethical Potential of Film, The” (Pinthus), 42, 386–89 ethnography, 48–49, 55–56, 76 ethnological exhibitions, 58n1 Étude des mouvements browniens (Henri), 525n4 Eulenberg Affair (1907–09), 242n3, 296 eurhythmics, 196n4 Europäische Atelier, Das (Film-Kurier special issue), 311–12 Europäische Film Allianz (EFA; European Film Alliance), 294, 297–98, 299 Europe (journal), 399 Eva (film; 1913), 319n3 Evangelische Stiftung Hephata, 523n5 Ewers, Hanns Heinz, 13–15, 188, 189, 197, 207 exile, 5, 306, 365, 402, 436 “Exotic Journeys with a Camera” (Ross), 60–61 “Experience and Poverty” (Benjamin), 403 “Experiences in Composing Music for Sound Films” (Meisel), 572–74 export films, 294–95

Index

expressionism, 6; aesthetics of, and insanity, 422; as countermovement, 436–38; end of, 447; journals, 42, 220, 253n4, 434, 489n1; naturalist film aesthetics vs., 439–40; original communication of, 118; Pinthus as chronicler of, 171; vitalist prose of, 426–33 expressionism and cinema: Cabinet of Dr. Caligari debate and, 422–26; Diebold on dynamization of visual art and, 415–20; dream sequences and, 443–44; factuality and, 444–47; film technology and, 420–21; Galeen’s retrospective gaze at, 447–49; Mierendorff on embourgeoisement of cinema and, 426–33; Müller on film as “quintessentially expressionist”, 433–36 “Expressionism and Cinema” (Diebold), 415–20 Expressionismus (Bahr), 419n3 Expressionismus und Film (Kurtz), 300, 440–42 expressionist architecture, 297n9, 487n2 expressionist drama, 39, 54n1, 365, 367 expressionist film, 308, 338, 359, 420–21, 424, 434–38, 441–42, 447–49, 458, 467, 576. See also Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (film; 1920); expressionism and cinema “Expressionist Film, The” (David), 420–21 expressionist literature, 53, 54n1, 171, 209, 220, 253, 361n6, 365, 367, 426, 482 expressionist painting, 119n7, 404, 415–20, 454, 588 extemporizing, 87–88 eye, and mimic expression, 136–39 Eye of the World, The (Das Auge der Welt; film series), 104n1 Fables Studios, 172n2 face: facial expressions, 119–21, 132, 193, 194–95; Kracauer on Garbo’s, 144–46; Lang on, 141–42, 142n1 Fackel, Die (satirical journal), 77, 164n4, 267–69 Fairbanks, Douglas, 288, 289, 290n7, 296, 331, 333n1, 448 fairgrounds, 32–33, 36, 113, 221, 259, 399, 423, 426, 445, 460, 482, 500, 608–609 fairy tales, 211–12, 401, 403, 403n3, 470, 542, 543n5 Falkenberg, Wilhelm, 523n3 “Falling in Love Again” (song; Hollaender), 70n2 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The (film; 1927), 98 Famous Players–Lasky, 294 Fanck, Arnold, 34, 68–70, 70n1, 97, 134, 212n2, 250, 564 fandom, culture of, 317 fan magazines, 7n17, 344–46 “Fantastic Film” (Galeen), 447–49 fantasy, 62, 81, 84, 118, 124, 135, 244, 249, 379–384, 388, 397, 407–408, 429–30, 434, 446–48, 453, 533, 576, 598, 590 Fantasy Machine, The (Fülöp-Miller), 407–8 Farblichtkonzert (László), 604 farces, 348 “Farewell to Silent Film” (Balázs), 517–19 “Farmer and the Dentist, The” (comic sketch), 27 Farmer aus Texas, Der (film), 501

653

fascism, 97, 303, 602 See also National Socialist Party; Third Reich fashion, 163, 396, 482, 501–3 fast-motion photography, 78–81, 508–9 Faust (Goethe), 21, 22n3, 33n3, 234, 332, 337n3, 489–90, 529n1, 582n1, 586 Faust des Riesen, Die (film; 1917), 319n2, 319n3 Faust des Riesen, Die (Stratz), 319n2 fax machine, 591 Fechter, Paul, 438n3 féerie productions, 21 Fehér, Friedrich, 424 Feind im Land, Der (brochure), 249–53 Fejos, Paul, 308n3 Feld, Hans, 337–38 Feldkinos, 293 Felix the Cat cartoons, 471, 554, 604 Felke, Naldo, 234–35 femininity, 340–43 Ferdinand, Franz, 120 Ferdinand-Bielitz, Elsa, 120 Ferdinand Lassalle (film; 1918), 433n5 Ferien vom Ich (Keller), 547, 548n2 Festschrift zur Feier des 50-jährigen Bestehens der Annoncenexpedition Rudolf Mosse, 279n2 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 308, 308n8 Feyder, Jacques, 146n3 Fiat lux (film; 1923), 583 film: as art, 10, 594; education about, 333–35; literature and, 392–94; material decomposition of, 99, 100–101; as photography, 333; proximity to reality, 266–67 “Film, A” (Kracauer), 389–91 Film, Der (journal), 141–42, 273–75 film actors: American, most famous, 289; body of, 122, 124–26; manuals for, 119–22; silent film aesthetics and, 195; sound technology and, 142–44; stage actors as, 111, 111n4, 188, 189n1, 318, 610–11; transition to sound film, 562–63. See also stars; star system; specific actor/actress “Film Advertising” (Pinschewer), 530–32 “Film Advertising and Advertising Films” (Lassally), 537–39 “Film Advertising and the Advertising Film” (Tannenbaum), 168–69 film aesthetics, 482. See also silent film aesthetics Film als Film: 1910 bis heute (ed. Hein and Herzogenrath), 450–52 “Film-America and Us” (Jacoby), 297–98 “Film and Conviction” (Pabst), 375–76 “Film and Dance Belong Together” (Eisner and Laban), 139–41 “Film and Fashion” (Elias), 501–3 “Film and Music: Illustration or Composition?” (Becce), 515–17 “Film and Music: On the Experiments in Baden-Baden” (Strobel), 552–55 “Film and Propaganda” (Münzenberg), 367–68 “Film and Radio” (Jhering), 585–86

654

Index

“Film and Theater” (C. Hauptmann), 115–19, 212n1 “Film and the People” (H. Mann), 364–65 “Film Archive of the Great General Staff, The” (E. W.), 88–89 film archives: documentary films assembled from, 103–4, 104n1; of educational films, 527–28; of German Army Great General Staff, 88–89; private, in Berlin Film and Photo Exhibition (1932), 607–8; proposals for, 74–77, 81–84, 99–102, 105–7, 522; WWI films in, 281–82 film art, 9, 153, 182, 197–98, 254, 300, 326, 334–35, 370, 397, 420–21, 452, 462n1, 465, 473, 477, 519, 534, 557, 564, 587–88, 594, 604–605; Arnheim on, 569; Balázs on, 105–106, 123, 130–34, 505–508, 519, 559; Behne on, 457–59; Lang on, 498; Russian, 355, 358, 399 film artists, 141, 192, 300, 319, 345, 399 film art theater (Filmkunstspiele), 163 “Film as a Means of Agitation” (Genenncher), 279–81 “Film as an Original Art Form, The” (Richter), 505 Film as Art (Arnheim), 459, 485, 487n1, 600, 602–3 film—as “art for the times”: Autorenfilm and, 178, 182–83, 184, 188–89; ballad as suitable for, 184–86; calls for, 190–92, 209; cinema reform and, 221–22; film dramas and, 192–96, 199–203; Friedell on possibilities of, 178–82; kitsch and, 178, 208–9, 210–12; Laemmle on film as “internationally collective art”, 305–6; Lubitsch on film poetry, 208–10; mass aesthetic/moral edification through, 203–6; Pinthus on, 187–88, 199–203; Scheller on film as relaxation/distraction, 196–99; Wegener on artistic possibilities of, 206–8 “Film as a Work of Art” (Behne), 457–59 film—as chiffre of modernity, 6, 8; Chaplin and, 398–402; as dream substitute, 384–86; ethical potential of, 42, 386–89; Giese on chorus girls and film, 395–98; Kracauer’s reviews of The Street, 389–92; as mass-produced fantasy, 407–8; Mickey Mouse character and, 403; painting and, 404–6; as sign of democratic modernity, 392–94; “spiritual needs” of modern mass audiences and, 381–84; theater vs. cinema aesthetics, 377–81 “Film as Historian” (Wolf), 94–95, 169 film—as knowledge/persuasion, 6–7; in advertising, 530–32, 537–39, 546–48; in biology/ medicine, 523–26, 526n5; in educational films, 539–40; in industrial films, 540–41; in Kulturfilms, 532–34, 539–43, 545; in law enforcement, 535–37; in neurology/psychiatry, 520–23; in popular education, 526–29; in promotional films, 545–46; X-ray technology, 529–30 “film at the bauhaus: a rejoinder” (Moholy-Nagy), 461–63 “Film Bolshevism” (Olimsky), 249–53

film composers, 515, 572–74 film crews, 562 film criticism, 18, 204, 318, 375. See also specific critic film culture. See American cinema; American film industry; cinephilia; German film industry; Hollywood; internationalism of film; stars; star system Film Culture (journal), 505 Film d’art, 182, 183n1 “Film Dramas and Film Mimes” (Turszinsky), 108–11 “Film Education” (“Hugo”), 333–35 “Film Ereignis, Ein” (Roh), 477n1 Film-Europe, 311–12, 312n1 “Film-Europe, a Fact” (anon.), 311–12 “Film Europe” and “Film America” (ed. Higson and Maltby), 312n1 film festivals, 105 film frames, 91 Filmgegner von heute, Filmfreunde von morgen (Richter), 333, 475 “Film Germany and Film America” (Laemmle), 305–6 film history, 9, 106, 315, 333, 335, 510, 549, 557, 564, 607–12 filmic lie, 274 film illusion, 335–337, 340, 547 “Film Image and Prophetic Speech” (Kracauer), 391–92 film industry: distribution networks of, 224; marketing strategies of, 349–50; money invested in, 206, 224; national archive proposal and, 102; nationalization of, 114; as opportunity for failed theater actresses, 153–54; theatrical productions and, 21; during WWI, 266. See also American film industry; German film industry “Film Internationality” (Lubitsch), 298–300 “Film in the New Germany” (Film-Kurier editorial), 282–84 Film in Ziffern und Zahlen, Der (Jason), 308 “Film Is Promotion” (Cürlis), 545–46 Film ist Rhythmus (Richter), 459 film journals, 317; Austrian, 329; early, 5; numbers of, 7n17; workers’, 351. See also specific journal film kitsch, 57 Filmkritik (journal), 5 Filmkunstspiele, 163 Film-Kurier (journal): “The ‘Absolute’ Fashion” (Ruttmann), 464–65; “Anita Berber” (Feld), 337–38; annual picture-book published by, 330; as archival source, 7n17; “Art and Technology in Film” (Michaelis), 581–82; “Avant-Garde for the Masses” (Eisner), 478; “Avant-Garde in the Realm of the Possible” (Richter), 475–76; “Documentary and Artistic Film” (Blum), 103–4; establishment of, 282; “Expressionism in Film” (“J. B.”), 422–24; Feld as editor of, 337; “Film and Dance Belong Together” (Eisner

Index

and Laban), 139–41; “Film as Historian” (Wolf), 94–95; “film at the bauhaus: a rejoinder” (Moholy-Nagy), 461–63; “FilmEurope, a Fact” (anon.), 311–12; “Film in the New Germany” (editorial), 282–84; “Film Is Promotion” (Cürlis), 545–46; “Film vom Bauhaus” (review), 462–63n1; “Fritz Lang: Problems in Sound Film Design: Moving Away from Naturalism”, 575–77; “Homosexuality and Jewishness” (Friedmann), 240–42; “Internationality through the Version System” (anon.), 312–13; “Mass-Man in the Cinema” (Ritter), 366–67; “The Muteness of the Film Image” (Kalbus), 485–87; “My Ideal Screenplay” (Lang and Murnau), 498–99; “A New India Film” (Eisner), 62–64; “The New Youth and Film” (Eisner), 359–61; “Only the Transformed Author Can Transform Film” (Döblin), 574–75; “Die Produktion der Ufa 1931–1932” (Kracauer), 347–48, 349n2; “The Reality of Sound Film” (Pabst), 563–64; “The Significance of Film for International Understanding” (“Valentin”), 292–94; “The Spectator in Cinema” (Wolf), 169–70; “The Style of the Export Film” (May), 294–95; “The Telefilm” (Bastian), 584–85; 10th-anniversary issue of, 564 Filmliga, 480 film magazines, 338–40 film mimes, 109–11 Film-Musik-Union, 555 “Film of Factuality, The” (Breuer), 444–47 Film of Tomorrow, The (ed. Zehder), 384–86 Film-Operateur, Der (Pander), 489 film palaces. See picture palaces film photo albums, 349–50 Film Photos wie noch nie (ed. Bucher and Kindt), 64–66, 447–49, 470–71 film poetry, 208–10 film posters, 168–69, 236–37 film projector, 549 “Film Propaganda for German Affairs Abroad” (Stresemann), 273–75 Filmprüfstelle (Film Censorship Office), 284, 353 Filmschauspieler, Der (Otten), 120 film serials, 58, 219n5, 433n7 film societies, 72, 351, 361, 466, 480, 574. See also ciné-clubs, Gesellschaft Neuer Film; Volksverband für Filmkunst film stars. See stars “Film Statistics: Looking Backward and Forward” (Jason), 308–9 film stock, light-sensitive, 510 filmstrips, 75, 77n4, 244–45 Film-Studie (film; 1928), 466, 555n3 Filmtechnik (journal): “An Afterword to Caligari“ (Reimann), 438–40; “A Commentary on the Crisis Facing Montage” (Arnheim), 568–72; “A Conviction” (Kracauer), 559–61; “The Delirious Camera” (Seeber), 503–5; “Done

655

with Hollywood” (“A. K.”), 309–11; “The Educational Values of Film Art” (Balázs), 130–34; “The Elements Once Again” (Moholy-Nagy), 592–93; “The End of Avant-Garde?” (Strasser), 478–81; “A Glance into the Future” (Warschauer), 598–600; “Individual and Montage” (Pick), 370–72; “The Isolated Artist” (Ruttmann), 474–75; “Only Stars!” (Balázs), 325–27; “On the Psychomechanics of the Spectator” (Witlin), 136–39; “Productive and Reproductive Film Art” (Balázs), 505–8; Seeber as co-editor of, 503; “Subjective Movement” (Holland), 137, 512–15; “The Third Dimension” (Grave), 593–95; “Where Is the Sound Film Archive?” (Balázs), 105–7 film technology, 7; art/commerce relationship and, 474; bioscope (Bioskop), 115, 116, 433n8, 579–80; color, 583–84; economic considerations, 589–90; expressionism and, 420–21; lighting potentials, 592–93; modern era and, 64–66; potentials of, 578; rapidity of images through, 38–39. See also sound technology film technology—imagined future, 7; animated films, 603–7; color film, 583–84; lighting, 592–93; sound films, 598–600; telecinema, 595–98; television, 584–85, 590–92, 595–98, 602–3; three-dimensionality (3-D), 578–79, 593–95 film theory: archival sources for, 7; “classical”, 10; historicization of, 2; institutionalization of, 2–3; Kultur-Bildung connection and, 9; as media theory, 9; necessity of, 4–5; “road map” for, 3, 5–8 film titles, 237–38 Film-Ton-Kunst (journal), 515 “Filmtradition und Filmzukunft” (lecture; Balázs; 1926), 505 Film und Fernsehen (journal), 317–19 “Film und Foto” exhibition (Stuttgart, Germany; 1929), 472 Film und seine Welt, Der (ed. Henseleit), 375–76 Film und Volk (journal), 361–65, 367–68, 369. See also Arbeiterbühne und Film (journal) Filmunterrichts-Organisation (Organization for Film Education), 539 “Film vom Bauhaus” (review), 462–63n1 Film vom der Königin Luise, Der (film; 1913), 433n5 Film von morgen, Der (ed. Zehder), 124–26, 386–89 Filmwelt (fan magazine), 344–46 “Film Works for Us!” (Balázs), 362–63 “First One Back from Hollywood, The” (Wilder), 306–8 Fischinger, Hans, 606, 607n6 Fischinger, Oskar, 600, 603 Fitzmaurice, George, 304n8 Flaherty, Robert, 55, 212n5 Flamme, Die (film; 1923), 303, 304n5 Flechtheim, Alfred, 295–97 Flesch, Hans, 467, 586

656

Index

flip books, 581, 611n2 Flötenkonzert von Sanssouci, Das (film; 1930), 348, 349n4, 355n1, 565 Flotow, Friedrich von, 161n5, 483, 485n3 Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm, 287, 287n3 folk art, film as, 330–33 folk festivals, 76 Forch, Carl, 35–38, 182 Ford Motor Company, 392 Form, Die (journal), 472–74 “Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression, The” (Benjamin), 399 Forst, Willi, 345 Forsyte Saga, The (Galsworthy), 356n2 Fortuny, Mariano, 589n2 Foto-Auge (Roh and Tschichold), 477n1 Fotorama, 226n1 Foulon, Otto, 300 found-footage films, 103–4 4 Devils (film), 307 Fox, William, 307, 552n2 Fox Company, 66–67, 71, 552n2 Fox Europa, 136, 463, 479 Fra Diavolo (Auber), 29, 30n2 France, 25; American cinema in, 288; avant-garde movement in, 8, 465–66, 474–75, 480; Film d’art movement in, 182, 183n1; German films in, 283, 292; politics and film in, 257–58; during WWI, 258; WWI propaganda films of, 273 François-Franck, Charles Émile, 525 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 88, 89, 89n1, 271–72, 273n2 Frank, Charles Emile François, 524, 525n3 Frank, Leonhard, 347, 349n1 Frankfurt (Germany), 216, 353–55, 452–54 Frankfurter Rundfunk (Frankfurt Radio), 467 Frank furter Zeitung: “Abstract Film” (Kracauer), 465–67; “All about Film Stars” (Kracauer), 344–46; “All Quiet on the Western Front“ (Kracauer), 284–86; “Chaplin in Old Films” (Kracauer), 400–401; “The Cinema on Münzstraße” (Kracauer), 175–76; “Destitution and Distraction” (Kracauer), 347–49; “A Film” (Kracauer), 389–91; “Greta Garbo: A Study” (Kracauer), 144–46; “Kierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin” (Adorno), 401–2; “The Klieg Lights Stay On” (Kracauer), 353–55; Kracauer as writer for, 64, 71, 73n4, 146nn2–3, 177n4, 286n4, 349nn4–5, 355n1, 402, 558n3; “Mountains, Clouds, People” (Kracauer), 97–98; “A New Art: Film’s Music for the Eyes” (Diebold), 452–54; “On the Border of Yesterday” (Kracauer), 607–12; Rauscher as correspondent for, 184; “The Restructuring of Ufa” (anon.), 304–5; Roth as correspondent for, 98; Sieburg as foreign correspondent for, 92, 124; “Sound-Image Film” (Kracauer), 556–58; “The Uncovered Grave” (Roth), 98–99; “Thoughts toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema” (Lukács), 377–81

