The Semiotics of Light and Shadows: Modern Visual Arts and Weimar Cinema 9781350016149, 9781350016170, 9781350016163

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics Semiotics has complemented linguistics by expanding its scope beyond the phoneme and the sentence to include texts and discourse, and their rhetorical, performative, and ideological functions. It has brought into focus the multimodality of human communication. Advances in Semiotics publishes original works in the field demonstrating robust scholarship, intellectual creativity, and clarity of exposition. These works apply semiotic approaches to linguistics and non-verbal productions, social institutions and discourses, embodied cognition and communication, and the new virtual realities that have been ushered in by the Internet. It also is inclusive of publications in relevant domains such as socio-semiotics, evolutionary semiotics, game theory, cultural and literary studies, human-computer interactions, and the challenging new dimensions of human networking afforded by social websites. Series Editor: Paul Bouissac is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto (Victoria College), Canada. He is a world-renowned figure in semiotics and a pioneer of circus studies. He runs the SemiotiX Bulletin [www.semioticon.com/ semiotix] which has a global readership. Titles in the Series: A Buddhist Theory of Semiotics, Fabio Rambelli Computable Bodies, Josh Berson Critical Semiotics, Gary Genosko Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics, Tony Jappy Semiotics and Pragmatics of Stage Improvisation, Domenico Pietropaolo Semiotics of Drink and Drinking, Paul Manning Semiotics of Happiness, Ashley Frawley Semiotics of Religion, Robert Yelle The Language of War Monuments, David Machin and Gill Abousnnouga The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning, Paul Bouissac The Semiotics of Che Guevara, Maria-Carolina Cambre The Semiotics of Emoji, Marcel Danesi The Semiotics of X, Jamin Pelkey The Visual Language of Comics, Neil Cohn

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows Modern Visual Arts and Weimar Cinema Piotr Sadowski

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Piotr Sadowski, 2018 Piotr Sadowski has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image courtesy of Everett Collection / Mary Evans All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-1614-9 PB: 978-1-3501-1901-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-1616-3 ePub: 978-1-3500-1615-6 Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Ewa, Bartek, Adam, and Isabela

To know what to reveal and what to conceal and in what degree and how to do this is all there is to art. Josef von Sternberg, director of Der Blaue Engel

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction: In the Kingdom of Shadows Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows: From Optical Phenomena to Semiotic Signs Light and Shadows in the Visual Arts Fixing Iconic Indexes Light and Shadows in Early Cinema Expressionist Light and Shadows in Weimar Cinema Shadows in the City

Notes Bibliography Index

viii xv 1 7 29 53 85 105 177 231 251 267

List of Figures 1.1

The shadow of Dr. Caligari on a promotional still for Robert Wiene’s film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920 (Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow [London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1997], 151) 1.2 A threatening shadow emerges from behind a building, opposite the silhouette of a girl in the painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914 (private collection) 1.3 The shadow of a child murderer (Peter Lorre) in Fritz Lang’s film M, 1931 (screen capture) 1.4 The shadow of a vampire on his way to his victim’s bedroom in Friedrich W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1922 (screen capture) 2.1 The face of the actor Emil Jannings sculpted by three-point lighting in E. A. Dupont’s film Varieté, 1925 (screen capture) 2.2 A self-shadow in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, 1941 (screen capture) 2.3 Self-shadows of two burglars seen against a bright window in Henry Lehrman’s film Bangville Police, 1913 (screen capture) 2.4 Silhouettes of two figures projected dramatically against the sky in Robert Reinert’s film Nerven, 1919 (screen capture) 2.5 Three types of shadow: A—shading, B—attached shadow, and C— cast shadow (photo by author) 2.6 A natural shadow in a location shot from Friedrich W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu, 1922 (screen capture) 2.7 Accidental and (probably) unwanted shadow of the camera on a door frame on the left in Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane, 1941 (screen capture) 2.8 Everyday objects cast realistic shadows in Robert Campin’s painting Mérode Altarpiece, 1428 (courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 2.9 Shading and cast shadows in Gerard David’s painting Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Annunciate, ca. 1510, oil on panel (courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 2.10 Natural light and shadows in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving St. Jerome in His Study, 1514 (courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)

10

15 16 25 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

41

42 44

List of Figures

2.11 Warm, painterly light in the Rabbi’s study from Paul Wegener’s film Der Golem, 1920 (screen capture) 2.12 Chiaroscuro lighting in Caravaggio’s painting The Denial of Saint Peter, c. 1610 (courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 2.13 Chiaroscuro lighting in Paul Leni’s film Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924 (screen capture) 2.14 “Photographic” shadows in the painting Piazza San Marco by Canaletto, c. 1730–5 (courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington) 2.15 A misty, melancholy, shadowless landscape in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting A Walk at Dusk, 1830–5 (courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 2.16 A rare example of painted Impressionist shadows in Claude Monet’s Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, 1891 (courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 3.1 A Young Corinthian Girl Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover, engraving by Giuseppe Bortignoni (1778–1860) after David Allan (courtesy of Wellcome Library, London) 3.2 Still Life of Sculpture and Architectural Fragments, photograph by Jean Pierre Philippe Lampué, 1862 (courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 3.3 The Clouds Are Broken in the Sky, photograph by Henry Stuart Wortley, 1863 (courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 3.4 The Haystack, photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot, 1844–6 (courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington) 3.5 Silhouette short film Cinderella (1922), animated and directed by Lotte Reiniger (screen capture) 3.6 The shadow theater of “Arabian Night” in the decadent Berlin Kit Kat Klub from Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret, 1972 (screen capture) 3.7 The entertainer mocks the count’s sullenness with a shadow expression of his head in Schatten, dir. Arthur Robison, 1923 (screen capture) 3.8 The self-mocking shadow in Schatten, dir. Arthur Robison, 1923 (screen capture) 3.9 Two hands “touching”: a misinterpreted shadow in Schatten, dir. Arthur Robison, 1923 (screen capture) 3.10 Paper Silhouette Portrait of a Woman, artist unknown (American), daguerreotype, 1840s–1850s (courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

ix

45 46 47

48

49

50

55

57 59 60 64 64 66 67 68

71

x

List of Figures

3.11 A Man Drawing the Silhouette of a Seated Woman on Translucent Paper Suspended in a Frame and Lit by a Candle, etching by J. R. Schellenberg, 1775 (courtesy of Wellcome Library, London) 3.12 The swinging movement of the shadow of the prison window punctuates the passage of days for Mabuse’s victim (Aud Egede-Nissen) in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, dir. Fritz Lang, 1922 (screen capture) 3.13 The self-shadow of “the man behind the curtain” in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, dir. Fritz Lang, 1933 (screen capture) 3.14 Silhouettes and shadows hide the identities of members of secret organizations in Spione, dir. Fritz Lang, 1928 (screen capture) 3.15 A silhouette portrait of the spy master Haghi in Spione, dir. Fritz Lang, 1928 (screen capture) 3.16 The criminals “shadow” the police by independently debating the plans to capture the child murderer in M, dir. Fritz Lang, 1931 (screen capture) 3.17 A “shadow theater” of a criminal changing his disguise in Asphalt, dir. Joe May, 1929 (screen capture) 3.18 Self-shadows of father and son in an Expressionist, Cubist stairwell in Asphalt, dir. Joe May, 1929 (screen capture) 3.19 A subjective, Expressionist shot in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, dir. Fritz Lang, 1933 (screen capture) 4.1 Short film Annabelle Dances and Dances made for Edison Manufacturing Co. (1894). A natural shadow on the floor betrays the sunlight coming through the open roof (screen capture) 4.2 Spanish Bullfight, the Lumière brothers’ short travelog (1900). The bull casts a dramatic shadow of its horned head on the toreador’s bright cape (screen capture) 4.3 Silhouette and cast shadow effects obtained by natural light in Intolerance, dir. D. W. Griffith, 1916 (screen capture) 4.4 Shadowless lighting typical for the Babelsberg studio of the 1910s: Asta Nielsen in Die Suffragette, dir. Urban Gad, 1913 (screen capture) 4.5 A Rembrandtesque semidarkness in Der Student von Prag, dir. Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1913 (screen capture) 4.6 The actor Conrad Veidt in a chiaroscuro shot from the horror film Unheimliche Geschichten (Eeerie Tales), dir. Richard Oswald, 1919 (screen capture) 4.7 Backlighting in Unheimliche Geschichten (Eeerie Tales), dir. by Richard Oswald, 1919, casts the cellar in sepulchral darkness (screen capture)

72

74 76 78 79 80 80 81 83

87

89 92 93 95

96

96

List of Figures

4.8 5.1 5.2 5.3

5.4

5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

5.9

5.10

5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15

xi

One of many canted shots in The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed, 1949 (screen capture) 102 Distorted architecture and painted light effects in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene, 1920 (screen capture) 112 The Expressionist interior design and lighting in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, dir. Fritz Lang, 1922 (screen capture) 114 Light from bottom left casts a shadow of the somnambulist’s hand onto the lid of the upright box in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene, 1920 (screen capture) 116 The shadow of a hand in Rembrandt’s etching of the preacher Jan Cornelisz Sylvius, 1646 (courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington) 117 The shadow of the murderer’s hand in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene, 1920 (screen capture) 118 The shadow of a phantom hand in Schloss Vogelöd, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1921 (screen capture) 119 The murderer’s shadow in an Expressionist interior from the film The Telltale Heart, dir. Charles Klein, 1928 (screen capture) 120 The shadow as a projection of a disturbed mind in the film The Fall of the House of Usher, dir. Melville Webber and J. S. Watson, 1928 (screen capture) 121 The ghost of Madeline as a disembodied shadow in the film The Fall of the House of Usher, dir. Melville Webber and J. S. Watson, 1928 (screen capture) 122 The doubling of the sultan’s figure (Emil Jannings) suggests his ambivalent (benevolent/despotic) personality in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, dir. Paul Leni, 1924 (screen capture) 125 Painted streetlamps and light effects in the film Von morgens bis mitternachts, dir. Karlheinz Martin, 1920 (screen capture) 126 A hallucinatory Expressionist set in the film Von morgens bis mitternachts, dir. Karlheinz Martin, 1920 (screen capture) 127 Expressionistic physiognomy (Ernst Deutsch) in the film Von morgens bis mitternachts, dir. Karlheinz Martin, 1920 (screen capture) 128 Sharp shadows produced by single-source sidelighting (right off the screen) in Der Golem, dir. Paul Wegener, dir. 1920 (screen capture) 131 Rabbi Löw and his shadow duplicated by the Golem and its outline drawn on the wall in Der Golem, dir. Paul Wegener, 1920 (screen capture) 132

xii

List of Figures

5.16 The gigantic shadow of Nosferatu in Albin Grau’s promotional artwork for Friedrich W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu (1922) 134 5.17 The shadow of a decorative skeleton on the clock at midnight in Nosferatu, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1922 (screen capture) 138 5.18 Dark silhouettes separate grounds and enhance deep space in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, dir. Fritz Lang, 1924 (screen capture) 144 5.19 Tonal contrasts in costume and makeup rather than lighting separate the “good” guys from the “bad” in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, dir. Fritz Lang, 1924 (screen capture) 145 5.20 The Burgundian Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) and the Amazonian Brunhild (Hanna Ralph) clash tonally in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, dir. Fritz Lang, 1924 (screen capture) 146 5.21 Kriemhild’s shadow formed by light emanating from Siegfried’s sarcophagus in Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache, dir. Fritz Lang, 1924 (screen capture) 148 5.22 The commotion amplified by the fighters’ shadows reflected on the rough-surfaced walls in Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache, dir. Fritz Lang, 1924 (screen capture) 149 5.23 Orgon’s theatrical shadow projects the bigoted folly of an otherwise decent character in Herr Tartüff, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1925 (screen capture) 152 5.24 A candle carried by a skeptical maid as the only light of reason in a house darkened by religious mania in Herr Tartüff, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1925 (screen capture) 153 5.25 Duplication as duplicity: the hypocritical Tartuff (Emil Jannings) and his shadow in Herr Tartüff, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1925 (screen capture) 154 5.26 A spotlight from low right casts a shadow on the wall, imitating the effect of a candle placed on the table in Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend, dir. Curt Goetz, 1923 (screen capture) 156 5.27 Incoherent shadow produced by spotlight in Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend, dir. Curt Goetz, 1923 (screen capture) 157 5.28 Satan’s self-shadow separates grounds in cosmic confrontation between good and evil in Faust, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1926 (screen capture) 160 5.29 Faust, etching by Rembrandt van Rijn, c. 1652 (courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington) 161

List of Figures

xiii

5.30 Faust (Gösta Ekman) and his disciples: chiaroscuro lighting à la Rembrandt in Faust, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1926 (screen capture) 162 5.31 The gigantic shadow of Satan’s wings spreads over the town, bringing pestilence in Faust, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1926 (screen capture) 163 5.32 The shadow “reconnects” with the body in Vampyr, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932 (screen capture) 172 5.33 The shadow now “reconnected” with the body in Vampyr, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932 (screen capture) 173 5.34 The Sabbath of puppet-like shadows dancing on the wall in Vampyr, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer, 1932 (screen capture) 174 6.1 The Panthéon, photograph by Eugène Atget, 1924 (Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) 183 6.2 A quasi-realistic set of a street in M, dir. Fritz Lang, 1931 (screen capture) 191 6.3 A high-angle shot of a Berlin street covered with elongated shadows in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, dir. Fritz Lang, 1933 (screen capture) 192 6.4 A misty street at dawn in the documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt, dir. Walther Ruttmann, 1927 (screen capture) 195 6.5 Long shadows during an afternoon romantic walk in the park in the documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt, dir. Walther Ruttmann, 1927 (screen capture) 196 6.6 A panning camera follows the shadow of a horse-drawn carriage in the short documentary Alt Berlin, dir. Franz Fielder, 1930 (screen capture) 197 6.7 A shadow theater of pedestrians in nighttime Berlin in the documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt, dir. Walther Ruttmann, 1927 (screen capture) 198 6.8 An Expressionist shadow in a violent scene at night in Die Verrufenen (Slums of Berlin), dir. Gerhard Lamprecht, 1925 (screen capture) 203 6.9 Expressionist staircase and atmospheric chiaroscuro lighting in Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street), dir. Georg W. Pabst, 1925 (screen capture) 204 6.10 Condemned to darkness: the demoted porter (Emil Jannings) leaves the brightly lit hall to enter the dark basement of the hotel in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1924 (screen capture) 206

xiv

List of Figures

6.11 A grand illusion: the ex-porter preceded by his own enlarged shadow in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1924 (screen capture) 206 6.12 The light of truth: a spotlight on the old man’s face confirms his status as an outcast in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1924 (screen capture) 207 6.13 The vamp from the city (Margaret Livingston) is dark-haired and dressed in black, and appears by moonlight in Sunrise, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1927 (screen capture) 209 6.14 A large, dark figure of the husband (George O’Brien) contrasts with a light-colored, tiny figure of his wife (Janet Gaynor) in Sunrise, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1927 (screen capture) 210 6.15 The titular sunrise brings the light of the city to the village in Sunrise, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1927 (screen capture) 212 6.16 The young wife’s detached shadow highlights her isolation and loneliness on the farm in City Girl, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1930 (screen capture) 213 6.17 The professor’s shadow accompanies him to the seedy nightclub in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1930 (screen capture) 215 6.18 The disgraced professor reduced to his own insubstantial shadow in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1930 (screen capture) 217 6.19 The futuristic city by night in Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, 1927 (screen capture) 223 6.20 The workers’ self-shadows help separate grounds and enhance space in Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, 1927 (screen capture) 225 6.21 A shaft of light from Rotwang’s torch pins Maria (Brigitte Helm) to the wall in Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang, 1927 (screen capture) 227 6.22 A crowd of beggars walk into the darkness in Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), dir. Georg W. Pabst, 1931 (screen capture) 230 Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of images listed above, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Acknowledgments As all academic writers know, acknowledging one’s sources and inspirations by listing all the relevant publications in the bibliography section is only part of the story. There remain equally stimulating if unpublished informal, often casual but no less helpful personal contributions from colleagues and friends. My debt of gratitude begins with my students from Dublin Business School, with whom I have over many years shared my reflections on the historical, esthetic, and cognitive aspects of cinema and visual culture. Students are often unaware how much lecturers learn from them, and how much their receptiveness, questions, and creative imagination encourage, however indirectly and unintentionally, the lecturers’ research interests. My engagement with early German cinema would not have begun without the good fortune of sharing an office in Dublin Business School for over sixteen years with Matthew Nolan, an academic with a passion for film and music. Our daily conversations, always light-hearted and humorous, on historical, critical, and technical aspects of filmmaking have been invaluable to me, while Matthew’s numerous film-related musical projects and public screenings he organized have opened my eyes to the strange beauty of silent cinema. It also gives me great pleasure to thank Paul Bouissac, renowned scholar and editor of Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics series, for his confidence in my project and for suggesting Bloomsbury as its possible home. Under the combined guidance from Paul and the Bloomsbury publisher Gurdeep Mattu my project has undergone a series of necessary restructuring revisions, in which every suggestion and piece of advice I received was a sobering reality check and a source of improvement. I also thank David Slattery, Michael Kane, and Rory McEntegart, all scholars and authors, for giving me the benefit of their knowledge and intellectual judgment in their comments on the early drafts of the manuscript. I am equally grateful to the anonymous external peerreviewers approached by Bloomsbury, who suggested the kind of clarifications and corrections that authors, too enamored of their own work, often overlook. Andrew Wardell and Manikandan Kuppan have been most helpful in smoothly guiding the manuscript through the editorial stages. For the faults and weaknesses of argument that still remain in my book I alone am responsible.

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Acknowledgments

My warm thanks go to a number of individuals whose assistance, great or small, has supported my project along the way. These include Ruth Barton, Stephen Brockmann, Declan Casey, J. J. Harrington, Trevor Haugh, Paul Hollywood, Anthony Jappy, Kenny Leigh, and Victor Stoichita. The ever-friendly staff of Dublin Business School Library has been extremely helpful with my interlibrary loan requests. I also thank the library of the Goethe-Institut in Dublin for their assistance with books on German cinema. I also acknowledge with gratitude the privilege of access to the superb library resources of Trinity College Dublin, without which I would not have completed the book in the time I did. I affectionately dedicate my book to my family: Ewa, Bartek, Adam, and Isabela—the main people in this world who make me happy.

Introduction: In the Kingdom of Shadows

Visual media are synonymous with light and meaning coded in light effects. The experience of painting, photography, or cinema depends both on the frequencies of electromagnetic wavelengths, which determine color perception, and on the differences in illumination on the grayscale between bright white and pitch black, which define the tonality and contrast of the image. Except for occasional experiments with hand-colored film (as in George Méliès’s trick fantasy films), all early cinema relied on monochrome photography (mostly black and white, but sometimes tinted), in which brighter and darker areas within the frame helped create the overall composition of the shot, guided the viewer’s attention to certain objects and figures, and in the process determined the image’s dramatic and esthetic import—in short, its semiotic value. A brightly illuminated patch of the screen becomes a meaningful sign by highlighting a key element of the action, just as a dark spot or a shadow becomes an intentional sign by concealing details that implicitly participate in the overall meaning of the scene. To rephrase Joseph von Sternberg’s observation used in the motto, the impact of visual arts depends on knowing what to reveal through light and what to conceal in darkness, in what degree and how.1 When the balance is right, light, darkness, and shadows in a painting or on the cinema screen become meaningful signs. But balance is key. An entirely white surface, like Kazimir Malevich’s painting Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918, New York Museum of Modern Art), contains hardly any visual information,2 and neither does the black screen, often used in cinema as a nondiegetic, dramatically void transition between scenes. But dark thoughtfully mixed with light becomes a semiotic sign: it acquires implicit meaning as an extension of the explicit information provided by the illuminated parts of the screen that reveal a scene or object, such as a semidark room or a partially lit face for example. Darkness and shadows attract attention and tease our imagination by their very suggestiveness and understatement, although their meaning is ultimately determined by light and elements of the scene that it illuminates.

2

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

The “light and shadows” in the title of the present book are meant first of all in a literal and technical sense: I want to examine the semiotic implications of the use of light effects in relation to human figures, spaces, and objects in modern visual arts, with a focus on the German films from the Weimar period (1919–33). Perception of light is a prerequisite of all visual arts, and effects of light such as shadows are occasionally included in paintings (see Chapter 2), but in cinema everything we see consists technically of shadows—insubstantial, fleeting photographic representations of life projected as light effects on a flat white rectangular surface of the screen. This is why after attending the screening of the Lumière brothers’ films at a Russian fair in July 1896, the writer Maxim Gorky could sum up the nature of the new medium in one sentence: “Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows.”3 Maxim Gorky was right because film does not just represent the natural shadows of objects such as people, trees, houses, and so on: the object themselves are technically shadows when projected on the screen. When the light falls on the celluloid strip in the projector it passes unobstructed through transparent, unexposed parts of the frame before it is projected on the screen as itself, that is, as bright light. The same happens when lamplight or sunlight falls unobstructed on a wall or pavement. When the light in the projector hits the exposed, dark parts of the frame it is obstructed in proportion to the opacity of the exposed areas, producing correspondingly dimmer light effects, or shadows, on the screen. Something similar happens when direct light falls on a solid object: it produces a dark patch—a shadow—on a bright surface on the opposite side of the object. In the optical sense therefore the experience of cinema is indeed the experience of shadows, not the shadows of objects from the outside world but of translucent photographic images on the celluloid strip. At the same time the perceptual prototype of screen shadows as semiotics signs are the natural shadows we notice in the real world. Chapter 1 examines what is so special about our perception and reaction to shadows discovered around us. Why our reactions to cast shadows tend in certain situations to be instinctive and automatic, and if so, what evolutionary reasons underlie these involuntary and often highly emotive responses? It will also be interesting to see how universal human attention to shadows is, as evidenced by popular beliefs found in folklore and art throughout history. This universalistic and evolutionary premise places a study of the semiotics of light and shadows in Weimar cinema in a broader historical context of visual arts. The German film directors, scriptwriters, art designers, and cinematographers of the 1920s did not invent the shadow as a visual motif; they offered cinematic

In the Kingdom of Shadows

3

versions of representations found in older art forms such as figurative painting, engraving, the shadow theater, silhouette portraits, and photography. They were also influenced by folk beliefs filtered through popular literature, like the story of Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso (1814), in which the titular character sells his shadow to the devil for a bottomless wallet. Certain symbolic connotations attached to human shadows, such as the idea of the Doppelgänger (double), proved extremely effective especially in the Expressionist films of the 1920s, such as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, Friedrich W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Herr Tartüff (Tartuff), or Arthur Robison’s Schatten (Warning Shadows). The esthetic, dramatic, and symbolic use of light and cast shadows in these and other films, in which the story lines and visual styles can be described as broadly Expressionist, is discussed in Chapter 5. All shadows in painting belong to the category of semiotic rather than natural signs because they are always intentional, just like everything else that the painter decides to include in the picture. In photography and film, however, shadows can be either intentional, that is, semiotic, or accidental, in which case they belong to the category of natural, physical states that just happened to be captured in the photographic image. As might be expected, in the early, pioneering days of cinema, when low-sensitivity stock allowed for filming only in full daylight, the camera often caught natural shadows as part of the scene. These non-semiotic shadows were largely irrelevant to the theme of the shot, be it a train arriving at the station, workers leaving the factory, or a gardener squirted by a prankster. The accidental presence of natural shadows in the frame probably mattered neither to the cameraman nor to the cinema audience. But when the first primitive room-sized film studios were built, with their roofs open to the sky, the shadows cast by the sun in staged interior scenes may have looked, one suspects, a bit awkward and incongruous at least to some spectators. There is something unintentionally surreal in a scene set in a “dark” prison cell for example, which is bathed in direct sunlight from above as betrayed by shadows cast by figures on the floor. The early studios soon solved the problem by using screens and awnings suspended below the glass ceiling to deflect and disperse natural light, creating an even, shadowless illumination for the scene below. Even when electric lighting was introduced in American and European film studios around 1910, it was first used to augment and imitate dispersed natural light, not to provide opportunity for creative light effects such as intentional cast shadows for example. Low-key, expressive illumination took years to develop, although imaginative cameramen, like Billy Bitzer who worked

4

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

for D. W. Griffith in mid-1910s, could on occasion utilize available daylight to create stylized shots with atmospheric contrasts between light and shadow. As I discuss in Chapter 4, it took over twenty years for lighting technology in American and European studios to develop the means to produce intentional cast shadows, in other words, to initiate the semiotic stage in the use of light as part of the ever-expanding repertoire of the visual grammar of film. The Weimar Republic, born in 1919 out of the German defeat in the First World War and buried in 1933 with the Nazi seizure of power, despite its economic and political instability managed to produce what in hindsight has been regarded as the golden age of German cinema. No other period of Germany’s twentiethcentury cultural history has seen so many films of comparable artistic quality and impact made within so short a time. No wonder that the thirteen years of Weimar cinema belong to one of the most celebrated and critically discussed chapters of the early history of film, next to the achievement of D. W. Griffith or the Soviet montage of the 1920s. In Chapters 5 and 6 I will be chasing shadows, literally, flitting across the Weimar cinema screen, in a more or less chronological order, as they first appeared in the Expressionist films of the early 1920s, and in the more realistic urban dramas conceived in the New Objectivist style later in the decade. It will be interesting for example to see that in the groundbreaking Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari shadows and other light effects are fully intentional because most of them are painted, as part of the highly stylized Expressionist décor for which the film has become so famous. The few real and no less intentional cast shadows in the film belong to the inadvertent villain of the piece, the sleepwalking murderer Cesare, the symbolic emanation of Caligari’s deranged mind. After Dr. Caligari cast shadows often accompany screen madmen, criminals, and supernaturals, in keeping with age-old beliefs that a person’s shadow represents his or her hidden, often evil, nature, their normally invisible inner self. In Paul Wegener’s Der Golem the shadow of Rabbi Löw blends with the life-size outline of the titular clay figure on the wall, implying a spiritual affinity between the human maker and his magically animated humanoid creature. The vampire in Friedrich W. Murnau’s Nosferatu lives up to his supernatural status by appearing at night only as a shadow—a dark outline in profile of a hunched, crookednosed, and clawed-fingered cadaverous monster—giving us some of the most memorable cinematic images from the Weimar period. Unique in the Weimar canon is Arthur Robison’s Schatten (Warning Shadows), a film conceived entirely around cast shadows. Here they represent the characters’ repressed desires—sexual lust, jealousy, and violence—which

In the Kingdom of Shadows

5

are allowed free play in a hallucinatory film-within-a-film designed to cure the characters of their potentially self-destructive urges, and generally to bring them to their senses. Fritz Lang’s two-part mythical epic Die Nibelungen, a stylistic accomplishment of the highest order, provides superb examples of contrasts between light and shadow to separate good guys from the bad, and on the esthetic level to differentiate between grounds of action and enhance a sense of dramatic space. Murnau’s rococo chamber drama Herr Tartüff takes us into the semidarkness of candlelit interiors, where shadows flitting across the walls project the characters’ folly, gullibility, and hypocrisy, as devised in Molière’s satirical play. The smoke-filled and doom-laden chiaroscuro style of Murnau’s Faust elevates the play of light and shadow onto a metaphysical plane as a struggle between the cosmic forces of good and evil. Toward the end of the Weimar period, folk supernaturalism and the occult return to the screen in Carl Th. Dreyer’s avant-garde, dreamlike Vampyr with its “white” esthetics, in which an abandoned country windmill, an icehouse, and a plaster factory provide eerie settings for encounters with disembodied shadows of ghosts and vampires. From mid-1920s onward, the New Objectivist style as a vehicle for contemporary urban dramas banished most of the shadows lurking in the dark recesses of distorted Expressionist spaces populated by Gothic characters. Whether in films conceived as social commentaries (Gerhard Lamprecht), as crime thrillers (Fritz Lang), or as sordid melodramas (Georg W. Pabst), Weimar art-house cinema becomes less concerned with the mise-en-scène as an expression of the characters’ inner turmoil than as a representation of a recognizable urban setting, whether a tenement slum of the poor or a fashionably furnished apartment of the more fortunate. The New Objectivist films are also a reminder that the medium of cinema had always been a quintessentially urban phenomenon, given its origin, technical and industrial basis, professional support, and target audience. In Weimar Germany the generic big city, whether studio-built or filmed on location, as the background for cinematic plots is nearly always Berlin, which in 1920s grew to be the third largest city in Europe (after London and Paris), renowned for its high-brow Kultur and notorious for its decadence. As location shooting became more frequent toward the end of the Weimar period, the modern city with its architecture, infrastructure, inhabitants, and light, natural by day and electric by night, appeared on the cinema screen not merely as a setting but increasingly as a dramatic character in its own right. The feature-length experimental documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, a City Symphony); the documentary-like, low-budget Menschen am

6

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

Sonntag (People on Sunday); or the children’s classic Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives) were all shot entirely in the streets of Berlin filled with accidental daytime shadows and abstract chiaroscuro effects produced at night by streets lamps, headlights of vehicles, shop window displays, and neon advertising. Even in city films relying heavily on studio sets, such as Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies) and Joe May’s Asphalt, or in the early sound pictures such as Lang’s M, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), or Phil Jutzi’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, real location shots are occasionally thrown in for enhanced realism and authenticity, while controlled studio lighting is used to create evocative and dramatic cast shadows. Intentional shadows, suggestive darkness, and atmospheric or symbolic chiaroscuro lighting as part of the visual semiotics of cinematic Expressionism thus continue to be employed in the New Objectivist urban dramas as an esthetic and dramatic choice. Beginning with Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (literally “The Last Man,” but translated as “The Last Laugh”) and culminating in Lang’s Metropolis the two visual styles help differentiate between urban socioeconomic milieus, whereby cheerless tenement dwellings tend to be illuminated by shadowy, depressed, low-key lighting, while downtown hotels, nightclubs, and stylish apartments enjoy the high-key electric brilliance as a sign of the modern age. Typically in the city films of the late 1920s light tends to be associated with modernity, wealth, and success, and darkness with backwardness, poverty, and failure. The symbolic cast shadow always remains an esthetic choice as part of the Expressionist repertoire of visual tricks to create poetic Stimmung (mood) and heightened emotion. Our chase after shadows on Weimar screen ends with a metaphoric but decidedly non-cinematic shadow that descended on Germany in 1933 with the country’s politically fateful turn toward Nazi dictatorship. Back in 1926 in Friedrich W. Murnau’s Faust a gigantic figure of Satan (Figure 5.31) extends its dark wings over a small town, blowing black pestilential wind toward its unsuspecting inhabitants.

1

Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows: From Optical Phenomena to Semiotic Signs

As optical phenomena shadows are of course not confined to the cinematic screen; they are ubiquitous and familiar side effects of light, natural or artificial, and of our perception of it. Most physical objects are solid and non-transparent, which means that when illuminated by sunlight, moonlight, fire, or electric light they impede the light rays producing an area of comparative darkness, what we call a shadow, on a surface opposite the source of light. As optical effects shadows do not therefore have an independent existence; their presence, shape, and intensity depend on the source of light that creates them; on the shape of the object that intercepts the light; and on the color, texture, and shape of the surface upon which the light falls. Shadows are visible but at the same time they do not appear to be part of the material world, because they lack solidity and substantiality. They are both physical and ethereal, always there as inseparable companions (in the right light conditions) of solid objects that occupy our living space: trees, houses, vehicles, animals, and of course people, including ourselves.1 We all experience shadows: on a sunny day with a clear sky we are accompanied all the time by our dark equivalent, especially visible when projected on a bright surface such as a wall or pavement. Our shadow is real but at the same time strangely elusive: we cannot touch or feel it, it may be on the ground in front of us but we cannot jump over it or shake it off, and if it is behind us we cannot run away from it. In their shape shadows can be long and thin, or short and fat; they can be dark and crisp, or faint and hazy; they may appear graceful or clumsy, shapeless, grotesque, mysterious, and sinister. Or they can be almost exactly like us in outline: when the ground is even and the rays of the sun fall at an angle of about forty-five degrees, the shadow will produce an undistorted image of ourselves, our dark double that is always at our side, imitating our appearance and movements, at the same time remaining curiously transparent and immaterial, unlike our solid bodies. If the light is diffuse the shadow can vanish altogether,

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

or it will appear blurred and fuzzy, just an irregular dark cloud superimposed on a light surface. But on a clear day or in the directional light of a lamp the shadow will have a clear, sharp outline, and, as the psychologist of art Rudolf Arnheim reminds us, it will no longer be perceived as a casual superimposition on a light surface but as an independent dark shape and an actual part of that surface.2 In other words, the shadow can sometimes be perceived as having a substance and life of its own, independent of its owner.

