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