Frankfurt School, 377. See also Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer Franz Josef I (Emperor of Austria), 77n5, 78 Franz Popjels Jugend (C. Hauptmann), 119n1 Frauenschicksale (film), 158, 161n4 Frauen und Film (journal), 5 Frau im Mond (film; 1929), 62 Fräulein Frau (film; 1912), 158 Frederick III (emperor of Germany), 529n3 Frederick the Great, 241, 287, 287n1, 355n1 Frederick William I (king of Prussia), 394n1 Free Association of Photography (Freie Photographische Vereinigung), 81 Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Frankfurt, Germany), 391 Freksa, Friedrich, 111–14, 114n2, 115, 454n2 Fremde Mädchen, Das (film; 1911), 111, 114n2, 384 French Academy of Sciences, 350 French cinema, 24, 182, 183n1, 266, 274, 302–3 French Revolution, 56, 74 French Second Republic, 361n6 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 39n2, 41, 340, 443, 449n4 Freudlose Gasse, Die (film; 1925), 330, 443, 504 Freund, Karl, 206, 364, 463, 465, 505, 508n3, 509–11 Frey, Hermann, 98n1 Fridericus Rex films, 287, 287n1, 296, 348, 353, 355, 355n1 Friedell, Egon, 178–82, 182n6 Friedensbund der Kriegsteilnehmer (Peace League of War Veterans), 281 Friedmann, Walther, 240–42 Friedrichstädter Theater (Berlin, Germany), 402 Fritsch, Willy, 345–46, 346n2, 572n3, 604 “Fritz Lang: Problems in Sound Film Design: Moving Away from Naturalism” (Film-Kurier article), 575–77 Fröhlich, Gustav, 345 “From Berlin North and Thereabouts” (Langer), 161–63 From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer), 97, 176, 177n4, 261 Fuchsjagd auf Skiern durchs Engadin, Ein (film; 1922), 135, 135n1 Fülöp-Miller, René, 25n4, 407–8 Fury (film; 1936), 534 “Fußball, Vorkriegsliebe und Revolution” (Kracauer), 71 “Future of Film, The” (Müller), 433–36 “Future of Mickey Mouse, The” (Diebold), 603–7 futurism, 53, 118, 404, 416, 420, 432, 437, 450, 454 futurist film, 390, 420, 421n1 Gad, Urban, 158, 161n3, 230n1, 517n1 Galeen, Henrik, 308n2, 447–49 Galili, Doron, 10n24 Galsworthy, John, 356n2 Ganeva, Mila, 501 Garbo, Greta, 144–46, 146nn2–3, 310, 325, 341, 342, 343

Index

Gartenlaube, Die (family journal), 429, 433n3 Gaudreault, André, 4n11 Gaugin, Paul, 417, 419n8 Gaulke, Johannes, 271–73 Gaumont Film Company, 254 Gaumont Newsreel, 87 Gaupp, Robert, 186n1, 223–27 Gavarni, Paul, 601, 602n3 Gebühr, Otto, 287, 287n1 Geflügeltes Wild (film), 348 Gegenwart, Die (journal), 271–73 Geheimes Leben in Teichen und Seen (film), 348 Geheimnis der Gräfin Karinsky, Das (film), 347 Geheimnisse einer Seele (film; 1926), 443–44, 503, 515 Geibel, Emanuel, 297n10 Geierwally, Die (film; 1921), 319–20, 323n1 Geierwally, Die (Hillern), 319, 323n1 Geist der Astrologie, Der (Schmitz), 355 Geist des Films, Der (Balázs). See Spirit of Film, The (Balázs) gender, 4, 147, 156, 215, 231. See also authorship; spectatorship; women Genenncher, Rudolf, 279–81 General Electric, 599 General Line, The (film; 1929), 371 General Motors, 599 Genuine (film; 1920), 436, 441 George, Stefan, 393 “Georg von Lukács’s Romantheorie” (Kracauer), 390 geotropism, 80 German Army: film archives of, 88–89; homosexuals in, 242n3; propaganda office overseen by, 269–71; reputation of, 284; WWI atrocity allegations against, 274, 275n3 German Cameramen’s Club, 505 German Chamber Music Baden-Baden, 552–55 German cinema: artistic reputation of, 565–66; birth of, 4–5; cinematography as distinguishing mark of, 509–11, 565; creation of, 309–11; ethical duty of, 96; great directors of, 498; historical spectacles, 295–97; internationality of, 375, 565–66; worldwide success of, 314 “German Cinema” (Siemsen), 295–97 German Colonial Association (Deutscher Kolonial-Verein), 49 German East African Railway, 55–56 German Empire: cinema and ethnographic studies of, 48–49, 55–56; national anthem of, 222n4; WWI and loss of colonies in, 4 German Enlightenment, 9 German film industry: American dealings with, 297–98, 302; avant-garde movement and, 6, 450, 461–63, 472–74; conglomerates, 290–92; expansion of, 291, 292n1, 302; export films, 294–95; Hollywood vs., 6, 301, 302; leftist critique of, 368–69; newsreels and, 369, 369n1; post-WWI, 292–94; Reimann on Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as lesson for, 438–40; Russian films

657

and, 472; statistical data, 308–9; theater organization membership and, 36, 38n1; transition to sound film, 563–64; Ufa restructuring, 304–5; unification of, 276; world market and, 290–91 German idealism, 455 German-Indian co-productions, 63, 253n3 German League for Human Rights, 286 German media, 69, 240–42, 242n1, 245–46, 267–69, 269–71, 282n2, 317–19 German Ministry of War, 275–77 German modernity, 4–5. See also film—as “art for the times”; film—as chiffre of modernity; modernity; modern urban life German Motion Picture Company (DLG), 246 German National People’s Party (DNVP), 246n1, 284, 286n2 German Natural Scientists and Doctors Convention (Dresden, Germany; 1907), 521 German Officer Corps, 172 German People’s Party, 273 German Red Cross, 420 German Reichsarchiv, 172 German Revolution (1918–19), 4, 365–66, 459 Germany: feminism in, 227; movie theater demographics in, 172–73; penal code in, 240; war bonds issued by, 277; during WWI, 258–59 Gerst-Thunsche method, 313 gerutschte Strumpfband, Das (Lustspiel), 167 Gervid production company, 420 Gesellschaft für künstlerische Lichtspiele “Deutsche Kunst”, 276 Gesellschaft Neuer Film, 465–67, 598 Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Lichtbildkunst, 17 Gestaltendes Schauspiel (Huszár), 459 Gestalt psychology, 92n1 Gestapo, 240 gestures: art of, 426, 486; Balázs on, 123, 132, 492, 495; in mimic expression, 121–22, 423, 610; “international language” of, 33, 63, 115–16, 183, 300–301, 384, 389, 431, 564; “originary”, 115–19; theater mimes vs. film mimes, 16, 32, 108–11, 266, 272, 297, 318, 343, 412, 511; theater vs. cinema, 33, 36, 85, 137, 138, 194–95; words and, 36, 43, 102, 112–13, 116–17, 125, 138, 180–81, 378–79, 391 ghost effects, 589–90 “Giantess, The” (poem; Baudelaire), 341, 344n4 Giese, Fritz, 304n3, 395–98 Gilardone, Heinrich, 269n4 Gilbert, John, 342 Ginna, Arnaldo, 450 Ginster (Kracauer), 284 Girlkultur (Giese), 304n3, 395, 396 Gish, Lillian, 304n7, 331, 343, 506 Glace à trois faces, La (film; 1927), 340, 344n3 “Glance into the Future, A” (Warschauer), 598–600 Gleichheit, Die (journal), 230–34

658

Index

Gloria-Palast (Berlin, Germany), 143, 338, 564 Gloria-Palast (Frankfurt, Germany), 556–58 Glück, Gustav, 403, 403n1 Glückskinder (film; 1936), 346n2 Godard, Jean-Luc, 5 Godless Girl, The (film; 1928), 348, 349n5 Goebbels, Joseph, 105, 286–87, 286n3 Goerke, Franz, 81–84, 526 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 18, 21, 22n3, 24, 44, 188, 189, 212n1, 216, 219n1, 234, 331, 332, 337n3, 393, 398n8, 410, 412, 415, 416, 419n12, 506, 526, 529n1 Goetz, Hermann, 484 Golden, Joseph, 433n6 Gold Rush (film; 1925), 290n6, 401, 402, 448 Goldscheid, Rudolf, 239 Golem, Der (film; 1915): fantasy in, 118, 119n5; Galeen as codirector/screenwriter for, 447; premiere of (1915), 208n2; set design for, 500–501; spectatorship of, 211; success of, 212; Wegener as director of, 206, 207 Golem, Der (Meyrink), 208n1 Golem: How He Came into the World, The (film; 1920), 297n9, 447, 509 Goll, Claire, 53, 288–90 Goll, Yvan, 52–54, 288 Gos cinema (Moscow), 357 Gottowt, John, 189 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 325n1 Goulding, Edmund, 344n6 Go West (film; 1925), 448, 449n2 Grabmal einer großen Liebe, Das (film; 1928), 63 Graetz, Paul, 558 Gräfin von Monte Christo, Die (film), 347 Graf Zeppelin (airship), 252n1 Gralla, Dina, 345 gramophone, 19–20, 26, 32, 44, 54, 81, 85–86, 90, 101, 175, 179, 191, 549–50, 568 Grand Hotel (film; 1932), 144, 145–46, 146n2, 327 Grand National steeplechase (Liverpool, England), 34 Grand Prix (Paris, France), 34 graphic art, 600–601 Grasset, J., 258n1 Grau, Albin, 487–89 Grave, Erich, 593–95 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 62 Great Britain, 258, 267; Chaplin as viewed in, 400; German films in, 292; WWI propaganda films of, 268, 269nn1–2, 273 Great Depression, 347–49 Great White Silence, The (film; 1924), 58, 60n1 Gregor, Joseph, 407 Grempe, P. Max, 230–32 “Greta Garbo: A Study” (Kracauer), 144–46 Griffith, D. W., 288, 295, 296, 304n7, 496, 499, 508n2 Grimm Brothers, 403n3, 448 Grock (Charles Adrien Wettach), 397, 398n5 Gronostay, Walter, 555, 566–67

Gropius, Walter, 499n1, 533 Gross, Hans, 535, 537n2 Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition), 500 Große Bilderbuch des Films, Das (Film-Kurier annual picture-book), 60–61, 330–33, 501–3 Große Deutsche Funkausstellung, 591–92, 592n3 Großes Schauspielhaus (Berlin, Germany), 486, 487n2 Große Sünderin, Die (film; 1914), 319n2 Grossman, Harry, 290n3 Grotesken im Schnee (film; 1928), 479 Grune, Karl, 390, 391 Gsell, Paul, 119n2 Guazzoni, Enrico, 186, 199n1 Gunning, Tom, 48, 49n1, 154, 426, 549, 551n1 Günther, Albrecht Erich, 247 Gupta, Sarada, 64 Gutenberg, Johannes, 394, 528 Guttmann, Richard, 238–40, 242 Haas, Willy, 282, 330–33 Haase, Friedrich, 85, 86n4 Habermas, Jürgen, 147 Habilitation (Adorno), 402 Hackländer, Friedrich Wilhelm, 185, 186n3 Häfker, Hermann: Brunner critiqued by, 236; “The Call for Art”, 190–92; Cinema and Geography, 51–52, 68; Cinema and the Educated Class, 51, 260–61; death of, as Nazi political prisoner, 262; Kino und Kunst, 51, 190–92; The Tasks of Cinematography in This War, 262–65 Hagenbeck, Carl, 37, 38n2, 38n3, 58n1 Hagenbeck, John, 56, 57, 58n1, 72 Hagener, Malte, 5, 479 Hague Peace Conferences (1899/1907), 366 Haid, Liane, 345 Hainisch, Michael, 329, 330n4 Hake, Sabine, 5n13 Hallo! Afrika forude! (film; 1929), 344n12 hallucinations, 46–47 Hamburg (Germany), 34, 83 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 332, 397 Handbuch der Filmwirtschaft Jahrgang 1930 (Jason), 308–9 Hands of Orlac, The (film; 1924), 436 Hanneles Himmelfahrt (film; 1922), 515, 517n1 Hanneles Himmelfahrt (Hauptmann), 517n1 Hansen, Miriam, 156 Hanslick, Eduard, 453, 454n5, 606 Hanstein, Otfrid von, 56 Hanswurst comedies, 324, 325n1 Hardt, Ernst, 344n13 Harms, Rudolf, 174–75, 300 Harrison, Beatrice, 589n5 Hartau, Ludwig, 486 Hartlaub, Gustav, 447 Hartmann, Paul, 343–44 Hartmann von Aue, 398n1 Harvey, Lilian, 315, 345–46, 346n2, 572n3, 604

Index

Hasenclever, Walter, 39–41, 199 Hasso, Harry, 544n3 Hatvany, Lili, 308 Hauff, Wilhelm, 185, 186n3, 230n3, 448 Hauptmann, Carl, 115–19, 212n1 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 54n3, 115, 320; Atlantis, 119n1, 205, 206n1; Autorenfilm and, 182; awards won by, 323n3; film criticism and, 18; films adapted from literary works of, 54, 119n1, 206n1, 319n2, 497, 515; Hanneles Himmelfahrt, 515, 517n1; involvement with film, 318; literary career of, 54n3; Phantom, 497; Rose Bernd, 319n2 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 447 Haus zum Mond, Das (film; 1921), 441 Havas (news agency), 274, 275n2 Hayakawa, Sessue, 289, 290n9 Hebert, Stephen, 611n2 Hedengran, Solveig, 343, 344n12 Hedin, Sven, 56 Heidegger, Martin, 64, 275 “Heil dir im Siegerkranz” (national anthem), 222, 222n6 Heilige Berg, Der (film; 1926), 134–35 Heimatfilme, 70n1 Heimat und Fremde (film; 1913), 189n1 Hein, Birgit, 450–52 Heine, Wolfgang, 282, 282n3 heliotropism, 80 Hellpach, Willy, 395 Hellwig, Albert, 45–47, 222–23, 246–47 Helm, Brigitte, 341, 345, 347 Hennes, Hans, 520–23 Henny Porten (documentary film; 1928), 104n1 “Henny Porten for President” (Pinthus), 319–23 Henri, Victor, 524, 525n4 Henseleit, Felix, 375–76 Henslow, George, 419n12 Hephata Institute for the Mentally Disabled (Mönchengladbach, Germany), 521, 523n5 Heraclitus, 79 Heritage of Our Times (Bloch), 130n3 Herrin der Welt, Die (film series; 1919–20), 294 Herrin des Nils, Die (film; 1913), 197 “Herz am Rhein, Das” (song), 164n2 Herzogenrath, Wulf, 450–52 “Hias” (Kraus), 269n4 Hias, Der (Gilardone), 268–69, 269n4 Higgs, Harry, 430 Higson, Andrew, 312n1 Hilfe, Die (journal), 25–28 Hillern, Wilhelmine von, 319, 323n1 Hindemith, Paul, 552, 554, 555 Hintertreppe (film; 1921), 489, 490, 499 Hirsch, Hugo, 519n4 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 240, 242n3 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig, 459, 567, 567n3 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard), 5 historians: cinema potential for use by, 28, 29–30, 88–89, 94–95; film archives as source for, 9, 74–77, 82–83, 100–102, 103–107, 366, 411, 528

659

historical films, 30, 158, 288, 295–97, 348, 502, 587, 607 historicism, 436 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 384 Hitchcock, Alfred, 344n2, 443 Hitler, Adolf, 105, 262, 306 Hitlerjunge Quex (film; 1933), 366 “Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity” (Benjamin), 399 Hochwacht, Die (monthly journal), 235 Hodler, Ferdinand, 416 Hofbräuhaus (Munich, Germany), 28 Hofer, Franz, 87 Hoffmann, Carl, 565–66 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 24, 25n5, 188, 189, 189n3, 380, 448 Hofmann, Ludwig von, 21, 22n3 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 111, 169, 182, 182n6, 384–86, 398n7 Hogarth, William, 15, 15n4 Hohenzollern (Kaiser’s yacht), 83 Hohe Ufer, Das (journal), 532–34 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 607 Hollaender, Friedrich, 70n2 Holland, 8, 465–66, 474–75, 480 Holland, Lotar, 137, 512–15 Hölle, Die (film; 1911), 119n5 Höllering, Franz, 361–62 Höllriegel, Arnold (Richard A. Bermann), 199 Hollywood, 249, 251; Film-Europe and, 311–12; film scoring in, 572; Fülöp-Miller on, 407–408; German actors in, 306–8; German film industry vs., 6, 301, 302; global cultural/ economic domination of, 288, 301–4, 309, 311; Leni in, 499; Lubitsch in, 299, 304n6; sound technology and, 310–11; Ufa vs., 348. See also American cinema; American film industry Holocaust, 5 holograms, 578, 598 Holy Mountain, The. See heilige Berg, Der Homer, 180, 331 Homme machine, L’ (Man a Machine; Offray de La Mettrie), 179, 181n2 “homo cinematicus”, 215, 242–43 “Homo Cinematicus” (Stapel), 242–43 homo economicus, 173–74 homosexuality, 240–42, 242nn2–3 “Homosexuality and Jewishness: The Latest Method of Agitation against ‘Aufklärungsfilme’“ (Friedmann), 240–42 Hong, Xia, 2n4 Hood, Fred (Friedrich Huth), 147–49 Hoover, Herbert, 591, 592n2 Hôpital Saint-Louis (Paris, France), 525 Hoppla, wir leben! (Toller), 360, 361n5 Horizontal-Vertikalorchester (Eggeling), 457n1, 458–59, 459n1 Horkheimer, Max, 275, 344, 409 Horn, Camilla, 336 Horner Rennbahn (Hamburg, Germany), 34

660

Index

Horrido (film; 1924), 543, 543n6 horror films, 499, 510 horseraces, 34 “Hostage, The” (Schiller), 20, 20n4 Houdini, Harry, 290n3 “How I Made My Berlin Film” (Ruttmann), 463–64 “How Singing Pictures (Sound Pictures) Are Made” (anon.), 549–51 Hugenberg, Alfred, 275n4, 304, 369, 369n1 Hugenberg group, 304–5 “Hugo” (pseud.), 333–35 Hugo, Victor, 306n2 Huhtamo, Erkki, 9n22 Hulda Rasmussen (film; 1911), 230n1 human zoos, 58n1 Humphrey, William, 161n4 Hungarian Soviet Republic, 351 Hunter, Ian, 2n5 Hurley, Frank, 60n2 Huszár, Vilmos, 459, 459n2 Huth, Friedrich (Fred Hood), 147–49 Hyan, Hans, 318, 319n2 Ibsen, Henrik, 130, 130n3, 180, 397, 412n2 Ica camera, 61, 61n4 “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt” (song; Hollaender), 70n2 If I Only Had the Cinema! (Mierendorff), 200, 426–33, 434–35 Ihr Sohn (film; 1917), 119n1 “Illusion in the Cinematographic Theater” (Hood), 147–49 illusionism, 45–47, 62, 147–49, 196–99, 215, 247, 249, 335–37, 547 “Illusions and Hallucinations during Cinematographic Projections” (Hellwig), 45–47 illustration, 553–54, 566 Illustrierte Filmwoche (weekly), 55–56 Illustrierte Film-Zeitung (newspaper), 305–6 Illustrierter Film-Kurier (magazine), 142–44, 338–40 Images mobiles (Léger and Murphy), 459 image wars: All Quiet on the Western Front controversy, 284–87; crowd psychology and, 256–58; propaganda films, 254–56; state/ cinema relationship and, 269–71 imagination, 75, 77, 94, 127, 137, 149, 181, 185, 198, 207, 219–21, 225, 257, 265, 272, 325, 341, 345, 354, 387, 408, 419, 438, 448, 466, 508, 517, 524, 526, 569, 571, 596, 604–606 Imago (journal), 39n1, 443 “Immer an der Wand lang” (song; Frey/Kollo), 98n1 immersion, 9, 291, 306 immortality, 84–86, 254–55 Impekoven, Sabine, 88n3, 453, 454n4 Imperial Colonial Office (Reichskolonialamt), 49 Imperial German Navy, 366n2 Imperial Naval Office, 297n3