Shadows and folklore Indeed, a shadow with sharp edges and a clearly defined dark shape can appear as something separate from the object or person that casts it—an elusive and intangible equivalent of its solid, material original. That is why in ordinary parlance we often resort to the metaphor of a shadow to describe something unreal: shadow boxing is not real boxing, and the shadow chancellor is not the real chancellor. The ancient Greeks believed that those who took their leave of this world continued their existence in Hades, a mysterious place populated by living “shadows” of dead people. Attached to a person during his or her lifetime, the immaterial soul can survive its carrier to dwell forever in the land of shadows, which is how Homer describes the Greek land of the dead, visited by Odysseus anxious to embrace the elusive figure of his dead mother.3 Likewise in Dante’s Purgatorio the poet tries to embrace a friendly shadow, but his arms touch nothing: “Three times I clasped my hands around his form, / as many times they came back to my breast.”4 In James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” Gabriel Conroy, as he falls asleep, seems to approach “that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead,” whose existence is “wayward and flickering,” while the shadowy other world itself is described as “gray” and “impalpable.”5 In modern Indonesia the shadow puppets represent ancestral spirits, gods, and demons, while the dalang, the puppeteer, still performs a semi-priestly function.6 Things that are objectively impossible but subjectively imaginable inspire supernatural beliefs the world over. At death the material body and the ethereal shadow are believed to part ways, and so in folklore the dead and the dying are described as casting no shadow. Just as a shadow on its own (impossible in real life) could be interpreted by the ancient Greeks as a soul of the dead or a phantom, so a solid object imagined to cast no shadow can also stand for the spectral or the unreal. As Dante walks through the Purgatory accompanied by Virgil, he suddenly realizes that his long-dead guide casts no shadow. In a tale

Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows

9

from the Mahabharata a beautiful princess Damayanti is to be betrothed to the heroic prince Nala. During the wedding ceremony, however, the princess finds herself confronted not by one but by five Nalas: four gods have been so captivated by her beauty that they have assumed the shape of her chosen beloved. But the princess notices that of the five identical suitors only one, the real Nala, casts a shadow. The others thus reveal themselves as mere phantoms.7 Empirically speaking, shadows, like mirror reflections, cannot exist without solid objects that produce them. But in physics-defying folk beliefs insubstantial ghosts can cast no shadows and are not reflected in mirrors, or else the opposite is the case: ghosts exist only as shadows or mirror reflections, without their bodily equivalents. In Eastern European folklore mirrors were covered in a house where someone has just died, lest the soul of the dead person appear in it. The director Roman Polanski exploits these superstitions in his spoof horror film The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), in which two mortals, the Professor (Jack McGowran) and his assistant (Roman Polanski), camouflage themselves in a crowd of vampires dancing at a ball. The disguise works until both the two mortals and the vampires stop in their steps after looking into a huge mirror hanging in the hall, which shows only the reflections of the Professor and his assistant—an unmistakable giveaway of their flesh-and-blood solidity, which prompts a comic chase after their very blood. Not that folklore logic is always observed in horror films. In Friedrich W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), for example, in blatant contravention of vampire mythology Count Orlok not only projects menacing shadows but in the final scene, just before he expires in a puff of smoke at the break of day, he is actually seen reflected in his female victim’s bedroom mirror. The supernatural domain apart, shadow in the physical world testifies unmistakably to the solidity of an object, for what casts a shadow (or is reflected in the mirror) must be real. The physical connection between an object and its shadow explains beliefs in shared properties between the two, as in the legend of the healing power of the shadow cast by Saint Peter, illustrated for example in the fresco by Masaccio (1425) from the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. At the same time the contrast between a solid object and its ethereal shadow is too compelling not to stimulate the imagination. A person’s shadow will accordingly be considered as a second, filmy self, an immaterial soul or a spiritual double, a “dark” alter ego, a Doppelgänger, like the archetype of the shadow in Carl Gustav Jung’s depth psychology, in which the shadow denotes the dark aspect of personality formed by fears and unpleasant emotions rejected by the conscious self.8 A shadow of the sinister Dr. Caligari on a promotional still

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

Figure 1.1 The shadow of Dr. Caligari on a promotional still for Robert Wiene’s film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920).

for Robert Wiene’s famous film is revealing in this psychological sense. In the photograph Caligari is holding a book with his right hand, while his left hand clenched into a fist is turned toward his chest (Figure 1.1). The book refers to the treatise on somnambulism which Caligari used to study as the director of the mental asylum, and in the photograph the doctor stands facing the viewer, as if lecturing passionately on his favorite subject. What dominates the picture, however, is the gigantic projection of Caligari’s shadow on the white wall to the right. Larger than the person, the shadow both externalizes and expands Caligari’s inner character, his evil intentions and megalomania.9 While Caligari’s stance, with his arms as if protecting his chests, appears harmless and benign, his enormous shadow with its unclenched fist and shriveled fingers reveals the doctor’s hidden sinister self. As in folk beliefs in which a person’s true character is betrayed by his shadow, in the promotional still for Dr. Caligari the distorted, menacing shadow reveals a Mr. Hyde behind the benevolent looking Dr. Jekyll, here a respectable director of the mental asylum. Beliefs in the shadow as a person’s spiritual extension are indeed common: in some cultures to step on one’s shadow is considered a serious offense, and a man can be “murdered” by having his shadow pierced with a knife. At a funeral, care must be taken to avoid having a living person’s shadow caught by the lid of the

Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows

11

coffin and thus buried with the corpse.10 The shadow as a familiar and natural element of the visible world, easily ignored or simply taken for granted, has universally generated beliefs in ghosts and specters, and has fascinated poets, philosophers, dramatists, painters, photographers, and filmmakers. By being noticed, interpreted, and represented in arts the shadow has been transformed from a natural optical phenomenon into a meaningful visual sign. Arguably the most famous example of philosophic speculation on the meaning of the shadow is Plato’s parable of the cave described in The Republic.11 What looks uncannily like a foreshadowing of a cinema experience from two and a half millennia later, Plato’s parable illustrates the limitations of human knowledge of the world as revealed by the senses. The philosopher compares humans to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads: all they can see is the wall of the cave in front of them. Behind them, at the other end of the cave, burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners’ backs there is a parapet, along which puppeteers hold up puppets and other “figures of men and animals made of wood and stone,” which cast shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets; all they can see and hear are shadows and echoes produced by these objects. In Plato’s rather pessimistic view of the extent of human understanding of the world people are not even seeing the shadows of real things—all they can see are the shadows of man-made puppets and figures that only refer to real things. In other words, for Plato our perception of the world is twice removed from that world. This is not unlike the modern cinema experience, in which viewers see on the screen the shadows of the shadows of real objects, as the light of the projector passes through the transparent images on the celluloid film and casts them as magnified shadows onto the screen. The real objects, perceptually twice removed from the viewers, exist out there in the physical world captured by the camera. This is what we see in documentary films, in which the camera captures spontaneous life, giving us shadowy images twice removed from that life. On the other hand drama films—in which the camera records simulations of life performed by actors realizing fictional scenarios in artificial studio sets—reveal on the screen shadowy images perceptually thrice removed from real life. The idea that a visual medium, like the cinema prefigured in Plato’s allegory of the cave, generates illusory shadows that only reflect rather than represent reality was discovered as a metaphor long before cinema utilized real shadows as part of its technology. In Shakespeare’s plays an actor on a stage, and in a wider sense any person who plays a role in the theater of life, is on occasion referred to as a “shadow,” as in Macbeth’s melancholy summation of life as “a walking

12

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

shadow; a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.”12 In the Renaissance theatrical metaphor the shadow appears to refer to the fictitious character which an actor creates on the stage as part of the dramatic illusion, just as a solid, material object produces its ethereal shadow, an insubstantial but perceptually real emanation.

The shadow as an indexical sign Why should a common, perfectly natural optical side effect stimulate the imagination to such an extent? The shadow is a function of light, and responsiveness to light helps most living creatures, us included, to get around in the world. Our eyes have evolved over millions of years to help us find our way, to avoid enemies and physical obstacles in our path, to recognize our mates, and to find food and shelter—in a word, to survive. The eye can discern the different objects in the environment because of the modifications that light undergoes when falling on the objects within view. The differences of light and shade on the surface of the objects tell us of their shape, the reflections on that surface indicate its texture, and the objects’ reactions to the various wavelengths of the light spectrum determine their color. Sight is the most effective and adaptively important sense in humans, and blindness is a serious, potentially life-threatening handicap. With our eyes we acquire crucial knowledge about the physical properties of objects in the environment, including shape, brightness, size, distance, movement, and spatial distribution. The unaided eye registers an extraordinary amount of information within 100-meter radius, and is still efficient for human interaction at a mile. Sight is the only unaided sense that can put us in touch with the cosmos: the sky with its planets and stars is only directly accessible to the human mind through the eyes.13 Shadows as side effects of light falling on opaque objects also play a role in our visual negotiation of the physical environment. A sense of depth is first of all created by our stereoscopic vision, which fuses two slightly different images produced by our eyes into a mental impression of three-dimensional space. But cues of depth can also be conveyed by shadows: cast shadows indicate the direction of light falling on objects, as well as the fact that something is obstructing the light. Texture of objects is revealed by small shadows, and both the texture of the surface and the direction of illumination are indicated by the form and direction of shadows. This is particularly important in drawing or painting, in which shading, or modeling, can create on a two-dimensional

Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows

13

surface a compelling illusion of volume and space, producing something surprisingly close to binocular vision.14 Cast shadows inform us about the solid objects that produce them, even if we do not see the objects themselves, as when the presence of a person hiding behind the corner of a house is betrayed by that person’s shadow cast on the pavement. In this way shadows testify to the existence of spatially displaced objects, just as footprints or photographs testify to the existence of objects that are displaced in both space and time. A sign physically caused by an object and referring to that object, now spatially and/or temporally removed, is what semiotics, the science of signs, describes as index.15 Some indexical signs are more removed from their referents than others. A fossilized footprint is an index of an animal whose species has been extinct for millions of years, while an old photograph shows an image of a person who died decades ago. One of the most poignant indexes on record is a human “shadow” etched in stone, whose photograph is displayed in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The photograph shows a dark spot on the bright steps of the Sumitomo Bank, about 260 meters from the hypocenter over which the atomic bomb went off on August 6, 1945. The “shadow” is what has remained of a person who sat on the steps that fateful day waiting for the bank to open. The victim was exposed to the flash from the atomic explosion and must have vaporized on the spot. The surface of the surrounding stone steps was turned whitish by the intense heat rays, while the dark patch, a “shadow,” corresponds with the outline of the victim’s body which reduced the heat’s exposure in that spot, making it darker. The important thing about the way we register and interpret indexical signs such as shadows is that we are making inferences about objects implied by their indexes, especially when we do not perceive the objects themselves. We infer someone’s presence in the dark by his or her voice; we smell a person’s odor and realize that the person is near us even with our eyes closed; we know that there is no smoke without fire; and we are making a reasonable deduction that a cracking sound of a broken twig in the forest may be a sign of an approaching large animal or human. An interesting thing about indexical signs is that they tend to stimulate the imagination more when they appear on their own than when they are accompanied by their referents. In the latter case what we see is what we get, so there is little else left to the imagination. The uniformly lit religious paintings of the Renaissance, like the high-key lighting of Hollywood musicals and comedies, provide us with full visual information of the scene to contemplate and interpret. On the other hand the chiaroscuro (Italian chiara,

14

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

“white,” and scouro, from Latin obscura, “dark”) of a Caravaggio painting or Rembrandt’s tenebroso (Italian for “dark”) hides more than it reveals, provoking the viewer to infer the invisible but implied elements of the scene from suggestive patches of darkness. A figure casting a shadow, whether in painting or in life, forms a perceptual whole in which the indexical shadow is for the most part ignored, our attention being concentrated on the figure as the main subject. This is probably why cast shadows are, as we shall see later, relatively rare in painting, just as in photography or film they are often only accidental and dramatically irrelevant; in other words, non-semiotic. But if we are not missing a shadow of a painted or photographed figure, we are certainly missing a figure if all we see is the shadow. The eeriness of the surrealist painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914) by Giorgio de Chirico is in no small measure due to a threatening human shadow emerging from behind a building, opposite a dark silhouette of a girl rolling the hoop and obliviously heading toward possible danger (Figure 1.2). Similarly at the beginning of Fritz Lang’s thriller M (1931) little Elsie Beckmann innocently bounces a ball against a police poster that bears an inscription “Wer ist der Mörder?” (Who Is the Murderer?), across which a shadow of a man wearing a hat moves ominously, the outline of his head projected accusingly on the word “Mörder” (Figure 1.3). The man’s voice (Peter Lorre’s) forms an additional auditory index of a suspected child murderer, his identity still unknown (in the children’s song that opens the film the murderer is simply referred to as “the man in black,” i.e., an elusive shadow). The menacing shot of the murderer’s shadow in Lang’s film may have been suggested by a similar image in Georg W. Pabst’s melodrama Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) from 1929, in which the shadowy outline of Jack the Ripper (Gustav Diessl) first appears next to the police poster warning the “women of London” against a serial killer at large. One’s inner character or hidden intentions can also be symbolically revealed in a mirror reflection, which is another example of a visual index. When many scenes later in M the child murderer’s face is revealed for the first time, it is reflected in the mirror as part of the murderer’s search for his dark inner self that compels him to commit his crimes. Another powerful “mirror shot” (for the director Wim Wenders “truly the most terrifying shot in the entire film”) confirms the character’s criminal identity, when Peter Lorre accidentally looks in the mirror in a shop window display and discovers the letter “M” (for “murderer”) that someone stamped on his back with a hand inscribed with a chalk.16 The effectiveness of shadow images from Lang’s and Pabst’s films is based on unconscious fears provoked by indexical signs. An index implies a missing original and ultimately it is the original that matters, because it can be a person

Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows

15

Figure 1.2 A threatening shadow emerges from behind a building, opposite the silhouette of a girl, in the painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico, 1914.

whose intentions toward us we are not sure of, or an animal out to attack us. For evolutionary reasons therefore our senses are instantly alerted by detached shadows whose mystery, as in de Chirico’s painting (Figure 1.2), is precisely about the yet unknown and potentially dangerous identity and intentions of their bearers. The mixture of uncertainty, curiosity, and fear that indexes such as detached shadows provoke in us appears to be instinctive and automatic: in

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

Figure 1.3 The shadow of a child murderer (Peter Lorre) in Fritz Lang’s film M (1931).

our history as a species it probably paid in survival terms to be keenly attentive, rather than indifferent, to indexical signs of movement of large objects such as fellow human beings or animals in one’s proximity.17

Evolution and film theory While evolutionary theory can explain persuasively why we are apprehensive about real detached shadows, we still need to account for the emotional and esthetic appeal of shadows represented on painted pictures, photographs, and cinema screen. Could the same sensory and cognitive mechanisms responsible for our reactions to real-life experience be also involved in our responses to artificial representations with their imagined and displaced referents? Is an evolutionary approach to figurative images and to simulations of human life found in literary and dramatic fiction possible? The editors and contributors to the first textbook in evolutionary theory of literature and film published in 2010 think it is.18

Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows

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Before we make any evolutionary assumptions about fictional representations, we must consider some important distinctions with regard to the way we see, interpret, and react to the world around us. We share with other animals the ability to use sensory perception to collect information about the world and to form in our brains a primary representation of that world based on sensory data. This level of representation constitutes what the psychologist Gerald M. Edelman calls “primary consciousness”—a state of being aware of things in the world, of having mental images cued in to the present, but without any sense of the past, of the existence of other places and events, and still less of hypothetical scenarios of possible events.19 In addition to primary consciousness humans appear to have at their disposal, probably uniquely in the natural kingdom, what Edelman calls “higher-order consciousness,” or what is referred to by psychologists and philosophers simply as “consciousness”—a recognition of one’s own acts and affections, which also embodies a model of the past and future as well as the present. Thus understood consciousness enables us to fashion our individual identities and to construct secondary representations in the form of mental “scenes” of past, present, and future, and also of hypothetical events, which can be shared socially through verbal fictional narratives, and through other forms of communication involving displaced referents, such as pictures. Permanent secondary representations are the stuff of art, understood as collective memory aids coding socially important cultural knowledge, which complements and expands our innate, genetic responses to the world. In this way our animal, direct, primary representations as a reflection of our contiguous experience are augmented by specifically human, indirect, secondary representations of culture, based to a large extent on displaced referents and on vicarious, imaginary experience.20 The philosopher Denis Dutton also argues that our capacity to simulate life situations in fictional stories and visual representations of art has given our species an adaptive advantage, in the sense that in our evolutionary past this capacity must have increased, on average, human chances of survival and consequently of propagation. The historical pervasiveness of fictions in the form of oral stories, preliterate mythologies, novels, plays, operas, films, video games, and so on can therefore be explained by their usefulness. Stories provide low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience in the form of hypothetical scenarios in response to “what if?” questions, which focus on the problems, threats, and opportunities that life might have thrown before our ancestors. Stories are also richly instructive sources of factual or plausible information about social life and the natural environment. Finally, stories encourage us to explore other people’s

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

points of view, beliefs, motivations, and values, thus inculcating potentially adaptive interpersonal and social capacities. In other words, fictions prepare us for life with its surprises and challenges by instructing and educating us in social behavior. These are all cognitive and social benefits of adaptive value, enhancing chances of survival and success in any cultural environment.21 This is why we are innately predisposed to enjoy stories and figurative pictures—in fact, any secondary representations, including our private fantasies. We have no record of the earliest oral tales, but the material evidence from art history reaches back to about 32,000 years ago and the spectacular and remarkably realistic paintings of wild animals found in the Chauvet cave in France. The enjoyment of art is universal and in fact so compelling that in some circumstances it can overshadow our more down-to-earth, primary engagement with the unmediated world around us. Notwithstanding Oscar Wilde’s dictum that it is only the unimaginative who ever invent anything, we often prefer the fictitious, artistic representations of life to the direct experience of the world. Commenting on the growth of popular culture Henry James pointed out in his 1890 short story “The Real Thing” that mass media encouraged the general public’s “perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one.”22 More than two centuries earlier the philosopher Blaise Pascal also remarked: “What vanity is painting, which attracts admiration by the resemblance of things the originals of which are not admired.”23 In other words, a painted or photographed object can be preferable to the real one, even though a represented object, a filmed lion for example, is of no consequence to the observer’s survival and should accordingly be treated with calm disinterestedness. Admittedly, images of animal predators in nature films usually provide us with a mere thrill and dispassionate interest, which cannot compare in emotional urgency with a face-to-face encounter with a dangerous animal in the wild. What probably stirs our interest in secondary representations, however, is that esthetically appealing images give us a pleasure of excitement from surrogate experience at no real cost in terms of life consequences or risk to our safety. This is why the supreme artist Oscar Wilde could say that “Art does not hurt us. The tears we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter,” because “emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.”24 The secondary representations of art attract our attention therefore for reasons other than immediate threat or emergency. In contemplating well-executed pictures we admire not only the represented objects themselves but also the

Natural Shadows, Represented Shadows

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artist’s talent, skill, and imagination—all manifestations of exceptional cognitive abilities that we are innately predisposed to appreciate in fellow humans, just as we appreciate similar cognitive abilities in ourselves when we interpret works of art: paintings, novels, or films. At least one of the reasons we enjoy art is precisely the satisfaction we take from using that extra cognitive effort required to understand it. Due to “an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence,” in Richard Dawkins’s phrase, natural objects become deceptively all too unambiguous and easy to understand, at least in their external manifestations, for the restless and inquisitive human brain.25 What we like instead is the intellectual challenge of contemplating familiar objects imaginatively transformed into elusive and stylized representations of art. We often find primary representations uninteresting because we think that with them what we see is what we get (until modern physics and biology tell us otherwise), whereas with secondary, man-made representations of art what we get is the suggestiveness and interpretative indeterminacy that so tease the mind. Also, the informational content of artistic representations of the world is usually of a different kind to that of the natural flow of things in life, precisely by virtue of being mediated by an artist’s vision and skill rather than created spontaneously by natural laws. No matter how realistic a picture, a photograph, or a film can be, it is always in some important respects uncannily different from the object it represents. For example, a human figure is shown in a painting or photograph as unnaturally and eerily still, giving the viewer an opportunity, unavailable in relation to a living person, of examining it closely and for as long as the viewer pleases. Art forms that do involve movement, like theatrical plays and films, are likewise both reassuringly similar to and unsettlingly different from real life. For example, film editing disrupts the natural continuities of time and space in ways that can be disorienting but also perceptually challenging. The unnaturalness of a sudden break in the continuity of space and time—the editorial cut and splice—was most probably the reason why it took the early filmmakers several years to attempt simple editing by joining together shots taken in different locations and at different times. As far as the content and structure of fictional stories are concerned, for all their mimetic quality their simulations of human experience are usually presented with an emotional intensity and causal order far above what, on average, surrounds us in the spontaneous and chaotic flux of life. Carefully selected visual elements thoughtfully arranged on a limited surface of a panel painting or in a photographic/cinematic frame can create meaningful tensions lacking in the haphazard array of objects normally filling our living space. In the same way the structure of events in a novel, play, or

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

film offers a version of life experience whose emotional intensity and dramatic concentration far exceed what, on average, can be found in our daily, and for the most part thankfully uneventful and unexciting, lives. A daily routine of a real secret agent, I suspect, is in no way as thrilling, suspenseful, and romantic as the plot of a James Bond movie. Because film and other narrative media such as literature and drama all exploit the same universal human propensity for fictional, vicarious experience, there is probably no reason why theories underlying the study of these cultural forms should not take that evolutionary premise into account. In his application of evolutionary theory to media studies Torben Grodal observes for example that in film the visual simulations of life involve, among other things, basic features of body language and the expression of key emotions such as hate, fear, love, or disgust, which are biologically hardwired in our brains and therefore reveal a high degree of cross-cultural universality. The critic further argues that psychological explanations based on evolutionary and biological considerations are in fact highly compatible with historical and moderate culturalist and constructivist approaches that have dominated film studies in the last few decades.26 Like other fields of research within the humanities and social sciences, film studies is today in the midst of a major shift away from the paradigm that has dominated the humanities for most of the twentieth century—the tabula rasa concept of the mind, based on the assumption that the human mind has no intrinsic nature, so that human personalities are entirely socially constructed and infinitely malleable. The new, emerging paradigm may by contrast be called evolutionary bio-culturalism, with its assumption that human intelligence, culture, and social communication are deeply rooted in human biology, and ultimately in human evolution.27 A bio-cultural approach to narrative arts accepts the evolutionary premise that by virtue of belonging to one biological species all humans are born with the same, fairly stable, and universal adaptive behaviors and cognitive specializations. This means that certain fundamental and instinctive ways of perceiving the world, such as being apprehensive about detached shadows and afraid of the dark, will be the same in all cultures, without needing to be socially learned. The innate, stable human nature would also be seen as providing constraints on cultural variation, so that one would not expect cultural differences to vary continuously along all imaginable dimensions, but one might expect to find a limited number of recurring patterns, both within and across cultures.28 According to the literary scholar Nancy Easterlin the bio-cultural paradigm (what she calls bio-epistemology) aims at nothing less than restoring cultural

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studies, including the study of literature and film, to a central position in culture and education, in the form of what she calls “a revised and informed humanism.” Drawing on recent research in evolutionary psychology and linguistics, Easterlin addresses the problem of the emergence of narrative media by stressing their indispensable role in human and social life. What all narrative forms across cultures and historical epochs have in common is that they give meaning to social and individual events and mental states and that their production and dissemination depend on the retention of action and thought in memory— that uniquely human cognitive attribute. Narrativity—defined as the ability to organize actor, action, goal, scene, and instrument into a sequential story using both linguistic and visual media—is thus a primary form of cognition in social interaction founded on the genetic predisposition to discover causal order and meaning in nature. For Easterlin fictional narrativity is therefore an adaptive tactic, because the intelligibility of events resulting from narrative constructs is correlated with a feeling of control and mastery over lived experience.29 Specifically in relation to film studies David Bordwell has advocated a new “poetics” to replace the postmodern frameworks such as feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, with their doctrine-driven concept of research, scholastic argument from authority, and often confusing language. In the place of the rhetorical pretensions and conceptual dogmatism of postmodern film theory Bordwell proposes a rational and empirical inquiry conducted in cognitive and evolutionary terms, one that would “probe concepts for their adequacy as descriptions and as explanations of problems, [while] checking our ideas against evidence that exists independent of our beliefs and wishes.” In practice, the new poetics (or film semiotics, as I would call it) involves analysis of films with regard to form, style, motifs, and themes, as well as explanation of how films function in historical contexts—what Erwin Panofsky and Ernst H. Gombrich did in art history. An “analytical poetics” for example examines the principles according to which films are constructed and through which they achieve particular effects. An “historical poetics” in turn asks how and why these principles have arisen and changed in particular empirical circumstances. A film theory in this sense is best described as a set of assumptions, a heuristic perspective, and a way of asking questions to discover facts and truths about films. It looks at artistic form of films as an organizing principle that works not on “content” but rather on “materials,” to see how cinema turns materials circulating in the culture into significant experiences for viewers.30 Within Bordwell’s new poetics of film analysis cinema experience is divided into three stages: perception, comprehension, and appropriation. Perception

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belongs to the bottom-up, data-driven process in which a film’s audiovisual dimensions present information about the three-dimensional environment in which humans live. At this level the viewer involuntarily sees the world depicted on the screen as consisting of other people, animals, and their surroundings, complete with noises, music, and language. Perception in a representational film is spontaneous, unlearned, and universal, based ultimately on innate, biological predispositions, such as the instinctive attention to human faces or apprehension about detached shadows. Some experiments testing babies’ innate reactions to facial expressions use filmed images of the mother. Research has also shown convincingly that people in cultures without images recognize films and photographs as representing persons, objects, and places. The perceptual mechanisms that film engages seem to be also shared with other primates, as evidenced by experiments in which chimps and monkeys identify their counterparts on the screen. In comprehending a film we construe the outputs of filmic perception as representing a hierarchical pattern of actions. The viewer applies a wide range of knowledge to construct a literal meaning of film and to identify a story (what is the film about). Here the technical choices made by filmmakers organize perception in ways designed to enhance comprehension. For example, in mainstream storytelling cinema the conventions of analytical editing help the viewer to comprehend the spatial-temporal relations of a scene and the characters: master shot, followed by a two shot or over-the-shoulder shots, followed by singles highlighting each character in shot/reverse-shot fashion. Bordwell argues that despite the artificial and technical nature of cinematic conventions, shot compositions and rules of editing are by and large nonarbitrary: for example, we know that people tend to face one another when they converse, so this regularity of social interaction makes the stylistic convention of shot/reverse-shot editing universally comprehensible. Finally, at the level of appropriation the viewer uses and interprets the film in a more or less deliberate and individual way in a particular cultural context. People may watch favorite films for mood management, as in watching an action thriller to pump themselves up or a romantic comedy to have a good laugh and a good cry. In both cases the surrogate screen experience offers, as it does in all art, the catharsis of emotional release without any serious life consequences. Bloggers may use films to flaunt their tastes or strike a posture, while academics interpret films to validate a theory and advance their careers. Personal or academic, a film analysis involves of necessity these three stages and processes, from bottom-up, evolutionary defined involuntary perception to top-

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down deliberate appropriation defined by a cultural moment, as the filmmaker’s control diminishes and the spectator’s power increases.31

The power of iconic indexicality The bottom-up processes include the perception of natural indexical signs such as detached shadows and footprints, which have played an important role in the history of human interactions with the environment, because they are instinctively (and correctly) interpreted as being connected to absent or partly displaced objects such as animals or other people, whose movements and possible intentions we often cannot afford to ignore. This is why an unexpected large shadow emerging from behind a tree, rock, or wall, in a film as well as in life, instantly catches our attention, triggering curiosity mixed with fear. One of the clichés of animated cartoons is a shadow quickly expanding around some hapless figure about to be crushed by a falling rock or some other large and heavy object (plenty of examples in the Looney Tunes, especially those involving Wile E. Coyote and his hopeless attempts to catch the Road Runner in the Grand Canyon). Our brains appear to be hardwired for cues of danger coming from large objects, human, animal, or inanimate, especially when these cues are, as is the case with indexes, literally “indicative” of physically real rather than just imagined objects. While natural indexes appeal to our senses, primal emotions, and imagination because of their direct, physical connection with their referents, human communication also appears to be based to a large extent on signs that are not physically caused by their referents but only resemble them to some extent. A person’s shadow is caused by and therefore physically inseparable from that person, but a painted portrait only resembles the person it is referring to. The sitter has not inadvertently caused her image to be imprinted on a painting, the way one automatically creates one’s shadow or produces one’s reflection in the mirror, but has allowed the imagination and skill of the painter to create the visual resemblance on the canvas. Apart from the similarity between the painted portrait and the sitter, which is formed in the minds of those contemplating the picture, there exists no direct, physical connection between the two. In semiotics a sign whose form resembles its referent is called an icon, or an iconic sign.32 Apart from figurative art thus understood iconicity is used for example in public signs, where a pictorial rather than a purely verbal code allows for quicker, more efficient understanding of the message. For instance, in traffic

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

signs three curved arrows forming a circle unambiguously imitate the shape of a roundabout ahead and the direction of the traffic; in public toilets sexes are indicated by small schematic outlines of a human body, one wearing a skirt and the other trousers; and a sign warning against mortal danger of high-voltage electricity bears an image of a skull with crossbones. Understanding iconic signs relies of course on the familiarity with the objects the signs are referring to, the knowledge that is usually culturally transmitted rather than instinctive, as is the case with most indexical signs. Also unlike natural indexes man-made iconic signs are not caused by or maintain any physical connection with the objects they represent: icons not so much indicate near-present real objects as suggest distant imagined ones. For this reason our response to iconic signs is usually not as emotive and instinctive as in the case of indexes: for example, silhouettes of Pleistocene lions painted with red ocher on the walls of the Chauvet cave, for all their admirable realism, are not terrifying to behold, whereas a shadow of a real lion lurking nearby certainly is. In analyzing the stylistic, dramatic, and symbolic function of cast shadows in artistic representations the iconic dimension is important, because not only shadows are physical extensions of their objects, but they can also resemble them in varying degrees. As observed earlier, the light falling on an object from an angle of forty-five degrees produces on even ground an accurate dark silhouette of that object. When falling from other angles light creates shadows that distort the shape of the object: a low-angle light, such as produced by the sun at dawn or sunset, casts shadows that are grotesquely elongated, while a high-angle, midday light produces a shortened, squat version of the object. Regardless of the degree of distortion, as long as the shadow silhouette resembles an outline of the object and thereby defines its character to some degree, we are talking about the iconic quality of the shadow. In Friedrich W. Murnau’s horror film Nosferatu (1922) the vampire approaches his victim’s bedroom in the form of a disembodied shadow in profile, its hunched, crooked-nosed and clawedfingered silhouette capturing the distorted, hybrid, human-animal essence of its owner (Figure 1.4). But the iconicity of indexes such as natural shadows is of course not of the same kind as the iconicity of figurative arts. In the case of natural indexes their occasional iconic character is still a function of the sign’s indexical origin, whereas the iconicity of figurative arts has entirely to do with the artist’s intention and skill. Insofar as an index resembles its object in a perceptual (mostly visual) sense, it can be called an iconic index. Iconic indexicality covers a fascinating area of visual culture, including some of the most perceptually and cognitively

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Figure 1.4 The shadow of a vampire on his way to his victim’s bedroom (Nosferatu, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau, 1922).

powerful media and art forms such as the shadow theater, magic lantern shows, shadow portraits, the camera obscura, photography, film, and television.33 What these visual media have in common, and what distinguishes them from purely iconic art forms such as drawing, painting, and sculpting, is that they combine the effects of both iconicity and indexicality to stimulate our senses, emotions, and imagination all the more effectively. The reliance on an indexical, physical extension of the represented object makes the shadow theater, an image created by the camera obscura, a photograph, or a film clip so much more efficacious in reflecting the outside world, and consequently so much more powerful in their emotive effect on viewers than purely iconic media, with their imagined rather than real connection with the world. The iconic indexicality of a shadow or a photograph means not only that the images created by these media resemble their objects (with a resemblance often much higher than in most realistic painting), but that they are also physically consubstantial with the objects they represent in a way never attained by painting. Shadows and photographs depend on the visible properties of the objects they represent, whereas paintings depend not so much on the objects themselves as on the painter’s beliefs about these objects. Even in painting from life, the painted scene

26

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

reflects only the painter’s belief of what is there, whereas a photograph or an iconic shadow (whether natural or as part of an artistic installation) captures an object or a scene in a way not affected by the artist’s beliefs. In other words, iconic indexical media depict realities that already exist (although of course only the artist’s choice can disclose them), whereas iconic media create physically often non-existent (even if plausible) realities. It is thus the combined emotive power of indexicality and iconicity that accounts for a truly “magical,” compelling effect of immediacy and suggestiveness produced by fleeting cast shadows or the fixed images of photography. One might even argue that the contiguous nature of natural shadows accounts for their comparatively stronger effect of instant curiosity, urgency, and anxiety than is normally the case with the contemplation of displaced, and therefore non-threatening, photographic images. Still, as the cultural critic Susan Sontag has argued, even old photographs exert an uncanny effect of being consubstantial with their subjects, allowing the viewer to establish an illusory if psychologically compelling impression of a surrogate possession of a cherished person or a thing, a possession based on an implicit assumption of identity, on an inseparable sympathy between a photograph and what it represents.34 This sympathy results from an indexical, real connection between the image and the subject, which in the case of photographs offers a compelling illusion of preserving someone’s existence and appearance forever, in defiance of time, just as in the case of visible shadows of concealed objects the connection creates an immediate sense of urgency, curiosity, and fear. The power of indexical representations to stir our primal responses can be exploited in fiction by “magically” endowing normally iconic images with indexical qualities to enhance their effects on the imagination. This is what Oscar Wilde did in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), in which the painted portrait becomes connected with the sitter, not indirectly via the imagination of the painter and the beholder as is normally the case, but directly, in an unnatural way, through some sort of telepathy, with the sitter’s body and mind. By a magical act the picture and the sitter swap properties: the portrait acquires the biological and psychological characteristics of the sitter, while the sitter becomes a living work of art, eternally young and handsome.35 Like other indexical media such as photography and film the portrait from Wilde’s novel begins to record its owner’s aging as well as his sins and misdemeanors by growing old and monstrously distorted. The uncanny and unsettling effect of Wilde’s magical portrait exploits our instinctive, irrational sense of the invisible but real, “indexical” connection, found also in the worship of religious images, between an iconic image and its referent.

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As visual phenomena shadows and photographs are of course in many respects different (the former is primarily a natural effect, the latter an advanced technology), but as I have been pointing out, from the point of view of perception and interpretation they both belong to a distinct class of visual signs based on iconic indexicality. They are also historically connected, in that photography as we know it has emerged after centuries of optical experiments and forms of popular entertainment involving shadow theaters and shadow projections. Other forms of visual representations based on iconic indexicality have been around at least as long as art itself. The first fixed iconic indexes, the prototypal “photographs,” on historical record are imprints of human hands with outstretched fingers, found among the paintings on the walls of the Chauvet cave from over 30,000 years ago. Here a hand was placed flat on the cave’s wall, and paint was then applied around it and between the fingers.36 Such negatives of human hands are also found in other Upper Palaeolithic caves in southern France and northern Spain, as are the positives: impressions of hands coated with pigment and pressed against the wall. In one Spanish cave, the Gargas, there are nearly a 150 red and black hands, some of them small, probably belonging to women or children.37 These “signatures” or memorials are to date the earliest permanent and intentional iconic indexes: iconic in the sense that the impressions of the hands bear a close resemblance to the hands pressed against the wall, and indexical in the sense that the images of the hands were not painted but were actually physically caused by the hands of living people, who evidently wanted to preserve a bit of themselves for posterity, not unlike those modern tourists who cannot resist inscribing or carving their names, with dates, on the walls of famous buildings they visit.