Imperial Tribute Parade (Vienna, Austria-Hungary), 76, 77n5 impressionism, 406, 415, 417, 436–37, 496, 497 “Impressions of a Naïf” (Musil), 323–25 Im Westen nichts Neues (Remarque), 284, 286, 287 In den Tiergärten des Meeres (film; 1923), 542, 543n1 In der Schule bei Freud (ed. Pfeiffer), 38–39 Indian films, 62–64, 253n3 Indian Tomb, The. See Das indische Grabmal indigenous peoples, ethnographic studies of, 48–49, 49n3, 55–56 indische Grabmal, Das (film; 1921), 62, 294 “Individual and Montage” (Pick), 370–72 industrial films, 537, 540–41, 542, 544 industrialization, 4 infantilism, 72 Inferno, L’ (film; 1911), 119n5 innervation. See cinema and sensory perception I.N.R.I. (film; 1923), 436 Insel der Seligen, Die (film; 1913), 197, 199, 199n1, 269n3 Institut für Kulturforschung, 532–33, 542, 545 institutionalization, 7 intermediality, 10 International Congress of Independent Cinema (La Sarraz, Switzerland; 1929), 556 Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (IAH; Workers International Relief), 367 Internationale Camera AG (Dresden, Germany), 61n4 International Exhibition for the Book Industry and Graphic Arts exhibition (Leipzig, Germany; 1914), 259–60 International Film Conference (Paris; 1926), 251, 508–9 internationalism, 252 internationalism of film: artistic vs. economic, 300–301; censorship and, 375; cultural propaganda and, 279–81; European-American collaborations, 305–6; export films, 294–95; film as folk art, 330–33; Film-Europe and, 310–11; Lubitsch on, 298–300; Moholy-Nagy on, 469; post-WWI German film industry and, 292–94; silent vs. sound films, 309–11; sound technology and, 312–13, 563; talking films, 314–16. See also “universal language” “Internationality through the Version System” (anon.), 312–13 “International Talking Film, The” (Pommer), 314–16 “Interpretation of Dreams in Film, The” (Sachs), 443–44 intertitles, 103, 117, 136, 172, 309, 370, 477, 482, 486, 489–92, 543, 565, 609 “Intertitles” (Pander), 489–92 “In the Empire of Film” (anon.), 349–50 “In the Movie Houses of Berlin West” (Langer), 161–62, 163–64 Intolerance (film; 1916), 296, 496, 499

Index

inwardness, 239, 240 Irish War of Independence (1919–21), 296, 297n5 Irrungen (film; 1919), 319n3 Irrwege der Leidenschaft (film; 1912), 230n2 “Is Film National or International?” (Stindt), 300–301 Italian film industry, 302, 303 Italian films, 205, 288, 296, 384 Italy, 292, 331 Ivens, Joris, 479 Jacobi, Joseph Max, 277–79 Jacoby, Georg, 58n3, 294, 297–98, 299 Jagow, Traugott von, 245, 246n3 Jannings, Emil: Berlin Alexanderplatz role considered by, 574; in The Blue Angel (1930), 314–15, 342; Brod on, as lover on film, 343; expressionist performance style of, 143; film education and, 335; internationalism of film and, 331; “Miming and Speaking”, 142–44; Oscar won by (1929), 143; return to Germany, 307, 308n6, 314; silent film aesthetics and, 486; in Stürme der Leidenschaft, 347; in Ufa’s first newsreel, 72n1; in USA, 307; Wilder on, 307; worldwide fame of, 296; writings of, 246 Janowitz, Hans, 423 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, 194, 196n4 Jargon of Authenticity, The (Adorno), 275 Jason, Alexander, 308–9 jazz, 136, 171, 247, 395–96, 398, 398n6, 465, 606 Jazz Singer, The (film; 1927), 316n1 Jensen, Johannes V., 23, 25n1 Jesenská, Milena, 164–66 Jessner, Leopold, 124n1, 304n5 Jesus Christ, 417 Jews, 5, 240–42, 391. See also anti-Semitism Jew Süss (film; 1934), 308, 308n8 Jhering, Herbert, 286, 374–75, 551–52, 585–86 Jianping, Hou, 2n4 John Hagenbecks lustige Jagden und Abenteuer (series; 1920/21), 58n1 Joinville Studios (Paris, France), 312, 312n2 Jolson, Al, 314, 315, 316n1, 564 Jonny spielt auf (jazz opera; Krenek), 398, 398n6 Josetti Film Album, 349–50 journalism: cinematography used in, 51; corruption in, 267; newsreels and, 49–51 Jud Süß (Feuchtwanger), 308 Julian the Apostate, 130, 130n3 jump-cuts, 478 Jung, Carl G., 256 Jünger, Ernst, 8, 325, 408–12 Jungk, Max, 63 Jürgensen, Theodor, 83, 84n3 Justice of the Redskin (film; 1908), 225, 226n1 Justitz, Emil, 433n5 Jutzi, Piel, 361n4 K., A., 309–11 Kaes, Anton, 5n13

661

Kafka, Franz, 15, 165, 403 Kagel, Mauricio, 482 Kahane, Arthur, 197, 199n1 Kainer, Ludwig, 318, 319n1 Kainz, Josef, 85, 86n3, 318, 334, 343 Kaiser, Georg, 390 Kaiser Wilhelm. See Wilhelm II Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring (Vienna, Austria-Hungary), 78, 78n1 Kalbus, Oskar, 104n1, 485–87 kaleidoscope, 534 Kalif Storch (film; 1923), 542, 543n5 Kállai, Ernst, 404–6 Kálmán, Emmerich, 396, 398n4 Kamera Theater (Berlin, Germany), 399, 606, 607n6 Kammer-Lichtspiele (Berlin, Germany), 427 Kammerspielfilms, 370, 486, 489–90 Kandinsky, Wassily, 406, 418, 419n1, 419n16, 419n17, 458 Kant, Immanuel, 174, 331, 381 Kapp Putsch (1920), 246n3 Karolus, August, 584, 591, 592n3 Kastner, Bruno, 296, 297n6 Kästner, Erich, 347, 349n1 Katzenbilder (film; 1922), 542, 543n1 Katzensteg (film; 1915), 428, 433n1, 516 Kaufmann, Nicholas, 129, 543n6 Kayser, Ulrich, 540–41, 543n4 Kearton, Cherry, 82, 84n1, 504, 505n1 Kearton, Richard, 504, 505n1 Keaton, Buster, 448, 449n2 Keller, Paul, 548n2 Keller, Philipp, 41, 41n3 Kid, The (film; 1921), 212, 212n6, 290n6, 587 Kielmansegg, Wilhelm Graf, 295–97 Kiening, Christian, 603 Kientopp (Berlin, Germany), 147; Ewers on “curious pleasures” of, 13–15; Hasenclever on mass appeal of, 39–41; as popular education, 527; spectatorship at, 149–50, 161–63, 185, 527; use of term, 23, 164n4 “Kientopp, The” (Ewers), 13–15 Kienzl, Hermann, 30–31 Kierkegaard, Søren, 401–2 “Kierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin” (Adorno), 401–2 Kiesow, Frederico, 46–47, 47n6 Kinarch, 419, 420n19, 454 Kinder der Sünde (film; 1911), 228, 230n1 Kindt, Albrecht, 64–66, 447–49, 470–71 Kinemacolor, 221, 222n4 Kinematograph, Der (journal): as archival source, 7n17; “Autorenfilm and Its Assessment, The” (anon.), 182–83; “The Benefits of War for the Cinema” (Költsch), 266–67; Brauner as contributor to, 74; “Cinematograph and Schoolchildren” (Kleibömer), 215–19; “Cinematographic Archives” (Brauner), 74–77; “Cinematograph in the Service of Ethnography,

662

Index

Kinematograph, Der (journal) (continued) The” (anon.), 48–49; establishment of, 5; “The Expressionist Film” (David), 420–21; “Film as a Means of Agitation” (Genenncher), 279–81; Häfker as contributor to, 51; “How Singing Pictures (Sound Pictures) Are Made” (anon.), 549–51; “Illusion in the Cinematographic Theater” (Hood), 147–49; “The Movie Girl” (anon.), 153–54; “A New Task for the Cinema” (Weisse), 20–22; “On Living Photography and Film Drama” (Melcher), 17–20; “On the Psychology of the Cinematograph” (Sommer), 28–30; “The Prehistory of the Bioskop and Its First Public Demonstration” (M. Skladanowsky), 579–81; “State and Cinema” (anon.), 269–71; Stein as contributor to, 50; “The Triumph of Film” (Jacobi), 277–79; “War and Cinema” (editorial), 258–59; “Will to Style in Film” (Lang), 95–96 Kinematograph als Volkserzieher, Der (Sellmann), 31 Kinematograph als Volksunterhaltungsmittel, Der (Gaupp and Lange), 196, 223–24, 226–27 Kinematographische Rundschau (journal), 5 Kinematographische Unterrichts-Kurse für Anfänger (Pander), 489 Kinematograph und das sich bewegende Bild, Der (Forch), 36 kineticism, 52–54 Kinetograph (moving picture camera), 74 Kinetoscope, 549 King, Burton, 290n3 King, Henry, 304n7 King Lear (Shakespeare), 29, 30n1 King on Main Street, The (film; 1925), 136 Kino (Russian-language journal), 505 Kinobibliothek, 515 Kinobuch, Das (ed. Pinthus), 39, 187, 188n1, 199–203, 208 Kino-Eye, 17, 476–77 Kino-Eye (film; 1924), 476 Kinogramme, 19 Kino in Gegenwart und Zukunft, Das (Lange), 226, 242 Kinoks movement, 477n1, 477n2 Kinomusikblatt (journal), 515 Kinoreform movement. See cinema reform movement Kinotechnische Rundschau (journal), 589–90 Kinotypen: Vor und hinter den Filmkulissen (Langer), 161–64 Kino und die Gebildeten, Der (Häfker), 51 Kino und Erdkunde (Häfker), 261 Kino und Kunst (Häfker), 51, 190–92, 261, 265 Kino und Theater (Tannenbaum), 192 Kino Universum (Berlin, Germany), 403 “Kintopp as Educator, The” (Hasenclever), 39–41 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 406 kitsch, 325; in adventure films, 57; American cinema and, 288, 393, 394; Autorenfilm and countermovement valorizing, 178; censorship

and, 245; cinephilia and, 318, 346; of early silent films, 518; in film advertising, 162, 169; in film music, 171, 344; Haas on art transformed into, 332; inevitability of, in cinema, 202, 208–9; in Kientopp, 15, 40; Lang on, 210–12; Mierendorff on, 428–30; in mountain films, 69; public weariness with, 590; revues and, 397–98 “Kitsch—Sensation—Culture and Film” (Lang), 210–12 Kittler, Friedrich, 271, 529, 562 Kläber, Kurt, 360, 361n6 Klebinder, Paul, 81–86, 254–56, 526–29 Klee, Paul, 406 Kleibömer, Georg, 51, 215–19 Kleine Muck, Der (film; 1921), 542, 543n5 Klenau, Paul von, 113, 114n3 “Klieg Lights Stay On, The” (Kracauer), 353–55 Klingenberg power plant (Berlin-Rummelsburg, Germany), 364, 365n2 Klinger, Max, 21, 22n3 Klitzsch, Ludwig, 275n4 Klub der Kameraleute Deutschlands (German Cameramen’s Club), 505 Kluge, Alexander, 1, 5, 6 Köbis, Albin, 366, 366n2 Koebner, Franz Wolfgang, 136 Koffka, Kurt, 92n1 Köhler, Alban, 530, 530n1 Köhler, Wolfgang, 92n1 Kohlhiesels Töchter (film; 1920), 288, 290n4 Kohner, Paul, 306, 306n3 Kollo, Walter, 98n1 Kollwitz, Käthe, 286, 364 Kölnische Volkszeitung (newspaper), 287n3 Költsch, Edgar, 266–67, 271 Komet-Film-Compagnie, 38n3 Kommunistische Jugend (Communist Youth), 353n1 Kongreß tanzt, Der (film; 1930), 314, 315, 316n2 Königspavillon-Lichtspiele (Leipzig, Germany), 186–88 Konservative Monatsschrift (journal), 256–58 Konstantin, Leopoldine, 308 Kontoristin, Die (The female clerk; film; 1912), 158, 161n4 Korn, Arthur, 590–92, 595 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 464n1 Kortner, Fritz, 342, 344n6 Koselleck, Reinhart, 1 Kosmos-Theater für Belehrung und Unterhaltung (Leipzig, Germany), 217–19, 219n3 Kossowsky, Alex, 210, 539–43 Köster, August, 129, 130n2 Krabbenfängerin, Die (La Pêcheuse de crevettes; film; 1907), 150, 151n3 Kracauer, Siegfried, 2, 7, 79; “Abstract Film”, 465–67; “All about Film Stars”, 344–46; From Caligari to Hitler, 176, 177n4, 261, 390; “Chaplin in Old Films”, 400–401; “Chaplin kommt an!”, 401; “Chaplin’s Triumph”, 401;

Index

“The Cinema on Münzstraße”, 175–76; “Cult of Distraction”, 171, 176; exile of, following Nazi takeover, 5, 144; “A Film”, 389–91; as film critic, 3, 146nn2–3, 391, 402, 558n3; “Georg von Lukács’s Romantheorie”, 390; on German cinema potentialities, 1, 3; Ginster, 284; “Greta Garbo: A Study”, 144–46; influence of, 247, 344; influences on, 64, 94; “The Klieg Lights Stay On”, 353–55; “Der Künstler in dieser Zeit”, 391; “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies”, 153, 347; “The Mass Ornament”, 401, 465; “Mountains, Clouds, People”, 97–98; “On the Border of Yesterday”, 607–12; “Photography”, 3, 64, 71, 557; photography/death writings of, 98; “Sound-Image Film”, 556–58; “The Weekly Newsreel”, 68, 70–73; Ufa restructuring opposed by, 304; “Vom Erleben des Kriegs”, 284; “Wiedersehen mit alten Filmen”, 447. See also From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer) and Theory of Film (Kracauer) Kräly, Hanns, 307 Kraus, Karl, 77, 163, 164n4, 267–69 Krauss, Werner, 347, 348, 423, 440, 486 Krenek, Ernst, 398, 398n6, 603, 603n1 Kreutzberg, Lola, 542, 543n3 Krieger, Ernst, 129 “Krieg und die Kinematographie, Der” (Häfker), 262 Krupp-Film (1917), 542, 543n4 Kubelka, Peter, 60 Kubler, George, 7n18 Kubrick, Stanley, 62, 234 Küchenmeister-Tobias-Klangfilm, 311 Kuhle Wampe (film; 1932), 374–75 Kultur (culture), 9 “Kulturfilm and Cinema” (Schlesinger), 541–43 Kulturfilmbuch, Das (ed. Beyfuss and Kossowsky), 210–12, 539–43 Kulturfilm, 79, 404; avant-garde movement and, 475–76; Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer (1926), 504, 505n3; camerawork in, 476–77; defined, 9, 101, 542, 545; distribution of, 252; emergence of, 526; feature film competition with, 541–43; film archive proposals and, 101; industrial films, 540–41; Lang on, 210–12; literature on, 539–43; as popular education, 103–4, 526, 539–40; production of, 541–43, 543n3; as promotional films, 545–46; Taut artistic film categories and, 532–34; in Ufa production catalog, 348; Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925), 126–30. See also educational films Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Friedell), 182n6 Kunstausschuss für Tanz (Arts Committee for Dance), 139 Kunstblatt, Das (journal), 444–47, 600–602 Kunst des Lichtspiels, Die (Foulon), 300 “Kunst im Kino” (Tannenbaum), 192 Kunst im Zeitalter der Maschine, Die (Naumann), 178

663

“Künstler in dieser Zeit, Der” (Kracauer), 391 Kunstnarr, Der (journal), 404 Kunstspielwerk (Baumeister), 459 Kunst und Künstler (journal), 349n4 Kunstwart, Der (journal), 206–8, 262 Kunstwart und Kulturwart, Der (journal), 184–86 Kuntze, Reimar, 464 Künzel, Max, 120 Kuppelhorizont (sky-dome), 589n2 Kurtz, Rudolf, 300, 440–42 Laban, Rudolf von, 139–41, 455, 477, 477n3 Lacan, Jacques, 41 La¯cis, Asja, 357 Laemmle, Carl, 251, 284, 305–6, 307 Laforgue, Jules, 23–24, 25n2 La Gallienne, Eva, 119n4 Lamprecht, Gerhard, 141, 361n4, 516 Lamprecht, Karl, 395 Landau, J. (Isidor), 84–86 Landpartie, Die (film; 1927), 479 Lang, Fritz, 62, 178, 212n2, 304n2, 334; as an actor, 269n4; “The Art of Mimic Expression in Film”, 22, 141–42; Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, 212, 297n6, 337, 498; Eisner writings about, 359; on film as modern fairy tale, 330; film education and, 334; Frau im Mond (1929), 62; Fury (1936), 534; Hoffmann (Carl) and, 565; “Kitsch— Sensation—Culture and Film”, 210–12; “Looking toward the Future”, 508–9; M (1931), 576; Metropolis (1927), 444–45, 589; “My Ideal Screenplay”, 498; on objects in film, 327; private archives of, 607–8; Siegfried (1924), 304n2; sound film aesthetics of, 576–77; The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), 576; “Wege des großen Spielfilms in Deutschland”, 142n1; “Will to Style in Film”, 95–96. See also Nibelungen, Die (film) Lange, Konrad, 196, 223–24, 226–27, 242 Langer, František, 199 Langer, Resi, 161–64 Laocoön and His Sons (sculpture), 122, 122n4 Laokoon (Lessing), 436n3, 450, 452n1, 454 L’Arronge, Adolphe, 579, 579n4 Larsen, Viggo, 94n1 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 199, 393 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 430, 433n5 Lassally, Arthur, 520, 522n1, 537–39 Last Command, The (film; 1928), 143 Last Judgment, The (painting; Michelangelo), 604, 605 Last Laugh, The. See letzte Mann, Der Last Performance, The (film; 1929), 307, 308n3 László, Alexander, 604 laterna magica. See magic lanterns Laube, Richard, 219n3 Lauchhammer-Film (1922), 542, 543n4 Laudin und die Seinen (Wassermann), 356n2 Laughter: as audience response, 16, 27, 32, 87, 201, 320, 367, 382, 491; Benjamin on, 358, 399–400; Jünger on, 411. See also slapstick