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Light and Shadows in the Visual Arts

The cast shadow has often been considered visually appealing by artists, both for the earlier mentioned evolutionary reasons and on esthetic grounds, by virtue of its relative independence as a formal element of the visible world. At the same time painters, photographers, and filmmakers have always been aware that the cast shadow is by no means the only type of shadow light can produce. Nor was the shadow always considered an automatic and inevitable by-product of light. It is a matter of simple observation that on an overcast day light can be so diffuse that it illuminates everything evenly, with the same intensity, producing hardly any shadows at all. Without the darkness of the shadow to offset brightness, light may not even enter awareness as a semiotic sign in its own right and an integral property of the visible world. This is the reason, argues Rudolf Arnheim, why in the early stages of visual arts light as such is not represented. As in the pictures of young children, in early art light is used only for modeling; that is to say, brightness values serve only to mark differences within the object itself, as in giving a person dark hair to set it off against a light face. This may be why on ancient Greek vases dark figures are detached from the bright background by a strong contrast produced by object brightness but not by scene illumination.1 In late antiquity painters eventually learned the use of shadows, which became represented whenever the goal of art was realism, that is, to render the external world as it appears to the artist’s eye rather than as it is transformed by the imagination. Cast shadows appear occasionally in naturalistic wall paintings of the Hellenistic period (fourth to first century BCE), on the Egyptian mummy portraits from around the second and first century BCE, or in Pompeian wall paintings of the first century CE. Here the chiaroscuro, the play of light and shadow, was handled with a virtuosity not rediscovered until the Italian Renaissance fifteen centuries later.2 Cast shadows appear in fact throughout Roman painting, where they enhance the three-dimensional effect of space created by represented figures. For example, the mosaic of the Battle between

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

Alexander and Darius from Pompeii (now in the National Museum in Naples) shows massed figures of mounted warriors, whose contact with the ground is emphasized by the cast shadows which transform the lower part of the picture plane into an illusion of horizontal ground plane. According to the art historian Miriam Schild Bunim, in the Alexander mosaic painted shadows help create the effect of limited depth resulting from the juxtaposition of two planes at right angles, one forming the ground and the other the rear wall, the “stage space” later developed and perfected by Renaissance painters from Giotto onward.3

Types of shadow Despite the ubiquity of cast shadows in nature, the first and probably the most common type of shadow found in visual arts is precisely the technique of modeling, or shading, used to convey the sense of volume and roundness of solid objects represented on a flat surface.4 After having worked with perceptually simpler means of line contour and evenly colored surfaces, as in the ancient Greek vases, painters eventually discovered the spatial effects of unevenly distributed brightness to emphasize the texture and shape of objects. Shading makes the surface of objects recede toward the contours, while highlights make objects protrude, creating for the viewer the illusion of relief and depth on an otherwise flat surface. Perfected during the Renaissance, the same technique of modeling was used hundreds of years later in artistic photography and cinematography, where highlights and shadows created by natural or artificial lighting provide important clues about the texture of the objects’ surfaces. For example, if the surface of the filmed object is smooth, like glass or chrome, the highlights tend to gleam and sparkle. On the other hand a rougher surface, like a course stone or wrinkled face, yields more diffuse highlights. The effect of shading in studio-made films is normally achieved by the classic three-point lighting system adopted in Hollywood around 1920, in which the key light from one side of the camera produces the strongest shadow, mitigated by the less-intense fill-light coming from the other side of the camera, while the figure’s silhouette is highlighted by the backlight coming from behind and above the figure.5 In fact, any combination of front-, side-, and backlighting usually brings out the texture in a rough-surfaced object, like the human face for example, by creating shading to simulate threedimensionality, as in the close-up of Emil Jannings’s face in E. A. Dupont’s film Varieté (1925) (Figure 2.1).

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Figure 2.1 The face of the actor Emil Jannings sculpted by three-point lighting in Varieté, dir. E. A. Dupont (1925).

Shading is by far the most common technique of creating an impression of relief in figurative arts, of which the earliest records, interestingly, come from the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings of over 30,000 years ago. For example, the Chauvet cave from the Ardêche region in France contains over 300 remarkably realistic wall paintings of rhinoceroses, lions, reindeer, mammoths, horses, bison, bears, and other animals. In these representations the prehistoric artists achieved the effects of relief both by accommodating the natural unevenness of the rock surface and by shading within the profile outlines of the animals using charcoal and red ocher.6 Like the geometric perspective perfected by the Renaissance painters, from the very beginnings of art shading has been the painters’ chief method to achieve visual realism that would transcend the flatness of the painted surface, creating the illusion of volume and depth. When shadows directly overlie the objects by whose shape, spatial orientation, and distance from the light source they are created, we are talking about attached shadows, or self-shadows.7 Attached shadows in painting and photography are usually formed by single-source side or backlighting which fails to illuminate parts of an object on the opposite side of the light source, with no fill-light to mitigate the sharp chiaroscuro effect. A self-shadow shows a

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

figure as a dark silhouette, without texture or surface detail, a living shadow that can be menacing, mysterious, and suggestive. Gregg Toland’s cinematography in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) provides classic examples. In the film a frequent use of self-shadows conveys a range of (usually negative) psychological effects: self-effacement, ignorance, insignificance, humiliation, self-delusion, or powerlessness, depending on the dramatic content of the scene. For example, when Kane (Orson Welles) reads his “Declaration of Principles” to his associates in the newspaper office his face remains in the dark compared with the other, dramatically less important characters (Figure 2.2). Here the attached shadow betrays Kane’s self-delusion and possibly insincerity in announcing his idealistic principles, which he will later betray. Attached shadows in film are usually achieved by carefully positioned artificial lights, but even in the early days of cinema, when only daylight was used for illumination, self-shadows could on occasion be created to considerable dramatic effect. In Henry Lehrman’s farce comedy Bangville Police from 1913, made by the Keystone Film Company based in New York, a farm girl (Dot Farley) overhears two burglars discussing their plans. The burglars are seen through a dark interior of the barn against a bright window, appearing only as dark, mysterious silhouettes. No intertitle translates what the burglars are

Figure 2.2 A self-shadow in Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles (1941).

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whispering about, but the distressed look on the girl’s face and her subsequent panicky behavior leave no doubt as to the sinister content of their conversation (Figure 2.3). In an early German Expressionist film, Robert Reinert’s Nerven (Nerves) from 1919, the factory owner Roloff (Eduard von Winterstein) loses his mind over the perjury he committed in court and imagines himself strangling his wife. His hallucination is reflected in an exterior shot in which the dark silhouettes of the two figures are projected dramatically against the sky (Figure 2.4). Years after Expressionism had ceased to dominate the Weimar screen, the director Georg W. Pabst introduced his Jack the Ripper by means of a menacing self-shadow in an updated Expressionist setting of his 1929 tragic melodrama Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box). The notorious serial women murderer first emerges from the London fog at night in the form of a dark silhouette, before he reveals his face (that of Gustav Diessl) to his next victim, the film’s femme fatale Lulu (Louise Brooks). An evocative self-shadow effect can also be achieved not by lighting but by costume and set design. In Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) the murderous somnambulist (Conrad Veidt), prowling

Figure 2.3 Self-shadows of two burglars seen against a bright window in Bangville Police, dir. Henry Lehrman (1913).

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Figure 2.4 Silhouettes of two figures projected dramatically against the sky in Nerven (Nerves), dir. Robert Reinert (1919).

at night in search of his victim, appears in his tight black costume like a shadow gliding along the wall. Finally, there are the already mentioned cast shadows, visually probably the most prominent because they are largely separated from their owners as stylistic and dramatic elements in their own right. As independent visual motifs in pictorial arts cast shadows naturally possess more symbolic significance than they normally do in real life, if only because real-life shadows exist simply as automatic by-products of light, whereas their representations in painting and studio photography are always intentional and motivated. Natural shadows also look insubstantial compared with the solid objects that cast them, while an artistically represented shadow has the same physical quality as the object—both are insubstantial and therefore potentially equivalent as pictorial motifs. The three types of shadow—shading, attached shadow, and cast shadow—generated by directional light and used in visual arts are illustrated in Figure 2.5. Cast shadows in photography and film can of course be also purely accidental, as in exterior shots taken in sunny weather for example. But even when accidental in origin, once accepted by the artist they become an integral part

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Figure 2.5 Three types of shadow: A—shading, B—attached shadow, and C—cast shadow.

of the image’s composition, transformed from inadvertent physical states into intentional semiotic signs. In Friedrich W. Murnau’s Nosferatu an exterior shot shows a town’s messenger accompanied by his natural shadow, about to read a proclamation about the danger of the plague (Figure 2.6). The messenger’s shadow on the cobbled pavement appears to fulfill no obvious dramatic or symbolic function, but it enhances a sense of space and signals the fact that the scene was shot outdoors, in a town of Wismar in northern Germany as it happens, rather than on a set. Location shooting for Nosferatu was done under time pressure due to budget constraints, and any accidental natural shadow was simply retained as part of the visual composition. Cinematic cast shadows can sometimes be not only accidental but also unwanted. These are usually a result of technical error or an oversight, and as such should be avoided or eliminated before they reach the screen. But sometimes they are not weeded out, even in otherwise perfectly crafted productions. In Citizen Kane, as the journalist enters the vault of Thatcher’s Memorial Library hoping to be enlightened on the meaning of “rosebud,” Kane’s dying word, the camera slowly tracks in to reveal a reading room eerily illuminated by an “otherworldly” shaft of light falling on the table (Figure 2.7). The directional

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The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

Figure 2.6 A natural shadow in a location shot from Nosferatu, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1922).

light casts the three figures into evocative self-shadows, but the overall beauty of the shot is somewhat marred for a split second by a distracting flicker of camera shadow reflected on the door frame on the left. This type of unwanted shadow is usually created by the key light falling on some large bright object that just happens to be too close in front of the camera. In a nighttime shot in Elia Kazan’s 1951 A Streetcar Named Desire, a white taxi cuts across as the camera pans right on the railway station in New Orleans. For a brief but visually awkward moment the large bulging shape of the brightly colored car is covered by a dark shadow of the booth hiding the camera. No matter how briefly they appear in the frame unwanted shadows nonetheless tend to catch the eye precisely because they play no dramatic or stylistic role, and as non-semiotic signs they are simply jarringly incongruous with the scene. Intentional shadows on the other hand are noticed because they are meant to be: they are an integral part of the film’s visual design by serving stylistic, dramatic, and symbolic functions within the cinematic plot. Any cast shadow included in a painting, a studio-made photograph, or a film is by definition intentional and motivated, because it requires planning and effort to produce.

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Figure 2.7 Accidental and (probably) unwanted shadow of the camera on a door frame on the left in Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles (1941).

Cast shadows in Renaissance painting In the spring of 1995 the National Gallery of London organized a small exhibition called The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art, which consisted of paintings selected by the eminent art historian Ernst H. Gombrich. The selection comprised twenty-seven paintings using the motif of the cast shadow by a range of Italian, English, Dutch, and French masters from between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the companion volume to the exhibition Gombrich observes how surprisingly rare cast shadows in early modern European painting are. Unlike shading, which is used in practically all painting at least since Giotto (1265–1337) to create volume and relief, the represented objects frequently cast either no or merely rudimentary shadows in their surroundings. Strange though it may seem, some of the greatest observers of nature appear to have deliberately avoided painting the cast shadow. However rich their mastery of tone and color, they show us a shadowless world. Gombrich suggests that the painters regarded projected shadows as a disturbing and distracting element in their otherwise coherent and harmonious

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compositions.8 But why should a natural effect of light, of potential stylistic or symbolic significance, be consciously avoided by the artists otherwise devoted to “Nature, the mistress of things,” and to “representing what can be seen,” in the words of the fifteenth-century Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti.9 The systematic recording of visual phenomena by Renaissance artists, including the anatomical accuracy in the rendering of the human body and the naturalism of linear perspective, paradoxically did not extend to the familiar and ubiquitous projected shadow.10 This is surprising, given the well-documented scientific interest during the Renaissance in the physical nature of the shadow, not least in the context of astronomy, where measuring the shadows cast by a gnomon was a means of recording the passage of the sun through the sky.11 The optical properties of cast shadows were of particular interest to Leonardo da Vinci, who nonetheless used his scientific observations of light phenomena to discourage artists from incorporating shadows in their paintings. If Renaissance humanistic painting is foreshadowed by Giotto’s first attempts to render space geometrically, to use shading to express emotional realism of human and divine figures, the newly found naturalism of representation did not, however, include shadows where one would expect them. Despite Giotto’s attention to spatial depth and volume, his figures touch the ground with their feet but cast no shadows, like paper cutouts, and neither do columns, trees, or animals often depicted against light backgrounds theoretically perfect for dark cast shadows.12 Throughout the Renaissance painting sharp shadows was generally avoided, but there were exceptions. One particularly interesting is Giovanni di Paolo’s small painting on a wooden panel of The Flight into Egypt (1436, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena). Here the Holy Family in the foreground is still painted Giotto style, without shadows, but the rural landscape in the background consists of houses, trees, people, and animals, which all cast long shadows consistent with the sun actually painted in the top left corner of the picture.13 Depriving the Virgin, the Child, Joseph, and the ass, lit as they are by the same sun that shines on the landscape, of natural shadows is all the more surprising considering the fact that the elongated shadows of the trees almost touch Joseph’s legs. One only suspects the painter’s attempt to differentiate between the temporal world, in which familiar objects cast predictable shadows according to natural laws, and the divine and transcendental realm represented by the “spectral,” shadowless procession of the Holy Family. In most of Renaissance paintings, however, variations of light and shade were consciously reduced in high-key, diffuse lighting of the scenes, which often dissolved shadows altogether. Another practice to control or eliminate

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cast shadows was recommended by Leonardo and is still followed by painters today: to use north light to avoid direct sun illumination. Still another method to minimize excessive shadows was to make little models of clay or wax before drawing their cartoons, in order to see the distribution of shadows in sunlight. Tintoretto used to make such clay models, clothing them with rags, which he would place within little houses and perspectives formed of wood and cardboard, arranging small lamps at the windows, to see the effects of light and shadow.14 In his notebooks Leonardo consistently advocates the sfumato (soft) effect over chiaroscuro, that is, shading over sharply defined shadows: “that your shadows and lights blend like smoke without strokes or borders,” because “you will get only poor perception of the details of a body when the part that you see is all in shadow, or all illuminated.”15 From medieval optical tradition Leonardo took his definition of shadows and their division into the three basics types mentioned earlier: “The scientific and true principles of painting first determine what is a shaded object, what is direct [attached] shadow, what is cast shadow, and what is light.”16 Passages in his notes show that Leonardo had a lifelong interest in problems of shadow projection, which he understood according to the principles of perspective. He was also interested in the role of cast shadows in astronomy, especially in the phenomena of eclipses.17 In relation to painting Leonardo believed that shading (rilievo) depended upon proper distribution of lights and shadows, which in turn necessitated an understanding of the particular types of shadow that are projected in differing lighting conditions. He also examined the role of cast shadows in creating relief, and he studied the effect of shadows on colors by observing the colors and shapes of shadows in towns, forests, and mountains. All these theoretical interests are revealed in his paintings.18 Famous for his subtle sfumato shading, in his Treatise on Painting Leonardo is nonetheless advising painters against the rendering of harsh shadows in strong sunlight: Lights separated from the shadows with too much precision, have a very bad effect. In order, therefore, to avoid this inconvenience, if the object be in the open country, you need not let your figures be illuminated by the sun; but may suppose some transparent clouds interposed, so that the sun not being visible, the termination of the shadows will be also imperceptible and soft.19

In one famous example, however, Leonardo departs from his own general principle of shadow avoidance in painting: The Last Supper, painted on the wall of the refectory in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan between 1494 and 1498. Despite the deteriorated quality of the painting it is still possible

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to see that the whole scene is not illuminated evenly by diffuse light, as would typically be the case in a Renaissance painting, but directionally from top left where the actual windows of the refectory are situated. The real light coming from those windows illuminates the fictitious wall in the painted room where the Last Supper is taking place, applying strokes of brightness to each figure and producing cast shadows to loaves of bread on the table and to the table’s legs.20 In an extraordinary feat of artistic illusion the three-dimensional space and natural light of the refectory blend almost imperceptively with the space and painted light and shadows represented in Leonardo’s two-dimensional picture. Interestingly, while cast shadows were for the most part avoided in the paintings of Renaissance Italy, they were often used in the art of northern Europe, especially in the Netherlands. Beginning with the fifteenth century, the Flemish masters depicted the traditional Christian themes in contemporary interior settings paying close attention to finely executed domestic details, including the realistic shadows produced by light coming from the windows. In a typical example, Robert Campin’s Annunciation scene in the Mérode Altarpiece (1428) shows a bourgeois interior in which practically all domestic objects cast realistic shadows, including a pitcher hanging in a niche, wall candelabras, a vase with a lily on the table, and a towel on a rack (Figure 2.8). Similarly in Campin’s Heinrich von Werl Triptych (c. 1438, Madrid, Museo del Prado) a small stone statue of the Holy Trinity standing on a mantelpiece casts a clear shadow on the wall, consistent with the light coming from the implied window to the left. Robert Campin’s shading tour de force is also his monochrome Holy Trinity (c. 1410, Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut), a painted imitation of a sculpture of God the Father supporting a swooning body of Christ, with the dove perched on Christ’s shoulder. Christ’s exposed flesh and God’s heavily draped coat display exceptionally plastic chiaroscuro modeling, while the architectural niche behind reveals the two figures’ sharp shadows cast by light coming from top right.21 A century later Gerard David used a similar technique in his near monochrome painted imitation of the sculptures of Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin (Figure 2.9). Renaissance grisaille (monochromatic) paintings and drawings, with their high-contrast tonality in which shadows are highlighted more than in color painting, are historical antecedents of low-key black-and-white studio photography and expressionistic cinematography. As observed by Rudolf Arnheim, an artist working in monochrome can achieve particularly vivid and impressive effects. The reduction of actual color values to a one-dimensional gray series (ranging from pure white to dead black) is a welcome divergence

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Figure 2.8 Everyday objects cast realistic shadows in Robert Campin’s painting Mérode Altarpiece, 1428.

from nature, which renders possible the making of expressive pictures by means of light and shade. In modern black-and-white photography control over lighting and shadows, the judicious use of sunlight in outdoor scenes, under- or overexposure, and so on are simple ways of achieving atmospheric and symbolic chiaroscuro effects such as contrasts between light and darkness, white purity versus black evil, opposition between gloom and radiance, and so on.22 According to the art historian Jean-Claude Frère, the remarkable visual realism achieved by the Flemish painters from the early fifteenth century, including their use of perspective and light effects, was a result of an essentially intuitive and empirical approach to representation, different from the theoretical and scientific attitude of their Italian contemporaries. It was this proto-photographic approach that gave the work of Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden extraordinary

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Figure 2.9 Shading and cast shadows in Gerard David’s painting Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Annunciate, ca. 1510.

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sophistication in the handling of detail in their faithful representations of everyday life. Shading was routinely used to bring out texture and relief, especially in human bodies and clothing, as were cast shadows visible on floors, tables, and walls to indicate sources of light and to create a sense of depth and perspective. In Jan van Eyck’s famous The Arnolfini Marriage (1434, London, National Gallery) the interior scene is illuminated by light coming through the windows on the left, one visible in the picture and the other implied by shadows cast on the floor by a pair of sandals in the bottom left corner of the picture. The implied window is actually visible in the reflection of the circular mirror in the middle of the wall opposite the viewer, which also shows two tiny figures, interpreted as the painter himself and a young man, doubtless arriving to act as witnesses to the marriage.23 Leonardo da Vinci’s theoretical interests in optics and its relation to art, including the role of the shadow, also inspired Albrecht Dürer’s scientific study and his art. In his Four Books on Measurement, published in 1525, Dürer follows Euclid’s assumption that light travels in straight lines, and he defines the shadow accordingly: “Every light reaches in straight lines as far as its rays run. But if an opaque object is placed before the light, then the rays break off there, and a shadow falls so far as the lines of the light rays would have travelled.”24 But despite his scientific interest in shadows Dürer, like Leonardo, avoids including cast shadows in his paintings and engravings. One notable exception is his engraving St Jerome in His Study (1514), highly praised by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) for its light effects: “In this work Albrecht represented a room with windows of glass, through which stream the rays of the sun, falling on the place where the Saint sits writing, with an effect so natural, that it is a marvel”25 (Figure 2.10). Like the realistic interiors of the Flemish painting from almost a century earlier, Dürer’s brightly lit study of St. Jerome includes shadows cast by sunlight on walls and floor, and paves the way for Vermeer’s and other Dutch masters’ subtly illuminated “photographic” bourgeois interiors painted a century later. Dürer’s effect will also be repeated by the cameramen Karl Freund and Guido Seeber in the warm and “painterly” study of the magician Rabbi Löw in Paul Wegener’s 1920 Expressionist Weimar classic Der Golem (Figure 2.11).26

The chiaroscuro revolution The Baroque period marks a radical change in the painters’ attitude toward light and shadows. After the subtle shading of Renaissance painting, the glider of contrast now moves decisively toward “high,” as diffuse lighting gives way to

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Figure 2.10 Natural light and shadows in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving St. Jerome in His Study, 1514.

sharp directional illumination. Already in 1568 Daniele Barbaro (an ecclesiastic with interest in architecture) said in his treatise The Practice of Perspective that only one light source should be used in a picture, since an object lit by many lights loses its relief and roundness.27 The taboo on harsh shadows was eventually lifted in the seventeenth century after Caravaggio’s groundbreaking chiaroscuro scenes.

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Figure 2.11 Warm, painterly light in the Rabbi’s study from Paul Wegener’s film Der Golem (1920).

It was then found that strong shadows added to the impression of depth and helped to enhance the effect of sunlight, as also evidenced by Dutch cityscapes of the period. In Caravaggio’s paintings much of the dramatic intensity derives from the sharply focused shadows produced by directional light, which tears up the unity of bodies and objects by tracing the borderlines of darkness across the surfaces (Figure 2.12). Here strong light and deep shadows disfigure familiar shapes and excite the eye by violent contrasts, as in German Expressionist cinema and Hollywood film noir centuries later.28 Rather than recreating the bright Mediterranean sun in his paintings, Caravaggio preferred gloomy cellars, lit usually by a single shaft of light up on the wall to the left or by a single lamp concealed within the painted scene. In his Lives of the Artists (1672) the painter and antiquarian Giovanni Pietro Bellori described Caravaggio’s lighting technique as follows: “He never brought his figures out into the daylight, but placed them in the dark brown atmosphere of a closed room, using a high light that descended vertically over the principal parts of the bodies while leaving the remainder in shadow in order to give force through a strong contrast of light and dark.”29 Whether for reasons of his disturbed personality or contentious artistic temperament, Caravaggio used black in his grounds and in his flesh tones,

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Figure 2.12 Chiaroscuro lighting in Caravaggio’s painting The Denial of Saint Peter, c. 1610.

covering his figures in the penumbra of enveloping darkness. Many artists of the seventeenth century were rapidly converted to Caravaggio’s idiom, whose tenebroso (dark) style conquered not only parts of Italy but also whole regions of northern Europe, where it culminated in the art of Rembrandt.30 Echoes of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro revolution eventually reached the medium of cinema as it matured artistically in the 1920s, notably in German Expressionist films. Paul Leni’s phantasmagoric Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks) from 1924 borrows copiously from Caravaggio’s visual style in its total rejection of realistic daylight in favor of shadowy, low-key, directional studio lighting. Before the viewer delves into the dream visions that constitute the film’s triple plot (centered on the wax figures of Haroun-Al-Raschid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper), the fairground booth, still allegedly part of the “real” world, is lit by a single lamp, Caravaggio style, held by the creepy owner who displays his wax figures to a young writer, the author of the dream stories that follow (Figure 2.13). As in chiaroscuro Baroque painting, the sidelighting in this scene sculpts the figures around patches of bright light and deep shadows, enhancing the sense of eeriness by blending the real with the imagined, as the human and the soon-to-beanimated wax figures (played by actors) become indistinguishable.

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Figure 2.13 Chiaroscuro lighting in Paul Leni’s film Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks) from 1924.

Proto-photographic shadows in early modern painting The stylistic excesses of Baroque chiaroscuro were ultimately curbed by the more empirical visual conventions of neoclassical art. Cast shadows continued to be used in painting, although not to fulfill any stylistic or dramatic functions but simply as elements of life. A typical case in point are Canaletto’s (1697–1768) almost photographic cityscapes of Venice, Rome, and London, with their accurate geometric perspectives, details of urban life, and naturalistic lighting complete with shadows cast by human figures and buildings. To obtain his highpitched visual realism Canaletto availed of the camera obscura (dark chamber) as a drawing aid—an optical device known since antiquity and during the Renaissance, and frequently used by painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.31 The camera obscura was a portable box equipped with a convex lens and an internal mirror which righted the upside-down image created by the lens, so that it could be traced on a piece of paper placed on translucent glass plate installed in the top of the device. Drawings thus made could help artists to trace the outlines of shapes to be transferred onto canvas to achieve highly accurate,

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Figure 2.14 “Photographic” shadows in the painting Piazza San Marco by Canaletto (c. 1730–5).

truly “photographic” paintings of landscapes and cityscapes such as those by Canaletto and other Italian vedutisti (view painters).32 Before the invention of film and television the effects produced by the camera obscura must have been truly astounding: on the two-dimensional screen the viewer could see a threedimensional scene, in its natural colors, fully animated, reduced in size, and neatly framed. If there were cast shadows in the original scene, the image created by the camera obscura would obviously reveal them, and the painter would accordingly transfer them onto the canvas in the name of realism (Figure 2.14). As a rule, the more empirical the visual conventions of art, as in Canaletto, in the positivist esthetics of Gustave Courbet (1819–77), or in the New Objectivity paintings in mid-1920s Germany, the more likely are the represented objects to cast shadows the way they do in real life. And conversely, the more stylized and expressive the modes of representation, as in Romantic and early twentiethcentury Expressionist painting, visual realism is often sacrificed in the name of subjectivity, experimentation, and abstraction. For example, the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), with their mysterious mountains, forests, the sea, and German lowlands, leave as a rule little room for realistic shadows that would distract from the misty moodiness and melancholy

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Figure 2.15 A misty, melancholy, shadowless landscape in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting A Walk at Dusk, 1830–5.

of the scenes (Figure 2.15).33 Nor were the French Impressionists keen on painting shadows, preferring to achieve visual contrasts by color values rather than by differences in tonality. Claude Monet’s Wheatstacks, Snow Effect offers a rare example of Impressionist painted shadows (Figure 2.16). In the early twentieth century only the Cubists’ experiments with pictorial space incorporated cast shadows, both to guide and to confuse the viewer. The surrealists too exploited the effects of shadows to enhance the mood of mystery, as in Giorgio de Chirico’s dreamlike visions of deserted city squares, in which statues and solitary human figures often cast harsh shadows to add to the sense of disquiet.34 In mid-1920s Germany the transition from Expressionism to the New Objectivity style in painting meant moving away from the distorted stylization of the former to the more empirical, “photographic” realism of the latter. In Expressionist painting cast shadows were generally avoided, even in figurative scenes, where they were replaced by clashes of colors and differences between shapes of objects. For example, in Ernst Ludwig 1911 painting Negertanz (Negro Dance) the dancers on the illuminated stage cast absolutely no shadows, and neither do pedestrians in an outdoor scene in Kirchner’s 1915 painting Der rote Turm in Halle (The Red Tower of Halle). In Expressionist pictures visual impact

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Figure 2.16 A rare example of painted Impressionist shadows in Claude Monet’s Wheatstacks, Snow Effect, 1891.

is achieved, as in Impressionist paintings, through tonal contrast and tension between complementary color surfaces rather than through realistic shading.35 However, by the early 1920s Expressionism, with its contorted emotionalism and physical distortions of reality, was effectively over as a dominant style in German art, although it continued to much acclaim on cinema screen. Already in 1919 the Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner indicated in his manifesto that “What will matter tomorrow, what I and all the others need, is a fanatical, fervent naturalism.” Similarly in France around 1920 painting was being increasingly characterized by a new figurative classicism, as represented for example by the former Cubist Jean Metzinger and the former Fauvist André Derain. In Italy the path to representationalism had been taken since 1917 by the Pittura metafisica (metaphysical art) painters such as Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, who left behind their earlier excessive surrealism in favor of a new “tectonic plastic realism,” creating a much admired synthesis of modernism and traditional classicism.36 In Germany the New Objectivist style offered a new rationality of vision, an objective, “photographic” feeling for what was down-to-earth, feasible, and real. Against the abstractions and fantasy of Expressionism were set banal, small-scale scenes of unassuming life, as in Georg Scholz’s Kleinstadttag bei Tag: Der Metzger (Small Town by Day: The Butcher) from 1922, with its buildings, people, carts, and animals complete with realistic shadows.37 After the ecstatic

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outbursts of Expressionism, painters such as Georg Grosz and Otto Dix focused their gaze upon the mundane here and now: a view from a window, everyday life taking place in front of one’s house, the alleyways, the gutter or the brothel, the factory floor, a railway level crossing, or the washing line in the backyard, where human figures, buildings, cars, and everyday objects more often than not cast realistic shadows consistent with the source of light used in the scene.38 Similar “shadows in the city” appeared at the time on the cinema screen in the realistic, urban dramas by Georg W. Pabst, Gerhard Lamprecht, Friedrich W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang discussed in Chapter 6.

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Fixing Iconic Indexes

Before the era of film, moving images, including natural shadows, were captured live by the camera obscura, which enabled the early modern painters like Canaletto to achieve almost photographic veracity and accuracy of representation (Figure 2.14). The camera obscura could capture a moving image (an iconic index of a scene), but it could not fix it for future contemplation—this part was accomplished by a painter who created a permanent icon out of a fleeting index, losing the indexical character of the image in the process. This is why Canaletto’s cityscapes, colorfully realistic as they are, are not as faithful and “real” as images obtained even by grainy black-and-white early photographs, to say nothing of today’s high-definition digital images.

The myth of the (indexical) origin of painting The direct physical connection established at origin between image and its referent, typical for indexical signs such as those produced by the camera obscura, accounts for the intuitive, almost irrational response to indexes, which is based on a perception of identity, or consubstantiality between the image and the subject, objectively absent in iconic media such as painting or sculpture. In the latter case the image is produced fully intentionally by the artist’s skill rather than accidentally or mechanically by nature, and the only link between the subject and its representation exists in the artist’s and the viewer’s minds. Also, while indexes always point to things that objectively exist, iconic images often refer either to nonexistent things, as in fantastic representations, or to objects of disputable ontological status, as in religious art. The only real connection between an icon and its subject is indirect and imaginative, and any contentions as to the alleged direct link between the two remain a matter of faith, as in homeopathic magic or religious worship of images, in which a viewer responds

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to images of objects as if they were objects themselves.1 But like all matters of faith, a belief that a painted figure or a statue is somehow con-substantial with something in the outside world, however psychologically compelling and emotionally gratifying it may be, cannot but offer an objectively false description and interpretation of reality. The perception that traditional figurative arts such as painting and sculpture, for all their historical richness and cultural prestige, are in some important respect deficient as representations of the world appears to lie at the root of a myth, found originally in Pliny the Elder (23–79 BCE), which argues that sculpture and painting originated from cast shadows. In his Natural History Pliny records an ancient Roman poetic love tale, in which Butades, a potter from Sicyon in Corinth, discovered with the help of his daughter how to model portraits in clay. The daughter was in love with a youth, and when he was leaving the country she traced the outline of the shadow which his face cast on the wall by lamplight. The father filled the outline with clay and made a model.2 In this way a transient indexical shadow was transformed by clay into a fixed iconic image of the young man’s head, not unlike the paintings obtained with the aid of the camera obscura, creating a quasi-photograph as a surrogate for the girl’s absent lover. As I have argued earlier, shadows as indexical extensions of objects remain more “naturally” related to these objects than painted images, whose iconic character establishes only an indirect link with the object through the artist’s and the viewer’s imagination. In other words, if a shadow is a representation of an object, a painted image is a representation of a mental representation of an object, twice removed from nature it purports to represent.3 In this sense Pliny’s myth appears to supply an otherwise missing indexical dimension to the iconic arts in an apparent attempt to bolster their representational power. Pliny’s story became popular with artists of the Renaissance, keen to promote visual arts as a mirror up to nature. In his treatise On Painting (1435), the founding book on early modern art, Leon Battista Alberti quotes Quintilian as saying that “the earliest painters used to draw around shadows made by the sun, and the art [of portraiture] eventually grew by a process of additions.”4 The popularity of this story in the Renaissance is also attested by Giorgio Vasari, who in his Lives (1568) recounts another version of the legend, according to which painting was first brought to Egypt by Gyges of Lydia, “who, on seeing his shadow cast by the fire, at once drew an outline of himself on the wall with a piece of coal. For some time after that it was the custom to draw in outline only, without any colouring.”5 Vasari even adorned his house in Florence with a fresco illustrating this legend,

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Figure 3.1 A Young Corinthian Girl Drawing the Shadow of Her Lover, engraving by Giuseppe Bortignoni (1778–1860) after David Allan.

which shows a painter drawing on the wall an outline around the shadow of his own head.6 Around 1660 Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, in his picture The Origin of Painting (Muzeul National da Arta in Bucharest), depicts a young artist similarly drawing an outline of another young man’s shadow cast on the wall. Another illustration of Pliny’s romantic tale by the Scottish painter David Allan (1744– 96) shows the potter’s daughter embracing her lover as she draws an outline of his shadow projected by candlelight on the wall (Figure 3.1).7

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From camera obscura to photography Pliny’s myth of the indexical origin of painting seems to reflect a perennial dream of inventing a visual medium that would combine indexical truthfulness with iconic, mimetic quality. In this sense such a medium was indeed waiting to be invented in post-Renaissance visual culture, which was for centuries evolving toward an ever-increasing naturalism of representation. The name of the medium is of course photography, “the mirror with a memory.” Its historical arrival coincided with the spread of positivism and a scientific approach to nature, which aspired to a faithful, completely impersonal, indexical and objective rendering of reality, to reproduce the objects as they are, or as they would be even if the observer did not exist.8 The credit for producing the first fixed indexical-iconic image by means of the photographic process of silver nitrate goes to the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and his first camera picture taken in 1826.9 Its subject is a city view, a courtyard at Gras seen from a window, rather than a human figure, mainly because the image required eight hours of exposure to be recorded on a photosensitive plate. As this historic photograph was being taken, the sun had made much of its daily journey across the sky, leaving traces of changing patches of light and shadows on all sides of the photographed buildings. Inadvertently therefore the first-ever photograph, due to the technical imperfection of the long exposure, succeeded in recording the traces of movement, here of the sun, about seventy years before the invention of the movie camera. It was Niépce’s younger partner, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who in 1829 developed the first precise photographic images, which he called, after himself, daguerreotypes. One of Daguerre’s photographs from 1837, Still Life (Interior of a Cabinet of Curiosities), shows carefully arranged fanciful objects such as plaster casts, a wicker-wrapped bottle, and a framed print. It also illustrates, incidentally, the three types of shadow identified centuries earlier by Renaissance artists: shading that highlights the objects’ different surfaces and textures, shadows attached to objects on the opposite side of the source of light, and shadows cast by objects on the wall.10 The effect produced by Renaissance grisaille painting, in which gray monochrome was used to imitate the appearance of a sculpture (Figure 2.9), could now be achieved quickly by black-and-white photographs (Figure 3.2). In the decades that followed photography became all the rage, first chiefly among rich enthusiasts, who carried their cumbersome and expensive cameras and tripods to take pictures of city squares, landscapes, historic monuments, buildings, and other large and immovable objects. The

Fixing Iconic Indexes

Figure 3.2 Still Life of Sculpture and Architectural Fragments, photograph by Jean Pierre Philippe Lampué, 1862.

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exposure time was gradually reduced to 15 minutes in full sunlight in the late 1830s, and then to 20–40 seconds by the early 1840s.11 The photographic image, like the fleeting shadow or the fixed footprint, is indexical in character, but unlike the latter it does not belong to the natural world; it is a product of human inventiveness and technology and as such it is a semiotic artifact. At the same time the photographic image presents itself as a result of a natural process—an imprint of light on a photosensitive glass plate, celluloid strip, or electronic chip. An image thus formed becomes an indexical trace of an object or scene in the real world, inscribed without direct human intervention on a photosensitive substance covering the support. This objective process is also the source of the supposition of “reality” which defines the photographic situation. Like a cast shadow or mirror reflection, a photographic image is paradoxical: it lacks thickness or substance, but at the same time it retains something of the physical, solid reality from which it is somehow released through its photochemical (today mainly electronic) process.12 From the very beginnings of photography the fascination with the new, initially expensive but easy and quick way of making accurate and realistic pictures went hand in hand with the recognition of the fundamental difference between photographic images and traditional paintings. Unlike the latter, photography was first perceived not as an art but as a mechanical process of impersonally copying nature, while the photographer was thought to be merely a non-interfering observer—a scribe, not a poet. Indeed, while it obviously took human inventiveness and ingenuity to produce a camera in the first place, the very creation of the image was taken care of by the optical and photochemical processes largely beyond the photographer’s direct control. Light reflected from objects was focused through the lens and exposed to chemically coated glass or metal plate, later replaced by flexible celluloid, before undergoing a complex chemical process resulting in a photograph—an index of reflected light at an instant in time (Figure 3.3). The earliest written accounts of photography often did not even describe the new medium in terms borrowed from machines, instruments, and other process of the Industrial Revolution, but in terms of nature and natural history. At the beginning photography was considered more of a natural phenomenon, much like magnetism or electricity, which were also understood to be discovered rather than invented, and then applied to human use.13 Of course the photographic process was not totally accidental, because it involved the photographer who chose the object to be photographed, placed the camera in front of it, and allowed the processes of nature to create the desired image. But it is these natural processes, applying largely beyond the

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Figure 3.3 The Clouds Are Broken in the Sky, photograph by Henry Stuart Wortley, 1863.

photographer’s control, that determine the inherently “truthful” character of indexical photography, so different from the artificiality of iconic media such as painting or drawing. In an article published in 1840 Edgar Allan Poe spoke of photography as more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands. If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear—but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing [photograph] discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. The variations of shade, and the graduation of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection.14

It is because of this fundamental difference between, on the one hand, intentional and personal, and on the other hand, physical and impersonal, manner of obtaining an image that we still say that a painting is made whereas a photograph is taken. Paintings are made because they are imaginatively constructed from a storehouse of themes, styles, skills, and attitudes, whereas photographs take

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mechanically from the outside world what is already there.15 While painting is never more than an interpretation, a photograph, in the words of Susan Sontag, “is a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask,” which turns a photograph into “a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.”16 Like the old camera obscura pointed at a city scene on a clear day, the photographic camera captures projected shadows of objects as a matter of course. However, represented shadows become really interesting as semiotic signs when they are intentional, as in painting, rather than accidental, as in casual snapshot photography; when they are sought by a photographer and consciously incorporated into the picture as part of its composition, or when they are contrived in the studio with the use of artificial lighting. For example, in his book of photography The Pencil of Nature (1844–6) William Henry Fox Talbot included a picture of a haystack with a ladder leaning against it (Figure 3.4).17 The photograph became especially popular with the public at the time, partly because of the way the new medium was used to pay homage to an old agricultural practice. But one also suspects an esthetic reason behind the photograph’s appeal: the way it highlights the contrast between the shapes and textures of the haystack and the ladder and the way the vertical shadow projected by the leaning ladder

Figure 3.4 The Haystack, photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot, 1844–6.

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onto the haystack enhances a sense of depth and spatial relations between the two objects. From the point of view of the visual esthetics of Weimar cinema, most relevant were the developments within artistic photography after the First World War. In an abrupt transition comparable to the radical changes then taking place in the graphic arts, European photography was moving away from the late nineteenthcentury direction inspired by post-Impressionist painting, with its picturesque effects achieved by soft-focus lenses and the bromoil process. The new, more objective photographic style focused on subjects in sharp detail, bound up with the new fascination with the esthetic aspects of technology, machinery, and urban modernity, as seen in the photographs by Karl Blossfeld, John Heartfield, August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, László Moholy-Nagy, or Hans Finsler.18 In 1929 the photography critic Wilhelm Kästner wrote retrospectively of the realistic and objective tendencies of the New Photography: “the focused reproduction of the object, in its clear emphasis—indeed, almost in the penetrating, all-round lighting, which completely banishes the shadows wherever possible or makes use of them as firmly outlined pictorial elements—and above all in the preference for solid, clearly recordable objects with a readily apparent formal structure as pictorial motifs.”19 As we shall see in Chapter 6, the modernist, avant-garde esthetics of the New Photography, with its preference for light at the expense of shadows, coincided with the decline of Expressionist stylization and the rise of naturalism in the mainstream films of the Weimar period. Cinema appears as historically the most recent and the most realistic (due to the added illusion of movement) of the iconicindexical media. Like photography, the movie camera automatically captures images of objects and their shadows, but unlike still photography film can combine the elements of the visible world into temporally structured narratives, similar to literature and drama. In film the semiotic functions of light and shadows include not just the very composition of the image but also the dynamic participation in the unfolding of a story. It was in cinema that cast and attached shadows eventually came into their own not only as purely formal but also as dramatic and symbolic narrative elements, similar to the ancient shadow plays.

The shadow theater As indexical signs shadows cast by people and other objects must have always attracted the kind of instinctive curiosity and apprehension described in Chapter 1. The belief in the fleeting shadow as a person’s spiritual extension

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is attested universally in folklore, as is the fascination with intentional visual effects produced by cast shadows: in many cultures carefully designed and controlled use of shadows of human and animal figures has been incorporated into dramatic spectacles to create eerie, spectral effects. Shadow theaters belong to the traditions of China, India, Java, the Middle East, and Turkey, among other countries. Chinese shadow plays for example were like modern films, serial in form, embracing themes and stories born in religious myth, local legend, history, and domestic life, and they were often satirical or melodramatic in tone.20 A Chinese legend about the origin of the shadow theater captures the uncanny sense of immediacy and sentimentality still attached to family photographs and videos: A long time ago a Chinese emperor had a favourite mistress whom he loved very much. But the lady died and the young emperor was so grief-stricken that he lost interest in life and neglected all his duties. His councillors were in despair and tried by every means to restore their ruler to his old self. But all in vain; nothing could overcome the emperor’s sorrow. Finally, one of the greatest artists of the court created with all his skill a likeness of a beautiful favourite in the form of a shadow figure. He put up a silk screen, lit it from behind and with his movable figure imitated the graceful movements of the departed mistress. He even managed to catch the intonation of her voice. The artist then invited the inconsolable emperor and made his shadow figure appear before him and speak to him, accompanied by soft music. So accomplished was the artist’s performance that the emperor really felt comforted. His grief was eventually assuaged and he gradually returned to his former state and resumed his duties to everyone’s relief.21

It is difficult not to be touched by this human story, although as the pioneer of silhouette animation film Lotte Reiniger has suggested, there is probably a more practical explanation of the origin of the Chinese shadow theater. As Chinese ladies were not allowed to attend live theatrical performances, many of the more successful plays were converted for their benefit into shadow shows which, apparently by virtue of not being considered as the “real thing” by the authorities, could be performed in the female quarters, evidently much to the ladies’ delight. In a typical shadow play, two-dimensional puppets made of parchment or hide were used, held against a translucent screen and lit so that an audience on the opposite side of the screen could see the shadows thus created. The traditional shadow player, like the modern filmmaker, created moving pictures on a bright surface by means of light projection, but unlike a filmmaker he did

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not create displaced fixed images to be contemplated after they were taken, but arranged moving projections as part of a live performance simultaneously with the audience contemplating it. During the play a sketchy shadow puppet would be transformed and fleshed out by the imagination of the spectator. Such suggestiveness remains the main visual appeal of all shadows, natural or intentional, where the bare outline of a figure and lack of texture stimulate the mind often more effectively than a three-dimensional puppet or a detailed photograph. Like all indexical representations, theatrical shadows only imply the essence of the characters or concepts they represent, inviting the audiences to supply dimensions that the dark silhouettes on the screen can only hint at, such as volume, depth, costume, bodily details, and facial expressions.22 Despite occasional flourishes of activity in early modern Europe, the shadow play did not become firmly established on the continent until the middle of the twentieth century, but even then it was considered as the poor relation of the three-dimensional puppet theater. It has been suggested that the shadow play, with its transcendental, ethereal quality resulting from the elusiveness and immateriality of cast shadows, was more in keeping with Asian spirituality, while the Western audiences appear to have been more comfortable with the empiricism and rationalism of tangible, solid representations. In one particularly remarkable example of cultural influence, the poetic and mystical qualities of the oriental shadow play have inspired Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette films of the 1920s, in which black cutouts animated against illuminated backgrounds illustrated the fairy tales from Arabian and European folklore (Figure 3.5).23 The ombres chinoises (Chinese shadows) of the more salacious variety also became part of nightclub entertainment in fin de siècle European cities. In Paris for example the cabaret Le Chat-Noir frequently employed suggestive shadow plays to the excitement of its bohemian patrons. In Weimar Berlin the Chinese shadow play also enjoyed popularity as a form of cabaret entertainment,24 although not always as decadent as the shadow show of oriental sensual delights performed at the Kit Kat Klub in Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret (1972) (Figure 3.6).

Schatten—a cinematic shadow play as hallucination While the shadow theater is historically associated more with Asia and the Arab world than with Europe, the ombres chinoises did enjoy some popularity in eighteenth-century Europe as an oriental curiosity. The German psychothriller Schatten: Eine Nächtliche Halluzination (Warning Shadows: A Nocturnal

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Hallucination) from 1923, directed by the American born Arthur Robison and set in the early nineteenth century, includes an oriental shadow play put on by a traveling puppeteer, who uses the play therapeutically to cure its spectators of

Figure 3.5 Silhouette short film Cinderella (1922), animated and directed by Lotte Reiniger.

Figure 3.6 The shadow theater of “Arabian Night” in the decadent Berlin Kit Kat Klub from Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret (1972).

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their uncontrollable sexual desire and murderous lust. The shadow play’s themes of marital jealousy, anger, and revenge parallel those of the cinematic plot, allowing the spectators within the film to witness on the screen the passions they themselves enact in the theater of life. In this way the shadow play becomes an indexical projection of the repressed desires of the screen characters, who are themselves cinematic shadows of the projected desires of the cinema audience. The idea and art design of Schatten were the work of Albin Grau (1884–1971), an occultist, a student of Eastern philosophy, and the author of pamphlets on relations between occultism and art and on the use of lighting in black-andwhite films.25 Along with other occultists Grau founded in 1921 a film company Prana (“life force” in Sanskrit), whose first production was Murnau’s Nosferatu, and second and last was Schatten, which followed Grau’s bold concept to make a film whose plot would be based entirely on cast shadows. Whether for occult or esthetic reasons, Grau seems to have been virtually obsessed with shadows, as the film’s title alone confirms. Even customary cards with numbers announcing the division of the film into acts—a common practice in German cinema at the time—are replaced by hand shadows with fingers indicating the number. Grau and Robison’s entire film truly is a hallucination about shadows. The film begins with an implicit reminder that what we ever see on cinema screen is just shadows, or even the shadows of shadows, in a technical as well as metaphoric sense. In terms of how the medium of film works this indeed seems to be the case: first the frames on the celluloid strip capture the reflected images or shadows of objects filmed by the camera, and then the light of the projector casts these shadows as new shadows onto the screen. In Schatten the dramatic personae (the count, the wife, the youth, three gentlemen, and servants), all accompanied by their shadows, are introduced in the prologue on an improvised theatrical stage. As each character enters, a gigantic shadow of an invisible shadow player’s hand moves across the white screen at the back of the stage and wipes out the living figures, leaving only their shadow silhouettes behind. The shadows from the prologue also iconically indicate the characters’ respective passions: the count (Fritz Kortner) stands alone eaten by jealousy and anger; his wife (Ruth Weyher) makes inviting gestures toward her admirers; the youth (Gustav von Wangenheim) draws his sword ready to fight for the woman he secretly loves; the three gentlemen (Eugen Rex, Max Gülstorff, and Ferdinand von Alten) make sleazy, lustful gestures about the count’s wife; and the servants (Fritz Rasp and Carl Platen) stand with their arms reaching forward, ready to grope the shadow of a coquettish maid (Lilli Herder). Last of all in the prologue appears the shadow puppeteer himself holding a candle—the source of light

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with which he extracts shadows from other characters, like a psychoanalyst uncovering the repressed contents of his patients’ minds. In the theatrical prologue the main characters are thus transformed into their own shadows, that is, into their (not-so-hidden) negative selves. It will be the job of the perceptive and wise traveling entertainer and shadow player to allow these characters fully to become their own shadows, to identify temporarily with their hidden selves, and to give their repressed and destructive passions full rein, only to be cured of them in the end. The shrewd entertainer first steals into the count’s house by amusing the servants with his improvised hand shadows, in which he ridicules the boorish footman by providing him with a succession of animal heads. He also wins the goodwill of the count by gently mocking his sullenness in a shadow expression of the count’s own head (Figure 3.7). To ingratiate himself with the count the entertainer even mocks himself in a shadow that represents him as a fawning dog (Figure 3.8). In this way the traveling shadow player establishes himself as a court jester licensed to expose and ridicule the weaknesses and follies of his social superiors.

Figure 3.7 The entertainer mocks the count’s sullenness with a shadow expression of his head in Schatten (Warning Shadows), dir. Arthur Robison (1923).

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Before the séance, in which the entertainer detaches the shadows of his hypnotized audience and cinematically throws them onto the screen to allow them to play out their unrestrained passions, accidental shadows cast by the characters gathered at the mansion perform an ambivalent dramatic role: they betray to others their owners’ hidden desires and in the process cause embarrassing misunderstandings which raise the emotional tension. For example, as the wife preens herself in front of the mirror, her shadow projected onto the curtained glass door attracts the attention and different reactions from the suitors and the husband. One by one the lustful suitors stroke, grope, and kiss the wife’s shadow as a substitute for the real thing, while the count, standing on the other side of the glass door, is tormented with jealousy at what he sees to be his wife’s willing submission to the caresses of other men. During the dinner the exasperated count bursts upon what he takes to be two hands joining, his wife’s and the guest’s, when in fact they only touch as a result of the prolongation of their shadows (Figure 3.9). For a jealous husband even the flimsiest of evidence, or none at all, provokes an angry but in the context deeply embarrassing and self-demeaning reaction. As the evening progresses, the emotional tensions thicken. The suitors’ shadows become more

Figure 3.8 The self-mocking shadow in Schatten (Warning Shadows), dir. Arthur Robison (1923).

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Figure 3.9 Two hands “touching”: A misinterpreted shadow in Schatten (Warning Shadows), dir. Arthur Robison (1923).

and more pronounced as the men’s lustful natures “come out” and their selfcontrol diminishes under the wife’s flirtatious behavior. Next comes dancing, that “vertical expression of the horizontal desire legalized by music,” which only makes matters worse by further enraging the count. With self-debasing masochism he frantically conducts the trio of musicians while his wife, Salomelike, swirls her body in front of the drooling and lip-licking suitors. At the same time the shrewd entertainer increases the salacious effect by using a candelabrum to backlight the dancer and reveal her sexy figure inside a gauzy dress. Having perceptively gauged the charged situation, the entertainer will organize a shadow play to allow the sexual passions to play themselves out safely on the screen rather than in real life with potentially disastrous consequences. The shadow play begins innocently enough in the form of conventional ombres chinoises (they are Japanese in the film, actually), popular in Europe in the eighteenth century. The silhouettes on the screen parallel the main plot with a story of female marital infidelity and the husband’s jealousy, rage, and revenge. As the spectators’ minds tune in to the screen story the entertainer, as if by magic, directs their natural shadows toward the screen, and then moves all the six spectators, now hypnotized, onto the other side of the table near the screen,

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to allow them to reconnect with their shadows. In this way both the spectators’ bodies and their shadows become part of the entertainer’s shadow play; or rather, the spectators become their own shadows, their dark inner selves. This is the beginning of the “nocturnal hallucination” from the film’s subtitle, introduced as a film within a film, in which the hypnotized characters experience the inner “shadow play” of their unrestrained passions and their tragic consequences. The transition from reality to hallucination is also marked by a change of tint: from daytime yellow to nighttime purple (the usual tint for cinematic night was blue, but here the red ingredient in color purple aptly fits the bloody course of hallucinatory events). In the purple-tinted hallucination the hell of released sexual lust, adultery, jealousy, and murderous passion finally breaks loose. The suitors now grope and kiss the even more inviting wife openly and without any restraint. The wife seductively lowers one strap of her dress to make it more revealing and alluring, and invites the youngest of the admirers to her bedroom, while the remaining suitors gloat and openly mock the count’s sexual humiliation. For his part the count, Othello like, gradually reaches the nadir of self-torment, jealousy, and madness, having confirmed his role both as an antlered cuckold and as a masochistic voyeur, as he contemplates the lovers’ embraces reflected in the mirror. Too cowardly even to confront his wife or the rival directly, the count orders the servants to capture and tie the unfaithful woman with a rope. Mad with jealousy and a thirst for revenge, the count then compels the four suitors to stab the fettered wife with provided swords. This hallucinatory overthe-top melodrama culminates with the furious suitors throwing the count out of the window. As the sordid tragedy of the film-within-a-film ends, the tint returns to daytime yellow, and the characters’ shadows move from the screen back to their owners, who slowly awake from their collective nightmare to realize, with some embarrassment, their own folly. The critic Siegfried Kracauer compares the entertainer’s experiment with the shadows to a psychoanalytic session: “Owing to this magical therapy—it recalls model cases of psychoanalytical treatment— the count changes from a puerile berserk into a composed adult, his coquettish wife becomes his loving wife, and the lover takes silent leave.”26 The dawn of a new day brings sobering natural light which banishes the nighttime shadows and restores the light of reason. The count and his wife, now happily reconciled, open a window of their hitherto claustrophobic and shadow-haunted house to the bright, shadowless world outside, where the local folk cheerfully hustle and bustle on a market day.

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Silhouette portraits While shadow plays exploited the mysterious quality of moving shadows in the context of live performance, the shadow portraits popular in eighteenth-century Europe—another incarnation of Pliny’s myth about the indexical origin of painting—came a step closer toward the fixed indexical images of photography invented a century later. Unlike the fleeting shadow projected on the screen, the silhouette portrait exists in its own right as a material object, a sort of fixed shadow, indeed like the photograph, usually executed in solid black and set against a light background. The chief proponent of the silhouette cutouts was the Swiss scientist cum physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater (c. 1741–1801), who believed that one could deduce the character of a person from the features of the face or the shape of the body. For his character reading Lavater used silhouette profiles obtained by tracing the shadow of a person’s head onto paper, and then filling the image in by hand and using it as a template to cut a silhouette from black paper. A profile projection reveals person-specific outline of the nose and the chin, the fact that enhances the iconic quality of the shadow portrait. The image thus created could then be unambiguously interpreted as an index of a person’s head to be used in character reading (Figure 3.10).27 In his popular Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98) Lavater emphasized the truthfulness of shadow portraits when compared with painted images: the shadow picture of a man—of a human face—is the most feeble, the emptiest— but at the same time, if the light has been standing in the right distance, if the face has been falling on a pure surface and been parallel with that surface, the truest and the most faithful picture which you can give of a man. For it is nothing positive, it is only negative, only the outline of half the face. The most faithful one, for it is the direct print of nature [emphasis added], such as one, not even the most skillful craftsman, would be able to make with a free hand from nature.28

The silhouette portraits of the eighteenth century were executed with the utmost care so as to obtain a true and unquestionable likeness of the sitter. As in photo studios a century later, the subject was seated on a specially constructed chair, with a support for her head. Incorporated in this chair was a frame with a glass plate in a fixed position (Figure 3.11). The frame was covered with oiled paper and a candle was employed to project a shadow on the screen without distortion. The outline of the head was then carefully drawn on the paper, the inner space subsequently filled in with black ink to create a negative image of the actual head. The portrait could then be reduced to a smaller size using a

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Figure 3.10 Paper Silhouette Portrait of a Woman, artist unknown (American), daguerreotype, 1840s–50s.

pantograph, a mechanical scaling device.29 In this way an ethereal and immaterial shadow was converted into a solid (if flat) object, itself an iconic index of the shadow, believed to retain the properties of the person’s head and consequently her personality. It is a remarkable fact that although shadow silhouettes were not as detailed and colorful as traditional painted portraits, they were considered to be more truthful of a person’s appearance (and personality) than the latter. The reasons for this intuitive assessment, present also in Pliny’s myth, must lie in the indexical nature of a person’s shadow captured in a silhouette portrait, which is

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Figure 3.11 A Man Drawing the Silhouette of a Seated Woman on Translucent Paper Suspended in a Frame and Lit by a Candle, etching by J. R. Schellenberg, 1775.

subsequently perceived as retaining the original direct link with the sitter, whose head has been imprinted on the shadow image by light, as in a photograph, rather than by the skill of an artist’s hand. The obtained silhouette portrait was thus accepted as an iconic as well as indexical record of a person’s appearance, with a fidelity never attained by painted pictures, whose accuracy of representation depends more on the artist’s imagination than on the objectivity of mechanical reproduction.

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Interestingly, the fascination with silhouette portraits continued long into the age of photography, whose main strength lies in combining the effects of indexicality (as in shadow plays) and faithful visual representation (as in realistic painting). With photography, the most naturalistic visual medium before film, came an almost complete fusion (at first without color) of shadow cutouts and painted portraiture. Still, an understated and suggestive plain dark shadow of a person continued to hold its fascination. In the early twentieth century, at the time of accelerated experimentation in Western visual arts, the eighteenthcentury silhouette portraits returned in the motif of a self-portrait in the form of a photographer’s shadow. In one example of a self-defining photographic experiment, Alfred Stieglitz’s Shadows on the Lake (1916), the photographer uses the camera to capture his own and his friend’s shadows projected onto the surface of the water, which in the picture becomes both a reflective surface, as in the myth of Narcissus, and a projection screen, as in shadow theater.30

The shadow of Mabuse Still shadow silhouettes of old could also be incorporated with considerable dramatic effect into the animated medium of film. Cinematic shadow portraits are often found for example in the crime thrillers of the Weimar period, where they convey the mystery and menace of charismatic villains, ordinary criminals, or spies concealing their identity behind a dark mask. In these films dramatic and evocative still shadows are all the more effective by their contrast both with the moving images that surround them and with the dominant high-key, shadowless lighting that supports the action-packed criminal plots. In Fritz Lang’s two-part Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler), made in 1922, the high-key illumination is consistently used both in the interior and in the exterior scenes, including city streets by day, apartment rooms, the inside of the stock exchange, a gentlemen’s club, smoky gambling dens, nightclubs, and so on. On these sets uniform lighting provides full visual information needed to follow the plot-driven narrative. On the other hand low-key, shadowy, more atmospheric lighting is reserved either for a few nighttime scenes or for occasional subjective, emotionally charged shots. In Dr. Mabuse the titular character—a charismatic arch-criminal exploiting the economic chaos of postwar inflation years in Germany—appears in one scene in the form of a large shadow silhouette in profile suspended menacingly over one of his victims/collaborators, a cabaret dancer Cara Carozza (Aud Egede-Nissen), a woman hopelessly in love

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with Mabuse, who is prepared to carry out any of his orders just to win his favor. Her own shadow, placed below and considerably smaller than that of Mabuse, emphasizes her insignificance, submission, and powerlessness. When arrested by the police, Cara Carozza refuses to divulge any knowledge about Mabuse’s whereabouts. The duration of her captivity and her determination to remain silent are captured in a shot in which she sits on her prison bed completely still, while a shadow of the bars of the cell window behind her moves repeatedly from side to side to mark the passage of days (Figure 3.12). The shadow of the bars indicates Carozza’s imprisonment, while the bright reflection of the cell window on the dark wall forms a negative shadow, one that reveals rather than hides, here the daylight and freedom of the outside world. But the unscrupulous Mabuse will take no chances. He rewards Carozza’s fidelity by smuggling poison to her prison cell with the instruction that she use it. Loyal to the end, she takes her own life as commanded. The sinister silhouette portrait returns eleven years later in 1933 in Lang’s talkie sequel to his silent Mabuse films, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse). While in the original Dr. Mabuse it is obvious right

Figure 3.12 The swinging movement of the shadow of the prison window punctuates the passage of days for Mabuse’s victim (Aud Egede-Nissen) in Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler).

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from the first scene how the master criminal operates, what his plans are, how his gang is organized, what logistics of communication and transportation are used, and so on, in Das Testament the exact connection between Mabuse’s plans and the actual crimes is not immediately clear. As far as the arch-criminal’s personal situation is concerned, Das Testament picks up where the earlier film left off: self-trapped in his money-counterfeiting workshop Mabuse loses his mind, to reappear in the later film in a solitary confinement of a lunatic asylum. There he silently sits in his bed, aged, disheveled, seemingly oblivious to the surroundings, scribbling compulsively on loose sheets of paper chaotic and disjointed sentences and drawings related to criminal plans that in a mysterious way manage to be carried out in the outside world. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) may be isolated, mute (an ingenious trick in a sound film), and almost motionless, but he still exudes his old hypnotic charisma. When Dr. Baum (Oscar Beregi, Sr.), the psychiatrist in charge of Mabuse’s case, projects in the lecture theater a slide of his patient, the half-bored students suddenly all sit up stiffly as if electrocuted. In his lecture Dr. Baum recounts the patient’s history (more or less the plot of the silent Dr. Mabuse), referring to the confined arch-criminal as “the man behind the curtain.” In Das Testament the metaphor materializes in the form of a still self-shadow of a criminal boss, known to his underlings only as a commanding voice coming from behind a curtain in a secret meeting room (Figure 3.13). The possibility that the invisible boss may have something to do both with the deranged and incarcerated Mabuse and with Dr. Baum is first hinted at by the strange fascination and obsession with which the doctor recounts Mabuse’s case, his favorite topic, in the lecture theater. Later, when the doctor checks Mabuse’s pulse in the hospital, a dark shadow detaches itself from Mabuse’s body to materialize, only for the doctor to see, as a disembodied spirit standing on the opposite side of the room. Some paranormal if only one-way communication is clearly taking place between the patient and his doctor via the patient’s indexical shadowy emanation. The shadow of Mabuse now becomes both stylistically and causally linked to the dark silhouette behind the curtain in the secret room: both are ultimately the projection of Mabuse’s evil mind, with Dr. Baum as Mabuse’s tool, like the sleepwalker acting on the hypnotist’s murderous orders in Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920). When half-way through the film Mabuse is pronounced dead in the hospital, his ghost seems to survive reincarnated in Dr. Baum, to be also represented by the shadow behind the curtain from where he continues to run his criminal organization. Ironically the shadow of Mabuse, terrifying as it is in the power it wields over the gang members and the wider public, ultimately turns out to be a harmless

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Figure 3.13 The self-shadow of “the man behind the curtain” from Fritz Lang’s 1933 film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse).

cardboard cutout, an insubstantial facade, literally a shadow of Mabuse’s former self. “The empire of crime” concocted in Mabuse’s deranged brain also comes to naught in the end. The spectacular destruction of a chemical factory turns out to be Mabuse’s last crime, after which Dr. Baum, now completely identified with the dead arch-criminal, checks in to his own mental institution to take Mabuse’s place on a hospital bed. There he sits tearing up to shreds the pages of Mabuse’s plans. As in the first Mabuse film, the story has come full circle, with the mad criminal back in the mental asylum. This time, however, it looks like the evil genius—only partly defeated by the law—has voluntarily decided, for reasons known only to himself, to give up, or suspend, his criminal activity. Mabuse may be dead but his evil spirit is still alive in Dr. Baum, and the empire of crime can still become a reality. When Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse was released in April 1933, the Nazis had already been in power in Germany for over two months.31 In 1928, between the two Mabuse films, Lang made Spione (Spies), a thriller very much like Dr. Mabuse in story line, characterization, and visual style. For

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the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum Spione is really a kind of compression and refinement of the 1922 Mabuse film, with its villain made into even more of an abstraction by virtue of sheer unmotivated gratuitousness of his schemes.32 The wheelchair-bound master spy Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge again) is another elusive Mabuse-like figure of multiple identities: a secret leader of a spy ring, a director of a bank during the day, and a vaudeville clown in the evening. Like Mabuse, the all-knowing puppet master Haghi controls a vast network of spies and emissaries whom he coerces into submission and cooperation by money or blackmail (women), and intimidation or honey traps (men). Allegedly modeled on Commissar Kinczuk, the leader of a Soviet spy ring uncovered by Scotland Yard in London in 1925, Haghi and his secret organization appear however to be less about international espionage, contemporary politics, or Mabuse-style economic subversion.33 Lang seems less interested in the social consequences of espionage than in a purely cinematic exploration of the psychology of control and the high-tech conspiratorial communication systems, with telephones, telegraphs, neon signs, intercom, switchboards, signal lamps, secret sign language, and so on, imbedded in a narrative focused primarily on suspenseful intrigue, adventure, and romance. Or, as Siegfried Kracauer has noted in his comparison of the two films, “while Dr Mabuse had incarnated the tyrant who takes advantage of the chaos around him, the master spy [Haghi] indulged in the spy business for the sole purpose, it seemed, of spying. He was a formalized Mabuse devoted to meaningless activities.”34 Cast or attached shadows as indexes of the characters’ hidden identities become a logical stylistic choice in a spy film, in which no one is what they appear to be, and where disguises and secrecy are part of the genre. Early in Spione a shabbily dressed and unshaven tramp (Willy Fritsch) drops a cigarette butt on the pavement. A cast shadow of a man emerges and pauses briefly in the frame, and then moves forward followed by feet in torn shoes, a naked toe sticking out. The man leans forward to pick up the cigarette butt, revealing a part of his bearded face. In the next scene the tramp turns out to be a government secret agent No. 326, while the beggar preceded by his shadow is revealed as Haghi’s agent who has been literally shadowing No. 326. The cigarette butt he picked up was used to obtain the government agent’s fingerprints, which are now presented to the master spy as part of the surveillance report, together with other indexical evidence such as photographs and a reel of cine film. Whereas in the shadow theater in Schatten cast shadows reflect the characters’ unconscious desires, in Lang’s spy thriller shadows hint at the characters’ concealed identities as members of secret organizations (Figure 3.14). In Haghi’s headquarters

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Figure 3.14 Silhouettes and shadows hide the identities of members of secret organizations in Fritz Lang’s 1928 film Spione (Spies).

hidden at the back of a bank figures often appear only as shadows, in keeping with the clandestine nature of the location and its purpose (Figure 3.15). Detached shadows as indexes of the characters’ hidden, usually negative selves appear in Lang’s other films from the late Weimar period. In the futuristic fantasy Metropolis (made in 1927, just before Spione) the double of the good Maria is preceded in one scene by a shadow as a reflection of her evil nature. In Lang’s contemporary urban thriller M (1931) cast shadows signal, as in Spione, the criminals’ secret lives and activities. As the police debate endlessly and fruitlessly on ways to catch the elusive child murderer, the gangsters confer on the same problem in parallel with the authorities, at first only shadowing but in the end effectively replacing the police in hunting down and catching the wanted man (Figure 3.16). The cast shadow indicating a criminal’s double identity is also used in Joe May’s 1929 Asphalt, one of UFA’s last great silent films, a sordid melodrama about a young constable (Gustav Fröhlich) who falls in love with a glamorous demimondaine (Betty Amann). Suggestive chiaroscuro lighting dominates the film, beginning with the famous title sequence in which workmen lay asphalt on the street at night, and the shots of their legs, feet, and tools pounding the semiliquid, steaming mass assume the same artistic and documentary quality as the

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Figure 3.15 A silhouette portrait of the spy master Haghi in Fritz Lang’s 1928 film Spione (Spies).

nighttime shots of street welders in Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin (see Chapter 6). In May’s film the demimondaine’s criminal lover (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) changes his identity, like Mabuse and Haghi in their films, here from an elegant and wealthy guest of a luxurious hotel to a shabbily dressed road worker involved in digging a tunnel under the vault of a bank. The criminal’s transformation assumes the form of a shadow theater (Figure 3.17) accidentally created by the fire coming from a furnace in his secret workshop producing counterfeit jewellery— not unlike Mabuse’s cellar with machinery for faking money. Other Expressionist echoes appear in Asphalt, as they do in the Mabuse films, in emotionally charged scenes. After the young constable kills the criminal in a jealous row, he is led by his own father (also a constable) to the police station down the atmospherically lit and Cubist shaped stairwell of a tenement house (Figure 3.18). The cinematic shadows of criminals and spies seem to borrow their dramatic power from the fascination attached centuries earlier to the underdefined and suggestive black silhouette portraits and the shadow theater, in which the indexical, physical connection between the image and the figure compensated for the absence of identifiable physiognomic detail, provoking “character reading” speculation, apprehensive curiosity, and mystery.