664

Index

Lautensack, Heinrich, 86–88, 199 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 122n1 law enforcement, 534–37 League of German Playwrights, 38n1 League of Nations, 508 “Leaving the Movie Theater” (Barthes), 169 Lebende Brücke, Die (film; 1912), 37, 38n3 Le Bon, Gustave, 256 Ledebur, Wilhelm von, 534–37 left-wing film culture, 8–9 Léger, Fernand, 53, 459, 460, 472, 587–88, 589n4 Lehár, Franz, 396, 398n4 Lehmann, Hans, 89–92 Lehmann als Boxerkönig (film; 1912), 483, 485n3 Lehrfilm. See educational films Lehrfilmbund (Educational Film Union), 546 Leidensweg einer Frau, Der (Calvario; film; 1911), 158 Leipzig (Germany): Bugra exhibition in (1914), 259–60; educational film presentations in, 217–19; first movie palace in, 186–88; WWI media coverage in, 267–69 Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (newspaper), 267–69 Leipziger Schauspielhaus, 188n2 Leixner von Grünberg, Otto, 261n2 Lenau, Nikolaus, 85, 86n2 Leni, Paul, 306, 306n2, 441, 499–501 Lenin, Vladimir I., 367, 393 Lenin’s Truth (film; 1925), 476, 477 Le Nôtre, André, 438n2 Leonardo da Vinci, 308 Leo XIII, Pope, 19, 20n4 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 85, 86n1, 419n7, 435, 436n2, 450, 452n1, 454 Lessing Theater (Berlin, Germany), 188, 438n1 “Letter of Lord Chandos” (Hofmannsthal), 182n6 Letzte Lockerung (Serner), 42 letzte Mann, Der (film; 1924), 489, 508n3, 509, 512, 515 Letzten Tage der Menschheit, Die (Kraus), 267, 269n4 Leudesdorff, Lore, 470 Lewis, Sinclair, 356n2 Leyde, Emil, 583 liberalism, 215, 219–20 libraries, 82, 100, 101 Lichtbild-Bühne (journal): “The Career of the Cinematograph” (anon.), 22–25; “The Education of Moviegoers into a Theater Public” (Mellini), 151–53; establishment of, 5; “How I Made My Berlin Film” (Ruttmann), 463–64; Kurtz as editor of, 441; “Looking toward the Future” (Lang), 508–9; Mellini as founder/editor-in-chief of, 151; “Various Thoughts on the Movie Theater Interior” (anon.), 154–55; “Why?—This Is Why!” (Lautensack), 86–88 Lichtbilderei GmbH, 31 “Lichtertanz” (Rubinstein), 606, 607n6 Lichtgestaltung, 487

Lichtspiel als Kunstform, Das (Stindt), 300–301 Lichtspielhaus, 163 Lichtspiel Opus I (abstract film; 1921), 450, 452–54, 454n7 Lichtspieltheater, 163 Liebeswalzer (film; 1930), 315, 568, 571–72, 572n3 Liebknecht, Karl, 279 Lied der Deutschen (national anthem), 323n5 Liedtke, Harry, 318, 319n3 Liesegang, Franz Paul, 523 lifestyle magazines, 7n17 lighting, 6, 18, 37–38, 97, 112–13, 162, 191, 207, 341–42, 380, 396, 426, 436, 463, 468, 482, 487–89, 493–94, 499–500, 510, 549, 589n2, 592–93, 597 “Lighting Design in Film” (Grau), 487–89 Light of Asia, The (Die Leuchte Asiens; film; 1925), 63 Lignose Hörfilm System Breusig, 141n1 Liliencron, Detlev von, 221, 222n5, 265, 265n1 “Limits of the Expressionist Film” (Kurtz), 440–42 Lincoln, Elmo, 58n3 Lindau, Paul, 185, 186n4, 428, 433n2 Linder, Max, 189, 189n5 Lindsay, Vachel, 2, 508 Linke-Hofmann-Lauchhammer company, 541 Linkskurve, Die (journal), 361n6 Lintz, Eduard, 5 Lisbon (Portugal), earthquake in (1755), 216, 219n1 Literarische Welt, Die (journal), 301, 330, 355–59, 398–400 literary films, 192, 491–92 literary salons, 189n4 Literatur, Die (journal), 567–69 literature: Autorenfilm and, 154, 182–83; fantastic, 355; film and, 14–15, 207, 318, 392–94; future of, 178; modernism and plot in, 415; radio adaptations, 586; serialized, thrills found in, 36; serial romantic fiction, 229–30, 230n3 Little Ida’s Sisters (ballet; Klenau), 113, 114n3 “Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies, The” (Kracauer), 153, 347 Liverpool (England), 34 “Living Shadows: The Art and Technology of Silhouette Films” (Reiniger), 470–71 Lloyd, Harold, 448, 460 Lloyd George, Daniel, 321, 323n7 Locarno Treaties, 508 locations, 203, 389, 408, 425, 485–86, 489–90, 597 Loew, Katharina, 578 London (England), 574n2; film archives in, 83, 105; German film premieres in, 315; television demonstrations in, 584 London Film Society, 574n2 Lonesome (film; 1928), 348, 349n5 long shot, 493–94, 496–97, 560 “Looking toward the Future: On the Occasion of the Paris Congress” (Lang), 508–9 Loos, Theodor, 318, 319n3 Louvre Museum (Paris, France), 105

Index

Love (film; 1927), 342, 344n6 Love on Film (Brod and Thomas), 340–44 love stories, 158, 203, 343, 587 Löwenbraut, Die (Gaulke), 271 Lo-Zoo-Filme, 542 Lubitsch, Ernst: Die Bergkatze (1921), 319n1; film education and, 334; “Film Internationality”, 298–300; Die Flamme (1923), 303, 304n5; in Hollywood, 303, 304n6; Kohlhiesels Töchter (1920), 290n4; Madame Dubarry (1919), 208–9, 296, 303, 304n5; So This Is Paris (1920), 136; Der Stolz der Firma (1914), 108; Sumurun (1920), 111, 454n2; “We Lack Film Poetry”, 208–10; writings of, 246 Lucas, Wilfred, 58n3 Ludendorff, Erich, 269, 275–77, 296 “Ludendorff Letter, The” (Ludendorff), 275–77 Lukács, Georg, 247, 377–81, 384, 390, 404, 409 Lumière brothers, 87, 226, 444, 503, 524, 580, 581 “Lunar Flight in Film” (anon.), 62 lunar flights, 62 Lustspiel, 26, 167, 167n1 Luxemburg, Rosa, 279 Lyrische Films (C. Goll), 288 M (film; 1931), 576 MA (Today; journal), 455 Macauley, Thomas Babington, 333, 333n2 Mach, Ernst, 90, 92n1 Macintyre, John, 529 Mack, Max: “The Conquest of the Third Dimension”, 578–79; correspondence with Bassermann, 610–11; Dämon Eifersucht (1912), 164n3; as film director, 578; Katzensteg (1915), 433n1; Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha sequel (1920), 58n2, 64n2, 169n2; private archives of, 607–8; Sein eigener Mörder (1914), 612n10; Ein Tag Film (1928), 557. See also Other, The (Der Andere; film 1913) Madame Dubarry (film; 1919), 208, 212, 296, 299, 303, 304n5 “Made in Germany” (Kraus), 267–69 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 180, 403, 403n2 Maggi, Luigi, 150n2 magical displays, 5–6 magic lanterns, 21, 29, 580 magic lantern slides, 48 “Magic of the Body, The” (Sieburg), 124–26 magnitude, shots of, 494–97 Maharaja’s Favorite Wife, The (Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha; film; 1917), 57, 58n2, 64n2, 169, 169n2 Makart Parade (1879), 76, 77n5 Malevich, Kazimir, 406 Maltby, Richard, 312n1 Mamoulian, Rouben, 512 manhunts, 536 Mann, Heinrich, 24, 25n3, 286, 342, 364–65 Mannheim (Germany), 156, 447 Mann im Mond, Der (Clauren), 230n3

665

Mannoni, Octave, 335 “Man of the Crowd, The” (Poe), 390 Man Who Laughs, The (film; 1928), 306, 306n2, 307, 499 Man Who Laughs, The (Hugo), 306n2 Man with a Movie Camera (film; 1929), 476, 477 Man without a Name, The (Der Mann ohne Namen; serial film; 1921), 57, 58n3 Man without Qualities, The (Musil), 3 Manzoni, Alessandro, 150, 150n1 Marbe, Karl, 13 Marc, Franz, 118, 119n7, 418, 419n1, 419n17 Marcantonio e Cleopatra (film; 1913), 197, 199n1 Märchen der Weltliteratur, Die, 211, 212n3 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 33, 79, 82, 84n1, 523, 525n1 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 421n1 Marks, Laura, 45 Marmorhaus (Berlin, Germany), 454n7 Marriage Circle, The (film; 1924), 299 Martha (opera; Flotow), 158, 161n5, 483, 485n3 Martin, Karlheinz, 441 Martin, Rudolf Emil, 222n2 Martinique, volcanic eruption in (1902), 216, 219n2 Märtyrerin der Liebe (film; 1915), 319n3 Marx, Wilhelm, 210 Marxism, 251, 391, 409, 567 März (journal), 77–78, 381–84 masculinity, 343–44 masks, 121 mass culture, 4, 8, 64, 215, 247, 377, 392 Masse Mensch (Toller), 367 masses: art and, 114, 131, 511; Balázs on, 495–96, 507; Benjamin on, 358, 400; Brecht on, 373; cinema’s relation to, 7, 112, 115, 155, 215, 249, 334, 389, 393–94, 408, 427, 435; Döblin on, 574–75; education of, 226, 545–46; Eisner on, 478; Kracauer on, 347; Lang on, 95, 211, 508, 576; Lubitsch on, 209, 299; moral influence over, 165, 228, 236, 257–58, 341; Pabst on, 376; political effects on, 32, 200, 239, 252, 276, 283–84, 305, 351, 361, 399, 469; popular entertainment for, 152, 221, 491; representation of, 63, 72, 231, 582; spectatorial practices of, 125, 156, 176, 381–83, 491, 538, 545, 575, 582. See also mass culture mass formations, photography of, 495 “Mass-Man in the Cinema” (Ritter), 366–67 mass mobilization, 4, 7, 366–67 Massolle, Joseph, 552, 552n2 “Mass Ornament, The” (Kracauer), 401, 465 mass psychology, 367, 547 Master Mystery, The (serial; 1920), 288, 290n3 Matador, 305 matinees, 480 Matrosenlied (film), 347 Matuszewski, Boleslas, 74 Mauerbilder (wall paintings), 459n3 Mauthausen concentration camp, 262 Max and Moritz (children’s picture book), 24, 93 May, Joe, 58n3, 62, 87, 189n1, 246, 294–95, 500, 501

666

Index

May, Karl, 41, 41n1 May, Mia, 296 Mayer, Carl, 370, 423, 489 “Mechanized Immortality” (Landau), 84–86 media studies, 9 medical cinematography, 76, 523–26, 527 Medizinische Klinik (journal), 520–23 Meinert, Rudolf, 38n3, 423, 424n3, 433n5 Meinert-Film-Gesellschaft, 424n3 Mein Film (magazine), 325, 328–30, 333–35, 335–37, 547 Meininger style, 436, 438n1 Meisel, Edmund, 364, 555, 555n2, 557, 559, 572–74, 574 Meißner (Berlin doctor), 527 Meister, Richard, 101, 103n2 Meister Eckhart, 519 Melcher, Gustav, 17–20, 23 Méliès, Georges, 62 Mellini, Arthur (né Nothnagel), 151–53 Melodie der Welt (film; 1929), 477, 559 Melodie des Herzens (film; 1929), 314 melodramas, 304n7, 370, 429 “Melody in the Cinema, or Immanent and Transcendental Music” (Bloch), 92, 377, 482–85 Melos: Zeitschrift für Music (journal), 515–17, 552–55, 566–67, 572–74 memory: cinema as a new form of, 19, 78, 138, 189; cinematographic, 16, 239; film’s impartial accuracy of, 94–95; Kracauer on, 557–58; World War I and, 281 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix, 337n2 Mendes, Lothar, 308n8 Menjou, Adolphe, 341–42, 343, 344n5 Mensch der Masse, Ein (film; 1928), 519n2 Menschen im Hotel (Baum), 144, 327 Menschenrechte, Die (journal), 286–87 Mensch ohne Namen (film; 1932), 349n3 Mère coupable, La (Beaumarchais), 411, 412n3 Meschrabpom, 68 Meschrabpom-Rus, 367 Message from Beyond, A (film; 1911), 161n4 Messter, Oskar, 168, 549, 551n3 Messter-Film, Inc., 277, 319n1 Messters Projektion GmbH (Berlin, Germany), 549, 550 Messter-Woche newsreels, 72n1 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 32 Metropolis (film; 1927), 228, 337n1, 444–45, 509, 589 “Metropolis and Mental Life, The” (Simmel), 190 Metropol-Theater (Berlin, Germany), 395 Metternich, Klemens von, 360, 361n6 Metz, Christian, 335, 492, 512 Meyer, Johannes, 543n6 Meyer’s Conversational Lexicon, 17, 20n1 Meyrink, Gustav, 208n1 MGM, 66, 301, 307 Michaelis, Heinz, 581–82, 598 Michelangelo, 116, 506, 569, 604, 605 “Mickey Mouse” (Benjamin), 403

Mickey Mouse (cartoon character), 346, 403, 603–7 microcinematography, 222n3, 525, 526n5 microscope, 80, 81, 90, 525 Middle Ages, 28 middle class, 159, 176, 182, 204, 229, 283, 609 Mienenspiel, 123 Mierendorff, Carlo, 200, 210, 426–33, 434–35 Mignon (opera; Thomas), 158, 161n5 Mihály, Dénes von, 591–92, 592n3 Miketta, Hubert, 60–61 Mikkelsen, Ejnar, 56 Milestone, Lewis, 285 militarism, 232n1, 251, 281, 287 military training, 259–60 mimic expression (Mimik), 33, 119–22, 122n1, 132, 136–39, 141–42 Mimic Expression in Film: Guidelines for Practical Instruction in the Art of Film Acting (Diehl), 119–22 “Miming and Speaking” (Jannings), 142–44 mimodramatic film, 258 Minima Moralia (Adorno), 220 Minnenspiel, 123 Miracle of Flowers, The. See Das Blumenwunder Mirakel, Das (film; 1912), 269n3 mirror images, 336, 337n1, 589–90 Misch, Robert, 30, 31n1 “Mischmasch” (Kracauer), 71 mise-en-scène, 340, 506, 565 Missa Solemnis (Beethoven), 606, 607n8 Mistinguett (Parisian singer), 334, 335n3 Mnemosyne Atlas (Warburg), 9 Mobilier fidèle (animated short; 1910), 196n2 Modernes Hüttenwerk, Ein (film; 1922), 541, 542, 543n4 modernity, 1, 4, 6n15, 7–9, 40, 179, 190, 325, 327, 377, 383, 392, 395, 398, 405, 465, 502. See also modern urban life modern subject, 390 modern urban life, 30; Americanisms in, 252; cinema and transformations in, 4; cinema as distraction from, 196–99, 381–84; “cinematic mankind” as result of, 238–40; culturalpessimistic diagnosis of, 238; defining characteristics of, 178; film portrayals of, 389–92; Häfker on sensory overload of, 190; Jesenská on escape potential of cinema, 164–66; Mickey Mouse character and aspects of, 403; Pfemfert on soullessness of, 220–22; Wolfram on spiritual bankruptcy of, 247–49. See also film—as “art for the times” Moholy-Nagy, László, 461–62, 462–63n1, 467–70, 487, 592–93 Moissi, Alexander, 318 Molière, 24 Moltke, Johannes von, 8n21 Moltke, Kuno Graf von, 242n3 Mondain, Le (Voltaire), 119n9 Mondrian, Piet, 406 Monet, Claude, 405

Index

Monica Vogelsang (film; 1920), 319n3 montage, 7, 390, 476–77, 487, 555, 560, 567, 576, 593, 605; Arnheim on crisis of, 569–72; involuted, 478; nonsynchronized, 568, 571–72; novel framework and, 574 montage films, 6, 103–4, 370–72, 463, 476–77, 539 Monte, Joe, 308n1 Monti’s Operetta Ensemble, 550 Montmartre, 479 Moore, Colleen, 303, 304n4 morality, 19, 150, 215, 218, 262, 373, 387–89; Aufklärungsfilme and, 240–42; Brunner on cinema as public menace, 235–38; “cultural Bolshevism” and, 249–53; nudity and, 129; sexual dangers of cinema, 227–30; Stapel on “homo cinematicus”, 242–43; “suggestive powers” of cinema, 223–26; trash films and, 222–23; Wolfram on modern spiritual bankruptcy and, 247–49. See also cinema reform movement Morel, der Meister der Kette (film series; 1920), 288, 290n3 Morena, Erna, 97 Morgen (weekly cultural journal), 13–15 Morgen, Der (German-Jewish journal), 391 Mort de Tintagiles, La (Maeterlinck), 180, 182n5 Moscow (Soviet Union), 68, 357 Moscow Artists Theater, 354 Moscow Diary (Benjamin), 357 Moses (sculpture; Michelangelo), 116 Moskvin, Ivan, 361n2 Mother (film; 1926), 357, 360, 446 motion, doctrine of, 79–81 motion disorders, 520–23 motion photography, 78–81, 89–92, 508–9 “Motion Picture and the State, The” (Hellwig), 246–47 motion picture camera, 74, 90, 301–2 mountain films, 34, 250; Balázs on, 68–70; critique of, 444–45; Kracauer on, 97–98; Riefenstahl on, 134–135 Mountain of Destiny, The. See Der Berg des Schicksals “Mountains, Clouds, People” (Kracauer), 97–98 movement, art of (Bewegungskunst), 454–57 “Movie Girl, The” (anon.), 153–54 movie house (Lichtspielhaus), 163 “Movies and Reality, The” (Woolf), 439 movie theater (Lichtspieltheater), 163 “Movie Theater as Gathering Place, The” (Harms), 174–75 movie theaters, 31, 38, 86, 149, 151–52, 158, 178, 185, 217, 229, 236, 250, 262–63, 283–84, 288, 368, 404, 428, 542–43, 597; as advertising site, 530–32; in Berlin, 42; as collective space, 174–75; distribution of, in Germany, 172–73; Kracauer on, 176–77; origins of, 175; preliminary programs of, 542–43; seating capacity of, 532; “spiritual needs” of modern mass audiences met in, 381–84; statistical data, 308–9