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Figure 3.16 The criminals “shadow” the police by independently debating the plans to capture the child murderer in M, dir. Fritz Lang (1931).

Figure 3.17 A “shadow theater” of a criminal changing his disguise in Asphalt, dir. Joe May (1929).

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Figure 3.18 Self-shadows of father and son in an Expressionist, Cubist stairwell (Asphalt, dir. Joe May, 1929).

The black screen—The ultimate cinematic shadow The visual impact of early (meaning monochrome) photographic media depended ultimately on the balance between light and darkness, in which darkness, in itself information free and meaningless, acquires implicit meaning as an extension of the explicit information provided by the illuminated parts of the image. In the right context therefore darkness—such as the black screen for instance—can be just as powerful and evocative as an iconically shaped dark silhouette of a human figure projected against a bright background. In Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse Lang uses a black screen—the ultimate cinematic shadow—in ingenious combination with sound effects which provide the necessary dramatic context. The black screen (the “slug”) is normally employed either as a leader at the start of a film or as a break between scenes. In the latter case the black screen by itself is non-diegetic, in the sense that it is not part of the mise-en-scène and provides no story-related visual information. As a transition device the black screen functions more like a curtain separating acts in a theatrical play. Das Testament contains two such black-screen breaks, with a

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fade-out and fade-in at either end. A related transition device in early cinema is an iris shot, in which a black circle closes to end a scene (Lang uses it a lot in his silent Dr. Mabuse). Again, a momentary black screen produced by an iris shot or a fade-out is non-diegetic and dramatically void, in the sense that it is not normally an element of either the preceding or the following scene. The black screen can be seen as analogous to the perception of complete darkness in real life, although strictly speaking what we often call “completely dark” is usually only partially dark rather than pitch dark (and neither is the noise-filled black cinematic screen ever completely dark). Even in the preelectric age a nocturnal outdoor would provide enough reflected light to stir the imagination, as in Shakespeare’s “Or, in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!”35 (In complete darkness one wouldn’t even see a bush.) If reduced visibility in partial darkness provokes unease and apprehension, complete darkness as the ultimate visual handicap should cause terror and panic. In Das Testament Lang uses the black screen not only as a transition between scenes, but on one occasion as a shock shot that is diegetically linked to an already highly dramatic and tense scene. Early in the film the ex-detective Hofmeister (Karl Meixner), dismissed from the police over a bribery affair, follows a gang of money counterfeiters to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his former superior, inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke). Discovered by the gangsters Hofmeister narrowly escapes being killed. At home, still terrified and confused the exdetective, with a gun in his hand for self-defense, tries incoherently to report the discovery of the mysterious organization to Lohmann over a telephone, when the screen suddenly goes black and the sound goes mute. For a second it is not clear to the cinema audience what has happened: has the projector gone kaput, or is the black screen an abrupt transition to another scene? The doubt is quickly dispelled by the sound of heavy knocking on the door heard over the black screen, followed by Hofmeister’s voice screaming to the telephone that the lights have gone out. The black screen is thus revealed as an integral part of the current scene, while the absence of visual information is compensated by the character’s agitated voice and the viewers’ imagination of extreme danger. The darkness is suddenly illuminated by four flashes of light (taking one frame each) in quick succession synchronized with the bangs of gunshots, as the detective opens fire on invisible assailants. We do not find out what exactly happens to Hofmeister in this scene until later, when the detective, deeply traumatized and gone insane, is found in the street by the police and placed in a mental hospital. In a hallucinatory version of the earlier

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Figure 3.19 A subjective, Expressionist shot in Fritz Lang’s 1933 Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse).

scene Hofmeister relives in the hospital room his panicky unfinished telephone conversation with Lohmann. A distorted, subjective shot shows him seated at an imaginary transparent glass desk surrounded by imaginary glass models of objects such as a telephone set, a lamp, and bizarre miniature animals. As the door opens to admit Lohmann and the doctor, the delusionary Hofmeister sees the spectral forms of two goons from the notorious section 2-B, the “cleaners” within the criminal organization, who have kidnapped Hofmeister earlier and scared him out of his wits before abandoning him in the street (Figure 3.19). The superimposition in the point-of-view shot thus takes us back to the earlier scene by revealing what was concealed behind the black screen.

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All types of shadow (shading, self-shadow, and cast shadow) as elements of visual composition tend to be enhanced in monochrome pictures, as in Renaissance grisaille (monochrome) paintings, early modern etchings, woodcuts, drawings, and photographs, with their heightened tonal contrasts to compensate for the absence of natural colors. Apart from occasional experiments with multicolored hand-painted films (as in Georges Méliès’s trick films of fantasy and magic), or the more common monochrome dyeing of strips of film to indicate the time of action (e.g., yellow for the day, blue for the night), early films were simply black and white and for the most part remained so for several decades. Interestingly however, absence of colors, which one would suppose to be a fundamental divergence from nature, was little noticed in cinema before the color film drew attention to the fact. This is surprising, as the reduction of all colors to monochrome tonality considerably modifies the perception of the actual world. Still, in the silent era and for decades afterward when black-andwhite films continued to dominate the screen, the spectators somehow accepted the monochrome world of cinema as being true to nature. They experienced no surprise at finding the sky on the screen the same color as a human face; the red, white, and blue of the flag to appear just as shades of gray; red lips as black; and the leaves on a tree simply as dark. That is to say, not only has the multicolored world been transmuted in a black-and-white world, but in the process all color values have changed their relations to one another: similarities presented themselves which did not exist in the natural world, and things with no color connection at all appeared as having the same color.1 Natural colors apart, one of the esthetic advantages of monochrome pictures is that they attract more attention to light itself, its source, direction, distribution, and effects, including the modeling of surfaces and formation of shadows, both attached and projected. In a word, shadows on the screen are most potent in black-andwhite cinema.

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Filming by daylight and accidental shadows Before shadows or any light effects for that matter came to be employed as stylistic and dramatic ends in themselves, they were present in cinema simply as an integral part of the medium, in which light was used to obtain representation of movement in the physical world. The autonomous focus on light and shadow effects did not appear in film until the medium matured esthetically, in America in D. W. Griffith’s first feature films from the mid-1910s and in Germany in the Expressionist films of Richard Oswald from the late 1910s, in Robert Wiene’s and Friedrich W. Murnau’s films from the early 1920s, or in Walther Ruttmann’s abstract animated shorts (absoluten Filme) from the same period.2 For more than two decades before the cast shadow became an intentional element of the cinematic mise-en-scène, it frequently appeared purely by accident, simply because all films, both documentaries and staged dramas, used daylight for illumination, whether on open-air locations or in primitive studios with roofs open to the sky. The earliest purpose-built small film studios were Thomas Edison’s so-called Black Marias from around 1893, named after the police paddy wagons that they resembled. The slanted portion of the roof opened to admit sunlight for filming, and the whole building revolved on a track to catch optimal sunlight. The short, about twenty-second long films shot in Edison’s Black Marias were later shown in so-called kinetoscopes placed in entertainment parlors in American cities. Kinetoscopes were not cinemas where films were projected on screens; they were peephole devices, which ran the film around a series of rollers.3 Some of the standard traits of kinetoscope films were the black background, a patch of sunlight from the opening in the roof, and a natural shadow cast on the stage floor by a moving figure such as a dancer for example. One of the surviving Edison films thus produced is Annabelle Dances and Dances from 1894, featuring a popular Broadway performer Annabelle Whitford Moore in her “serpentine and butterfly dances” (Figure 4.1). The black background brings out the brightness of Annabelle’s “butterfly” dress, while the shadow cast by the dancer on the floor betrays the sunlight coming through the open roof. Filming in sunlit studios, now fitted with glass roof and walls, continued in America until the end of 1910s when the first dark studios rigged entirely with electric lighting were built, making indoor filming independent from often unpredictable natural light.4 In Europe the Lumière brothers’ first films were all shot on various outdoor locations and naturally used available daylight, whether on sunny or overcast days. In either case, the presence or absence of cast shadows does not appear

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Figure 4.1 Short film Annabelle Dances and Dances made for Edison Manufacturing Co. (1894). A natural shadow on the floor betrays the sunlight coming through the open roof.

to be part of the films’ design, and occasional enhancements of the visual effect caused by shading and cast shadows were purely accidental. The main benefit of filming on a sunny day was a clearer and more contrasty image which enhanced surface sculpting and texture of objects. It also seems evident from the surviving Lumière films that while filming on sunny days the cameramen chose to shoot with the sun behind them, both to avail of optimal “high-key” illumination and to avoid possible dazzling effects of backlight. Thus in Sortie d’usine (Workers Leaving the Factory) from 1895 the workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyon walk through the wide gate in direct sunlight coming from behind the camera, as evidenced by the direction of shadows cast by the moving figures. The pavement in the foreground also reveals a large shadow apparently projected by an invisible tree standing behind the cameraman. The first-ever slapstick comedy, Le jardinière et le petit espiègle (The Sprinkler Sprinkled) from 1895, was likewise shot on a clear day with the sun coming from behind to the right of the camera, allowing both the gardener and his hose to cast visible shadows on the ground. In the first ever “train film,” Arrivée d’un train en gare à la Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) from 1895, direct

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sunlight from back left appears ideally placed to keep both the platform and the milling passengers in full light, while preventing the arriving train from casting a large shadow onto the platform and potentially darkening the view of the people getting on and off the train. In another Lumière train documentary, Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (1896), the camera is mounted at the back of a departing train, gradually revealing the station building and a throng of people standing on the platform. With direct low sunlight coming from the right the human figures cast long, parallel shadows horizontal with the screen, creating an unintended expressionist effect. During the shooting of the slapstick Bataille de boules de neige (Snowball Fight) in 1896 on a partly overcast winter day, the sunlight coming from back left forms faint shadows of the snowball fighters on the white ground. The mild contrast between the white-gray snow, the dark clothes of the fighters, the bare tree trunks, and the gray buildings in the background creates an (probably) unintended overall impressionistic effect, not unlike that found in Claude Monet’s wintry scene in the painting The Magpie (1869) or in an overcast scene in Alfred Sisley’s painting Snow at Louveciennes (1874). Probably the most interesting accidental shadow effect in the Lumière films was achieved during the shooting of a travelog Spanish Bullfight in 1900 (Figure 4.2). Here the sunlight coming from back left creates elongated, dramatically moving shadows of the bull and the toreadors, one of them on horseback. The shadows certainly add drama to an already exciting scene, especially when the bull, just about to attack the toreador, casts a sharp, dark, threatening shadow of its horned head on the toreador’s bright cape.

Electric light and the first intentional cinematic shadows The medium of cinema is synonymous with the technology of light, and in a double sense. First of all cinematic images are created by light, at first only natural and later also artificial. Second, cinema requires electric light to project the translucent images on the celluloid filmstrip onto the screen. Given the medium’s dependence on electricity for exhibition, it is interesting that it took filmmakers several years to adopt electric lighting to create the images in the first place. The reasons for this delay were mainly practical and economic: early lamps were cumbersome to use and electricity was initially expensive.5 Early filmmakers inherited a lot of the experience of late nineteenth-century studio photographers, who often invested in artificial lights, not so much to avail of new esthetic opportunities as to duplicate the natural, that is, soft and

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Figure 4.2 Spanish Bullfight, the Lumière brothers’ short travelog (1900). The bull casts a dramatic shadow of its horned head on the toreador’s bright cape.

diffuse, look of daylight. In America photographers would use arc lights as well as the Cooper-Hewitt mercury lamps invented in 1901, which gave off general, dispersed light, and they tended to avoid carbon arc lights, already used in the theater, which produced hard, directional light, the one likely to create sharp shadows. According to the film historian Patrick Keating, both hardlighting and shadows were avoided by studio photographers and filmmakers from the beginning of the twentieth century, while electric lighting, in combination with reflectors, screens, and shades, was used primarily to recreate the softer look of daylight. Lighting in early studio films aimed at high-key, dispersed illumination that was dominant in the theater at the time, and which tended to wash away the facial features of the actors, providing little modeling and relief.6 Uniform and shadowless electric illumination was indeed standard in early cinema around the world. As the film historian Daisuke Miyao reminds us, the slogan of the first decades of filmmaking in Japan was “clarity first, story second” (ichi nuke, ni suji), with clarity (nuke) stressing the importance of lighting in filming. However, the emphasis was not necessarily on sensitive tones, subtle sculpting of faces and spaces, or expressive contrasts between light and shadow.

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Rather, the term nuke indicates a more practical emphasis on overall brightness that would provide visibility even for worn-out prints projected with dim light bulbs. This meant illuminating the set with flat frontal lighting (as in flash photography today) that would make everything clearly visible both to the spectator and to the live narrator, who explained the film’s story and dialogue for the audience during the screening in the first Japanese cinemas. The “clarity first” slogan also meant that early Japanese filmmakers were effectively prohibited by studio executives from using back- or sidelighting. Actors, props, and backdrops received an overall diffuse light, usually coming from the front above the camera. As late as 1926 scenes in Japanese films were lit evenly by a row of arc lights placed behind the camera, rather than by a more plastic combination of threepoint lighting standard in Hollywood and Europe since the late 1910s.7 Years before the full possibilities of electric lighting to create stylized and dramatic visual effects were recognized, lamps in European and American studios were used simply to augment the effect of daylight. In Britain Cecil Hepworth, who started making films in 1898, at first shot interior scenes for his pictures on a temporary open-air stage, and then in 1903 built a proper fully enclosed studio with muranese glass to diffuse the light, with arc floodlights derived from the theater for subsidiary lighting. In Rescued by Rover (1905), directed by Lewin Fitzhamon who worked for Hepworth Company, arc lighting is used in interior studio scene in the gypsy’s attic to simulate light coming in through the window.8 Stagy as it looked, simulation of sunlight by electric lamps was more convincing than the more common practice of painting light effects. For example, in The 100-to-One Shot; or, A Run of Luck (1906), made in America by the Vitagraph Company, in one interior scene the sunlight coming in through the window is painted on the wall, creating an awkwardly inconsistent effect with the stark shadows cast on the floor by the real sunlight used to illuminate the scene.9 Shadows produced by the sun on the floor in interior scenes, always a giveaway that open-roof studios were used, were common in the first years of filmed stage dramas. In a typical example, in Histoire d’un crime (Story of a Crime) from 1901 directed by Ferdinand Zecca for the Pathé Frères company, figures in the courtroom and in a prison cell cast incongruous shadows produced by exterior daylight.10 It seems clear that control over cast shadows and other light effects in interior scenes only became possible with fully artificial, electric illumination. In America during the nickelodeon era, between 1905 and 1912, as production companies were making more money from their films, some built larger studios to replace the earlier open-air stages. The new studios were fitted with glass walls to admit sunlight but often also with some type of additional electric lighting.

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Some film companies, such as the Manhattan Biograph studio built in early 1903, were fully rigged with artificial lights produced by Cooper-Hewitt lamps.11 As a result many films used deeper, more three-dimensional settings and some used banks of electric lights to provide even, high-key illumination. It was also during this period that filmmakers sometimes used a single arc lamp to cast a strong light from one direction. For example, in a scene from Shamus O’Brien (1912), directed by Otis Turner for Independent Moving Pictures, an invisible arc lamp placed in a fireplace provides a cosy low-key light effect which casts a part of the room in atmospheric darkness.12 Controlled studio lighting would be an important development in American film style of the late 1910s, when the first large dark studios relying solely on artificial illumination were constructed. While cast shadows appearing in exterior shots are nearly always accidental side effects of weather, natural light could sometimes be opportunistically captured to create intentional attached shadows, or silhouette effects. In D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) Billy Bitzer’s camera uses natural backlighting to create an evocative silhouette of the two lovers, The Dear One (Mae Marsh) and The Boy (Robert Harron), as they enjoy their romantic walk in the harbor (Figure 4.3). According to Patrick Keating, the cinematic silhouette technique was probably inspired by pictorialist photography, such as the one published in Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photography journal Camera Work, which in 1904 for example printed J. Craig Annan’s artistic photograph The Dark Mountains, and in 1912 Annie W. Brigman’s photograph Dawn. Stieglitz’s influential journal championed the idea that photography was a creative art rather than merely a technique of mechanical reproduction. The more ambitious Hollywood cinematographers, such as Charles Rosher and Henry Cronjager who worked on Frances Marion’s film The Love Light (1921), would use the silhouette effect for scenes of exotic locations and romantic embraces, despite the disadvantages of the silhouette such as keeping the actors’ faces in shadow and lack of modeling.13 In Germany as late as 1918, in his Handbook of Practical Cinematography (Handbuch der praktischen Kinematographie), the physicist Franz Paul Liesegang still recommended the glasshouses as a standard type of film studio, and natural light as the main source of illumination, to be augmented by electric light only in cloudy weather and during the dark seasons.14 The first such glasshouse “film factory” was built in the southwest suburb of Berlin in Babelsberg in 1912, on the site where the famous studio of UFA was to open five years later. Initially only daylight was used to illuminate the sets, but in Germany daylight hours are more limited and therefore less reliable than in Hollywood, the main site of American

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Figure 4.3 Silhouette and cast shadow effects obtained by natural light in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

motion picture industry from around 1910 onward, where the glorious Californian sun shines practically all the year round. The obvious advantage of using natural light for filming is an economic one: daylight comes free. Electric light in the early 1900s on the other hand was prohibitively expensive. This is why in the first two decades of European cinema lighting was obtained mainly by manipulating diffuse sunlight coming through the roof of a glass studio. Occasionally petroleum and gas were used to enhance daylight used in filming, especially on cloudy and rainy days.15 But the downside of relying primarily on natural light in northern Europe is that its use is effectively limited to the sunny months and to a few hours of the day. The Danish director Urban Gad, who in 1911 started making films in Germany starring his wife Asta Nielsen, later recalled that because of changing lighting conditions the best shooting time was limited daily to one hour in the morning between 10 and 11 o’clock, and then to two hours in the afternoon between 3 and 5 o’clock. An attempt was also made to eliminate unwanted natural shadows in interior scenes by a system of screens and awnings suspended below the glass ceiling, which helped disperse direct sunlight and gave some degree of control over the intensity of illumination (Figure 4.4).16

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Figure 4.4 Shadowless lighting typical for the Babelsberg studio of the 1910s: Asta Nielsen in Die Suffragette, dir. Urban Gad (1913).

It soon became clear at the Babelsberg studio that some form of artificial illumination had to be introduced in addition to daylight. The alternating current initially used to power the lamps produced, as it turned out, an undesirable flicker effect, unnoticeable to the eye in the studio but captured on film when the camera was cranked at the usual speed of twenty-four frames per second. According to the cinematographer Guido Seeber who worked with Urban Gad, the flicker effect had to be eliminated by undercranking the camera to about sixteen frames per second. The advantage of filming at a lower frame rate was that the reduced time of exposure was compensated by higher aperture, which increased the depth of focus. The disadvantage, however, was a blurry screen effect produced on all moving objects, such as hands for example, which neither Gad nor Asta Nielsen, who had unprecedented control over her films, were willing to accept. The studio eventually switched into direct current and new mercury tube lamps, also used in America, which offered stronger, evenly diffused and flicker-free illumination.17 Arc lights were also used for directional illumination, necessary for more plastic modeling of sets and human figures, if not yet for the contrasts of chiaroscuro and shadow effects, which were not used until the first Expressionist and horror films such as Richard Oswald’s

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Unheimliche Geschichten (Eerie Tales) from 1919. The historian of German cinema Corinna Müller argues that in Babelsberg the artful combination of diffuse illumination obtained by mercury tube lamps and hardlighting projected by arc lamps produced the best studio lighting in the world in the 1910s.18 The popular films with Asta Nielsen, a major star in Germany at the time, certainly displayed the capacity of the Babelsberg studio to provide high-quality even and shadowless illumination for interior scenes. During that time the internationally famous Nielsen (known simply as “die Asta”) made over sixty films in Germany. In Die Suffragette from 1913, directed by Urban Gad, Nielsen plays an Englishwoman who joins the suffragette movement, only to suffer a conflict between her political convictions and her love for a man who is a bitter opponent of women’s emancipation. In the film Guido Seeber’s camera avails of the usual high-key illumination in interior scenes, and creates a few dramatically effective close-ups and medium shots. The camera also displays mobility remarkable for its time: while the camera itself remains static, frequent panning and reframing movements, even if not always smooth, effectively guide the viewers’ attention and enhance the movements of the actors. Such dynamic panning and reframing shots are also found in other German films with Asta Nielsen, such as Die Börsenkönigin (The Queen of the Stock Exchange) from 1916, directed by Edmund Edel, and the comedy Das Eskimobaby, directed by Heinz Schall, from the same year. In the latter film Asta Nielsen plays an Eskimo woman brought to Berlin by an explorer from his expedition to Greenland. The exotic woman reacts childishly to modern European ways, among other things by flicking the switch of the table lamp on and off in amazement. This scene is illuminated entirely by electric lights, as the room changes suddenly from dark to bright with every flick of the lamp switch by the Eskimo woman.19 In German films of the 1910s the expressive use of electric light still plays a minor part; the main role of illumination is to augment the natural light coming through the studio’s glass ceiling to maintain an even, high-key illumination of the entire scene to enable shooting in deep focus. Visual realism still reigned supreme at the time, and filming in low-key light, with soft focus and fuzzy outlines was generally avoided as technically flawed and “inartistic.” A rare exception that literally foreshadows the atmospheric lighting found in the Expressionist films of the early 1920s is Der Student von Prag (The Student from Prague), directed by Hanns Heinz Ewers in 1913, probably the first art-house film made in Germany. A scene in a gambling club shows a table surrounded by card players lit from above, while the onlookers standing around the table are obscured in a Rembrandtesque semidarkness (Figure 4.5). As one by one

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Figure 4.5 A Rembrandtesque semidarkness in Der Student von Prag (The Student from Prague), dir. Hanns Heinz Ewers (1913).

the players lose to the titular hero, played by Paul Wegener, they leave the table humiliated and disappear into the dark background. Experimenting with low-key lighting, atmospheric shadows and set design did not truly begin in Germany until the end of the decade. In Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) the avant-garde Expressionist look, for which the film is so famous, was still achieved by traditional methods borrowed from theatrical sets and contemporary painting. But already in Richard Oswald’s Unheimliche Geschichten (Eerie Tales), made in 1919, the cameraman Carl Hoffmann would avail of directional electric lighting to create atmospheric chiaroscuro effects (Figure 4.6). In Oswald’s film practically all interior scenes are illuminated by low-key lighting, often with little or no fill to mitigate the sharp relief. Some scenes involving violence and death are even lit exclusively with backlighting, which contributes dramatically to the “eeriness” of the horror tales. For example, in the film’s dramatization of the story The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe, the husband (Reinhold Schünzel) murders his wife (Anita Berber) and carries her body down the stairs to bury it in the cellar. The scene is illuminated by a single-source light coming from up the stairs behind the figures, which casts the cellar in deep, sepulchral darkness (Figure 4.7).

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Figure 4.6 The actor Conrad Veidt in a chiaroscuro shot from Richard Oswald’s horror film Unheimliche Geschichten (Eerie Tales) from 1919.

Figure 4.7 Backlighting in Richard Oswald’s 1919 horror film Unheimliche Geschichten (Eeerie Tales) casts the cellar in sepulchral darkness.

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In Unheimliche Geschichten electricity is not just used to illuminate the scenes; on occasion it becomes a dramatic element in its own right. Characters in interior scenes often switch the lights on and off as if to draw especial attention to this modern facility, which was certainly new in film studios. Full independence from natural light was not to be achieved in some German studios until the early 1920s, when the electricity supply improved and its price went down. It then became economical to use more powerful, better quality lamps in greater quantity: floodlights, spotlights, and special effect lights. The Babelsberg glasshouses nonetheless remained in use throughout the twenties, and the first dark studio was not built by UFA until 1926. With its 56 by 123 meters size it was the biggest film atelier in Europe, consuming one-third of the power supply of the nearby city of Potsdam.20 Combined with the Expressionist style dominant in the arts at the time, modern lighting technology created the most distinctive feature of German postwar cinema, namely its famous chiaroscuro quality. In Thomas Elsaesser’s assessment, German cameramen from the early 1920s on preferred lighting that was assumed to come from hidden or invisible sources, adding mystery and indeterminacy to scenes, character motivation, and story causality, as seen in the films of Friedrich W. Murnau, Paul Leni, or Arthur Robison. The UFA cameramen not only were famous for their techniques involving dramatic attached and cast shadows, but also discovered the “magic” of lighting, its power to endow an object with life through luminosity, both to illuminate the object and to make it look as if it radiated light. Modulated studio lighting, for all its artificiality, could make objects and figures on the screen look more authentic and expressive than in real life.21 As we shall see in the next chapter, never did the qualities of artificial lighting become more esthetically and dramatically powerful than in the darkly poetic, mythical, and fantastic plots, scenery, and characterization of German Expressionist films of the 1920s.

Der Student von Prag: The first art film from Germany Before the end of the First World War, despite the technical improvements in the Babelsberg studio and the popularity of films starring Asta Nielsen, German film industry still lagged behind that of France, Italy, Denmark, and the United States. Probably longer than in other countries, in Germany cinema was being perceived mainly as a low-brow entertainment, hardly able to sway the educated classes with their respect for traditional Kultur: philosophy and theology, literary

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classics, music and opera, theater, and gallery art.22 Indeed, the respectability of central European high-brow culture could hardly be challenged by what popular cinema had to offer in the early days. Typical cinematic attractions offered at fairground screenings included for example the serpentine dance, a family of jugglers, a fantasy of court ladies bathing, the early animation about adventures of Wee Rob Roy, exotic “Japanese” acrobats, the erudite dogs dressed up as humans, the horrible end of a caretaker, Miss Harry’s Snake Woman, mustard footbath, the turn-of-the-century barber slicing off his client’s head, fox terriers chasing rats in a cage, slapsticks of all sorts, Dr. Macintyre’s X-ray cabinet, trick films of the Georges Méliès variety, an occasional pornographic scene, and hundreds of other curiosities displayed by popular traveling cinemas.23 Dr. Caligari’s Cesare, the clairvoyant somnambulist exhibited at a small-town fair in Robert Wiene’s film, is part of this popular tradition. After the war the German film companies found themselves in an opportune position to expand, paradoxically largely due to the postwar inflationary spiral. With foreign films too expensive to import, the vacuum in the domestic market was filled at first with German-made melodramas, literary adaptations, and low-brow comedy films. Despite the severe economic slump postwar Germany was the one nation which could offer a European answer to Hollywood, by presenting a commercial as well as artistic alternative to American domination.24 It won international recognition with a series of outstanding films such as Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry from 1919 and Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari a year later. Due to the low international value of the Deutsch Mark, foreign sales of domestic products could finance a number of artistic and experimental films, including adaptations of literary classic designed to woo middle-class audiences to the cinema and possibly impress foreign distributors. Back in the prewar years no one expected cinema to compete with the traditional arts or to promote Kultur, and so the appearance in 1913 of Der Student von Prag (The Student from Prague), directed by Hanns Heinz Ewers and with Paul Wegener in the titular role, came as something of a surprise to audiences and critics alike. Made six years before Dr. Caligari and remade in 1926 and again in 1935, Der Student von Prag exhibited many of the properties later found in the classic Expressionist films of the 1920s: the atmosphere of mystery, horror, and “medievalism” (the film was shot in the old town of Prague), later evoked in the studio in Wegener’s second Der Golem from 1920. Based on Ewers’s own script, Der Student von Prag tells a story of a poor student named Balduin (Paul Wegener) who, infatuated with a countess (Grete Berger),

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signs a Faustian pact with a sorcerer Scapinelli (John Gottowt), whereby he is given untold wealth in exchange for anything that Scapinelli fancies to take from Balduin’s modest apartment. The coveted object happens to be Balduin’s mirror reflection, his soul and Doppelgänger, which now begins an independent existence and eventually brings about Balduin’s downfall. Ewers’s story was evidently inspired by a 1814 novella Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story), written in German by a French aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso, in which a young man sells his shadow to the devil for a bottomless bag full of gold, only to find that a man without a shadow is shunned by human society.25 In Ewers’s film Balduin finds that he can no longer see himself reflected in the mirror, much to the horror of the countess for whose sake he signed the devil’s pact. For technical reasons it was apparently easier for the cameraman Guido Seeber to manipulate a mirror reflection and the character’s double by using multiple exposures and superimpositions, while the dramatic use of cast shadows only became possible with the introduction of controlled electric lighting in the late 1910s. Announced as “the first real art film” by its self-promoting author, Der Student von Prag proved a commercial success at home and abroad.26 The film forced audiences and critics to reconsider the relationships between visual arts, literature, and film, and to become aware of the extent to which established arts were beginning to affect silent cinema in Germany. The film historian Heide Schlüpmann argues that the golden age of German cinema after the First World War actually had its origins in the years 1912–14, when it took many of its impulses from established artists and writers. Paul Wegener was a member of Max Reinhardt’s famous acting troupe since 1906, while the cameraman Guido Seeber shot many of Asta Nielsen’s films and later went on to work with such prominent directors of the Weimar period as Paul Wegener, Lupu Pick, Georg W. Pabst, and Friedrich W. Murnau.27 In a public lecture given in April 1916 Paul Wegener stressed the artistic possibilities of cinema, an art form distinct from the theater and literature. He argued that “the real creator of the film must be the camera,” with its power to guide the spectator’s point of view, to use special effects such as superimpositions, and so on. Der Student von Prag certainly exhibits many of the Romantic and Gothic characteristics later found in the classic Expressionist films from the 1920s, with their penchant for supernaturalism, horror, murderous insanity, and Doppelgängers reflected in mirrors and shadow projections. This extraordinary chapter in world cinema starts officially in Berlin on February 26, 1920, with the first public screening of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (see Chapter 5).

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The semiotics of the cinematic frame Before we start chasing shadows on the cinema screen in 1920s Germany, a comment on the semiotic and esthetic qualities of the cinematic frame seems in order. The viewers’ enjoyment of films as well as critical discourse on cinema depend on the visual information communicated through the rectangular surface of the screen, which in traditional strip film is created by projecting, and in the process enlarging, the cinematic frames which compose the moving picture. When the strip film is displayed, each frame is flashed on the screen for (traditionally) about 1/24 of a second, and then immediately replaced by the next frame. The phenomenon of the eye known as persistence of vision blends the frames together, producing the illusion of continuous movement. Silent films were mostly shot at a “golden” 1.33 frame aspect ratio, which means that camera captured the scene within an angle of vision enclosed by a 4:3 horizontal rectangle, and this was how film viewers saw and interpreted the cinematic image. The cinematic frame, like the rectangle frame of a photograph or panel painting, defines the image’s composition and consequently impacts on its meaning, because it determines the nature of spatial relations of objects enclosed within the horizontal and vertical edges of the frame. The visual field covered by our naked eyes is of course wider than the photographic frame but it is also limited, because sight is strongest at the center of the retina and clearness of vision decreases toward the edges. However, because both our eyes and heads are mobile, the limitations of our range of vision can be overcome. In practice we can detect some visual cues from a field of more than 180 degrees horizontally (about 90 degrees to the right and 90 degrees to the left), and about 130 degrees vertically (about 65 degrees up and 65 degrees down). The lack of vertical symmetry in the binocular field is due to occlusion by the nose. The wide angle of vision combined with the movements of our eyes and head allows us for example to view an entire room in a continuous visual field, as our gaze is constantly moving and scanning the space in front of us. Our horizontal vision is wider than our vertical vision for evolutionary reasons: it is more important to our survival to see what is happening around us on the ground at some distance from us, than what is happening directly above our heads and at our feet. This is also why the cinema screen was expanding horizontally in the course of the twentieth century rather than vertically, and why panning shots are more common in film than tilting shots. The angle of vision is therefore narrower in film, even when using a wide-angle lens, especially when a shot is taken from a fixed camera position. The edges of

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the frame limit the range of natural vision, although from the esthetic point of view they constitute an advantageous, enabling constraint that, according to Rudolf Arnheim, gives photography and film their right to be called an art.28 By limiting the field of vision framing creates a composition, in which selected visual elements, including the distribution of light and shadows, form meaningful spatial relationships and tensions, absent in the scene viewed with the naked eye. That is to say, from a semiotic point of view the frame not so much highlights meaningful relations between objects as creates relationships that did not exist before.29 Any scene can reveal a practically unlimited number of esthetically and dramatically significant “framings,” which is why cinematographers and film directors often use viewfinders to scan the scene to set up optimal camera angles and positions. The practice of carefully choosing the framing as the basis of the picture’s composition started with Renaissance panel painting, when the picture frame was compared to an open window through which an artist saw what he wanted to paint.30 The visual limitations imposed by the frame are an absolute essential if the stylistic and dramatic qualities of the picture are to be displayed. The two vertical and two horizontal lines of the frame form points of reference for any vertical, horizontal, diagonal, or curved line occurring within the painting, photograph, or cinematic shot, because every deviation from the norm requires some visible standard of comparison to show from what it deviates. The oblique lines of the Expressionist sets in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari appear oblique only because the margins of the frame are vertical and horizontal, just as the cinematographer Robert Krasker’s unsettling canted shots in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) appear canted only in reference to the edges of the cinematic frame (Figure 4.8). The frame not only creates meaningful compositions within its rectangular space but also separates a portion of the world visible within the frame from the invisible rest of the world which continues beyond the frame’s edges. This too can create dramatic tensions between the explicit visual information within the frame and the implied information outside of it. When a figure walks off the screen it disappears from the view but not from the viewer’s imagination, and the invisible but implied offscreen action may be an intended extension of the plot. In the theater too the choice between which elements of the plot are to be enacted onstage and which are to be relegated offstage is an essential part of the play’s dramatic structure. Similarly in film, implied offscreen action and parallel editing expand the explicit visual information on the screen, helping to create more complex plots and more dramatic tension within individual scenes.

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Figure 4.8 One of many canted shots in The Third Man, dir. Carol Reed (1949).