667

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 29, 157 Mozart-Lichtspiele (Berlin, Germany), 188–89 Mozartsaal (Berlin, Germany), 284 müde Tod, Der (film, 1920), 212, 498, 499, 515 Muette de Portici, La (Auber), 29, 30n2 Müller, Friedrich, 38n3 Müller, Robert, 433–36 multiple-language versions, 309, 310–11, 312n2 Mulvey, Laura, 41, 340 Mumford, Lewis, 393, 394n3 Mumm, D. Reinhard, 245, 246n1 Mummy, The (film; 1932), 510 Munch, Edvard, 406, 418, 419n17 München (film; 1922), 542, 543n1 Münchner Allgemeine Zeitung (newspaper), 527 Münchner Künstlertheater, 21 Münchner Neueste Nachrichten (newspaper), 476–77, 477n1 Munich (Germany), 21, 22n3, 28, 136, 476–77 Munich Bohème, 355 Munich Carnival, 136 Munich Revolution (1918–19), 365 Münsterberg, Hugo, 2, 174, 492 Münzenberg, Willi, 367–68 Münzstraße (Berlin, Germany), 175–77, 177n2 Münztheater (Berlin, Germany), 177n2 Murder in the Monkey Mountains (film), 18 Murnau, F. W, 209, 306–7; Eisner writings about, 359; Faust (1926), 336, 337n3; Hoffmann (Carl) and, 565; The Last Laugh (1924), 508n3, 509, 512; “My Ideal Screenplay”, 498–9; negotiations with Ufa, 308n6; Nosferatu (1922), 487; Our Daily Bread (City Girl; 1930), 307, 308n5; Phantom (1922), 498n2; Sunrise (1927), 307, 516; Tabu (1931), 308n6 Murphy, Dudley, 459, 589n4 Murray, Mae, 303, 304n4 Musag Köln (film), 544, 544n3 Museum of Ethnology (Völkermuseum; Leipzig, Germany), 49 Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY, USA), 105 museums, 82 Musger, August, 89 music, 16, 40, 44, 128, 132–34, 326, 396, 451, 456–57, 498, 534, 606; accompanying film, 46, 92–94, 113, 148, 164, 175, 193, 198, 263, 386, 433, 458, 484, 542, 557, 562–63, 572–73; in animated films, 171–72; “frozen,” architecture as, 398, 398n8; illustration vs. composition, 515–17; modernism and tonality in, 415; pantomime and, 113; public perception of, 589; its place in cinema, 193–96, 483, 606; quarter-tone, 587, 589n3; revues and, 398; silent film aesthetics and, 482–85, 515–17; sound films and, 143, 310, 552–55, 563, 566–67, 572–74; spectatorship and, 92–94, 148, 157, 158–59; in The Student of Prague (1913), 189; visual, 452–54, 463–64, 603 musical comedies, 348, 600 Musikalisches Wochenblatt (weekly), 21n1 Musikdrama, 566

668

Index

Musil, Robert, 3, 323–25 Muskete, Die (journal), 323–25 Mussolini, Benito, 393, 394n2 muteness, 485–87, 508–9 “Muteness of the Film Image, The” (Kalbus), 485–87 Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (film; 1929), 361n4 Muybridge, Eadweard, 33 “My Ideal Screenplay” (Lang and Murnau), 498–99 “My Process” (Schüfftan), 589–90 mystery plays, 28 “Myth of the Total Cinema, The” (Bazin), 551 Nach-Expressionismus (Roh), 447 Nächte einer schönen Frau, Die (film; 1923), 399 Nagy, Käthe von, 345 Nanook of the North (film; 1922), 55, 212, 212n5 Nansen, Fridtjof, 399, 400n5 Napoleonic Wars, 56, 361n6 Napoleon III, 89, 89n1 narrative film, 476; avant-garde co-optation of, 478; avant-garde turning away from, 466–67; defined, 545; first, 609, 611n4; lighting design in, 487 Nath, Promode, 63 National Association of German Cinema Owners (Reichsverband deutscher Lichtspieltheaterbesitzer), 56 National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (USA), 215 Nationale Kinoreform (Lange), 226 Nationalfilm GmbH, 277 nationalism, 56, 232n1, 235–36, 242, 247, 251–52, 368 National Liberal Party, 273 National Socialist Party: All Quiet on the Western Front controversy, 284, 286nn2–3; body cult of, 126–27; cinema appropriated by, 5; critics of, 287n3, 426; elections (1930), 286n3; media policies of, 602; Nietzsche appropriated for, 381; propaganda of, 250; Ruttmann’s propaganda work for, 464; seizure of power (1933), 5, 286, 306; supporters of, 60, 366; Volksgemeinschaft as used by, 282 Nationalversammlung (National Assembly), 280 naturalism: of American films, 511; avant-garde rebellion against, 453–54; Balázs on revolutionary effect of, 363; close-ups and, 493; expressionism and, 425–26; film aesthetics, 439–40, 487–88, 568; gesture and, 195; history of, 436–37 naturalist representation, 10, 36, 115, 122, 167, 209, 416, 422, 426, 436–38, 439, 453, 473, 487, 511, 524, 554, 569–71, 587, 604, 606 naturalist theater, 438n1, 587 nature: Antarctic expedition films, 58–60; cinema reform and, 215; cinematographic images of, 51–52; gendered spectatorship of, 158; in mountain films, 68–70, 97; photographic realism and, 444, 445–46; political contentiousness over, 68–70

“Nature and Value of Sound Film, The” (Correll), 562–63 nature films, 421 Natur im Film: Katzenbilder (film; 1922), 542, 543n1 Nauen (Brandenburg, Germany), 56, 56n1 Naujoks, Alois, 167 Naumann, Friedrich, 178, 278, 279n1 Nazimova, Alla, 303, 304n4 Nazi Party. See National Socialist Party Negri, Pola, 304n5, 332, 343, 349 Nero and the Burning of Rome (film; 1908), 150, 150n2 Nero-Film AG, 372 Nero; Or the Fall of Rome (Nerone; film; 1909), 150, 150n2 nervousness, 8, 25–26, 65, 263 Neubabelsberg Studios (Potsdam, Germany), 312, 312n2 Neue Generation, Die (journal), 227–30 “Neue Kinoziele” (lecture; Wegener), 206 Neue Rundschau, Die (journal), 15–17, 70–73, 149, 401 Neues Bauen movement, 532 Neue Schaubühne, Die (monthly), 52–54, 92–94, 115–19, 288–90 Neue Zürcher Zeitung (newspaper), 415–20 Neumann, Hans, 443 neurology, 520–23 “New Art, A” (Diebold), 452–54 “New Illusion, The” (Scheller), 196–99 “New India Film, A” (Eisner), 62–64 “New Means of Filmmaking” (Richter), 472–74 New Objectivity, 406, 443, 447 newsreels: banned, 364, 365n1; documentary films assembled from, 103–4; as educational tools, 531; framing of, 404; historical potential for, 74; as immortalizers, 87; as journalistic tools, 49–51; Kino-Eye, 476–77; Kracauer’s critique of, 70–73, 73n4; leftist critique of, 368–69; origins of, 49; proletarian, 369; Roth on uncanny historicity of, 98–99; Russia as depicted in, 98; sound technology in, 66–67; sports newsreels, 34; of Ufa studios, 72n1, 172; during WWI, 264, 266, 272–73 news reports, 27 “New Task for the Cinema, A” (Weisse), 20–22 “New Terrain for Cinematographic Theaters” (anon.), 22 Newton, Isaac, 331 New York (NY, USA), 105, 208, 315 “New Youth and Film, The” (Eisner), 359–61 Nibelungen, Die (film), 212n2, 337n3; animated sequences in, 463; dream sequences in, 443; film education and, 335; film illusion in, 336; Lang on screenplay of, 498; Lang on stylistic laws in production of, 95, 96; spectatorship of, 211, 212; success of, 212, 250 Nibelungenlied, 96 Niblo, Frank, 447n2

Index

Nicholas II (Czar of Russia), 98–99, 99n1 Nick Carter books, 41, 219, 219n5, 223, 233 Nick Carter films, 229, 230n2 “nickel madness”, 242 Nielsen, Asta, 518; in Absturz (1923), 506; acting talents of, 194, 198; Balázs’s writings on, 122–24, 340, 344n7; costumes selected by, 501; in Erdgeist (1923), 122–24, 124n1, 304n5; eroticism of, 122–24, 342; film education and, 335; Mierendorff on kitsch and, 429; retirement of, 303; spectatorship of, 158, 159; star-type of, 325; understudies of, 87; worldwide fame of, 296, 349 Niemann-Raabe, Hedwig, 85, 86n4 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 608–9, 611n1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 381, 407, 489–90 Nikolaus, Karl, 256, 546–48 Noa, Manfred, 433n4 Noack, Victor, 155–56 Noé, Gaspar, 512 Nolde, Emil, 406 Nollendorftheater (Berlin, Germany), 135 “nonreproductive filmmaking”, 457–59 nonsimultaneity, 8 Nord, F. R., 56 Norddeutscher Lloyd, 544, 544n1 Nordische Filmgesellschaft (Nordic Film Company), 276–77, 277n2 Nordisk Film Company, 206n1, 226n1, 277, 277n2 Nornepygge Castle (Brod), 15 Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, First Viscount of, 297n2 Northcliffe Press, 296 Norway, 114 Nosferatu (film; 1922), 447, 487 Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The (Rilke), 22 Nouguès, Jean, 188, 188n3 Nouvelle source de l’histoire, Une (Matuszewski), 74 Novarro, Ramon, 310, 341–42, 344n5 novelists, 182, 183 Novelli, Ermete, 29, 30n1 novels, 198, 201, 204–5; “crisis of”, 574; films based on, 119n1, 207–8, 421; serialized, thrills found in, 36 November Group, 459–61, 587 November Revolution (1918), 281–82, 282n2 nudity, 126–30, 337 Oberprüfungsstelle (Central Censorship Board), 244, 247, 284, 353, 354, 375 Oberth, Hermann, 62 obscenity, 341 October (film; 1928), 360, 361n6, 371, 376n1 October Revolution (1917), 99n2, 361n6 Oderwald-Lander, Solveig, 343, 344n12 Oeuvre de E.-J. Marey, L’ (Frank), 525n3 Offenbach, Jacques, 189n3 Olimsky, Fritz, 249–53 Olympia (film; 1938), 34, 127, 566 Ondra, Anny, 340, 344n2

669

O’Neill, Eugene, 146n3 “On Jazz” (Adorno), 247 “On Living Photography and Film Drama” (Melcher), 17–20 “Onlookers of Life in the Cinema, The” (Rennert), 203–6 “Only Stars!” (Balázs), 124, 325–27 “Only the Transformed Author Can Transform Film: A Conversation with Alfred Döblin,” 574–75 On Photography (Sontag), 60 “On the Artistic Possibilities of the Motion Picture” (Wegener), 206–8 On the Beautiful in Music (Hanslick), 454n5 “On the Border of Yesterday: On the Berlin Film and Photo Exhibition” (Kracauer), 607–12 “On the Psychology of the Cinematograph” (Sommer), 28–30 “On the Psychomechanics of the Spectator” (Witlin), 136–39 “On the Question of a National Film Archive” (Schimmer), 99–102 On the Sociology of Cinema (Altenloh), 156–61 “Ontology of the Photographic Image, The” (Bazin), 86 opening program, 403, 479. See also advertising film, shorts, Vorprogramm opera, 29, 30n2, 161n5; films based on, 303–4, 436, 550–51; gendered spectatorship of, 157; Landau on immortalization of performances in, 85–86, 86n4 opera film, 603 operettas, 348 optical balancing, 91 optical effect, 553 optical illusions, 5–6, 150, 363, 589–90 Optical Media (Kittler), 271, 562 “optical unconscious”, 90, 403, 492 Opus 1–4 (Ruttmann, 1921–25), 459, 460, 463 Organization for Film Education, 539 Orientalism, 62–64 Ortega y Gasset, José, 415 Osborn, Max, 126–30, 404, 406n1 Oscars, 143 Ossietzky, Carl von, 286 Osten, Franz, 62–63, 253n3 Oswald, Richard, 240, 242nn2–3, 433n4, 565 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons, 471 Othello (Shakespeare), 31 Other, The. See Der Andere Otten, Max, 120 Ottwalt, Ernst, 374 Our Daily Bread (film; 1930), 307, 308n5 Our Trip to Africa (Kubelka), 60 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 105, 364, 498; The 3 Penny Opera, 372; “Film and Conviction”, 375–76; Joyless Street, 443; “Reality of Sound Film”, 563–64; Westfront 1918, 284–285 Pachulla, Ludmilla, 167

670

Index

pacifism, 240n1, 287 pageants, 76, 77n5 painting: animated, 603–7; Berlin Secession debate about, 406n1; color and, 592–93; film as, 53; impressionist, 436–37; Kállai on crisis in, 404–6; naturalist, 436–37; “temporal”, 450–52; as visual music, 452–54, 463–64 Painting, Photography, Film (Moholy-Nagy), 468, 592 “Painting and Film” (Kállai), 404–6 “Painting with Time” (Ruttmann), 450–52 Palace Cinema (Berlin, Germany), 427 Pander, Hans, 489–92 Pan-Germanism, 240–42 Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), 242n1, 276 “Panic of Reality, The” (Polgar), 66–67 Panofsky, Erwin, 8, 424 panoramas, 48, 426. See also Sedan Panorama pans, 503 Panter, Peter (Kurt Tucholsky), 166–67 pantomime, 33, 36, 87, 108, 111–14, 184, 195, 257, 289, 300, 326, 483, 534 Paradies der Dirnen, Das (film; 1919), 433n4 Paragraph 175, 240 Paramount Opéra (Paris, France), 176, 177n3 Paramount Pictures Corporation, 71, 177n3, 301, 307, 312n2 Parikka, Jussi, 9n22 Paris (France), 15–16, 24–25; amateur film in, 329; American cinema in, 288; avant-garde movement in, 465–66, 480; film archives in, 74, 76, 83, 105; German film premieres in, 315; International Film Conference in (1926), 251, 508–9; Kracauer in, 144; movie theaters in, 176; revues originating in, 395; sports events filmed in, 34 Paris Arrangement, 483, 485n2 Paris Commune, 352 Pariser Tonfilmfrieden (Paris sound film treaty; 1930), 311 Park Ring (Vienna, Austria-Hungary), 78, 78n1 Parufamet, 301, 304 Parville, Henri de, 444 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (film; 1928), 567, 604 pastoral plays, 29 Pastrone, Giovanni, 296, 499 paternalism, 245 Pathé Baby cameras, 329–30, 330n5 Pathé Frères Company (Paris), 15–16, 24–25, 50, 71, 109, 111n2, 183n1, 226n1, 526n5 Pathé-Journal, 43 patriotism, 267 Pavlova, Anna, 184, 186n2 Peace Conventions, 366n1 Peasants, The (Reymont), 361n6 Péladan, Joséphin, 393, 394n4 Pelée, Mount, eruption of (1902), 216, 219n2 People on Sunday (film; 1930), 306 People’s Association for Film Art, 351

people’s theater movement, 232, 351–52 Peschka, Heinrich Stefan, 558n2 Pest, Die (Hasenclever), 39 Pester Lloyd (journal), 377–81 Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Chamisso), 189n3 Petersen, Margot, 38n3 Petra electromagnetic company, 539n1 Petronius, 187 Peukert, Leo, 296, 297n6 Pfeiffer, Ernst, 38–39 Pfeiffer, Heinrich, 246–47, 298–300 Pfemfert, Franz, 219–22 Phantasiemaschine, Die (Fülöp-Miller), 25n4, 407–8 phantasmagorias, 10, 417 Phantom (film; 1922), 497, 498n2 Phantom (G. Hauptmann), 497 Pharus (pedagogical journal), 50 phenomenology, 45 Philbin, Mary, 306 Philippi, Felix, 318, 319n2 Philosophie des Films (Harms), 174–75, 300 Phoebus Film, 562 phonograph, 19, 58, 75, 85, 90, 148, 220, 222, 549, 551n1 phonographic archives, 75, 83 phonola, 218, 219n4 photogénie, 492 photographic camera, 90 photographic realism, 444, 445–46 photography: black-and-white nature of, 168–69; chronophotography, 79; cinematography vs., 52, 191, 207; close-ups, 340–44; color and, 502; cultural mission of, 83; death and, 98; documentary, 600; “electric snapshot photography”, 92; film as, 333; invention of, 611n1; Moholy-Nagy on, 468–69; motion photography, 78–81, 89–92, 508–9; painting vs., 436; sport-hunting compared to, 60–61; time-lapse photography, 79; ubiquity of, 64–66; wireless transmissions of, 591 “Photography” (Kracauer), 3, 64, 71, 557 photography clubs, 329 Photoplay, The (Münsterberg), 174 photoplays, 199–203, 492 physiognomy, 120, 122n1, 141, 144–46 Picabia, Francis, 459, 460, 567 Picasso, Pablo, 53, 406, 415–16, 455 Pick, Lupu, 370–72 Pickford, Mary, 288, 296, 299, 331 pictography, 490 picture palaces, 54, 147, 170–72, 176, 186–88, 284, 317 “Pictures-Pictures” (Burger), 64–66 Piel, Harry, 336, 607–8 Pilgrim, The (film; 1923), 400, 401 Piloty, Carl Theodor von, 296, 436, 438n1 Pinder, Wilhelm, 8 Pinschewer, Julius, 277, 530–32, 537, 544, 547 Pinthus, Kurt, 325; “The Ethical Potential of Film”, 42, 386–89; as expressionist-era

Index

commentator, 170; “Henny Porten for President”, 319–23; as Kinobuch editor, 39, 188n1, 199–200, 208; “The Photoplay”, 199–203; “Quo Vadis, Cinema?” (Pinthus), 186–88; “Ufa Palace”, 170–72 Piscator, Erwin, 20, 361n5, 364, 371, 372n1, 396, 567–69, 575 Piscator-Bühne, 479 Plakat, Das (journal), 168–69 Plato, 331 playwrights, 182, 183 Plotinus, 416 Poe, Edgar Allan, 23, 380, 390, 448 Poelzig, Hans, 297, 297n9, 487n2, 500–501, 533 Point de vue de Gras (photograph), 611n1 polarity, concept of, 455–56 Polgar, Alfred, 66–67 police, 167, 185, 219, 225, 227, 232, 244, 246n3, 342, 355, 369, 391, 430, 513, 520, 534–37 Polikushka (film; 1922), 360, 361n2, 446, 447n6 Polikushka (Tolstoy), 447n6 Polimanti, Osvaldo, 523–26 political salons, 189n4 political sovereignty, 77 politics and film, 4; adventure films and, 57–58; mountain films and, 68–70. See also censorship; cinema reform movement; film—as chiffre of modernity; image wars; internationalism of film; morality; propaganda; propaganda films; revolutionary cinema Polizei, Die (trade journal), 534–37 Polygraph (journal), 377–81 Pommer, Erich, 144, 290–92, 293, 302, 314–16, 423 Pommer-Produktion, 571 Ponting, Herbert G., 60n1 Ponzo, Mario, 46–47, 47n5 Poot, Linke (Alfred Döblin), 149 Porges, Friedrich, 329 Porten, Franz, 433n5 Porten, Henny, 317–23, 325, 336, 343, 610 Porter, Edwin S., 150n2, 381n2, 433n6 “Possibilities for Absolute Radio Art” (Weill), 586–89 “Possibilities for the Use of Music in Sound Film” (Gronostay), 566–67 postcards, 48 “Potemkin and Tendentious Art” (Schmitz), 355–56 Pouctal, Henri, 433n6 Pound, Ezra, 424 Pour bien tourner (Duclair-Northy), 329, 330n2 Pour le Merité (film; 1938), 366 Prager, Wilhelm, 129, 141n2, 543n5 Prager Presse, 433–36 Präludium (Richter), 457n1 Praxinoscope, 92n2 “Prehistory of the Bioskop and Its First Public Demonstration on November 1, 1895” (M. Skladanowsky), 579–81 Préjean, Albert, 347