Much as the esthetics of the cinematic frame shares with photographs and panel painting, the presence of movement, both in relation to the elements within the frame and to the frame itself, introduces a dimension absent in the still visual media. Indeed, as the art historian Victor I. Stoichita has remarked, to discourse on a cinematic frame as though it were an isolated image is not, from a theoretical point of view, a justified procedure.31 One can always artificially isolate any film frame to contemplate it as a still image full of meaningful inner tension, but this is not how the film has been shot, nor how the viewer sees it. Movement, with its attention grabbing continuous changes of visual information, allows little or no time to notice, let alone contemplate, any meaningful compositions within single frames, which in any case may be entirely unintended. Except in static shots in which a fixed camera records an unchanging scene, the composition of individual frames is not part of the cinematographer’s design. This is why isolating and analyzing individual frames, especially in shots involving movement, may reveal meanings not necessarily intended by the director and can consequently misinterpret the film. However, as Stoichita concedes, the procedure is justified in relation to films relying heavily on static shots, as in early Expressionist films by Robert

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Wiene, Paul Leni, and Friedrich W. Murnau. Often trained in art history and set design, these directors openly acknowledged their debt to contemporary art and traditional painting. Except for occasional dynamic cinematographic effects such as Murnau’s unchained (entfesselte) camera, Expressionist directors relied mostly on static shots with carefully designed framings. Hermann Warm, one of the three Expressionist artists who designed the sets for Dr. Caligari, said that “films must be drawings brought to life.”32 This explains why frames from German Expressionist films reproduce well in books without their original screen impact being lost, and why analyzing compositions of single frames in static shots from early films is a justified hermeneutic procedure in film criticism.

5

Expressionist Light and Shadows in Weimar Cinema

Any study of silent cinema must acknowledge a melancholy fact that the majority of films from the period must simply be considered lost, either perished for good or—in a more hopeful scenario—possibly still hidden somewhere in the vaults of museums, archives, or private attics. Prints of old films do sometimes surface sensationally, expanding our knowledge of early cinema. Most famously in recent times, in 2008 the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires accidentally revealed a shop-worn 16 mm dupe negative of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, replete with almost half an hour of footage missing from all earlier editions of this famous film.1 Similar finds will hopefully be made in the future, although realistic estimates speak of over 50 percent of German silent films being probably irretrievably lost.2 The news about early American cinema is even bleaker: a recent study conducted by the Library of Congress has revealed that only about 25 percent of the silent films released by major American studios now exist.3 The number of early films available for viewing is even smaller, although the growing catalogues of DVD releases of digitally remastered vintage films inspire contemporary and future students of cinema with some optimism. In Germany, cultural institutions such as the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the Murnau-Stiftung in Wiesbaden, and the film museums in Potsdam, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and München are busy digitizing the 18,000 prints of surviving films made since the silent era till the 1990s. But the work to preserve the German film heritage for future generations is slow and expensive: it costs between €30,000 and €50,000 to produce a high-quality digital transfer of a single analog film. According to a recent estimate only less than 1 percent of the prints deposited in the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv have been made available in digital format.4 It is worth bearing this fact in mind when making any generalizations about the films from the Weimar period, or about early cinema from any other country.

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The films that have survived demonstrate nonetheless that in terms of both quantity and quality Germany’s cinematic output in the period following the First World War was truly impressive. Between 1920 and 1929 about 2,180 feature-length films were produced, an equivalent of almost half of the total film output of all thirty-three European countries. In 1920 there were already 3,500 cinemas in Germany, and by the end of the decade their number had risen to about 5,600, attracting six million cinema goers every week (about 10 percent of the population). Compared to other forms of entertainment such as the theater, variety shows, operetta, or cabaret, cinema was the most popular pastime in Germany during the 1920s. Even in metropolitan Berlin, the center of German theater culture, there were twice as many cinemas as theaters or variety stages combined.5 As a sign of growing cultural prestige during the Weimar period huge “film-palaces” (Filmpaläste) and “light-play houses” (Lichtspielhäuser) were built, splendid buildings for the masses, which assumed the function that opera houses and theaters had had for the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. With their neoclassical, “high-brow” names such as Marmorhaus, Universum-Filmpalast, Titania-Palast, Gloria-Filmpalast, Capitol, or Babylon, these glamorous cinemas were the Weimar mass equivalent of the Wilhelmine Bayreuth opera house.6 The Gloria-Filmpalast in Berlin, for example, seated 1,600 people and was built like a baroque theater in a conscious attempt to win respectability for the new form of popular entrainment. In his book Spazieren in Berlin (Walking in Berlin) published in 1929, the contemporary flâneur and commentator Franz Hessel depicted Berliners’ love affair with the cinema: We Berliners are passionate film goers. The weekly show substitutes for all of world history that we have not experienced. The most beautiful women of both continents belong to us every day: we see their smiles and tears in moving pictures. We have our great film palaces around the Memorial Church, on Kurfürstendamm, in the area around Potsdamer Platz, in the suburbs, and in the thousands of small theatres, bright, enticing lights in the half-dark streets of every neighbourhood. Oh, and then there are the morning cinemas, nice, warm halls for body and soul. In the movie theatre the Berliner is not so critical, not so dependent on the critics he reads in his newspapers, as is the case with the theatre. He allows himself to be flooded by illuminations. It is the substitute for life for millions, who want to forget the monotony of daily existence.7

In the immediate postwar period the illuminations flooding German cinema screens consisted largely of domestic productions, mainly due to the wartime ban on film imports. Even when the ban was eventually lifted at the end of 1920, the German currency was too weak due to the hyperinflation to attract

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foreign film sales, and as a result the German film industry faced little economic competition at home. In 1921 for example against 646 German films (features and shorts) released, only 136 foreign (mainly American) ones were distributed in Germany. Interestingly therefore the postwar inflation, although ultimately catastrophic for the economy, appears to have actually aided the recovery of the domestic film industry, because the very weakness of the currency gave the German studios an advantage when competing abroad. For example, a relatively inexpensive film like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, made at a time of tremendous economic and political turmoil in Germany, was a financial and artistic success elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. From the flowering of cinematic Expressionism, through the chamber dramas of Lupu Pick and Friedrich W. Murnau, the early thrillers of Fritz Lang, the comic and epic classics of Ernst Lubitsch, to the historical and mythical works of Richard Oswald and Paul Wegener, early Weimar cinema expanded rapidly and won international prominence. Paradoxically, hyperinflation and postwar economic instability produced a remarkable artistic and commercial boom.8 With the stabilization of the Deutsche Mark and consequently of the economy in 1924, sales of German films abroad dropped off sharply and the industry passed through commercial and creative crisis which arrested the earlier expansion. The German market was flooded with foreign films, especially Hollywood action films and comedies. UFA’s alliance with Paramount Pictures and Metro Goldwyn Mayer at the end of 1925, known as Parufamet, marked a radical change in the funding and direction of German film industry, interpreted at the time with some resentment in Germany as the Americanization of national cinema. The number of domestic films noticeably declined and the industry went through years of financial crisis, in which even such prestige megaprojects as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis turned into financial flops. By the end of the decade the ratio of homemade films to foreign productions was reversed compared with the immediate postwar years: in 1929 only 188 German films were distributed against 458 American ones.9

Art house versus popular cinema Critical studies of Weimar cinema usually focus on the art films by directors such as Paul Wegener, Robert Wiene, Friedrich W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Fritz Lang, Georg W. Pabst, and a few others. Culturally prestigious and influential as Weimar art-house cinema was, in reality it formed a rather small part of the overall national

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output, which consisted mainly of carefully crafted productions designed to woo educated audiences at home and to impress viewers abroad. The overwhelming majority of films made in Germany at the time were ephemeral productions, catering for the daily entertainment needs of large urban masses. They included detective flicks and comedies, the so-called Aufklärungsfilme (educational films, supposedly devoted to sexual instruction but treating straightforward brothel stories in a pseudoscientific fashion), social and romantic melodramas, epics and costume films, patriotic films about Frederick the Great, operettas, war films, barrack-room comedies, mountain films, adventure serials, horror films, and even German Westerns. We know about those films from contemporary reviews and studio records, but most of them are simply lost.10 This broader picture of daily cinema fare in Weimar Germany puts the few surviving art-house classics in the right sociocultural perspective. Writing in 1947 H. H. Wollenberg, who between 1920 and 1933 was an editor of the influential trade paper Die Lichtbildbühne, argued that it was “certainly a mistake” to generalize about Weimar cinema on the basis of a few quality films that were still being shown to students of the cinema, because the vast majority of films made in Weimar Germany never survived the one season for which they were intended.11 In Lotte H. Eisner’s estimate, out of about 300 films made annually in Germany during the 1920s, only 4 or 5 per year count as quality productions, the ones attracting the most critical attention at the time and scholarly interest in later decades.12 As the historian of Weimar culture Sabine Hake also argues, far from being the norm, the few art films such as Dr. Caligari, Der Golem, Nosferatu, Die Nibelungen, Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, Varieté, and so on were made with an explicit goal to create a quality product to attract middle-class, educated audiences, who were skeptical about a form of entertainment that was still in the process of casting off its fairground origin. Whether working in an Expressionist or realistic mode, art film directors, aided by often lavish financial studio support, developed a discernible, personal style that marked their films as individual works of art, different from commercial cinema. Together with set designers such as Robert Herlth, Kurt Richter, Erich Kettelhut, and Hermann Warm, and cinematographers including Guido Seeber, Karl Freund, and Eugen Schüfftan, art-house filmmakers were able to employ the most advanced technology to serve a limited but culturally more demanding middle-class audience. Quality cinema was designed to display the same cultural standards normally expected of traditional Kultur: the theater, opera, classic fiction, and gallery art. The involvement of famous stage actors such as Emil Jannings, Alfred Abel, or Rudolf Klein-Rogge also contributed to Weimar cinema’s gradually rising respectability.13

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While commercial cinema remained an economic bedrock for German film industry, the few art-house films, promoted and generously financed by UFA, were also designed for export, mainly to America. According to Thomas Elsaesser, the UFA productions from around the mid-1920s not only showed distinct stylistic features as far as lighting, camera work, and set design were concerned, but were also distinct in the editing patterns and the kind of narrative continuity which gave them a slower tempo and poetic ambiguity different from films made in Hollywood.14 Put simply, German films, like German literary fiction and opera, probably required a little more attention and concentration than was normally called for in American commercial cinema. The more demanding narrative and visual style accounted for what international critics saw as specifically German psychological depth and complexity, the emotional inwardness (Innerlichkeit) and obliqueness of character motivation. This more experimental mode of filmmaking was possible in Germany because, unlike the American system (demand-driven and organized around release dates), the “auteur” model introduced by UFA, especially by its leading producer Erich Pommer, was largely driven by the artistic personality of the director. Commenting years later Pommer said that after the First World War he had deliberately supported specifically Expressionist style in cinema, to differentiate German films from contemporary American and French ones: Germany was defeated; how could she make films that would compete with others? It would have been impossible to try and imitate Hollywood or the French. So we tried something new: the Expressionist or stylized films. This was possible because Germany had an overflow of good artists and writers, a strong literary tradition, and a great tradition of theatre. This provided a basis of good, trained actors. World War I finished the French industry; the problem for Germany was to try to compete with Hollywood.15

Pommer’s philosophy of filmmaking in the early 1920s was truly avant-garde and bohemian, so different from the departmentalized and commercial approach typical for American film industry. Under Pommer’s imaginative supervision production schedules were uncertain, budgets often open-ended, and release dates flexible. The specifically German (and wider European) mode of filmmaking produced a cinematic style whose artistic sophistication impressed both foreign viewers and the cultural intelligentsia at home, a taste elite that demanded cinema to become an art or it would denounce it as “kitsch.” These cultural expectations allowed the young medium to mature artistically in Germany after the First World War within only a few years. Not just the stories

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and character psychology, but the films’ visual styles, inspired by the trendiest contemporary artistic movements, continuously improved to ensure that cinema secure its equal place among the established visual arts.

The painted light and shadows of Dr. Caligari While Der Student von Prag introduced some of the Romantic and Faustian themes later found in the art-house cinema of the Weimar period, the film that launched the cinematic Expressionism and with it the golden age of German silent cinema is undoubtedly Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this film. After its première on February 26, 1920, in the Berlin Marmorhaus cinema, Dr. Caligari played for four weeks to full houses. Two months later it was screened again due to popular demand, and five years later it returned to the cinemas to remain with time one of the world’s best-known early films.16 After its New York première in April 1921 Dr. Caligari became an international hit, while in France it played in the same Parisian cinema every day between 1920 and 1927. When in 1967 the director John Huston wanted to recreate the bleak atmosphere of communist East Berlin in his James Bond spoof Casino Royale, he chose the imitation of the stylized décor of Dr. Caligari as the backdrop. In February 2014, nearly a hundred years after its original release, a new digitally restored version of Dr. Caligari became a major event at the Berlinale film festival. In its time the film lent a name, le Caligarisme, to a whole international avant-garde movement which described the world after the First World War as spiritually upside down and out of balance, one in which art seemed like the emanation of a sick and traumatized brain.17 With its distorted perspectives, dreamscapes, murder mayhem, and a few but powerful menacing shadows the film became the benchmark of cinematic Expressionism. After the Second World War, Dr. Caligari’s preoccupation with insanity, mind control, and murder was interpreted by the cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer as the first cinematic prophecy of the danger of Nazism.18 The main reason for Dr. Caligari’s popularity and strong if short-lived cinematic influence is not so much the story as the film’s unique, esthetically revolutionary, Expressionist set design. Cultural historians like to see in German Expressionist art of the early twentieth century an external manifestation of the inner turmoil, but the contemporaries were more likely to be just baffled by the stylized, distorted Cubist patterns of Expressionism.19 As Dr. Mabuse says

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cynically in Fritz Lang’s film from 1922, Expressionism is play (Spielerei), because in postwar Germany everything was just play. The sets of Dr. Caligari, however, remain fully in harmony with the film’s plot, involving as it does delusion, somnambulism, hypnotic mind control, madness, obsession, mysterious murders, and terror. Hans Janowitz’s and Carl Mayer’s script obviously predates the film’s art direction, but on the screen it seems as if the story grew out of the bizarre and nightmarish scenery for which the film is chiefly remembered. Interestingly, much of Dr. Caligari’s visual impact, including the play of light and shadow, is created by painted flats, while electric lighting is responsible only for a few, albeit dramatically powerful, shadow effects.20 The sets of Dr. Caligari are not only artificial because, like all film sets, they were designed and built in the studio to imitate real locations; they were made to look artificial and unreal to attract attention to themselves. Realistic sets imitate some familiar type of scenery without distracting from the characters and dramatic action, whereas subjectively distorted sets, as in Expressionist theater and cinema, shock and unsettle the viewer by their unreality, becoming the very focus of characterization and dramatic action. In Expressionist plays and films scenery and architecture come before plot and characters, dictating the acting style and movement.21 In Dr. Caligari the somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt), just before his death, blends with the scenery as his dark, lean body with outstretched arms imitates the withered lifeless trees around him. In a similar fashion in Der Golem, directed by Paul Wegener, the animated clay body of a humanoid creature seems to be of one element with the uneven, rough texture of the walls in the architectural fantasy of the medieval Jewish ghetto in Prague designed by Hans Poelzig. Fritz Lang, who was trained as an architect, was reported to say that one of the principles of film was the correspondence between thing and person, in which “an expressionism of the most subtle kind will bring surrounding props and action into harmony with one another.”22 This harmony is often hard to achieve on real locations, however carefully chosen (Murnau’s Nosferatu remaining a notable exception), whereas man-made sets and artificial lighting give filmmakers total creative control by eliminating all incidents and allowing only for what is dramatically and psychologically desired. This was especially important in the silent era, where the absence of voice made directors rely more on the mise-en-scène to convey the drama in clear pictorial terms.23 In Dr. Caligari the cameraman Willy Hameister allows the viewer to dwell longer on the scenery by using sustained static shots with carefully framed compositions, creating cinematic images that indeed look like “drawings brought

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to life,” as the set designer Hermann Warm had advocated. The film’s immovable camera and painted décor were perceived at the time as too theatrical and even technically backward, but the effect of stylization and artificially was certainly deliberate. As said earlier, to achieve a framing akin to painting is only possible in static shots, as it is considerably more difficult to control the composition of a shot if the camera is panning or tracking across a set. Siegfried Kracauer suggested the Expressionist paintings of Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), with their narrow, edgy, and crystalline Cubist streets, as possible inspiration for the look of Dr. Caligari.24 Expressionist mise-en-scène is by definition stylized and artificial, a product of imagination rather than observation, as it can hardly be found in real scenery and architecture. This is why instead of shooting their horror story on some appropriate location, in the fashion of Der Student von Prag filmed in the old city of Prague, the director Robert Wiene and the three set designers, Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig, and Walter Reimann, chose to create on canvas backdrops an eerie small town full of painted false perspectives, painted shadows and shafts of light, painted knife-edged rooftops and oblique chimney pots, bent streetlamps, and hallucinatory houses whose wild geometry dispenses altogether with right angles (Figure 5.1).25

Figure 5.1 Distorted architecture and painted light effects in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), dir. Robert Wiene (1920).

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Two years later Hermann Warm repeated some of these Expressionist effects on three-dimensional sets of Murnau’s Phantom (1922). In the film, whose plot is based on the novel by Gerhart Hauptmann, an impoverished young poet (Alfred Abel) descends into near-madness on account of his obsession with a beautiful woman he once saw passing by in a carriage. The film’s décor is in the main more realistic than stylized, with Expressionist features limited to emotionally charged scenes. In one delirious moment the protagonist imagines himself being followed by moving angular shadows of houses collapsing around him, while he and his elongated shadow run in panic across an empty square.26 As a result of its avant-garde sets, of the kind never before seen on the screen, Dr. Caligari became a turning point in the history of cinematic art design. The scenery, normally providing a background to a human story, in Dr. Caligari became the most important element of the film. It was the bizarre sets, the oblique lines, and surfaces, rather than the acting that conveyed the fear, the nightmare, and the mood of the film, the behavior of the characters, and their emotions and fates. For the first time in film history theater set designers trained in architecture and inspired by contemporary visual arts, rather than writers and actors, determined the artistic shape of a film.27 The distorted, geometric sets of Dr. Caligari remained a reference point for cinematic Expressionism through the 1920s and beyond, both in Germany and abroad (see below in the section on American Caligarisme). Even in films not immediately recognized as Expressionist in their plot and dominant décor, the Expressionist style could occasionally be used to convey specific meanings. For example, the visual style of Fritz Lang’s 1922 Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) remains for the most part realistic, with the occasional Expressionist accents reserved for dark and menacing backstreets at night and for the interior design in the luxurious apartments of the rich, or exclusive restaurants and clubs.28 Especially in the spacious apartments and expensive restaurants the pronounced artificiality of sharp angles, distorted designs, and painted shadows suggests a social class out of touch with economic reality, cushioned in their own oasis of affluence in a world of postwar economic chaos, lawlessness, and depravity. The trendy décor gives the rich a sense of splendid isolation, an esthetic escapism, and a false sense of security. The unscrupulous criminal-hypnotist Mabuse first exploits financially the naiveté and weaknesses of people like the industrialist Hull and the Count and Countess Told, only to mastermind the men’s deaths and the kidnapping of the Countess afterward. Driven by Mabuse first to madness and then to suicide, Count Told (Alfred Abel) staggers drunk through the vast rooms of his Expressionistically decorated and

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atmospherically lit house, before collapsing senseless on the floor (Figure 5.2). As the film critic E. Ann Kaplan suggests, the elaborate Expressionist designs in the private houses and clubs of Dr. Mabuse appear to threaten and overwhelm people, whose smallness within the expansive luxurious spaces makes them appear insignificant despite their arrogance and high social position. As in Dr. Caligari, in Lang’s film the Expressionist sets acquire a life of their own, emerging as far more interesting and alive than the reserved, blasé, and emotionless people they surround.29 The sets of Dr. Caligari are for the most part covered in uniform lighting, but the main light effects, including the chiaroscuro contrasts and shadows, are not achieved by electric illumination but are undisguisedly painted onto the flats which form the walls of the town and its various interior spaces. Dr. Caligari is by no means unique or the first film to use painted shadows, but it is probably the first film that does not try to hide the fact. Back in the 1910s painting light effects on sets was often a way of creating more sophisticated illumination than natural light or early electric lighting could allow. For example, the Babylon set in Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), which due to its size had to be erected outdoors,

Figure 5.2 The Expressionist interior design and lighting in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler), dir. Fritz Lang (1922).

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had some of its light effects painted on walls to enhance the modeling of depth. Shaded corners were painted darker than the open areas exposed to natural light, and in interior scenes walls further away from windows were also painted darker.30 But while in Intolerance painted light and shadows were designed to enhance realism, and their artificial character was certainly not meant to be recognized as such on the screen, in Dr. Caligari painted light effects were designed to attract attention to themselves by their very unnaturalness and artificiality.31 Bizarrely shaped streams of light and shadows were painted across floors, walls, and upand-down staircases, with the putative sources of light often unidentifiable. Interestingly, the uncanny artificiality of the light effects for which Dr. Caligari is so famous may have been partly at least a result of prosaically financial rather than artistic planning. The producer Erich Pommer reportedly advised the set designers to use painted flats rather than build spatial sets to bring down electricity costs. Painting shafts of light and shadows could reduce the lighting setups to simple floodlights applied uniformly from the front, left, and right.32 The diffuse illumination can be detected from faint crossed shadows cast by figures on walls and floors, but it seems clear that except for a few selected effects these authentic shadows were intended to go unnoticed. One of the few scenes in which electric lighting rather than painted effects creates the required mood is inside Caligari’s fairground tent, in a theater-within-the-film scene announced by a card that identifies the tent as the “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Both the repetition of the film’s title at this point in the story and the cabinet’s theatricality suggest that the outside world is as much under the control of Caligari’s deranged mind as is Cesare, the hypnotized actor carrying out murderous orders issued by the insane theater director. Once inside the “cabinet” the camera takes a back seat in the darkness of the auditorium, while the stage is lit atmospherically by lamps placed low on either side, very much the practice of stage illumination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same directional light coming from bottom left momentarily casts an evocative shadow of Caligari’s magic wand and of Cesare’s outstretched hand onto the lid of the coffin-like upright box, from which the awakened somnambulist is slowly emerging (Figure 5.3). The shadow of the outstretched fingers draws attention to Cesare’s hands as instruments of his murders, and in so doing it adds to the impression of depth by projecting a foreshortened, barely visible hand onto an improvised screen. Painters of the past had likewise on occasion used a cast shadow of a hand to emphasize its importance, whatever the context, and to create the illusion of depth. For example, in his picture St Luke Painting the Virgin’s Portrait (c. 1550) Martin van Heemskerck shows the

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painter’s right hand casting a dark shadow onto the small board on which he is working. A similar theme is taken up in Marie-Louise Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Self-Portrait (1790), in which the painter looks directly at the viewer while her hand holding a brush casts a shadow on the canvas she is working on.33 In Rembrandt’s etching of the portrait of the Dutch preacher Jan Cornelisz Sylvius (1646), the painter creates a Baroque illusion of three-dimensionality by allowing the preacher’s hand, extended toward the viewer as if from a pulpit, to cast a shadow on the edge of an oval frame (Figure  5.4). Also in Rembrandt’s famous Night Watch (1642) the captain’s gesticulating hand, seen only in foreshortening, appears as a shadowy apparition in full shape, with outstretched fingers, on the uniform of the lieutenant standing nearby, thus indicating a source of directional light (from top left) and enhancing a sense of depth in the scene.34 In Wiene’s film the hands of the sleepwalking murderer, first introduced in a shadow projection in Caligari’s fairground theater, reappear in action in the most dramatic scene of the film, that of the murder of Alan (Hans Heinz von Twardowski), who earlier in Caligari’s tent unwittingly asked the “clairvoyant” somnambulist “how long do I have to live?” Acting presumably on Caligari’s

Figure 5.3 Light from bottom left casts a shadow of the somnambulist’s hand onto the lid of the upright box in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), dir. Robert Wiene (1920).

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Figure 5.4 The shadow of a hand in Rembrandt’s etching of the preacher Jan Cornelisz Sylvius, 1646.

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order, Cesare comes true on his word (“Till dawn tomorrow”) by appearing in Alan’s bedroom that night. Paralyzed with fear in his bed, the young man is unable to defend himself against the approaching assailant, whose shadow grows menacingly on the wall. The murder itself is filmed as a struggle between two shadows, the victim’s and the murderer’s, in which the murderer grabs Alan’s hands, holds them down, and then raises the knife to stab his victim. The murderer’s hand introduced as an immaterial shadow in Caligari’s theater now returns in solid flesh to carry out its deadly task (Figure 5.5). In this scene the characters’ shadows are in fact superimposed onto painted shadows, which the critic David Cairns finds inconsistent with the film’s esthetic design.35 The moving shadow play in this scene is nonetheless highly dramatic, as staging a violent scene as a struggle between shadows can be more effective than an explicit shot of two fighting adversaries. The shadow as an indexical extension of its object suggestively implies dramatic action, often engaging the viewers’ imagination more than explicit visual information. Besides, scenes with physical violence often look unrealistic and stagy in early films, creating an unintentionally comic rather than terrifying effect. Except of course when fear and terror are intended to appear comic. In Friedrich W. Murnau’s high-

Figure 5.5 The shadow of the murderer’s hand in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), dir. Robert Wiene (1920).

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Figure 5.6 The shadow of a phantom hand in Schloss Vogelöd (Castle Vogelöd, the Revelation of a Secret), dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1921).

society chamber drama Schloß Vogelöd, Die Enthüllung eines Geheimnisses (Castle Vogelöd, the Revelation of a Secret) from 1921, a cast shadow of a hand attacking a man in bed appears like a comic version of the murder scene from Dr. Caligari. One of the guests in the castle, introduced in the film’s personages as “the anxious gentleman” (Julius Falkenstein), has a bad dream, in which a large, monstrous, hairy, and clawed hand extends to his bed from an opened window. An expressive close-up shows the awakened and horrified man, with the shadow of the phantom hand behind him (Figure 5.6). The hand then grabs the man by the neck and drags him out through the window. Terrified by his nightmare, the “anxious gentleman” leaves the castle in a hurry the following morning.

The American Caligarisme In one example of international influence of Robert Wiene’s film, the murder scene staged as a struggle between two shadows was remade in a 1928 American avant-garde adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Telltale Heart,” directed by Charles Klein. The film practically outcaligaries Dr. Caligari in the

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distortions of its Expressionist sets as a projection of the subjective mind-set of the insane protagonist, a young man bent on murdering an old man because of his filmy “vulture eye.” As in the corresponding scene in Dr. Caligari we do not see the assailant approaching the old man’s bed, but only the menacing shadow gradually darkening the face of the terrified victim, with a dagger-like reflection of a window in the background. After the dead body is concealed under the floorboards, the murderer’s deranged mind transforms the attic into a hallucinatory site of the horror that has just taken place. The visual distortions, even more extreme than those of Dr. Caligari, include skewed walls and ceiling, a sharply angular window and door, a triangular wall clock, and the Doppelgänger shadow of the murderer projected by the light emanating accusingly as if from the dead body hidden under the floorboards (Figure 5.7). In another American art-house short film from the period, inspired both by Dr. Caligari and by another classic tale of horror by Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, dir. Melville Webber and J. S. Watson), dramatically enlarged cast shadows externalize Roderick Usher’s madness after he buried his sister Madeline apparently alive (Figure 5.8). The dead Madeline, or rather her ghost, appears to her brother in the form of a disembodied shadow, causing him to lose

Figure 5.7 The murderer’s shadow in an Expressionist interior from the film The Telltale Heart, dir. Charles Klein (1928).

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his mind (Figure 5.9). We even see the shadow of Madeline’s hand pressing the handle of a door to open it, not unlike the shadow of the vampire opening the door to his female victim’s bedroom in Murnau’s Nosferatu. Roderick’s madness is conveyed in an Expressionist montage sequence that combines multiple mirrors, superimpositions, and dynamic chiaroscuro effects achieved by artificial lighting. The film follows the same folk logic applied to shadows as that found in Nosferatu: living characters with solid bodies (Roderick) are accompanied by their shadows as a sign of their split personalities, while characters of uncertain ontological status (Madeline’s ghost or the vampiric Count Orlok) appear in some scenes only as shadows. The American avant-garde films of the late 1920s inspired by Dr. Caligari appear to be far more esthetically satisfying, thanks to their consistent Expressionist décor to support their Gothic themes, than Robert Wiene’s own next film from 1920, Genuine, die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses (Genuine, a Tragedy of a Strange House), known in the Anglophone world as Genuine, A Vampire’s Tale. Unlike Dr. Caligari, Wiene’s next venture into cinematic Expressionism was not a success. Part of the problem was Carl Mayer’s rather

Figure 5.8 The shadow as a projection of a disturbed mind in the film The Fall of the House of Usher, dir. Melville Webber and J. S. Watson (1928).

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Figure 5.9 The ghost of Madeline as a disembodied shadow in the film The Fall of the House of Usher, dir. Melville Webber and J. S. Watson (1928).

silly melodramatic script, full of oriental fantasy, sexual lust, and murderous jealousy. Equally disappointing, compared with the groundbreaking Dr. Caligari, were the incoherently eclectic and extravagant sets and costumes designed by the painter César Klein, described by the art critic Rudolf Kurtz in 1926 as “excessive, chaotic, and displeasing to the eye.”36 In Genuine an eccentric aristocratic loner Lord Melo (Ernst Gronau), a combination of Count Orlok and The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns in appearance but more pathetic than sinister in character, buys at a slave market a tribal “high priestess” (Fern Andra), a femme fatale with a lust for blood. A surviving 43-minute condensed version of the film contains scenes of attempted escapes, male seductions, and murders.37 Eventually the “strange house” (in Ireland as it happens) is stormed by a mob of angry villagers, and the “vampire” is killed by a jealous lover. In one scene Lord Melo’s shadow on the wall of his house appears as a purely formal device, without any apparent psychological or dramatic motivation. It does not expand the character’s personality by revealing its possible sinister inner self (there is none), but remains instead an isolated “atmospheric” visual element, a part of the art-for-art’s-sake Expressionist décor.

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Much more artistically successful and more in the spirit of Dr. Caligari was Wiene’s psycho-drama Raskolnikow, inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. After the première on November 3, 1923, in the Berlin Mozartsaal the reviews hailed the film as a masterpiece. The critics especially praised the consistent fit between the story of delusion, criminal madness, and spiritual regeneration and Andrej Andreiev’s Cubist sets, visually even more distorted than those in Dr. Caligari. Inspired as much by German Expressionist art as by Russian constructivism, the unreality of Andreiev’s angular, jagged sets (described by the designer himself as “romantic realism”) became a perfect background for the protagonist’s dreams and guilt-ridden hallucinations. The surviving 90-minute long fragment of the film (out of the original 2.5 hours) gives some idea of the avant-garde three-dimensional sets and the resulting spatial depth, additionally enhanced by directional, selective lighting that separates grounds of action and provides moving figures with unexpected disquieting shadows.38

The carnival nightmare of Das Wachsfigurenkabinett Paul Leni’s film Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks) from 1924 looks in part like an homage to Dr. Caligari, and is certainly influenced by it. The three stories (or dream visions) comprising Leni’s film are linked to the wax figures of Haroun-Al-Raschid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper, displayed in a booth at a popular fair, not unlike Caligari’s fairground tent exhibiting a clairvoyant somnambulist. The actor Werner Krauss, who played Caligari, makes his appearance in the third episode as the equally sinister, pathological murderer Jack the Ripper. His phantom-like figure wearing a hat and a scarf and holding a knife is superimposed on a dark, indistinct, phantasmagoric background of a city at night, complete with a Caligaresque painted streetlamp. Several years after Expressionism had ceased to dominate the Weimar screen, the director Georg Wilhelm Pabst placed his Jack the Ripper in an updated Expressionist setting, designed by Andrej Andreiev, in a 1929 tragic melodrama Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box). As in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett the episode with the notorious serial women murderer in London is placed toward the end of the film, but unlike in Paul Leni’s film Jack the Ripper is not part of a bad dream from which the protagonists manage to awake. He first emerges from the London fog at night in the form of a mysterious and unidentified selfshadow, before he reveals his face (that of Gustav Diessl) to his next victim, the film’s femme fatale Lulu (Louise Brooks).39

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The three stories comprising Leni’s film (Arabian, old Russian, and modern urban) employ different décors but they are united by their fantastic (they are all dream visions after all) Expressionist style. The set of Baghdad combines traditional onion-shaped cupolas of mosques with sharp diagonals of rooftops characteristic of modern Expressionist theater and film set design, not unlike the jagged architecture of the small town in Dr. Caligari. Paul Leni had first worked with the famous avant-garde theater director Max Reinhardt as a set designer, and he also designed posters for the cinema. In an article published after the release of Das Wachsfigurenkabinett Leni confirmed his Expressionist intention behind the set design: For my film Waxworks I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no idea of reality. My fairground is sketched in with an utter renunciation of detail. All it seeks to engender is an indescribable fluidity of light, moving shapes, shadows, lines, and curves. It is not extreme reality that the camera perceives, but the reality of the inner event, which is more profound, effective and moving than what we see through everyday eyes.40

Practically all scenes take place either indoors or at night, which allows Leni to dispense with realistic daylight and to rely entirely on shadowy, chiaroscuro studio lighting to enhance his “decorative and manneristic Expressionism,” in Lotte H. Eisner’s assessment.41 Occasional cast shadows are created by singlesource, directional lighting, as when Haroun-Al-Raschid (Emil Jannings) appears with his dark double in the house of the baker’s wife whom he tries to seduce (Figure 5.10). The sultan’s puffy, dough-like physique reflects his ultimately benevolent character, while his dark shadow is a reminder of his despotic and potentially sinister aspect. No doubt because of its modern, urban setting, the final episode with the Jack the Ripper story is for Lotte H. Eisner the most abstract and Expressionist in its style, with its sliding corners, its continually shifting surfaces, its walls yielding without revealing what they conceal. It is a chaos of forms: triangles and rhomboids pierce space, sudden cascades of light collide against an infernal darkness. The sequence of all these unconnected objects is completely incoherent, their form offering no point of support. Through the turmoil of this setting glides the phantom of Jack the Ripper . . . elusive, insubstantial. Like the surrounding space the ground is without limits, it dissolves underfoot, cracks, congeals, becomes unreal.42

For Siegfried Kracauer too the Jack Ripper episode “must be counted among the greatest achievements of film art.”43 It is against the background of this delirious,

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Figure 5.10 The doubling of the sultan’s figure (Emil Jannings) suggests his ambivalent (benevolent/despotic) personality in Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks), dir. Paul Leni (1924).

nighttime, claustrophobic urban setting that Jack the Ripper first makes his appearance as a self-shadow, before he finally catches up with the terrified young couple and stabs the man (it’s only a bad dream).

Von morgens bis mitternachts, or film as graphic art The angular shapes, false perspectives, and painted and real light effects of Dr. Caligari belong to the most recognizable and influential, “classic” brand of cinematic Expressionism. On the other hand, the art design in Karlheinz Martin’s 1920 lesser-known film adaptation of Georg Kaiser’s play from 1912 Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight) stands out in the Expressionist canon as something stylistically quite unique. Martin’s film deserves its place right next to Dr. Caligari as an Expressionist classic, its obscure status and lack of impact being largely due to the fact that apart from a single press screening the film was never shown in Germany. According to Rudolf Kurtz, a contemporary film critic and author of the first study of Expressionism and film published in

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1926, cinema owners objected to Martin’s film’s treatment of characters not as human beings but merely as formal elements of the scenery, as cold abstractions that estranged and alienated the audience.44 The cinema owners were right in their esthetic assessment, but decided against the distribution of the film for financial reasons. Interestingly, From Morning to Midnight was shown in Tokyo in 1922 to much critical acclaim.45 The sets in Martin’s film, designed by the architect Robert Neppach, are uniformly lit in a way that leaves little room for special light effects. There are no intentional cast shadows, although a non-naturalistic mise-en-scène contains several painted streetlamps as well as painted patches and strips of light, Caligari style (Figure 5.11). The story of a frustrated cashier (Ernst Deutsch), who steals money from his bank to throw himself for a time into a life of decadent pleasure, is staged in front of Carl Hoffmann’s camera as a succession of highly stylized Expressionist graphic vignettes, which indeed reduce human figures and the scenery to stark black-and-white abstractions and hallucinatory distortions (Figure 5.12). It is the sharp chiaroscuro quality of Neppach’s painted sets that gives the film its unique visual style, which is not unlike the intentionally crude and schematic monochrome drawings, woodcuts, and etchings of the prewar

Figure 5.11 Painted streetlamps and light effects in the film Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight), dir. Karlheinz Martin (1920).

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avant-garde artists from the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter movements. If color film had been available at the time, Robert Wiene would probably, one suspects, have used it in Dr. Caligari to create a cinematic equivalent of the richly colored Cubist city- and landscapes found in the paintings of artists such as Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, and Lyonel Feininger. On the other hand Robert Neppach’s two-dimensional, colorless, bright, and contrasty linear graphic designs in From Morning to Midnight, seen against the nondescript blackness of the surroundings and with little sense of space, naturalistic or distorted, seem more in harmony with the esthetics of monochrome graphic arts and black-andwhite photography. If in Dr. Caligari one still finds some remnants of naturalistic form in the representation of human figures and the interior and exterior spaces, in From Morning to Midnight they are all but erased. The figures, landscapes, and interior furnishings are geared toward a linear graphic effect in the movement of surfaces, lines, light, and darkness which no longer suggest any three-dimensional space. All exterior locations, such as the hotel entrance, the town gate, a suggestion of a street with a streetlamp, are all sketched out with only a few glaring white lines against a flat black backdrop. The dazzling simplicity of Robert Neppach’s painted

Figure 5.12 A hallucinatory Expressionist set in the film Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight), dir. Karlheinz Martin (1920).

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décor portrays a drab and dehumanized material world of the frustrated clerk, which in its daily routine is divided between the exploitative and humiliating work in the bank, and the banal and depressing petit bourgeois home. When in an act of desperation the clerk tries to escape his boring existence, the futility of his decision is indicated by the unreal, painted rays of light on the hotel staircase where he seeks sensual pleasure: what promises to be a fulfillment of his frustrated desires leads only to further humiliations and disappointments. Apart from physical space, the sharp contrasts of light and darkness in the costume and makeup design are also of a piece with the consistent chiaroscuro décor. The cashier’s clothes, contoured with stripes of white paint, seem torn, mirroring his mental condition. His white face, panda eyes, the black contour lines along his brow and the bridge of his nose all characterize a person who is socially deformed and yet thirsty for life (Figure 5.13). The black, mimic lines on the cashier’s gaunt face emphasize his cheekbones, while eye sockets are painted onto a chalky white face, giving the man the appearance of a woodcut. The remaining characters also have their respective social characteristics expressionistically painted on their faces in emphatic and exaggerated physiognomic detail.46

Figure 5.13 Expressionistic physiognomy (Ernst Deutsch) in the film Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight), dir. Karlheinz Martin (1920).

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For all its remarkable visual style, Von morgens bis mitternachts remains unfortunately an isolated event of no immediate cultural consequence. The credit for launching Expressionism in cinema went to an esthetically equally radical Dr. Caligari, whose domestic and international success speaks for itself. For almost a decade many of the art-house German films eschewed naturalism by being shot on highly stylized sets designed meticulously by avant-garde painters and architects. Even films that featured large outdoor scenes often avoided real locations in favor of huge sets constructed in UFA’s Neubabelsberg studio. Robert Wiene’s film INRI, ein Film der Menschlichkeit (INRI, a Film about Humanity) from 1923, for instance, which features Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, was shot on a hill made entirely of timber, beneath banks of arc lighting on gantries high in the roof of the huge Staaken sheds in Berlin. The 1924 documentary Der Film im Film (Film in the Film) by Friedrich Porges, about the making of Wiene’s INRI, shows the huge size of the adapted studio (a former Zeppelin hangar) and the extensive light rigging used in supposedly outdoor scenes involving crowds of extras.47 The bold experiment of painted light effects in Dr. Caligari quickly gave way to an even greater experimentation with artificial light sources, as film production from the early 1920s onward was kept indoors to allow independence from limited sunlight hours as well as greater artistic control. Reliance on artificial light quickly led to improvements in lighting technologies, including the use of spotlights, floodlights, mirrors, reflective surfaces, and light-focusing devices to control, intensify, diffuse, or redirect the light beams.48 Technological progress in turn increased the scope of visual effects that controlled use of lighting could produce, including cinematic shadows.

The Golem and the shadow of Rabbi Löw Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, How He Came into the World), released in 1920 just six months after Dr. Caligari, presents yet another, stylistically different version of cinematic Expressionism. Less avantgarde than Dr. Caligari’s modernist, Cubist sets with their straight oblique lines and twisted geometry, Der Golem’s medievalism called for a more organic, curvilinear, rough-textured but equally fantastic scenery. At the time there was even doubt whether the three-dimensional sets of the imaginary Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Prague, designed for the film by the acclaimed architect Hans Poelzig, were to be considered Expressionist at all. Poelzig’s vision of the medieval ghetto was certainly not directly inspired, the way Dr. Caligari was,

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by contemporary avant-garde art, which is probably why Rudolf Kurtz did not include Der Golem in his 1926 study Expressionismus und Film (Expressionism and Film), besides noting the film’s indebtedness to Gothic architecture.49 Indirectly, however, the medieval fantasy of Der Golem is Expressionist in the sense that the film’s sets are in harmony with the mystery, superstition, and magic of the Golem story. As Paul Wegener explained in a Film-Kurier interview from 1920, which introduced the film: “It is not Prague that my friend, the architect [Hans] Poelzig, has erected. Rather, it is a poem of a city [Stadt-Dichtung], a dream, an architectural paraphrase of the golem theme. These alleys and squares should not call to mind anything real; they should create the atmosphere in which the golem breathes.”50 Hans Poelzig understood that Wegener did not want a re-creation of an actual medieval town; rather, the director wanted buildings, streets, and interiors to reflect the mystery, threat, and the supernatural which underlie the Golem story. This is what Poelzig accordingly created on the lot of the UFA’s Tempelhof studio: a warren of winding cobblestone streets, with Gothic arches, oblique rooftops, and deformed half-timbered houses. The interior spaces, less angular and Cubist and generally less Caligaresque, with their cave-like chambers, inward-curving walls, and crookedly spiraling staircases also match the mood of a medieval fantasy. The organic unity of character and setting—always an Expressionist trait—was noted by Lotte H. Eisner, who found the steeply pitched thatched roofs and narrow gables of Poelzig’s set “somehow echoed in the pointed hats and wind-blown goatees of the Jews, the excited fluttering of their hands, their raised arms clutching at the empty yet restricted space.”51 The exotic look of the mise-en-scène and the superstition that governs the lives of the ghetto’s bizarre inhabitants are also emphasized by the cinematographer Karl Freund’s striking lighting effects. The exterior, open-air sets are exposed to the sky, the fact betrayed in some shots by natural shadows, but the mystery of Hans Poelzig’s burrow-like interiors is enhanced by hard, single-source or crosslighting that produces atmospheric sharp shadows, especially in medium and close shots (Figure 5.14). Lotte H. Eisner derives the chiaroscuro effects in Der Golem and other Expressionist films from the stage lighting used in Deutsches Theater (German Theater), then under the inspired leadership of Max Reinhardt. During the later years of the First World War the shortage of raw materials and lack of money forced the famous theater director to economize and reduce the scale of his productions. Instead of building several sets for a play Reinhardt would use a single fixed setting which he would illuminate imaginatively in different ways. In a structurally simplified set, varied lighting conditions would

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Figure 5.14 Sharp shadows produced by single-source sidelighting (right off the screen) in Der Golem, dir. Paul Wegener (1920).

assume different dramatic meanings. By shifting lighting effects, by making them cross and clash with one another, Reinhardt could hide inferior materials used for the sets and vary the intensity of the atmosphere to suit the action. Darkness could also be used simply to divide one scene from another, like the black screen in film, and sparsely illuminated crowds could be made to appear denser in the secrecy of shadows.52 The subtleties of Expressionist lighting in the interior scenes of Der Golem would indeed indicate Wegener’s theatrical inspiration (he had been a member of Max Reinhardt’s acting troupe), although his understanding of Expressionism was more organic than abstract or Cubist. Der Golem’s curvilinear, earthy forms and the real lighting, natural or electric, sculpting the sets remain far removed from the jagged edges, geometric forms, and painted light effects of Dr. Caligari. Hardlighting and the chiaroscuro effects dominate in the Rabbi’s windowless cellar where he conducts his secret work on the clay superman who would protect the Jewish people, where he reads his books on necromancy and conjures up spirits to assist him in bringing the Golem to life. In a sense the Golem is the Rabbi’s alter ego that complements his public persona as a community leader with a hidden dream of physical power that would save the Jewish people from

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persecution. The Rabbi needs the help of spirits to animate the clay creature, but the very idea of the Golem and its creation are Rabbi’s own, an expression of a secret wish to give his people physical protection as well as spiritual guidance. The intimate connection between the Rabbi and the Golem, the maker and his creation, is signalled by the film’s only intentional, highly expressive cast shadow, that of Rabbi Löw facing the half-formed sculpture of the Golem in his secret chamber. As the Rabbi approaches the still unfinished clay statue, his shadow is projected onto the rough full-size drawing of the Golem on the wall, and symbolically merges with it. A moment later the Rabbi himself enters the frame, thus completing the symbolic pattern consisting of the Rabbi and his shadow, duplicated by the Golem and its outline (Figure 5.15). The symbolic cast shadow thus becomes a projection of a hidden character and its desires, whatever they may be: egotistic and malignant in the case of Dr. Caligari (Figure 1.1) and unselfish and noble in the case of Rabbi Löw. The Rabbi’s RoboCop, his secret weapon to defend the Jewish people and to ward off their eviction works for a time as the emperor, impressed by the Golem during its presentation at the court, revokes his decree against the Jews. But as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a humanoid creature brought to life by unorthodox

Figure 5.15 Rabbi Löw and his shadow duplicated by the Golem and its outline drawn on the wall (Der Golem, dir. Paul Wegener, 1920).

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means in arrogant usurpation of God’s creative prerogatives turns punishingly against its human maker by wreaking havoc and destruction. The Golem gets out of control, sets fire to the ghetto, and breaks through the gate to venture into the outside world, possibly to spread further destruction. On the Christian side, however, the Golem is finally disarmed, although neither by the Rabbi’s prayer or magic nor by the emperor’s might, but by a little, blonde Aryan girl who, out of curiosity, plucks the magic talisman from the Golem’s chest, rendering the creature lifeless and harmless.

Nosferatu, or the shadow of a vampire Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferau, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror) from 1922 contains some of the most famous detached shadows in Weimar cinema. This is almost surprising, because unlike most of the films of the period Murnau’s horror classic was shot only partly in the studio, under controlled lighting setups. Most of the scenes were filmed on outdoor locations in Germany and Czechoslovakia, in places “infused with dusky skies and restless seas, trees with branches like flourishing claws, the woods and mountains and perched castles of the rugged Carpathian terrain, the narrow cobbled streets and close-packed gabled houses.”53 According to the film historian Christopher Frayling, real locations in Nosferatu, although rather unusual in a horror film, actually enhanced the atmosphere of terror, by implying that the story was happening in the real world, not in an artificial studio environment.54 The “painterly naturalness” of the outdoor scenery is mainly responsible for the old-fashioned Romantic feel of Murnau’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel Dracula (1897), but it is the interior scenes with controlled lighting that offer some of the most memorable, most often reproduced cinematic images of the period, including Count Orlok’s artfully contrived, truly terrifying shadows. Upon its release Nosferatu was advertised as “an erotic, occult, spiritualist and metaphysical film,” mainly due to the involvement of the scriptwriter Henrik Galeen and the art designer and coproducer Albin Grau, both of whom were occultists and members of the Masonic Lodge.55 Albin Grau (1884–1971) was a student of Eastern philosophy, a fan of the English magician and occultist Aleister Crowley, a friend of the symbolist writer and painter Alfred Kubin, and the author of pamphlets on relations between occultism and art and on the use of color in décor and lighting in black-and-white films.56 In a sense Nosferatu was as much Grau’s film as it was Murnau’s. The film was the first

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(and last as it turned out) to be produced by the Prana (“life force” in Sanskrit) production company, founded in 1921 by Grau along with other occultists. The fellow occultist and Rosicrucian Henrik Galeen, author of the screenplay for Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wrote the script for Nosferatu loosely based on Bram Stoker’s novel, while Grau invited Murnau to be the film’s director. As coproducer Grau was also in charge of Nosferatu’s art direction. He made drawings for every scene and produced promotional material for the

Figure 5.16 The gigantic shadow of Nosferatu in Albin Grau’s promotional artwork for Friedrich W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu (1922).

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film’s première and the accompanying masquerade ball in the Marmorsaal in Berlin on March 4, 1922. One of Grau’s designs shows a gigantic shadow of Nosferatu cast across the street and onto the houses, and causing panic in a small town (Figure 5.16). Grau’s storyboarding was in turn influenced by Gothic illustrations designed by Hugo Steiner-Prag for Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel Der Golem. (Meyrink’s novel did not inspire Wegener’s Golem films however, which drew more on the original Golem legend than on its modern literary versions.) The impact of Grau’s art design on Nosferatu’s look and esoteric climate is unquestionable. Grau and Galeen also infused the film with such “occult” elements as the telepathic powers of Ellen (Greta Schröder), the wife of Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), the young clerk sent to Transylvania to secure Count Orlok’s purchase of the property in the fictitious German town of Wisborg. When in the Transylvanian castle the vampiric Count Orlok (Max Schreck) approaches the slumbery Hutter to suck his blood, back in Wisborg Ellen wakes up in terror with her husband’s name on her lips. Similarly, the Count’s servant in Wisborg, a creepy estate agent Knock (Alexander Granach), even when locked up in the mental asylum always telepathically “knows” when the “master” is “near” and when he is “dead.” Notwithstanding the contributions of Grau’s and Galeen’s “occultism,” Nosferatu remains first of all a Romantic, Gothic, and Expressionist film, and this is largely due to Murnau’s sensibility, artistic taste, and direction. It was Murnau who introduced such simple but highly effective special effects as the “eerie speed” of Count Orlok’s coach (by undercranking the camera), and the self-assembly of the coffins containing the deadly cargo of rat-infested earth and the sleeping vampire (by one crank-one frame technique). It was also Murnau’s idea, as evidenced by his handwritten annotations on the script, to film Count Orlok’s phantom coach ride, again at “eerie speed,” through the “white forest” (by using negative film).57 Murnau was also responsible for choosing the locations: in the city of Lübeck in north Germany, in the harbor of the city of Wismar, on the Baltic island of Sylt, in the Tatra mountains, and in the castle of Oravský Podzamok in Dolný Kubin in Slovakia, which still stands largely unchanged since Murnau and his cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner went there on a shoot in 1921.58 It was also Murnau’s idea to enhance the atmosphere of foreboding by a cinematography inspired by Romantic painting: shots of real landscapes, forests, rocky mountain peaks, skies with dramatic patterns of clouds, Gothic churches and archways, the dunes, and the sea. Commentators have also pointed out the influence on Murnau of the early Swedish cinema with its feeling for landscape and the open air. Equally important was the deep influence of German Romanticism, of E. T.

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A. Hoffmann’s stories of fantasy and horror, and especially of the painter Caspar David Friedrich’s majestic and melancholy “moodscapes.”59 Murnau’s exquisite visual Romanticism had its origin in his art-historical and humanistic training. After leaving Berlin where he studied philology, Murnau went to the University of Heidelberg to study the paintings of Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein, as well as German Romantic literature and Shakespeare. The art historian Angela Dalle Vacche also suggests that the facade of Nosferatu’s new house in Wisborg (the old salt storehouse, still standing in the city of Wismar where the scene was shot), punctuated by a series of dark windows of impenetrable and empty surfaces, recalls the surreal and stagy atmosphere of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of alluring arcades, in which the suspicious regularity of the design can only release something dark hidden behind it. It was both a lucky coincidence and Murnau’s judicial choice to find such haunting locations for his horror film. The real bridge in the Tatra mountains that Hutter crosses on his journey into the land of phantoms is for Dalle Vacche reminiscent of the surrealist iconography of Alfred Kubin’s fantastic pictures of coaches traveling through the forest.60 Murnau was also fond of the old-German look of little towns with timberframed houses and narrow, winding streets, which lent atmosphere not only in Nosferatu but later also in Phantom (1922) and Faust (1926). As the location scouting for Nosferatu revealed, this Romantic idyll was still a reality in the early 1920s. Village life in the German provinces and the medieval character of Germany’s small towns were still intact at the time, with their Gothic gates, ivy-covered walls, shady courtyards, and steep, tiled roofs such as those found in Wismar. Murnau’s old-German nostalgia may be partly responsible for moving the action of Bram Stoker’s literary prototype from late nineteenth-century England to Germany of the Biedermeier period (1830s). The Biedermeier style was still cherished in Germany in Murnau’s time for its cult of privacy, domestic coziness, and sentimentality (Gemütlichkeit), the middle-class virtues of the home, the family, and the celebration of a clean and peaceful existence, with its well-kept gardens, family portraits, and flowery wallpaper. Biedermeier art was rediscovered in 1906 at the Centennial Exhibition of the National Gallery of Berlin, the same event that marked the rediscovery of Caspar David Friedrich’s work, which also influenced Murnau’s esthetics. In Nosferatu the Biedermeier ideal of bourgeois domesticity, recorded in the popular paintings of Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785–1847) and Moritz von Schwind (1804–71), is challenged and threatened by the arrival of the vampire in a rat-infested ship that brings plague and death to the town.61

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The Gothic esthetics associated with the vampire, so different from the Biedermeier coziness, is clearly the work of the art director Albin Grau. His drawings created the first design for Count Orlok’s appearance: dark, cadaverous, with long predatory arms and bird-like clawed fingers, even with simian facial features. The critic Darryl Jones finds the vampire in Grau’s drawings “a disturbing combination of a rat and a penis.”62 What we see on the screen in Max Schreck’s makeup are pointed bat’s ears, protruding rodent’s teeth, a pale bald head like a bare skull, and a “Semitic” crooked nose. Nosferatu’s hybrid monstrosity thus suggests a cross between a human skeleton, a bloodsucking bat, and a plague-spreading rat. His appearance is captured in one of the film’s classic images, in which on the stroke of midnight Count Orlok enters Hutter’s bedroom, framed in a back-lit Gothic archway that suggests a crypt and a coffin in which the vampire sleeps during the day.63 It is likely that this powerful image was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod (Destiny) released only a year earlier, in which a dark figure of Death (Bernhard Goetzke) is seen entering a graveyard through a similar Gothic gate. It is also at midnight that Count Orlok’s dual nature—a creepy old man by day and a vampire by night—is revealed through his projected shadow. As discussed in Chapter 1, in folklore vampires, ghosts, and other supernatural beings appear either in seemingly solid form but without a shadow (or a mirror reflection), or else only as shadows (or mirror reflections). That is to say, in natural objects the solid body and its shadow (or some other indexical extension) are inseparably connected, whereas in supernatural objects the body and its shadow are believed to be separated. This principle is for the most part observed in Nosferatu, where a detached shadow on its own, without the accompanying solid body, is reserved for the vampire, while ordinary mortals and other material objects cast shadows according to natural laws. But natural shadows too can assume symbolic significance in a horror film. At midnight in Count Orlok’s castle the beginning of spooky time is announced by a sharp shadow of a small decorative skeleton attached to the clock (Figure 5.17). This visual duplication is repeated in the shot of Count Orlok, now as the vampire Nosferatu, rising stiffly from his daytime slumber to feed on his hapless guest. In the morning, the still unsuspecting Hutter examines the marks on his throat left there by Nosferatu, while his shadow reminds the viewer of the night in which the young man has fallen victim to the Count’s vampirism. The completely detached shadow in Murnau’s film is logically reserved for the vampire, because it is as the disembodied spirit that Count Orlok attacks his victims. It is as if all of the Count’s hypnotic power to paralyze his victims before

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Figure 5.17 The shadow of a decorative skeleton on the clock at midnight in Nosferatu, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1922).

he sucks their blood was concentrated in his shadow, which in those scenes possesses the power of a solid, material body. Count Orlok’s shadow, immaterial yet all-powerful, is paralleled in Professor Bulwer’s scientific demonstration of examples of vampirism in nature, which include the Venus flytrap and a polyp with tentacles used to catch its prey. The polyp’s body is described in Professor Bulwer’s lecture as “transparent . . . almost incorporeal,” in other words, like a shadow. Indeed, in the film’s intertitles the vampire is often referred to simply as the “shadow.” It is as a disembodied shadow that Count Orlok overwhelms his victims, first in his castle and later in Ellen’s bedroom. When the shadow of Nosferatu’s clawed hand crawls up Ellen’s swooning body and then suddenly clutches at her chest in triumph, the woman reacts with spasmodic shudder as if gripped by a real hand, before giving up entirely to the vampire’s power. The fact that Nosferatu’s victims, male and female, find instinctive refuge in their beds has occasioned critical interpretations, often in a psychoanalytic context, of vampirism as a metaphor for sexual predation. As noted by Thomas Elsaesser, cinematic vampires tend to be bisexual, and it is often unclear whether beautiful young women are for the Count ends in themselves, or merely means to an end (as Venus traps, to attract young men to their rescue who then become

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the juicier victims).64 In Murnau’s film Nosferatu’s hybrid animal and human form makes him a species and a gender of its own, driven by raw and destructive desire of ultimately sexual origin. It is not clear why Count Orlok wants to buy property in Wisborg in the first place (his hieroglyphic letter to the estate agent Knock remains untranslated), but it is very clear why he wants to buy a house directly opposite Hutter’s: he makes that decision after seeing Ellen’s portrait on Hutter’s medallion and admiring her “beautiful neck.” In one of her telepathic moments Ellen establishes contact with Count Orlok through an eyeline match between shots taking place in different locations, which suggests an element of female attraction to a perverse creature as much as wifely concern for her absent husband. Finally, the climactic encounter between Nosferatu and Ellen bears all the hallmarks of a secret romantic night tryst. While on the face of it Ellen, described as a “woman without sin” (is her marriage unconsummated?), accepts the self-sacrificial task of ridding the town from the plague by making the vampire to forget the first cock crow, there is also a possibility of a hidden, perverse desire of sexual gratification with a repulsive but experienced older man.65 Be that as it may, the sexual subtext certainly adds spiciness to vampiric bloodsucking as the mixing of “precious bodily fluids.” As Ellen awaits her “lover” at night, already panting and swooning in her bed, she sends her unwitting husband away on the pretext of fetching a doctor, and then opens the window to welcome the creepy “secret admirer” from across the street. When she buries her face in her hands, it is not clear whether the gesture is a reaction of fear or of shame. There is a sense of entrapment on both sides, as we see Count Orlok behind his window, looking toward Ellen, his hands wrapped around the strong horizontal and vertical bars, which suggests that the vampire is as much a prisoner of his desire as Ellen is of hers. The shadow of one of the bars falls across Orlok’s head, holding him captive until Ellen’s open window will release him.66 When Nosferatu begins the final leg of his journey toward Ellen, the sense of foreboding is further enhanced by Murnau’s (and Grau’s) most spectacular and most famous detached shadows of the film. Here the “undead,” cadaverouslooking but still corporeal Count Orlok is entirely replaced by the hunched, crooked-nosed shadow of Nosferatu gliding creepily along the wall up the stairs, and then pushing the door of Ellen’s room with his elongated clawed hand (Figure 1.4). Only after Nosferatu subdues Ellen by clutching her chest (or her heart), does the shadow reveals its corporeality as the vampiric Count Orlok, feeding on the limp body of his victim. At daybreak we see the Count reflected in Ellen’s standing mirror—an element of inconsistency with the vampire lore (the mirror appears to play no role in this scene, except as part of furniture in a

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woman’s bedroom). On the other hand, perfectly in keeping with folklore logic is the vampire’s final annihilation in the rays of the morning sun: he is, after all, only a shadow, a patch of darkness now obliterated by light. Historians of cinema are fond of citing the images of Nosferatu’s shadow as examples of the influence of German Expressionism on cast shadows in Hollywood horror films of the 1930s. But as Patrick Keating persuasively argues, this technique was probably an established melodramatic convention before Hollywood cinematographers had seen Murnau’s horror masterpiece, which incidentally was not released in the United States until 1929. Keating cites an image from Harold Lloyd’s 1920 comedy short Haunted Spooks, which looks remarkably like the vampire shadow from Nosferatu, though it predates Murnau’s film by two years. The critic suggests the influence on the cinematic cast shadow in America by the graphic arts, such as the engravings by Gustave Doré which inspired the work of D. W. Griffith’s cinematographer Karl Brown among others. Doré’s illustrations accompanying criminal fiction frequently use carefully detailed lighting effects such as a policeman with a flashlight, or dodgy interiors, such as opium dens, lit atmospherically by a single candle. A popular American crime magazine The National Police Gazette from the turn of the nineteenth century often used shadowy imagery to represent murders and robberies. Books with horrific subject matter could include similar illustrations, as in the shadowy illustrations typically included in editions of books by Edgar Allan Poe. The generic conventions of associating shadows with crime and horror appear to have been widespread in popular culture before the 1920s, and were already well established in Hollywood before the American release of many German film classics later in the decade.67 As mentioned earlier, the evocative shadows associated with the vampire in Murnau’s film are largely due to the art designer Albin Grau’s drawings and occult interests. Some of these drawings were included in Grau’s article published in a special issue of Film-Tribüne to accompany the release of Nosferatu, referred to on that occasion as “the first authentic occult film.” Part of the “occult” was the shadows, which for Grau represented the “dark side of goodness,” and “a visible manifestation of the devil.” Through shadow, wrote Grau, dark and invisible forces become visible, because the shadow represents the evil “other side” of reality.68 As we could see in Chapter 3, Grau’s fascination with cast shadows was not exhausted in Nosferatu, because his next film project, Schatten: Eine Nächtliche Halluzination from 1923, was based entirely around the concept of cast shadows. After Schatten Grau assisted on a number of UFA projects as a set designer, before he withdrew completely into occultism in 1925.

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The suggestiveness and evocativeness of shadows, their elusive “uncanniness,” probably do not require a supernatural explanation. As I argued in Chapter 1, cast shadows automatically attract attention and stimulate the imagination for evolutionary reasons: shadows are indexes of often hidden living beings such as people or animals, whose intentions toward us may not be initially clear. The fact that a detached shadow indicates something that is hidden is in itself a sufficient cause for instinctive and often justified suspicion. This is why a shadow on its own (Figure 1.4) can attract more anxious attention than a shadow that just accompanies a visible object; in the latter case cast shadows are usually simply ignored. This is what we are invited to do when we see Count Orlok carrying his coffin on his way from the ship to his new house in Wisborg. In these exterior shots, often with Gothic architecture in the background, the vampire casts a natural shadow like any other solid object, which as a creature of uncertain ontological status (he is, after all, “undead”) he probably should not do. One suspects that Murnau and his cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner would have preferred to shoot those exterior scenes on an overcast day, which their pressing location schedule probably did not allow. Max Schreck’s natural shadow does not compromise his status as a filmic vampire, however, because these shots, though taken in full daylight, were subsequently tinted blue to indicate the time of night, the only time when one can “logically” expect a vampire to be awake carrying his coffin around rather than sleeping in it in some crypt.

The moral chiaroscuro of Die Nibelungen The medieval myth of the Nibelungs was for centuries of central importance to Germany’s national identity, and since Richard Wagner’s 1876 opera Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) it became one of the country’s most successful cultural exports. In 1924 Fritz Lang screened the mythical story in an unhistorical, sort of late Expressionist, eclectic visual style that successfully matched the barbaric and austere grandeur of the material. It was the film’s esthetic achievement rather than the nationalistic themes and putative political intentions (so admired at the time by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels among others) that explain the film’s immediate success abroad and its later status as a classic of Weimar cinema.69 What has probably dated about Die Nibelungen is Thea von Harbou’s (Lang’s wife) ponderous script with its titanic themes of doomed love, inexorable fate, unrelenting hatred, jealousy, and destructive thirst for power and revenge. What has stood the test of time, however, is Lang’s

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coolly analytic mise-en-scène, the modernist set designs and costumes, as well as spectacular special effects and atmospheric lighting, including a few highly dramatic cast shadows. The film’s stylistic eclecticism includes an inspiration, as suggested by Siegfried Kracauer, of Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), a symbolist Swiss painter famous for his visionary and moody landscapes. The scene in which the heroic Siegfried (Paul Richter) rides on horseback in the artificially built ancient forest of Odenwald may recall Böcklin’s series of paintings on the theme of Great Pan, especially those known as Das Schweigen im Walde (Silence in the Forest).70 By 1924, however, these late Romantic paintings—for all their haunting beauty— had become perceived as rather outmoded and even kitschy. In Lang’s film the sun-streaked, misty forest was built on the grounds of the Neubabelsberg studio, where thick tree trunks were made of wooden frames coated with cement to imitate bark, while real soil and moss were heaped about their roots. The artificial forest was enclosed by a cyclorama which was open only at the point where the camera and lighting equipment were positioned.71 A similar scenery in the Alberich episode with its superb ground mists, whatever its ultimate pictorial inspiration, was apparently achieved almost by accident. Unlike the outdoor-built forest of Odenwald, the exterior scene in which Alberich the Nibelung, hidden under a net of invisibility, tries to strangle Siegfried was shot inside the studio. The dense mist through which the twigs can faintly be distinguished was produced by fire extinguishers. The shooting happened on a hot spring day, and the sunbeams pouring through the glass walls and roof gave the suspended vapor an eerie atmospheric effect. Later Lang tried to repeat the effect but to no avail: in different weather the artificial fog generated by fire extinguishers simply dispersed about the studio.72 As noted by Lotte H. Eisner, for some curious reason the well-balanced, symmetrical, spacious sets of Die Nibelungen have often been regarded as quintessentially Expressionist, probably on account of their fantastic, unhistorical appearance. But in Lang’s film there are none of the Caligaresque distortions of space, false perspectives, and oblique angles. The cinematic space of Die Nibelungen is realistically three-dimensional, with no facades, painted backdrops, or leaning walls that in Dr. Caligari seem to challenge gravity.73 The architectural design of the Burgundian castle for example is founded on massive cubic structures with regular right angles, horizontal and vertical lines, complete with Romanesque arches in its interior spaces to convey a sense of solidity, solemnity, and stateliness, rather than the madness and paranoia usually associated with the Expressionist mise-en-scène.

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Fritz Lang and his architects Otto Hunte and Erich Kettelhut inevitably had gone through the Expressionist stage in their artistic experience, but the only surviving trace of the style in Die Nibelungen is a tendency toward abstraction and stylization of form. Otherwise the film’s décor appears more indebted to popular fantasy art, such as that found in contemporary children’s book illustrations for example, than to avant-garde experimentation.74 The superbly back-lit silhouette of the plain cubic towers of the Burgundian castle is clearly an architectural fantasy, a sort of medieval Bauhaus, pointing also toward the futuristic skyscrapers of Lang’s Metropolis. The equally fantastic castle of the Amazonian queen Brunhild is less refined than its Burgundian counterpart, appearing more like an organic outgrowth of a sharp rock on top of which it rests, than a designed structure. The eclectic collection of architectural forms includes also an oriental-looking fortress of the Hunnish King Etzel. This pagoda-like structure is surrounded by the burrows of earthen dwellings swarming with the king’s uncouth, swarthy subjects and their naked children. The civilized décor of the Burgundian court and the Worms Cathedral, for all their abstract stylization, is ultimately based on classical harmony, balance, and order rather than on Expressionist distortions. The centrally symmetrical framings of static shots frequently emphasize the illusive, as it turns out, stability and permanence of the Burgundian world. Conventional arcades and niches predominate, with static human figures practically framed by them. The figures too become part of the décor, as when the dark silhouettes of knights stand motionlessly in the foreground with their backs to the camera, all dressed in the same geometrically ornamental way, and each identical in posture: one hand on the hilt of the sword, the other holding a shield (Figure  5.18). Behind this palisade of cardboard cutouts of the guards the procession of royals, heroes, and knights slowly and majestically approaches on its way to the cathedral. The monumental stillness and stylization seem to indicate a theatrical, decadent, and overcultured world of the Burgundians which is about to disintegrate.75 In Expressionist films illumination is often low key (the painted light effects of Dr. Caligari notwithstanding), relying on hard, directional lighting and atmospheric chiaroscuro effects. In Die Nibelungen this type of lighting is reserved for the barbaric world of the Huns, while the superior civilization of the Burgundian court is illuminated uniformly in a high-key fashion typical for costume dramas. An example of Expressionist lighting early in the film is a close shot of topless Siegfried forging his sword in the cave of Mime. The slightly low-

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Figure 5.18 Dark silhouettes separate grounds and enhance deep space in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, dir. Fritz Lang (1924).

angle camera position monumentalizes Paul Richter’s body, while the fire from the forge underlights his naked torso, allowing the twinkling flames to play on the musculature of the Germanic super hero. Another feature of Expressionist esthetics is high contrast, which can be used both as a formal element, for example to bring out depth by differentiating tonally between grounds, and as a visual metaphor, to distinguish the brightly lit and clad “good” guys from the swarthy “baddies.” As Siegfried approaches the dragon on his way to Worms, the attached shadows of the foreground trees and the hero’s silhouette are sharply separated from the bright space in the background, creating a powerful graphic effect as well as deepening the mise-en-scène. Costume design (by Paul Gerd Guderian and Aenne Willkom) and makeup also rely on bright/dark contrasts to guide the viewers’ moral sympathies. The villain of the piece, the ever-conniving and power-thirsty Hagen von Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), always wears a dark chain mail and a matching coif to emphasize his militaristic, aggressive intents, which distinguish him at first glance from the fair-haired Siegfried clad in a bright tunic (Figure 5.19).