671

Pride of the Firm, The (Der Stolz der Firma; film; 1914), 108 Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 393, 394n2 Prince, Charles, 290n4 Prince of Thieves (Fürst der Diebe; film; 1919), 93, 94n1 “Principles of the Sound Film” (Ruttmann), 555–56 printing vs. cinematography, 387 Pritzkow, Otto, 177n2 “Problems of the Camera” (Hoffmann), 565–66 “Problems of the Film Drama” (Tannenbaum), 192–96 Pròdromos (Altenberg), 181n3 “Productive and Reproductive Film Art” (Balázs), 505–8 professional class, 159–60 projection, 29, 241, 263, 458–59, 485, 496, 537–39, 608; backward, 13, 17; beyond the cinema, 537, 578, 598, 604; cinematographic, 45–47, 75, 260, 411; for educational uses, 130, 228; technology for, 65, 101, 174, 512, 534, 538, 550, 580–81, 593; used for stage, 20, 269n4, 361n5, 372n1, 396. See also screens Projektions-AG (PAGU), 208, 277, 441 proletarian newsreels, 369 Proletarian Traveling Theater, 361n1 proletariat, 231, 233, 251, 351–53, 358–59, 365–67, 427, 527. See also working class “Prologue before the Film” (Friedell), 178–82 Prometheus-Film, 367 promotional films, 537, 544, 545–46 propaganda, 5, 7, 129, 256, 280–81, 360, 421, 464, 530, 548, 569 propaganda films, 207; advertising and, 279, 279n2; Bolshevist-Marxist, 251; as cultural propaganda, 279–81; for economic war, 274; expressionist film developments and, 421; for German war bonds, 277–79; for Germany’s image abroad, 273–75, 278; Nazi, 134, 250; 362; post-WWI, 283–84, 545; revolutionary, 367–68; during WWI, 254–56, 268, 269nn1–2, 275–77, 293 “Proposal for the Establishment of an Archive for Cinema-Films” (Goerke), 81–84 prostitution, 162, 227, 229–30, 242n2, 338n5, 430 Prostitution, Die (film; 1919), 433n4 Protazanov, Yakov, 357 protofascism, 97 Proust, Marcel, 558 Prussia, national anthem of, 222n4 Prussian State Parliament (Landtag), 284, 286n2 psychiatry, 520–23 psychoanalytic films, 443 psychoanalytic theory, 41, 340, 443–44 psychological films, 491–92 Psychologie der Massen (Le Bon), 256 “Psychology of Advertising, The” (Wiese), 279, 279n2 Psychology of the Unconscious (Jung), 256

672

Index

public health, 215, 234–35 “Public’s Attitude toward Modern German Literature, The” (Behne), 392–94 Puccini, Giacomo, 161n5 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 104, 104n4, 357, 365n3, 376n1, 555 Pynchon, Thomas, 62 quarter-tone music, 587, 589n3 Querschnitt, Der (journal), 517–19 Querschnitt durch 1922, Der (ed. Flechtheim, Kielmansegg, and Wedderkop), 295–97 quota agreements, 479 Quo Vadis? (film; 1912), 186, 187–88, 200, 430 Quo Vadis? (opera; Nouguès), 188n3 Quo Vadis? (Sienkiewicz), 186, 187, 188, 188n3 “Quo Vadis, Cinema?” On the Opening of the Königspavillon-Theater” (Pinthus), 186–88, 199–200 race: Balázs on, 3, 362; cinema and, 4; disregard of, 295, 545; Duenschmann on, 256–58; Guttmann on, 238–40; Indian, 63; “Jewish race”, 240–41; “the white race”, 250–51 Rache der Frau Schultze, Die (film; 1905), 609, 611n4 Rache der Gefallenen, Die (The Fallen Woman’s Vengeance; film; 1920), 609–10, 611n6 Rache des Indianers, Die (film; 1908), 225 Racine, Jean, 331 Radetzky March (Roth), 98 radio, 10, 56, 62, 69, 137, 219n4, 393, 395, 398, 404, 467, 502, 557, 559, 563, 566, 569, 584, 585–89, 591, 595–99, 602–3 Radio Corporation of American (RCA), 599 “radio-film”, 602–3. See also television “Radio-Film” (Arnheim), 602–3 radio play, 559, 586 “radio symphony”, 566 Radio Symphony Orchestra, 172n1 radio waves, 585 Rai, Himansu, 63, 251, 253n3 Rakete zu den Planeträumen, Die (Oberth), 62 Raleigh, Charles, 49n2 Raleigh & Robert, 48, 49n2 Ralph, Louis, 290n3 Rank, Otto, 449n4 Rapée, Ernö, 171, 172n1 Raphael, Max, 416, 419n2 Raskolnikow (film; 1923), 436, 441 Rathaus-Lichtspiele (Munich, Germany), 476–77 rationalism, 173–74, 476 Raumlichtkunst (Fischinger), 604 Rauscher, Ulrich, 184–86 Ray, Man, 466, 473, 479, 567 realism, 271, 285, 436, 594, 600 “Reality of Sound Film, The” (Pabst), 563–64 Récamier, Juliette, 189n4 record industry, 598–99 record player, 219n4

Red Cross, 269n4, 420 “Reel Consciousness” (Balázs), 58–60 Reflektorische Farblichtspiele (film), 567n3 Reger, Max, 118 Reich, Bernhard, 357 Reicher, Emanuel, 188, 189n1 Reichpietsch, Max, 366, 366n2 Reichsfilmarchiv, 105, 281–82 Reichsfilmblatt (journal), 56–58, 555–56 Reichslichtspielgesetz (Reich Motion Picture Law; 1920), 244, 246, 247 Reichstag, 144, 286, 323n4 Reichsverband (National Organization against Social Democracy), 231, 232–33, 232n1 Reichswehrministerium (Ministry of the Reichswehr), 284, 285 Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst, 444 reification, 384 Reimann, Albert, 338n2 Reimann, Walter, 423, 424n4, 438–40 Reimann School of Art and Design, 338, 338n2 Reinhardt, Max: film education and, 334; Galeen as assistant to, 447; Die Insel der Seligen (1913), 199n1, 269n3; Jannings and, 314; literary cabaret founded by, 166–67, 206; Das Mirakel (1912), 269n3; Sumurun (1920), 269n3; Sumurun (stage pantomime) staged by, 111, 114n2; theaters with productions of, 87, 88n2, 487n2; theatrical career of, 335n1; Eine venezianische Nacht (1914), 269n3; Wegener and, 206 Reiniger, Lotte, 470–71, 479, 530, 543n5, 555, 604 Reiß, Erich, 434 Réjane, Gabrielle, 111n3 Reklame, Die (journal), 537–39, 544, 546–48 religion, 28, 128, 130n3, 159, 216, 248, 281, 389, 391, 397, 417–18, 456, 540 religious films, 226 Remarque, Erich Maria, 284, 286, 287 Rembrandt van Rijn, 417, 506 Renaissance, 28–29 Rennert, Malwine, 203–6 Renoir, Jean, 136, 479 Repin, Ilya, 265, 265n1 reproducibility, 190, 327, 378; Benjamin on, 4, 77, 178, 357 reproduction, 90, 165, 416, 437, 505–508, 517, 525, 552, 554, 559, 569, 594, 601; mechanical, 129, 143, 257, 265, 518, 599; photographic, 123, 438, 470, 505; of reality, 51–52, 196, 457, 583, 598–99; of sounds, 568, 572, 274 “Restructuring of Ufa, The” (anon.), 304–5 Reuter (news agency), 274, 275n2 Revolution (journal), 39–41 revolutionary cinema: Balázs on potential/ difficulties of, 351–53; Battleship Potemkin controversy, 353–59; censorship of, 374–75; Film und Volk articles supporting, 361–65, 367–68; mass mobilization and, 366–67; Pabst on film as “property of the masses”, 375–76;

Index

propaganda films, 367–68; Russian montage films and, 370–72; Threepenny Opera lawsuit and, 372–74; Toller on German Revolution film, 365–66; Weltfilm report, 368–69; youth organization survey, 359–61 “Revolutionary Cinema, The” (Balázs), 351–53 “Revue and Film” (Giese), 395–98 Revue Nègre, 335n3 revues, 395–98 Reymont, Władysław, 360, 361n6 Reynaud, Charles-Émile, 91, 92n2, 580 Rheingold, Das (Wagner), 21n1 Rhein in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Der (documentary film; 1922), 212, 212n4, 543, 543n6 rhythm: in abstract and experimental film, 418–419, 451, 453–454, 455, 458, 460–461, 466, 470, 473, 517, 567; accelerated, 249, 289, 340, 383, 395–396; American 395, 511; balanced, 374; in dance, 140, 194, 196n4; eurhythmics, 196n4, 419; industrial 1, 541; in gestures and performance, 63, 113, 116, 129, 132, 155, 194, 198, 289, 300, 551; in editing, 507, 511; in music/sound, 54, 516, 550, 561, 567, 573, 586, 589, 594, 605–606; of nature, 52, 446, 494, 605; optical, 517, 586 (see also ‘rhythm in abstract and experimental film’); in painting, 416, 455; as principle of soul or vitality, 417, 455, 507; in screenplays, 439; in set design, 488; in silent film, 552; in temporal arts, 605–606; of war, 271. See also tempo Richard, Frida, 97 Richard III (Shakespeare), 15, 31, 579 Richter, Hans, 2, 196n2, 441; “absolute films” of, 479; Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich (1929), 566; “Avant-Garde in the Realm of the Possible”, 475–76; “Basic Principles of the Art of Movement”, 454–57; collaborations with Eggeling, 458–59; Dada circle of, 139; exile of, following Nazi takeover, 5; “The Film as an Original Art Form”, 505; Filmgegner von heute, Filmfreunde von morgen, 333, 475; Film-Studie (1928), 466, 555n3; as Gesellschaft Neuer Film co-founder, 465; “New Means of Filmmaking”, 472–74; as painter, 455; Präludium, 457n1; rhythmic movement impulse in films of, 567; Vormittagsspuk (1928), 555, 555n4 Richter, Klaus, 189 Richter, Paul, 336 Riefenstahl, Leni, 34, 68, 127, 134–35, 566 Rien que les heures (film; 1926), 481n1 Riezler, Walter, 472 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 22 Rinaldo Rinaldini (novel, 1798), 229, 230n2 Rippert, Otto, 433n4 Risko, Johnny, 308n1 Rist, Sepp, 69, 70n1 Ritter, Karl, 366–67 Robinson, Arthur, 487 Rococo Era, 29 Rodin, Auguste, 116, 119n2

673

Rodowick, D. N., 2, 482 Roh, Franz, 447, 477, 477n1 Röhrig, Walter, 423, 424n4, 439 Roi de la boxe (film; 1912), 485n3 “Roland” (Gleichheit contributor), 232–34 Romance of Tarzan, The (film; 1918), 57, 58n3 romantic fiction, 229–30, 230n3 romanticism, 56, 68, 70, 379, 398 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 132 Rose Bernd (film; 1919), 319n2 Rose Bernd (G. Hauptmann), 319n2 Rose der Mutter, Die (film; 1911), 158, 161n4 Rosenkavalier, Der (film; 1925), 303–4, 304n8, 436, 515, 517n2 Rosenkavalier, Der (opera; Strauss), 304n8, 517n2 Rosenzweig, Franz, 391 Rosita (film; 1923), 299 Ross, Colin, 60–61, 61n3 Rossini, Giacomo, 29 Rote Fahne, Die (journal), 351–53, 353n1, 362 Roth, Joseph, 98–99 Rotha, Paul, 105 Rousseau, Henri, 417, 419n9 Rowohlt, Ernst, 330 Roy, Charu, 64 Royal Ministry of War (Germany), 275–77 Rübezahls Hochzeit (film; 1916), 119n5, 206, 207–8, 208n2 Rubinstein, Anton, 606, 607n6 Rude, François, 119n2 Rühmann, Heinz, 177, 177n4, 345 Russia. See Soviet Russia Russian ballet, 194 Russian films: avant-garde movement and, 472–74, 476; Balázs on revolutionary pathos of, 70; Benjamin on, 357–59; Blum on “proximity to life” in, 104, 104nn3–4; close-ups in, 343; imports of, in Germany, 351, 360, 361n2, 364, 370; montage techniques in, 370–72, 477. See also Battleship Potemkin (film; 1925) Russian Revolution (1917), 98, 99nn1–2, 352, 358 Ruttmann, Walter, 458; “absolute art” of, 441, 479; “The ‘Absolute’ Fashion”, 464–65; abstract films of, 588; animated films of, 463, 464; collaborations with Pinschewer, 530; color experimentations of, 600; Deutscher Rundfunk (1928), 574n1; “How I Made My Berlin Film”, 463–64; “The Isolated Artist”, 474–75; Lichtspiel Opus I (1921), 450, 452–54, 454n7; Melodie der Welt (1929), 477, 559; Nazi propaganda work of, 464; as Nibelungen set designer, 443; Opus 2, 3, and 4, 459, 460; as painter, 455; “Painting with Time”, 450–52; “Principles of the Sound Film”, 555–56. See also Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (film; 1927) Rye, Stellan, 77, 87, 188 Sachs, Hanns, 38, 443–44 Sächsische Landesbildstelle (Dresden, Germany), 99 sadomasochism, 242n2

674

Index

Sally (film; 1929), 602n4 Salten, Felix, 197, 199n1 Sanin, Alexandr, 361n2, 447n6 Sardou, Victorien, 54, 54n3 Scandinavia, 276 scenic composition, 193 Schacht, Roland, 422 Schaffende Hände (film series), 532–33, 544, 544n1 Schall und Rauch (journal), 166–67 Schatten (film; 1923), 487 Schaubühne, Die (journal), 41–45, 108–11, 167, 246n2 Schaulust (visual pleasure), 41–45 Schauspiel, 63, 64n3 Scheidungsreise, Die (operetta; Hirsch), 519n4 Scheller, Will, 196–99 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 398n8 Scherben (film; 1921), 370, 489, 490 Scherl’s Magazin, 62 Schildkraut, Rudolph, 111, 111n4, 199n1 Schiller, Friedrich, 18, 20, 20n4, 41, 107n1, 121, 180, 241, 323n6, 397, 604 Schillings, Max von, 515, 517n1 Schimmer, Fritz, 99–102 Schlesinger, Eugen R., 541–43 Schleyer, Johann Martin, 33n4 Schmeil, Otto, 540, 540n1 Schmeling, Max, 307, 308n1 Schmidl, Leopold, 111n1 Schmidthässler, Walter, 230n1 Schmiterlöw, Vera, 343, 344n12 Schmitz, Oscar A. H., 279, 355–59 Schneickert, Hans, 535, 537n1 Schnitzler, Arthur, 182, 318 Schoenberg, Arnold, 552–53, 566 Schomburgk, Hans, 55–56, 58 Schönheit, Die (journal), 108 “School and Film” (Beyfuss), 539–40 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 331, 398n8, 419n4, 594, 595 Schrifttanz (Laban), 139 Schröder-Devrient, Wilhelmine, 85, 86n4 Schüfftan, Eugen, 337n1, 589–90 Schüfftan process, 336, 337n1, 589–90 Schulz, Ulrich K. T., 543n1 Schumacher, Ernst Mathias, 543n5 Schundfilms (Hellwig), 45, 222–23 Schundfilme. See trash films Schünemann, Emil, 63 Schutzverband der Filmfabriken Deutschlands (Association for the Protection of German Film Manufacturers), 277, 278–79 Schwarz, Hanns, 177n4 Schwind, Moritz von, 296, 297n8 Schwobthaler, Robert, 49n2 “Science as a Vocation” (Weber), 384 science fiction, 62, 136 scientific apparatuses, 90 scientific cinematography, 52, 76, 82, 101, 239, 520–23, 532–33 scopophilia, 41, 340

Scott, Robert Falcon, 58, 60n1, 400n5 screens: consisting of paper, 259–60; extended in width, 573; flickering, 234, 243, 427, 510, 580; as “glass screen” (telefilm), 585; and illusions, 147–49, 176; images beyond, 596–97, 599; magnification of objects on, 250, 340; for medical demonstrations, 521; placement of, 155, 176, 428; projection on, 185, 310, 330, 451; proliferation of, 9; for public advertising, 538–39; size of, 320, 496; sports on, 32–34; surface of, 425; as swaying canvas, 426; transformation of, 573, 596–97, 598–600; viewing a living image on, 32, 46, 113–14, 162, 168, 336, 495, 610; as white linen sheet, 98–99. See also 3-D; three-dimensionality; stereoscopic film screenplays, 13, 86, 183n1, 210, 350, 439, 444, 482, 498–99, 506, 562, 567, 590 screenwriters, 36, 68, 182, 194, 347, 360–61, 490, 568, 579, 604 sculpture, 53–54, 90, 100–101, 116, 122, 190–91, 421, 452n1, 490, 492n3, 594, 601 Secret of the Black Cloister, The (film), 229, 230n2 “Secret of the Cinema, The” (Sellmann), 31–33 Secrets of a Soul. See Geheimnisse einer Seele Sedan, Battle of (1870), 89, 89n1, 273n2 Sedan panorama (Berlin, Germany), 271–72, 273n2 Seebach, Marie, 85, 86n4 Seeber, Guido, 246, 443, 503–5, 530 Seele des Lichtspiels, Die (Bloem), 300, 581 Seidels Reklame (journal), 530–32 Sein eigener Mörder (film; 1914), 611, 612n10 self-reflection, 59, 284 Sellmann, Adolf, 31–33 Semsel, George S., 2n4 Sennett, Mark, 288 sensationalism, 211–12, 215, 236–38, 242n2 sensory fragmentation, 13 Sept camera, 504–5 Serbia, 258–60 serial literature, 36, 208n1, 229–30, 230n3, 430 serials, 25, 58, 230, 288, 290n3, 294, 396, 410. See also film serials Serner, Walter, 41–45, 335 set design, 6, 21, 105, 109, 137, 291, 318, 336, 422–24, 482, 487–88, 498, 499–501, 510, 562, 594 Seven Years’ War, 216, 219n1 Severing, Carl, 286n2, 369, 369n1 sexism, 230–32 “Sexual Danger in the Cinema, The” (Spier), 227–30 sexuality, 4, 167, 215, 223, 225, 227–30, 242n2, 249, 322, 407 Shackleton, Ernest Henry, 58–59, 60n2, 400n5, 495, 498n1 Shakespeare, William, 15, 29, 30n1, 31, 132, 199n1, 331, 332, 397, 399, 506, 579 Shanghai Document, The (Das Dokument von Shanghai; documentary film; 1928), 104, 104n3

Index

Sherlock Holmes films, 587 Shiraz. See Grabmal einer großen Liebe, Das shorts, 479–80, 543n4, 546 Shub, Esfir, 98, 103 Shylock von Krakau, Der (film; 1913), 197, 199n1 Sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films, Der (Balázs). See Visible Man or the Culture of Film (Balázs) Sidney, Scott, 58n3, 172n3 Sieburg, Friedrich, 6, 53, 92–94, 124–26, 325 Sieger, Der (film; 1932), 347, 349n1 Sieger, Die (film; 1918), 319n2 Siegfried (film; 1924), 95, 304n2, 336 Siemsen, Hans, 295–97 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 186, 187, 188, 188n3 “Significance of Conglomerates in the Film Industry, The” (Pommer), 290–92 “Significance of Film for International Understanding, The” (“Valentin”), 292–94 Silberman, Marc, 372 silent film aesthetics, 6; architecture in, 499–501; camera movement in, 503–5, 509–15; close-ups in, 492–98; fashion in, 501–3; intertitles in, 489–92; lighting design in, 487–89; music and, 482–85, 515–17; muteness and, 485–87, 508–9; screenplays in, 498–99 silent films, 30n1, 311, 349, 480; criticism of, 180–81; extra-filmic possibilities of, 182n6; gestures and acting style in, 108; internationality of, 142, 286, 309–11; Lang on peace potentials of, 508–9; mouth movements of speech in, 195; object fascination in, 327–28; pantomime as precursor to, 111; sound technology and end of, 517–19; spectatorship of, 323; use of term, 485 silhouette films, 470–71, 542, 555, 604 Simmel, Georg, 13, 190 simultanism, 53 Sinclair, Upton, 352 Singing Fool, The (film; 1928), 564 sites of exhibition: cinema reformist criticism of, 155–56; as collective space, 174–75; gentrification of, 151–53; German demographics of, 172–74; illusionism in, 147–49; interior design, 154–55; standardization of, 174–75; workingclass movie theaters, 149–50. See also Kientopp (Berlin, Germany); movie theaters; picture palaces; spectatorship Sixth Part of the World, A (film; 1926), 476 Skizze, Die (journal), 147 Skladanowsky, Emil, 4, 33, 433n8, 580 Skladanowsky, Max, 4, 33, 433n8, 579–81, 586, 609, 611, 611n4 sky-dome, 587, 589n2 slapstick, 18, 25n4, 27, 108, 188–89, 288, 290n6, 323, 409, 448, 467, 479, 354, 396, 401, 476, 479, 510, 587–88. See also comedies; laughter Slevogt, Max, 607n3 slides, 218, 258, 263–64, 525 “Slow Motion” (Lehmann), 89–92

675

slow-motion photography, 6, 78–81, 89–92, 508–9 Slums of Berlin (film; 1925), 361n4 Smith, George Albert, 222n4 Sobchack, Vivian, 45 social class, 4 Social Democratic Party, 232n1, 242, 279, 361, 369n1, 420, 426 social-realist film, 375 Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (SCAGL), 183n1 society films, 502 Society for the Promotion of Motion Picture Art (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Lichtbildkunst), 17 “Sociological Foundations of the Cinema Industry, The”, 172–74 Sohn, Der (Hasenclever), 39 So ist Sowjet-Rußland! Ein Tatsachenbericht (Olimsky), 249 Somme, Battle of the (film; 1916), 268, 269nn1–2 Sommer, Ph., 28–30 Sontag, Henrietta, 85, 86n4 Sontag, Susan, 60, 98 Sophocles, 201, 203n2, 380 S.O.S. Iceberg (S.O.S. Eisberg; film; 1933), 70n1 So sind die Männer (film; 1923), 298 So This Is Paris (film; 1926), 136 Souffrances de l’inventeur, Les (Balzac), 590n1 sound film companies, 141n1 “Sound Film Friend and Foe” (Piscator), 567–69 sound films, 7; All Quiet on the Western Front controversy, 284–87; American, in Germany, 563–64; audience reaction to, 550, 554, 560–61, 563; camera mobility as problem in, 565–66; Chaplin’s refusal to appear in, 601; in color, 599; Dietrich on acting in, 339–40; earliest German, memories of, 556–58; expressionist principles in, 576; imagined futures of, 598–600; internationality of, 286, 309–11, 314–16; Lang’s aesthetics, 576–77; music and, 552–55, 566–67, 572–74; Oscar winners, 564n1; potential/limitations of, 559–61, 563–64; production of, 549–51; as “reproduced reality”, 551–52; Ruttmann on principles of, 555–56; theater/film relationship and, 567–69; transition to, 562–63; writing for, 574–75. See also sound technology “Sound-Image Film: On the Presentation in Frankfurt’s Gloria-Palast” (Kracauer), 556–58 sound-on-film systems, 551–52, 552n2, 557 sound technology, 7; actors’ voice/body connection and, 142–44; avant-garde movement and, 478–81; film composers’ need to master, 573; illusion created through, 148; in newsreels, 66–67; silent films and, 517–19; Sprossenschrift, 558n2; synchronized sound, 559; Tonbilder and, 148, 149n1; transformative power of, 562–63; transition to, and “crisis of language”, 182n6; transition to, and film archives, 105–7; Tri-Ergon system, 551–52, 552n2, 557. See also sound films

676

Index

Soupault, Philippe, 399–400, 400n3 Sousa, John Philip, 396, 398n2 South: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Glorious Epic of the Antarctic (film; 1919), 58–59, 60n2 Soviet films, 251 Soviet Russia, 5, 9, 98, 249, 251, 258, 276, 351, 357, 367, 375–76, 400, 473, 536 Sozialistische Monatshefte (monthly), 457–59 Space Light Art, 604 space travel, 62 Spartacist uprising (1919), 279 Spartakusbund, 351 “Spectator in Cinema, The” (Wolf), 169–70 spectatorship: of advertising films, 547–48; in Berlin, 161–64; bourgeoisie, 163–64; camera movement and “subjective identification”, 512–15; children and, 219–22; class/gender identities, 156–61; color impressions and, 583; dual model of, 335; education/disciplining of, 130–34, 151–53; embodied, 6; eroticism and, 166–67, 340–44; Guttmann on “cinematic mankind” as result of, 238–40; haptic theories of, 45; hypnotic quality of, 40, 169–70; illusion and, 45–47, 335–37; intertitles and, 490–91; music and, 92–94, 148; phenomenological theories of, 45; of silent films, 323; sound technology and, 310; of sports films, 34–35; theater vs. cinema acting performances, 486–87; women as, 230–32; working class, 147, 149–50, 161–63, 381. See also Kientopp (Berlin, Germany); movie theaters; picture palaces; sites of exhibition spectroscope, 80 Spellbound (film; 1945), 443 “Sperber-Debatte”, 279 Spier, Isaak (“Ike”), 227–30 Spinoza, Baruch, 607 Spirit of Film, The (Balázs), 20, 58, 362, 492, 517, 581 Spitzweg, Carl, 296, 297n8 Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (Balzac), 290n3 split-screen, 207 Spohr, Louis, 607n8 sports, 10, 72, 389, 445, 586 “Sports on Film” (Arndt), 33–35 Sprechchor (speaking chorus), 359, 361n1 Sprossenschrift, 558n2 Stachelschwein, Das (journal), 439, 459–61 stage actors: in Autorenfilm, 182–83, 188–89; facial expressions of, 194–95; as film actors, 111, 111n4, 143, 188, 189n1, 318, 409, 563, 610–11 stage artists, 318 Stahl-Film (1922), 542, 543n4 Stalin, Joseph, 376, 376n1 Stapel, Wilhelm, 8, 242–43, 247, 534 stardom, dialectics of, 317 Starevich, Ladislas, 479 stars, 3, 123, 125, 251, 288, 302, 306, 314–15, 319, 506, 550, 588; autographs of, 344, 346; Balázs on, 325–27; cigarette-pack picture cards portraying,

346n3, 349–50; female, and eroticism, 340–44; Kracauer’s critique of, 344–46; letters to fans, 338–40; “self-destructive” prototype, 337–38; “types”, 144, 325 star system, 6, 317, 325–27 “State and Cinema” (anon.), 269–71 “Statement on Sound”, 555 Stationmaster, The (film; 1925), 360, 361n2 Ste., H., 48–9 steamships, cinemas onboard, 542, 543n2 Stefani (news agency), 274, 275n2 Steffen, Ernst, 595–98 Stein, O. Th., 49–51, 71, 236 Steinach-Film, Der (1923), 543, 543n6 Steiner, Max, 572 Stephan, 351–52, 353n1 stereographs, 48 stereoscopic film, 430, 504, 524, 573, 578–79, 593–95. See also 3-D; three-dimensionality Stern, Ernst, 318, 319n1 Sternberg, Josef von, 70n2, 144, 315, 338–39, 340, 342 Sternheim, Julius, 423 Sticks and Stones (Mumford), 394n3 Stiller, Mauritz, 111, 114n2, 384 stimulation. See cinema and sensory perception Stindt, Georg Otto, 300–301 Stöcker, Helene, 227 “Stoker, The” (Kafka), 165 Storm over Asia (film; 1928), 104n4 Storm over Mont Blanc. See Stürme über dem Montblanc storytelling, popular, 184–86 Stramm, August, 53, 54n1 Strasse, Die (film; 1923), 389–92 Strasser, Alex, 478–81, 603 Stratz, Rudolph, 318, 319n2 Strauss, Richard, 304n8, 398n7, 515, 517n1, 606 Street, The (film; 1923). See Die Strasse Stresemann, Gustav, 273–75 Strindberg, August, 288 Strobel, Heinrich, 552–55 Strobl, Karl Hans, 25–28 Strom, Der (journal), 30–31 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The (Habermas), 147 Stuart, Henry, 345 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 466 “Student of Prague, The” (anon.), 188–89 Student of Prague, The (film; 1913), 13, 77, 119n5, 188–89, 197, 199, 206, 207, 449n4, 503 Student of Prague, The (film; 1926), 307, 308n2, 447, 449n4 Studio des Ursulines (Paris, France), 465–66 Studio Rus, 367 Sturm, Der (journal), 118, 119n8, 253n4, 489n1 Stürme der Leidenschaft (film; 1931), 347 Stürme über dem Montblanc (film; 1930), 68–70, 70n1 Sturm und Drang, 417

Index

style, 196 “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (Panofsky), 424 “Style of the Export Film, The” (May), 294–95 stylistic laws, 95–96 subjective identification, 512–15 “Subjective Movement” (Holland), 137, 512–15 subjectivity, 147, 415, 482, 554 “Substitute for Dreams, The” (Hofmannsthal), 169, 384–86 Süddeutsche Filmzeitung (newspaper), 136 Süddeutsche Monatshefte (monthly journal), 223–26 Sudermann, Hermann, 318, 428, 433n1 Sullivan, Louis, 393 Sumurun (film; 1920), 269n3, 453, 587 Sumurun (Freksa), 111, 114n2, 454n2 Sündige Liebe (film; 1911), 158, 161n3 Sunrise (film; 1927), 307, 516 superficiality, 36, 39, 65, 95, 125, 216, 262, 266, 289, 334, 394, 453, 458 surrealist movement, 400n3 Sur un air de Charleston (film; 1927), 136 Survage, Léopold, 450 surveillance, 534–37 Suttner, Bertha von, 265, 265n1 Swanson, Gloria, 303, 304n4, 332 Swedish films, 479 Switzerland, 77n3, 530 Sylvester (film; 1924), 370, 371, 489, 503 Symphonie Diagonale (Eggeling), 459, 460, 466–67 “symphoties”, 418–19, 420n18, 604, 607, 607n10 synchronized sound, 550, 559, 564, 573, 603 Szczepanik, Petr, 2n4 Tabu (film; 1931), 308n6 Tag, Der (journal), 58–60, 123, 583–84 Tag bei Krupp, Ein (film; 1917), 542, 543n4 Tage-Buch, Das (journal), 66–67, 170–72, 208–10, 290–92, 319–23, 384–86 Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (film; 1929), 564 Tag Film, Ein (film), 557, 558 Tägliche Rundschau (journal), 188–89 Taine, Hippolyte, 333, 333n2 Tales of Hoffmann, The (opera; Offenbach), 189n3 talking films. See sound films Talma, François-Joseph, 334, 335n2 Tannenbaum, Herbert, 168–69, 192–96 Tantris der Narr (Hardt), 343, 344n13 Tanz-Brevier, Das (dance manual), 136 Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase, Die (Droste), 338n1 Tanz ist Leben (unfinished; Laban and Prager), 141n2 tariffs, 544 Tartuffe (film; 1925), 512 Tarzan of the Apes (film; 1918), 57, 58n3 Tausk, Victor, 39, 39n2 Taut, Bruno, 532–34 Taylor, Richard, 2n4 taxation, 103, 114, 227, 247, 252, 270, 283, 474, 479

677

Technicolor, 564n1, 602n4 “Telecinema in the Home” (Steffen), 595–98 “Telefilm, The” (Bastian), 584–85 Telefunken, 55–56 Telefunken-Karolus-System, 592n3 telegraph, 164n4, 270, 420, 428, 592 Telehor apparatus, 591–92, 592n3 telephone, 84, 179, 270, 272, 518, 596 telescope, 80, 81, 90 television, 7, 10, 70n1, 137, 303, 312, 573, 584–85, 590–92, 595–98, 602–603 Tempo (tabloid), 306–8 tempo, 8, 26, 29, 44, 65, 109, 132, 164n4, 171, 184, 396, 406, 419, 429, 434–35, 451, 456, 463, 470, 477, 483–84, 486, 550–51, 564, 566, 587–88, 595. See also rhythm Tendenzen der Filmwirtschaft und deren Auswirkung auf die Filmpresse (Olimsky), 249 Tendenzkunst-Debatte, 279 Terra Nova Expedition, 60n1 Terry, Paul, 172n2 Testament of Dr. Mabuse, The (film; 1933), 576 thaumatograph, 550, 551n3 theater: cinema as opportunity for failed actresses in, 153–54; cinematographic technology used in, 21; cinema vs., 87–88, 108–11; films based on, 124n1, 146n3, 207–8, 421, 515, 517n1; future of, 178; Landau on immortalization of performances in, 85–86, 86n4; modern urban life and, 198; motion in, 418; traveling (Wanderkinos), 147; upper class attendance at, 160. See also theater vs. cinema Theater, Das (journal), 149–51 “Theater, Pantomime, and Cinema” (Freska), 111–14 “Theater and Cinema” (Bazin), 424 “Theater and Cinematograph” (Kienzl), 30–31 Theater des Westens (Berlin, Germany), 550, 551n2 Theater in der Josefstadt (Vienna, Austria), 335n1 theater mimes, 108–9 theater of intrigue, 28–29 “Theater of the Little People” (Döblin), 149–51 theater organizations, 36, 38n1 theater scandals, 409–10 “Theater unserer Zeit, Das” (Piscator), 567–568 theater vs. cinema: Autorenfilm and, 154, 182–83; cinema reform movement and, 215; cinematic innervation and, 30–31; film dramas vs. photoplays, 199–203; Friedell’s satire of, 178–82; gesture in, 36, 108–11, 115–19, 137, 138, 194–95; intellectual demands, 31–33; Jesenská on escape potential of cinema, 164–66; Jünger on modern “type” vs. bourgeois “individual”, 408–12; kitsch and, 209; Lautensack on time conceptions, 86–88; Lukács on aesthetic differences, 377–81; mass appeal and, 87; optical lure, 31–33; pantomime in, 111–14; Pinthus on, 186, 187–88, 199–203; Serner on, 45; sound films and, 339–40, 567–69;

678

Index

theater vs. cinema (continued) spectatorship and actor performance, 486–87; in Vienna, 333; Wegener on, 207; writing and, 36–37 Théâtre de la République (Paris, France), 335n2 Théâtre du Vaudeville (Paris, France), 177n3 Théâtre Optique, 92n2, 580 Théâtre Réjane (Paris, France), 109, 111n3 Theorie der kinematographischen Projektion (Marbe), 13 Theory of Film (Kracauer): on “basic aesthetic principle”, 94; on experimental film, 466; on factuality, 444; film critiques in, 390, 424; spectatorship chapter in, 346n3 Theory of the Novel (Lukács), 390 Thief of Baghdad, The (film; 1924), 448, 449n3 Thiele, Wilhelm, 568, 571–72, 583 “Third Dimension, The” (Grave), 593–95 Third Reich, 130, 130n3, 134, 349 Thomalla, Curt, 543n6 Thomas, Ambroise, 161n5 Thomas, Brandon, 172n3 Thomas, Rudolf, 123, 340–44 Thompson, Kristin, 499 “Thoughts toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema” (Lukács), 377–81, 390 three-dimensionality, 137, 168, 191, 225, 423, 425, 446, 558, 564, 578–79, 589, 593–95. See also 3-D; stereoscopic film Three Million Trial (film; 1926), 357 “Threepenny Lawsuit, The” (Brecht), 372–74 Threepenny Opera, The (Brecht and Weill), 372–74 thrills, 5–6, 13, 25, 35–38, 149, 159, 178, 421 “Thrills in Film Drama and Elsewhere” (Forch), 35–38 Throw of Dice, A (film; 1929), 62–64 Tiefland (film; 1954), 134 Tierpark Hagenbeck (Stellingen, Germany), 38n2 Tiller Girls, 395, 396 time, concepts of, 557, 558n4. See also cinema and time conceptions time-lapse photography, 6, 17, 79, 97, 313, 473, 533–34, 543 Tirpitz, Alfred von, 296, 297n3 Tischlein deck dich (film; 1921), 542, 543n5 Titanic, sinking of (1912), 44, 206n1 “To an Unknown Woman” (Dietrich), 143, 338–40 Tobis (German film company), 312, 313 Tobis-Klang-Film, 372 Toch, Ernst, 555, 555n3 Today’s Cinematograph: A Public Menace (Brunner), 235–38 Todessprung, Der (film; 1919), 289, 290n8 Toller, Ernst, 360, 361n5, 365–66, 367 Tolnæs, Gunnar, 306, 306n1 Tolstoy, Leo, 265, 265n1, 344n6, 447n6 Tonbilder (sound pictures), 148, 149n1, 423, 424n2, 549–51, 611n8 Tosca (opera; Puccini), 158, 161n5 “total cinema” myths, 551, 598

Töteberg, Michael, 275–77 Tote Stadt, Die (opera; Korngold), 464n1 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 601 tracking shots, 503 traffic, 26, 75–76, 270, 367, 411, 464, 496, 530, 539, 544 Tragödie der Liebe (film), 500 Tramp, The (film; 1916), 290n6 “Transcendence of the Film Image, The” (Sieburg), 53, 92–94 transformations of experience, 5–6. See also bodies in film; cinema and sensory perception; cinema and space conceptions; cinema and time conceptions; film—as “art for the times”; sites of exhibition; spectatorship “Transparencies on Film” (Adorno), 402, 482 trash dramas (Schunddramen), 52, 86 trash films, 33, 205, 207, 233; censorship proposed for, 222–23, 241, 246–47; cinema reform movement vs., 45, 222–23, 246–47, 381; Rennert on moralists/aesthetes vs., 205; use of term, 45; during WWI, 261, 263–64 “Trash Films: Their Nature, Their Dangers, and the Fight against Them” (Hellwig), 222–23 trash literature, 233, 381–82 Travail (film series; 1920), 288, 290n2 Travail (Zola), 288, 290n2 travel films, 20, 48–49, 60–61, 544 travel literature, 56, 57 travel pictures, 27, 48 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 56 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 333, 333n2 Tribuna (journal), 164–66 Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit series, 426 Tribüne Theater, 308 “Trick Film, The” (Dreyer), 544 Trick filme. See animated films trick photography, 17 Tri-Ergon system, 551–52, 552n2, 557, 573, 574n1 Trip to the Moon, A (film; 1902), 62 “Triumph of Film, The” (Jacobi), 277–79 Trotsky, Leon, 99n2, 376, 376n1 Tschichold, Jan, 477n1 Tucholsky, Kurt, 6, 127, 166–67, 243–46, 246n2, 281–82, 286–87 Turksib (film; 1929), 371 Turszinsky, Walter, 108–11 Twardowski, H. H. von, 424 “Twilight of Film, The” (Eggebrecht), 301–4 2001: A Space Odyssey (film; 1968), 62 “types”, 144, 325 “Übermensch, Der” (Kraus), 269n4 Ucicky, Gustav, 349nn3–4, 565 Uexküll, Jakob von, 79 Ufa (Universum Film AG), 71, 103, 104n1, 212n4, 254, 322; avant-garde artists assisted by, 455; Bordkinos of, 543n2; Correll as production director at, 562; Cultural Section, 127, 129, 459, 461n1, 485, 539, 541; establishment of, 275n4;

Index

films produced by, 403; FilmunterrichtsOrganisation, 539; Hollywood and, 301, 302, 348; international talking films of, 314–15; Kracauer’s critique of Depression-era escapist films, 347–49; Kulturfilms produced by, 126–30; Kurtz at, 441; Lubitsch and, 299; marketing strategies of, 346n2; mergers with, 290; Music Section, 515; newsreels of, 369, 369n1; Nordische Filmgesellschaft purchased by, 277n2; Pommer and, 314; restructuring of, 304–5; transition to sound film, 562 “Ufa-Bord-Kino” (Schlesinger), 543n2 Ufa-Buch, Das (ed. Bock and Töteberg), 275–77 Ufa Feuilleton (journal), 562–63 Ufa-Magazin, 543n2 “Ufa Palace” (Pinthus), 170–72 Ufa-Palast am Zoo (Berlin, Germany), 62, 170–72, 172n1, 208, 319–20, 427 Ufa-Theater am Kurfürstendamm (Berlin, Germany), 459–61 Ufa-Theater im Schwan (Berlin, Germany), 452–54, 454n2 Uhu (journal), 509–11, 590–92 Umschau (journal), 92, 234–35, 259–60 “Uncanny, The” (Freud), 449n4 “Uncovered Grave, The” (Roth), 98–99 Ungleichzeitigkeit (nonsimultaneity), 7–8 Union, the (German cinema association), 38n1 Union of German Educational and Cultural Filmmakers, 545 United Artists, 299 United States: capitalism and, 298; cinema and space conceptions in, 54; cinema reform movement in, 8; elite Weimar fascination with, 392–94; film censorship in, 215; German films in, 283, 292; movie theater demographics in, 173; “nickel madness” in, 242; television demonstrations in, 591; WWI entered by, 273–74. See also American cinema; American film industry Universal Filmlexikon 1932: Europa (ed. Arnau), 314–16 “universal language”, 330, 455, 508, 209. See also Esperanto, Volapük Universal Motion Picture Manufacturing, 305 Universal Studios, 251, 284, 301, 305, 306n2, 308n3, 590 Universelle Sprache (Richter and Eggeling), 455 Universum Film AG. See Ufa (Universum Film AG) upper class, 159–61, 208, 362, 382, 401 Urania (scientific society; Berlin, Germany), 39n2, 79, 81, 82, 83, 277n3 Urania (scientific society; Vienna, Austria), 39, 39n2, 239 Urban, Charles, 222n4 urbanism, 4. See also modern urban life urban psychology, 31 utopia, 598, 600 “Valentin” (pseud.), 292–94 Valentino, Rudolph, 290n9, 343

679

“Valhalla and Rainbow” (Wirth), 21n1 “Value of the Adventure Film, The” (Cornel), 56–58 Vampyrtänzerin, Die (film; 1912), 225, 226n1 Van Gogh, Vincent, 418 Varieté (film; 1925), 509 variety shows, 10, 13, 26, 36–38, 42, 160, 202, 267, 395, 417 “Various Thoughts on the Movie Theater Interior” (anon.), 154–55 Vaterländische Film-Gesellschaft mbH (National Film Company, LLC), 281 Vaterländischer Schriftenverband (Writers’ Association of the Fatherland), 235 vaudeville, 23–24, 30, 171–72, 526 Veidt, Conrad, 240, 306–9, 308nn2–3, 308n8, 336, 423 Vélez, Lupe, 343, 344n11 Venezianische Nacht, Eine (film; 1914), 269n3 Verband Deutscher Bühnenschriftsteller (League of German Playwrights), 38n1 “Verbotene Films” (Tucholsky), 246n2 Verein der Plakatfreunde, 168 Verein Deutscher Reklamefachleute (Association of German Advertising Experts), 537 Vereinigung Deutscher Filmfabrikanten e.V. (Association of German Film Manufacturers), 240 Vereshchagin, Vasily, 265, 265n1 Verhaeren, Émile, 435, 436n1 Veritas vincit (film; 1919), 294 Verne, Jules, 62, 81–82, 445, 585 Verrocchio, Andrea del, 122, 122n4 Versailles, Treaty of (1919), 56, 437, 544, 545 Vertov, Dziga, 17, 351, 476–77, 477n1 Victoria (empress of Germany), 529n3 Vidor, King, 519n2 Vienna (Austria-Hungary): Deutsche Bildwoche in, 130–34, 134n1; film journals established in, 5; German film premieres in, 315, 316n2; pageants in, 76, 77n5; theater vs. cinema in, 333; Urania society in, 39n2 “Vienna Is Filming!” (anon.), 328–30 Viertel, Berthold, 4, 77–78 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 25n4 Visible Man or the Culture of Film (Balázs): Antarctic expedition films discussed in, 58; athletics and film chapter in, 34; on close-ups, 492–98, 559; on color film, 583; on dance and film, 108; on expressionism and film, 434; film theory as defined in, 3; Hofmannsthal and, 384; on Kultur-Bildung connection, 9; Musil’s review of, 323; Nielsen portrait in, 123, 340, 342, 344n7; on Nielsen’s eroticism, 123; publication of (1924), 130 visual arts, 116 visual culture, 1, 5–6, 10, 384 visual engagement, 94 visual literacy, 22 visual pleasure (Schaulust), 41–45

680

Index

visual technology, 58–60 Vitascope, 254 Vogelhändler, Der (opera; Zeller), 550, 551n3 Vogt, Hans, 552, 552n2 Volapük (international language), 33, 33n4, 87, 88n1 Volkelt, Johannes, 174 Völkerschauen (human zoos; ethnological exhibitions), 58n1 Volksbühne (People’s Theater), 353n1 Volksbühnenbewegung (people’s theater movement), 232 “Volks-Film-Bühne” (Stephan), 353n1 Volks-Film-Bühne (People’s Film Theater), 351–52, 353n1, 360 Volksgemeinschaft, 282, 283 Volksverband für Filmkunst (People’s Association for Film Art), 73n4, 351, 361–62, 364–65, 367, 466 Voltaire, 119n9, 180, 182n4 “Vom Erleben des Kriegs” (Kracauer), 284 Vom Werden eines Flügels (film), 544, 544n2 Von Ibissen und Reihern (film), 348 Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (film; 1920), 441 Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts before break fast; film; 1928), 196n2, 555, 555n4 Vorprogramm. See opening program Vossische Zeitung (newspaper), 127, 556 Vox-Haus (Berlin, Germany), 586 W., E., 88–89 W., K., 335–37 Wachsfigurenkabinett, Das (film; 1924), 441, 447, 499 Wagner, Richard, 21, 21n1, 26, 157–58, 180, 419, 454n5, 484, 566, 594, 595n1, 606, 607n9 Wakonda people, 49n3 Walden, Herwarth, 119n8, 488, 489n1 Waldteufel, Émile, 483, 485n3 Wallensteins Lager (Schiller), 107n1, 121, 180, 397 Walrossjagd, Die (The Walrus Hunters; animated film; 1923), 171, 172n2 Walther, Hertha von, 97 Waltz of Love (film; 1930), 315, 568, 571–72, 572n3 Wandering Jews, The (Roth), 98 Wanderkinos (traveling theaters), 147 Wangenheim, Gustav von, 361n1 Wankende Glaube, Der (film; 1913), 319n3 “War and Cinema” (Der Kinematograph editorial), 258–59 war bonds, 277–79 Warburg, Aby, 9 war film, 281, 363; Kracauer on, 284–86. See also World War I “War Films” (Tucholsky), 281–82 Warm, Hermann, 423, 424n4, 439 Warner Brothers, 299, 372, 599 Warschauer, Frank, 465, 594, 598–600 Was da kreucht und fleucht (film), 348 Was das Auge nicht sieht (film; 1923), 542, 543n1

“Was ist Kino-Auge?” (lecture; Vertov), 476 Wassermann, Jakob, 356n2 Way of All Flesh, The (film; 1927), 143 Webbs, Stuart, 430 Weber, Alfred, 156 Weber, Die (film; 1927), 330 Weber, Max, 325, 384 Wedderkop, Hermann von, 295–97 Wedekind, Frank, 124n1 “Weekly Newsreel, The” (Kracauer), 68, 70–73 Der Weg, der zur Verdammnis führt (film; 1919), 433n4 “Wege des großen Spielfilms in Deutschland” (Lang), 142n1 Wegener, Paul: Autorenfilm and, 182; fantasy in films of, 118; Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), 297n9; “On the Artistic Possibilities of the Motion Picture”, 206–8; Rübezahls Hochzeit (1916), 119n5; silent film aesthetics and, 486; as stage actor in film, 318; in Student of Prague (1913), 188–89; worldwide fame of, 296. See also Golem, Der (film; 1915); Student of Prague, The (film; 1913) Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (film; 1925), 126–30, 141, 141n3 Weib des Pharao, Das (film; 1922), 296, 319n1 Weill, Kurt, 372–74, 403, 552, 586–89 Weimar Constitution, 535 Weimar Germany: American cinema in, 212n6, 392; avant-garde movement in, 8; body culture in, 126–27; Chaplin as viewed in, 400; cinema institutionalized in, 317; cinema reform movement in, 8; class dynamics in, 176; cultural journals in, 296; dance theorists in, 139; during Depression, 347; film censorship in, 240–42; Film-Kurier editorial on role of film in, 282–84; film photo albums in, 349; international image of, 296; Kapp Putsch against (1920), 246n3; mark devaluation in, 298; national anthem of, 323n5; newsreels discrediting, 369, 369n1; November Revolution (1918) and, 282n2; Pinthus’s call for Porten as figurehead of, 319–23; political turmoil in, 319, 323n4; right-wing mass mobilization concerns in, 366–67; Russian film imports in, 351; spiritual impoverishment of, 204; WWI as filmically/literarily portrayed in, 284–87 Weimar Kulturfilms, 79 Weiner, Alfred, 282 Weisbach, Werner, 417 Weiss, Josef, 189 Weiß, Karl, 39, 39n1 Weisse, Kurt, 20–22, 443 Weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü, Die (film; 1929), 564 Weißen Blätter, Die (journal), 426–33 Weiße Sklavin, Die (film; 1910), 225 “We Lack Film Poetry” (Lubitsch), 208–10 Welt am Montag, Die (journal), 365–66 Weltbaumeister, Der (Taut), 534, 534n1

Index

Weltbühne, Die (journal), 286, 459; “Cinema Censorship” (Tucholsky), 243–46; “The Public’s Attitude toward Modern German Literature” (Behne), 392–94; “Der tönende Film” (Arnheim), 568; “The Twilight of Film”, 301–4; “War Films” (Tucholsky), 281–82 Welte Company, 555 Weltfilm report, 368–69 Weltreklamekongress (World Advertising Conference), 545 Welt und Arbeit (film report), 369 Wenn du einmal Dein Herz verschenkst (film; 1929), 403 Werner, Anton von, 271, 273n2 Wertheimer, Arjeh Yehuda. See Brunner, Constantin (Arjeh Yehuda Wertheimer) Wertheimer, Max, 92n1 Westerns, 158, 212, 219, 590 Westfront 1918 (film; 1930), 284, 285–86, 286n4, 375, 564 Westinghouse, 599 Westinghouse Works series (1904), 541 Wettach, Charles Adrien, 398n5 Weule, Karl, 49, 49n3 “What Is Film Illusion?” (“K. W.”), 335–37 “Where Is the Sound Film Archive?” (Balázs), 105–7 white-collar, 283, 293 White Sister, The (film; 1923), 303, 304n7 White Slave Trade, The (film; 1910), 225, 226n1 Whitman, Walt, 393, 435 “Who Will Create the German Revolutionary Film?” (Toller), 365–66 “Why?—This Is Why!” (Lautensack), 86–88 “Why We Love Film” (Haas), 330–33 “Why We Still Do Not Have Television: Possibilities of Electric Television” (Korn), 590–92 Why Worry? (film), 448 wide screen, 573 “Wiedersehen mit alten Filmen: Der expressionistische Film” (Kracauer), 447 Wie ich wurde (Porten), 317–19 Wiene, Conrad, 290n3 Wiene, Robert, 304n8, 422, 423, 436–38, 441, 517n2. See also Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (film; 1920) Wiener Bildwoche, Die, 103n2 Wiese, Leopold von, 279, 279n2 Wiesenthal sisters, 113, 114n2 Wie werde ich Filmschauspieler, Filmschauspielerin? (Künzel), 120 Wie werde ich Kino-Darsteller? (Ferdinand and Ferdinand-Bielitz), 120 Wigman, Mary, 403 Wilde, Oscar, 178, 181n1, 188, 189, 241 Wildenhain, Bernhard, 187, 188n2 Wilder, Billie, 306–8 Wild Orchids (film; 1929), 343, 344n10 Wilhelm, Carl, 108, 199n1

681

Wilhelm II (Kaiser of Germany), 360, 361n6; abdication of, 319; children as spectators, 222; cinematographic appearances of, 18, 20, 78, 84n3, 222, 254–56; cinematograph visits of, 17, 78; Eulenberg Affair and, 242n3, 296; international image of, 296; memoirs of, 296; photographs of, 83, 84n2; Sedan panorama and, 273n2; 25th crown jubilee, 254, 256; Vienna visit of, 77–78 “Will to Style in Film” (Lang), 95–96 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 435 Wintergarten (Berlin, Germany), 4, 580–81 Winterstein, Eduard von, 318, 319n3 wireless photography, 591, 592n3 wireless transmissions, 56, 137, 578, 584, 591, 594, 596–97 Wirth, Moritz, 21, 21n1 With Nature and a Camera (Kearton and Kearton), 505n1 Witlin, Leo, 136–39 Woche, Die (illustrated paper), 537, 537n3 Wolf, August, 94–95, 169–70 Wolff, Käthe, 470 Wolff, Ludwig, 304n5, 508n2 Wolfram, Aurel, 242, 247–49 Woman in the Moon. See Frau im Mond Woman of Paris, A (film; 1923), 399 women, 6, 129, 166; American, as actresses, 303, 304n4; cinema reform and, 230–32; divas, 317–23; as film critics, 204; as film spectators, 153, 156–61, 229, 230–32, 303; as illustrators, 470; Kracauer on Garbo’s physiognomy, 144–46; as susceptible to visual spectacle, 230–32, 532 Woolf, Virginia, 439 Worker, The (Jünger), 408–12 workers’ film journals, 351 workers’ film societies, 351 workers’ movement, 231–32 working class: artistic portrayals of, 164n1; in Berlin, 149–50, 161–63; cinema as dream substitute for, 384–86; cinema reform and elitist assumptions about, 381; female, as film spectators, 156–59, 176, 187, 233–34; Kientopps as site of, 147, 149–50; movie theaters attended by, 161–63. See also proletariat working-class cinema, 6, 8, 147, 149, 176, 229, 231–33, 283, 351–52, 361, 368, 381, 532. See also working class “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The” (Benjamin), 4, 77, 178, 339, 357, 377, 399, 403, 409 World Advertising Congress (Berlin; 1929), 530 World as Will and Idea, The (Schopenhauer), 398n8, 419n4 “World Film Report” (“A. A.”), 368–69 World War I: avant-garde movement following, 450; as beneficial for film, 266–67; censorship during, 269–71; cinema reform movement during, 50, 254; film as historiographical tool during, 88–89, 281–82; film as “spiritual education” during,

682

Index

World War I (continued) 262–65; film industry expansion during, 302; film portrayals of, 284–87; foreign films banned during, 293; Gaulke on lack of pathos in, 271, 272–73; German defeat in, 4, 256; German film industry following, 292–94; German modernity and, 4; German war bonds issued during, 277–79; German war crimes during, 366n1; Guttmann on cinema as trivial distraction from, 239–40; Der Kinematograph on outbreak of, 258–59; Kraus on battlefield footage during, 267–69; literary portrayals of, 267; “living target” displays during, 259–60; newsreels during, 264, 266, 272–73; propaganda campaign during, 7, 530; propaganda films during, 254–56, 293; religious revival following, 391; Rennert on, as liberation from banality, 204, 205; Romanticism and, 56; Serbian campaign during, 259; transformative power of, 260–61 Worringer, Wilhelm, 416, 419n2 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 393 Writers’ Association of the Fatherland, 235 Wrobel, Ignaz. See Tucholsky, Kurt Wunder des Schneeschuhs, Das (film; 1920/22), 135, 135n1, 211, 212, 212n2 Xenophon, 94, 583 X-ray technology, 527, 529–30, 584 Yale Journal of Criticism, 401 Yorck (film; 1931), 250, 252, 252n2, 348, 349n4

Yorck von Wartenburg, Ludwig, 252n2 youth organizations, 359–61 “Yvette Guilbert” (Altenberg), 181n3 Zauberei auf dem Sender (radio play; 1924), 586 Zehder, Hugo, 386–89 Zeitlupe, 89–90, 91 Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde (journal), 45–47 Zeller, Carl, 551n3 Zeller, Wolfgang, 555 Zelnik, Friedrich, 433n4 Zentralblatt für Volksbildungswesen (journal), 222–23 Zentralinstitut für Erziehung und Unterricht, 130 Zeppelin, Ferdinand von, 252n1 Zeppelins, 75, 77n3, 250, 252n1, 585 Zetkin, Clara, 231 Zeyn, Willy, 119n1 Zhelyabushsky, Yuri, 361n2 Zielinski, Siegfried, 9n22 Zille, Heinrich, 162, 164n1, 355n2, 360 Zille films, 360, 361n4 zoetrope, 92, 609 Zola, Émile, 24, 25n7, 180, 288, 290n2, 412n2 zoos, 38n2, 58, 525 Zuckmayer, Carl, 286 Zukunft, Die (journal), 78–81 Zum Kampfe gegen den Schmutz in Wort und Bild (von Grünberg), 261n2 Zürn, Walther, 212n4, 543n1, 543n6