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Figure 5.19 Tonal contrasts in costume and makeup rather than lighting separate the “good” guys from the “bad” in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, dir. Fritz Lang (1924).

Even Hagen’s facial features, partly concealed by long hair and a beard and disfigured by a fearsome scar on one eye, always remain dark and impenetrable. The physiognomic contrast with Siegfried’s bright, handsome, honest face, additionally adorned by a sexy mop of fair hair, is striking. Similarly the two queens, the Burgundian Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) and the Amazonian Brunhild (Hanna Ralph), clash tonally as well as culturally, politically, and temperamentally. The more civilized and self-controlled fair-haired (those long tresses!) Burgundy is fitted out in bright tones against the more barbaric, feisty, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and darkly dressed Amazonian queen (Figure 5.20). Probably the most abstract example of black-and-white symbolism in Die Nibelungen comes in the form of an animated insert known as “Kriemhild’s Dream of the Falcon.” This piece of animation was devised by Walther Ruttmann, who in 1927 was to make his famous feature-length experimental documentary Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (to be discussed in Chapter 6). More in the style of Ruttmann’s early abstract animated shorts such as Opus I (1921) and Opus II (1922),76 Kriemhild’s dream conveys a premonition of Siegfried’s death by treason during the hunt. In the insert Siegfried is represented by a white falcon, while his adversaries King Gunther and Hagen are symbolized by two

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Figure 5.20 The Burgundian Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) and the Amazonian Brunhild (Hanna Ralph) clash tonally in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, dir. Fritz Lang (1924).

black eagles pecking at the falcon. Interestingly, Ruttmann’s animated sequence is the only truly black-and-white part of Die Nibelungen, because the rest of Lang’s monumental two-part, five-hour-long picture is uniformly tinted yellowy orange. It is tempting to speculate that Lang wanted to keep Ruttmann’s piece of abstract animation black and white to highlight both its inherent visual contrasts and its “dreamy” quality distinct from the rest of the film. Apart from Kriemhild’s dream almost all existing prints of Die Nibelungen are tinted orange (except for some early export prints, which were black and white), although—interestingly—it is not self-evident that the film was tinted at all in its original release. There exists anecdotal evidence that Lang did not approve of tinting in principle. He is reported to deplore especially the awkward practice of shooting night scenes during the day and subsequently tinting them blue. This was an early version of the day-for-night process, in later decades often used in American Westerns for example. For the sake of expediency and greater visibility in the background outdoor sequences would be shot during the day and underexposed (or dimmed in postproduction) to look as if they were taking place at night.77 Often exposing incongruous daylight shadows, the “American night” was just as visually awkward (if easy to shoot) as the blue tinting from the silent era.

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In view of this common practice it is interesting that as early as 1922 Fritz Lang’s cinematographer Carl Hoffmann (who also worked on Die Nibelungen) made a breakthrough by filming some scenes of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler at night, rather than resorting to the standard daytime shooting and blue tinting. The realistic effect was highly praised by the critics.78 The nighttime shooting was also used in Die Nibelungen in the scene of the dreary nocturnal march at Siegfried’s funeral procession, and at the end of the film during the burning of the Hunnish fortress. With the need to vary the tinting according to the time of action (typically, yellow for the day, blue for the night) thus eliminated, the entire film (again, except for Kriemhild’s dream) could now receive a uniform orange tint, which is what the latest restoration of Die Nibelungen by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung from 2010 has done, on the assumption that this was most likely Lang’s original idea. The consistent orange tint includes even the spectacular final conflagration of the Hunnish fortress, a scene that would more typically be tinted red, as in the fire of the Jewish ghetto in Der Golem from only two years earlier. The warm, sepia-like orange tint certainly contributes to the antique look of the tragic heroic saga. It also helps reduce hard tonal contrasts often produced by the low-sensitivity film emulsions of the early 1920s. The color of the tint extended the grayscale and produced a kind of polychromatic effect, rendering the tonality of the natural world more finely and more realistically. In a tinted film white looks less bright and black less dark. When the eye is less shocked by the sharp contrast between white and black parts of the screen, it can pick up the intermediate tones more easily. Used in an original and judicial way color tinting thus becomes an integral part of the film’s visual esthetics. Die Nibelungen was, it is assumed, uniformly tinted orange also because nighttime shooting in some scenes eliminated the need for blue tint. Except for Kriemhild’s dream (which as a piece of abstract animation looks different anyway) the awkward clashes between different tints could thus be avoided.79 Much as the film’s symbolism depends on visual juxtapositions, Lang could afford to use uniform tinting to reduce general contrast also because the elements of the set design, costume, and makeup contain enough tonal differences to convey the necessary symbolic connotations. Occasional cast shadows could also be easily created by carefully placed directional sources of light. When Siegfried puts on the net of invisibility to secretly substitute King Gunther in the heroic tasks (stone hurl, distant jump, and spear throw) stipulated by the Amazon Queen, his shadow remains visible on the ground to indicate his actual physical presence and agency in the execution of the tasks. For his part, the unmanly King Gunther (Theodor Loos) can only react to Brunhild’s taunts by raising his clenched fist in helpless anger, because he knows that without

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Siegfried’s help he could not win the fiery Amazon Queen. The insubstantial shadow of Gunther’s fist bouncing off Brunhild’s sturdy shield aptly illustrates the king’s powerlessness and ineffectuality. Probably the most powerful cast shadow in Die Nibelungen belongs to the chief villain and Siegfried’s murderer Hagen. After Siegfried’s body is laid on the floor to be mourned by the Burgundian court, at first the only person absent is his murderer. The suspense lasts until Hagen finally makes his appearance, emerging slowly and defiantly in the doorway, preceded by the enlarged shadow of his formidable feathered helmet. The public accusation that Kriemhild utters on this occasion, literally pointing her finger at Hagen, paves the way for part II of Lang’s epic film, Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge). It begins with a symmetrically framed tableau vivant of the vault containing Siegfried’s sarcophagus flanked by female mourners, with Kriemhild at the top center. Bright light seems to be emanating from within the sarcophagus, forming Kriemhild’s shadow on the wall high behind her, as if to mark the emergence of the Queen’s “dark side”—her steely determination to avenge at all cost the death of her beloved Siegfried (Figure 5.21). From this moment on the merciless

Figure 5.21 Kriemhild’s shadow formed by light emanating from Siegfried’s sarcophagus in Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge), dir. Fritz Lang (1924).

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Kriemhild is often accompanied by her shadow as she begins implementing her deadly long-term plan, first by entering into strategic negotiations to marry Etzel, king of the Huns, who would give her political leverage and military might necessary to carry out the revenge. She now also wears an inky cloak of mourning, which contrasts sharply with the melancholy wintry landscape. As the action moves to the barbaric fortress of King Etzel, the high-key illumination that accompanied the superior civilization of the Burgundians is replaced by dimmer, directional lighting, often suggested by naked fires that provide light and warmth in the confined, cavernous abodes of the primitive Huns. Low-key lighting naturally produces numerous cast shadows, especially visible in close shots. In this part of the film shadows tend to be atmospheric rather than symbolic; they are just part of the dark, barbaric world of the Huns. In the inner chambers of the fortress sharp shadows and backlighting also provide texture and enhance a sense of depth by separating grounds. When the all-out indoor battle erupts in King Etzel’s fortress between the Huns (outside) and the invited Burgundians (trapped inside), the commotion is amplified by the fighters’ shadows reflected on the rough-surfaced walls (Figure 5.22). The dynamic, fast-edited, dramatically well-structured, and

Figure 5.22 The commotion amplified by the fighters’ shadows reflected on the rough-surfaced walls in Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Kriemhild’s Revenge), dir. Fritz Lang (1924).

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suspenseful (very Griffithian) battle scenes that follow offer an exciting change to the operatic stillness of most of the first four hours of Lang’s mega film. In the Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) of the ultimate conflagration almost everyone of note dies (except King Etzel, although he loses his little son) as a result of fraternal feuding. The casualties include those directly responsible for Siegfried’s death, those avenging it but also indirectly responsible, and those, like the Huns, instrumentally caught in-between the warring sides. In a spectacular example of nighttime filming the burning down of the fortress was shot at dusk to expose both the bright flames and the black smoke billowing against the gray sky, without the need to resort to red tinting, as would typically have been the case in filming fires. Over ninety years after its release, the esthetic and technical achievements of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, the swan song of Weimar cinematic Expressionism, still impress and amaze.

Herr Tartüff, or shadows by candlelight After the success of Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) in 1924 (see Chapter 6) Friedrich W. Murnau was already working on Faust when he was sidetracked to make a film version of Molière’s play Tartuffe from 1664, a satire on stupidity, credulity, religious hypocrisy, and greed. Molière’s classic comedy was freely rewritten by the scriptwriter Carl Mayer into a Kammerspiel (chamber play), a cinematic genre that emphasized intimate psychological relations among a few characters in sparse décor and atmospheric lighting. Mayer also added a framing device to parallel the main plot: a modern story of a greedy housekeeper (Rosa Valetti), a Tartuffe-like hypocrite, who conspires to swindle her credulous aging employer (Hermann Picha) out of his fortune. To do this she needs to persuade him to disown his grandson, an actor by profession, by insinuating that he is leading a life of dissipation and debauchery. After the film’s release in 1925 German reviewers dismissed the framing story as clumsy, something unnecessarily tacked on, and many years later even the film historian Lotte H. Eisner called the framing device faintly ridiculous and utterly pointless.80 Today, however, it is possible to see that the two story lines offered Murnau and his collaborators an opportunity to experiment with different visual styles, including contrasting lighting techniques. The framing device also allowed Murnau to introduce a meta-cinematic element: the Tartuffe story is technically presented as a film screened by Wanderkino (touring cinema), popular at European fairs and marketplaces in the early twentieth century.81 In

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Herr Tartüff the screening, organized by the actor-grandson (André Mattoni) in disguise, takes place in the old man’s house. The didactic film-within-a-film is designed to expose the housekeeper’s greed, deception, and murderous intents (she is in fact planning to poison her employer). In an interview published in 1929 in the Close Up magazine, the cinematographer Karl Freund commented on the different styles used in the two stories: “The beginning and the end I took in the modern style, allowing the artist no make-up, and using ‘angles’; while the middle section is in soft focus, gauzed and artificial.” Much of the central portion of Herr Tartüff was indeed shot through gauze, which produced a misty, delicate, and ethereal “retro” look. On the other hand the “angles” refer to a number of unusually framed Expressionist shots, like the one showing a distorted reflection in a brass pitcher of Orgon (Werner Krauss), hiding behind the curtain to eavesdrop on a conversation between his wife and Tartuffe. The screenwriter Carl Mayer also had in mind different styles for the two stories: “a cruelly realistic and un-made-up style for the modern sequences, and an unreal, Watteauesque style for the Tartuffe sequences.”82 Put differently, the modern framing story appears to have been shot in the New Objectivity style emerging in the mid-1920s, best represented by the melodramas of Georg W. Pabst, the social-realist films of Gerhard Lamprecht, and the urban thrillers of Fritz Lang. On the other hand the Tartuffe story offers an Expressionist take on the eighteenth-century world with its rococo costumes and furniture, atmospherically lit by candles and candelabrums. Apart from candles, the visual element that unites the two stories is a sepia tint, which in addition to reducing tonal contrasts gives the entire film a warm, nostalgic feel of an old photo album. Even the vaguely modern framing story appears outdated by the standards of mid-1920s, with its old-fashioned bourgeois apartment still firmly set at the time before gas or electric lighting. The doorbell is pulled by hand, and the implied sources of light are candles and petroleum lamps. When the touring-cinema projectionist draws the curtains before the screening, he leaves a single candle to illuminate the room now transformed into a private cinema. The candlelight (in reality an electric spotlight) casts the shadows of the two viewers, the old man and the housekeeper, onto a curtain behind them. As the projectionist blows out the candle, the light coming from the projector casts its own cinematic shadows onto the screen. Interestingly, the first shot of the film-within-a-film offers a close-up of an old-fashioned candelabrum with as many as ten candles just being lit for the evening in Orgon’s house. Candles as a visual motif and as putative sources of light thus provide a bridge between the two stories, whereby the dimmed light of the screening

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scene in the modern apartment paves the way for the chiaroscuro lighting dominating in the Tartuffe story. While the studio sets in both stories are of course lit electrically, considerable care is taken to make the scenery look as if it was actually illuminated by candles. Frequent cast shadows on the one hand offer a realistic sense of life after dark in a preelectric age, and on the other hand create some of the most dramatic shots of the film. Candles are not only a permanent element of the eighteenth-century miseen-scène; they also become a moral issue. The bigoted Orgon decides that artificial light is a sinful luxury and vain extravagance, and orders his servants to extinguish all candles in the house (he subsequently also fires his servants as another sinful extravagance). As Orgon announces his inspired decision standing theatrically at the top of the stairs, his enlarged shadow cast by a few remaining candles reveals the dark double of a fool possessed by religious mania (Figure 5.23). The Rembrandtesque tenebroso that subsequently descends on Orgon’s house coincides with the arrival, at night, of the hypocritical Tartuffe, a sworn enemy of light and joy (or so Orgon thinks). For a time the entire house seems to be illuminated by a single candle carried by a curious maid, whose healthy skepticism about Tartuffe appears as the only

Figure 5.23 Orgon’s theatrical shadow projects the bigoted folly of an otherwise decent character in Herr Tartüff, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1925).

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light of common sense in a house darkened by religious madness (Figure 5.24). When Tartuffe (Emil Jannings) finally makes his official entrée in the morning, he majestically walks down the stairs reading a (presumably religious) book, seemingly oblivious to all the worldly things around him. Notwithstanding his insistence on starting the day with a prayer, we quickly see him devouring voraciously the copious meal served him by the host. The sorry spectacle of Tartuffe’s blatant hypocrisy and Orgon’s equally blatant gullibility lasts through the day. Orgon’s wife, Elmire (Lil Dagover), can only watch with growing distress and disbelief her husband’s stupidity in pampering the impostor. As darkness descends again on Orgon’s house, suggestive chiaroscuro lighting exposes Tartuffe’s shadow as a sign of the prosaic truth hidden during the day behind a duplicitous mask (Figure 5.25). The dark double follows Tartuffe as he sneaks out of his room for a secret tryst with Elmire (arranged by her to prove to Orgon what a scoundrel Tartuffe is), while the snooping maid sees only a mysterious detached shadow of a man stealing into her lady’s chamber. When the private screening of the Tartuffe film comes to an end, the projectionist lights the candle to highlight the film’s moral: to recognize cheats and hypocrites for what they are. Blinded by sudden light the housekeeper grimaces awkwardly, betraying a maliciousness normally hidden behind an obsequious smile. Light can

Figure 5.24 A candle carried by a skeptical maid as the only light of reason in a house darkened by religious mania in Herr Tartüff, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1925).

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Figure 5.25 Duplication as duplicity: the hypocritical Tartuff (Emil Jannings) and his shadow in Herr Tartüff, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1925).

be a bringer of truth in Murnau’s film, but it can also conceal reality by allowing the characters to hide their evil intentions and put on deceptive “daylight” personalities. In the morning the housekeeper pulls the curtains to flood the old man’s bedroom with light, only to continue her sleazy spectacle of pretended care and tenderness. Tartuffe begins his day by a show of piety before graciously condescending to devour a lavish breakfast laid out for him by fawning Orgon. The master of the house becomes effectively his guest’s slave, gently swinging his hammock and chasing away the flies that disturb Tartuffe’s leisurely nap in the garden. Only in the darkness of the night does the truth about Tartuffe’s duplicitous character come out in the form of his shadow, just as the darkness of the old man’s house and the shadows on the screen expose the housekeeper’s sinister intentions.

Candlelight as realism: Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend Murnau’s candlelight Expressionism in Herr Tartüff produces shadows that can be interpreted not just stylistically, as part of the film’s early modern décor, but also symbolically, as expressions of the characters’ hypocritically concealed (Tartuffe)

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or unconsciously repressed (Orgon) selves. In this Murnau’s film has much in common with Arthur Robison’s Schatten made two years earlier, except that in the latter film the characters’ shadows do not just suggest the hidden passions but are allowed, in the imbedded shadow play, to dominate their owners’ daytime personalities and to act out their destructive potentials. Murnau’s and Robison’s achievements in using cast shadows to deepen the characters’ psychology were an exception rather than the norm in early Weimar cinema. In more conventional costume dramas shadows produced by candlelight were more often than not just a part of the stories’ historic realism than vehicles for symbolism. A good case in point is Curt Goetz’s biopic Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend (Friedrich Schiller, the Poet as a Young Man) from 1923, which aims primarily at a faithful recreation of the early life of the Romantic poet against the realities of late eighteenth-century Germany. This historic approach is manifest first of all in the use of actual outdoor locations in and around Stuttgart, including historic buildings and palaces, courtyards, narrow streets lined with half-timbered houses, the countryside, and so on. The film’s realism also includes an attempt to use studio electric light to imitate the atmosphere of early modern candlelit interiors.83 In a typical example, inside a warmly lit wine cellar a spotlight from below right off the camera casts an enlarged shadow of one of the revellers on the wall, imitating the effect of a candle placed on the table (Figure 5.26). According to Patrick Keating, similar compositional strategy was utilized at the time in Hollywood in more stylized productions, such as Maurice Tourneur’s The Last of the Mohicans from 1920, in which characters are seen grouped around a table with a hidden light source in the middle. Keating suggests that such atmospheric shots were inspired by the chiaroscuro effects found in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings by George de La Tour (1593–1652) and Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97).84 In Goetz’s film the pictorial effect is additionally reinforced by the warm and cozy orange tint. In other scenes candlelight combined with the blue tint conventionally signals the time of night. For example, as one of the boys from the military dormitory emerges from behind the door, a sudden flash of spotlight produces a less than fully convincing impression that the scene is actually lit by the candle the boy is holding in his hand. A similarly awkward effect is produced when the steward, alarmed by the commotion in the boys’ bedroom, appears on the stairs carrying a lamp. It is all too evident that the steward’s shadow is produced not by the lamp but by a spotlight cast on the figure from the left off the camera. For all the insistence

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Figure 5.26 A spotlight from below right casts a shadow on the wall, imitating the effect of a candle placed on the table in the film Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend (Friedrich Schiller, the Poet as a Young Man), dir. Curt Goetz (1923).

on period realism, the nocturnal effects in Friedrich Schiller appear much less convincing than in Herr Tartüff, where the moving shadow of the maid walking up the stairs is perfectly consistent with the light of the candle she is holding in her hand (Figure 5.24). In Goetz’s film on the other hand cast shadows, especially of moving figures, often do not correspond with candles or lamps placed in the scene, but are typically created by offscreen spotlights. The results can be not only dubiously realistic but also incoherent (Figure 5.27). Only occasionally, when both the candles and the actors are stationary, was it possible to align the spotlight so as to create an impression that the shadow is actually produced by the candle as part of the mise-en-scène. Equally awkward are occasional moments of blowing out the candle, when the action is not in perfect sync with the off-flick of the spotlight switch. By comparison, in Gerhard Lamprecht’s contemporary social drama Unter der Laterne (Under the Lantern) from 1928, the symbolic act of extinguishing the candle at the beginning of erotic intimacy is perfectly synchronized with the off-switch of electric studio light. The close-up of the girl’s hand smothering the flame to invite suggestive darkness is one of the dramatic turning points of the film.

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Figure 5.27 Incoherent shadow produced by a spotlight in the film Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend (Friedrich Schiller, the Poet as a Young Man), dir. Curt Goetz (1923).

The dramatic climax of Friedrich Schiller is the première of the poet’s first play Die Räuber (The Robbers), historically taking place in Mannheim in 1782. Before the performance the usher illuminates the stage in an eighteenth-century fashion, by igniting candles placed behind semicircular screens hiding the footlights along the front of the stage. (In the early nineteenth-century theater candles would be replaced by gaslight.85) It is clear in Goetz’s film that the footlights hide electric lamps rather than candles, but the illusion is convincing enough. In a close shot of the stage narrow streaks of smoke are even seen rising from the “candles” concealed in the footlights. On the stage real smoke also rises above the robbers’ campfire, while the electric lamp concealed inside the fire illuminates the theatrical set with a Caravaggio-style chiaroscuro. Unlike the better-known Herr Tartüff and Schatten, Friedrich Schiller is not essentially an Expressionist film, despite the use of low-key lighting techniques to imitate candlelight in some interior scenes. Goetz’s film has little of the Stimmung, the atmosphere of mystery, fear, or foreboding usually associated with the Expressionist style. As a biopic the film is more indebted to popular costume dramas of the Madame Dubarry type than to Expressionist fantasies.

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It belongs to films set in a clearly defined historic moment rather than in some unidentified semi-mythical past, and it aims more at realism than at mood or mystery. The use of directional single-source illumination to imitate candlelight is less a stylistic and even less a symbolic device, but rather an attempt, not always fully successful as we could see, to render certain material details of life in a preelectric age with historic accuracy.

Smoke, light, and darkness in Faust There are probably as many different cinematic Expressionisms as there are films and directors, just as every Expressionist painter offered his own individual version, some more radical than others, of a departure from centuries-old tradition of realism in art. In practice Expressionist painting extended from stylized figurativeness such as that found in the landscapes, interior scenes, and portraits of Max Beckmann, August Macke, or Erich Heckel, to nonfigurative abstractions found in the Cubist compositions of Franz Marc or Wassily Kandinsky.86 Expressionism was more a matter of artistic attitude than of uniformity of style, and as a form of individual expression it naturally meant different things to different artists. It also denoted being different not only from academic realism but also from French Impressionism, which to the Expressionist artists had evidently not departed far enough from traditional figurative painting. Expressionism also meant being trendy, provocative, and cool. Like all avant-garde and experimental movements, Expressionism was indeed just play, Spielerei, in Dr. Mabuse’s dismissive remark about the elusiveness and pretentiousness of contemporary artistic debates. From a historic perspective probably only Dr. Caligari remains consistently Expressionist in the classic sense, while in other films of the early Weimar period Expressionism remains a personal, often idiosyncratic stylistic choice to be combined with older, more conventional influences and inspirations. In Nosferatu the occult shadows merge with the Gothic and Biedermeier styles of the architecture and interior design, as well as with the Romantic landscape painting that inspired the outdoor scenes. In Herr Tartüff the Expressionist chiaroscuro produced by candlelight coexists with the French rococo. In Murnau’s Faust (1926) in turn the dominant style is one of unhistorical medievalism popular in the Weimar period, with Expressionist accents recognized in dynamic frame compositions, in the play of light and shadow, and—uniquely in the Murnau canon—in the generous use of smoke, fog, mists, and clouds for stylistic and

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symbolic purposes. Smoke and fog are manifestations of the air—a ubiquitous but normally invisible element—which in Murnau’s film acquires a life of its own, becoming revealed to our eyes as a dramatic element of space. Murnau’s smoky Expressionism applied to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s morality tale remains one of the most memorable and esthetically impressive features of the director’s last German film. Billowing, formless dark clouds that almost look like abstract animation bring the viewer through the “portals of darkness” (die Pforten der Finsternis of the opening title) into a cosmic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Out of the dark smoke emerge the phantom Horsemen of the Apocalypse chasing across the dark sky and bringing famine and death to mankind. The fact that both the riders and the horses are actually stiffly animated puppets (one of them is a skeleton wielding a scythe) only emphasizes their spectral, unnatural character. In another “animated” image a hazy circle of light rises like the sun, growing bigger and bigger and radiating light that finally breaks through the prevailing darkness. A shaft of light penetrates the cloudy darkness and dazzles an almost puppet-like figure of the horned and winged Satan (Emil Jannings), all black except for fiercely gleaming eyes. In this way at the start of Faust abstract darkness assumes an anthropomorphic form and so does brightness: out of the cosmic light emerges Satan’s counterpart, the white winged angel of Christian folklore, who accuses his enemy of bringing war, plague, and famine to mankind. For the first time in Murnau’s films light and darkness not just assume stylistic and dramatic significance, but become part of the story’s metaphysical and theological dimension. The cosmic confrontation between good and evil is summed up in a characteristic Murnau composition, with the dark silhouette below in the foreground and a bright figure diagonally above in the background (Figure 5.28). The tonal contrast creates deep dramatic space by increasing the distance between the devil and the angel. The angel’s elevated position both emphasizes his comparative importance in the larger scheme of things and anticipates his ultimate victory in the cosmic moral battle. In other words, light high up will triumph, while darkness down below will be defeated. The metaphysical chiaroscuro is also emphasized by the fact that Murnau’s Faust (like his Der letzte Mann from the previous year) dispenses entirely with tinting, so often used in the films of the early 1920s, including some by Murnau as we could see. The domestic edition of Faust, restored by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung in 2006, presents the cosmic battle for Faust’s soul in superbly panchromatic, silky black-and-white imagery, a perfect vehicle both for the symbolic opposition

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Figure 5.28 Satan’s self-shadow separates grounds in the cosmic confrontation between good and evil in Faust, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1926).

between light and darkness and for the smoky Expressionism as the film’s dominant style.87 A transition from the celestial-metaphysical to the earthly practical sphere takes the form of a cloud of bright smoke billowing against a dark background. When the smoke blows away it reveals the old Faust holding a large book and lecturing to his disciples in a darkened room à la Rembrandt (Figure 5.29), illuminated only by the light emanating from a bright globe, a model of the cosmos, placed in the middle of the room (Figure 5.30). The second brightest object in the room is the figure of Faust, the mediator of divine knowledge, while his disciples remain in ignorant semidarkness or as complete self-shadows. In the early part of the film practically every shot also includes clouds of smoke moving across the scene, sometimes for no dramatic or logical reason (nothing seems to be burning), but purely for stylistic consistency it would seem. Apart from smoke, twinkling light is often projected onto a scene, so that even when the camera and the figures remain static, the shot appears dynamic and energized, as if the smoke and the play of light betrayed some ubiquitous supernatural presence. For example, Faust’s alchemical study is mysteriously and dimly lit by

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Figure 5.29 Faust, etching by Rembrandt van Rijn, c. 1652.

the fire coming both from the kiln and from a large glass sphere, which sparkles and pulsates with light. The flickering flames underlight Faust’s face, creating an almost diabolical effect. The rest of Faust’s study, with books piled up along the walls, is shrouded in semidarkness by the ever-present clouds of dust and smoke produced by a candle or the fire place. The resulting glimmering shadows and chiaroscuro patches of light on the dark wall add mystery to Faust’s cavelike study, with its books and strange instruments of prescientific, semi-magical

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Figure 5.30 Faust (Gösta Ekman) and his disciples: chiaroscuro lighting à la Rembrandt in Faust, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1926).

experiments. The old Faust (the young Swedish actor Gösta Ekman after an excellent makeup job) wears an impressive patriarchal mane of bright hair and a long beard, which contrast with his dark cloak. Above the skyline of a medieval town dimly lit by the full moon the night clouds appear to be unmoving, but the streaks of smoke rising from the chimneys animate the studio model and provide another formal link with the unfolding smoke-filled cosmic drama. Dark or bright clouds, fog, mist, or sooty smoke are everywhere in the early part of the film: in Faust’s study, in the streets and lanes of the plague-stricken town, and high up in the supernatural world where smoke seems inseparable from Satan’s presence. To achieve this smoky effect Murnau reportedly instructed the studio workers to burn strips of unwanted nitrate film and waft the fumes toward the action.88 Billowing smoke on its own also appears as a transition device, to separate the scenes, like the plain black screen used in films from later periods. The smoky Expressionism of the plague sequence culminates in one of the most memorable images of Weimar cinema: the gigantic figure of Satan hovering over and dwarfing the idyllic small town, his enormous black wings

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Figure 5.31 The gigantic shadow of Satan’s wings spreads over the town, bringing pestilence in Faust, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1926).

slowly covering the sky and eclipsing the sun, casting a large shadow that gradually moves across the rooftops (Figure 5.31). The small streaks of bright smoke rising from the chimneys—a sign of peaceful domesticity—are entirely smothered by thick clouds of soot emanating from Satan’s belly and infecting the town with pestilence. Soon everything is engulfed with almost complete death-like darkness. During the filming of this famous shot Emil Jannings had to stand for several hours on a metal grid above the model of the town, while his dark cloak was blown aloft by powerful electric fans and clouds of soot were pumped out from beneath his feet. Apparently neither Jannings nor the technicians were amused. Only Murnau, pleased with the effect, seemed unperturbed by the dirt and discomfort. After the shoot he simply discarded his blackened overall and mildly rebuked the grumblers by saying, “If it’s too much for you, don’t bother to come.”89 The plague was added to the Faust story by the script writer Hans Kyser to give Faust a clear and unselfish moral reason for involving Satan: Faust contacts the evil powers to save the people, whereas in the classic dramatic versions of the story by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Faust is

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seeking supernatural knowledge for vaguely intellectual and even hedonistic reasons. Besides, the plague and its effects offer more opportunities for cinematic expression than abstract intellectual debates. In the film the sudden arrival of the plague causes panic in the town now filled with dirty smoke blown around by a strong wind. The air, already visible by the presence of smoke and now turning into a fierce and destructive element by the power of the wind, is constantly moving and vibrating, so that even in static shots the mise-en-scène is always unnervingly energized. The directional, low-key lighting creates a rapidly changing and pulsating pattern of dynamic chiaroscuro effects as a reflection of spreading panic, chaos, and hysteria. A fervent call to “repent, fast and pray!” is redoubled by shadows of the cross and the preacher’s dramatically raised hand. The ubiquitous smoke is a constant reminder of the plague which, as was always suspected, was carried by air and wind. A link between the dark smoke, the plague, and the evil powers is finally driven home by an image of Satan’s black gigantic face superimposed on the nocturnal sky over the devastated town. Expressionist lighting that makes the smoke look so dramatic can also create spatial texture and plasticity to enhance the three-dimensionality of the scenery. In an amazing feat of inventive lighting, staging, and cinematography Murnau and his cameraman Carl Hoffmann managed to create an impressive sense of deep dramatic space, fifteen years before Orson Welles and Gregg Toland perfected this technique in Citizen Kane. In Faust several shots offer a compelling sense of depth by sharply differentiating between grounds with relative sizes of objects and contrasting lighting, while keeping all objects and figures within the frame in sharp focus. In one Wellesian avant la lettre shot the foreground is dominated by a dark silhouette of unnaturally enlarged feet of a plague victim, with the victim’s shadowed face in the middle ground, and the approaching hooded attendants carrying torches in the background. In this shot darkness corresponds with the dead while light is associated with the still living hooded figures as they move gravely toward the prostrate victim, linking the three grounds and increasing a sense of dramatic space. As one of the attendants covers the victim’s face with a black cloth, another does the same with the camera—as if drawing the curtain on the scene and implicating the viewer as the next possible victim. In another deep-space shot the foreground reveals a face in profile of a prostrate woman, stricken with the plague but still alive, which is why her emaciated face is clearly sculpted with moderate light. The woman’s daughter, still alive and well, is brightly lit in the middle ground, while Faust, summoned by the girl to cure her sick mother, is emerging from a Rembrandtesque dark background, his figure growing bigger and bigger to indicate the girl’s increasing

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hope, false as it turns out, of saving her mother’s life. It is the failure to save his people from the plague that finally persuades Faust to seek supernatural aid by invoking Satan. Depressed by his powerlessness Faust burns his now useless books, creating yet more smoke and dust in the process. The only book that the old sage saves from combustion is a hefty tome on necromancy, half burned and smoky as Faust pulls it from the fire. The fateful instructions on how to conjure up the Spirit of Darkness contained in the book direct Faust to a Romantic moonlit landscape covered with dark, contorted, barren trees wrapped in slowly moving mist. The full moon is not only a magical prerequisite for communicating with Satan; it also provided Murnau with an opportunity to play with light and shadow in an otherwise nocturnal exterior scene. The Romantic landscape soon turns into a fantastic and magical one after Faust draws a circle of fire, like Rabbi Löw in Der Golem, to invoke the evil spirit. The three riders of the Apocalypse from the beginning of the film now reappear chasing across the night sky. Other manifestations of demonic presence include a sudden gust of powerful wind, flashes of lightning zigzagging across the dark sky, and a fall of a shining comet that crashes onto the earth with a fiery explosion. Out of the flames emerges a figure of Mephisto (Emil Jannings again) dressed modestly as a peddler (or a holy man) in dark clothes, sitting in semi-shadow with only his eyes gleaming spookily. Smoke is again associated with this unassuming looking Spirit of Darkness: as he unfolds the Devil’s contract before the astounded Faust, the smoke rising from the page gradually reveals the lettering with its message of renouncing God and accepting Satan as the ruler of the world. The newly acquired demonic powers nonetheless prove futile in Faust’s attempt to save more plague victims. The cross held by one of the sick seems to emit a light of its own, casting a shadow on Faust’s hand and holding it back. Tainted by black magic, Faust cannot now touch the cross itself but only its insubstantial shadowy emanation. Faust’s failure to cure his people proves to be one of the turning points in the film. The superstitious folk suddenly lose all their faith in the old sage and attempt to stone him. The outcast Faust finds escape in Mephisto-assisted time-and-space travel which takes him, now rejuvenated, far out into the outside world in search of pleasures. The famous sequence of Faust’s airborne travel on Mephisto’s cape was filmed in a hangar specially built for the purpose, with a model town complete with rooftops, church spires, palaces, treetops, mountain peaks, rivers and waterfalls, sea coast with a sail ship, clouds of fog, a flock of fantastic reptile birds flying amid dark clouds, and a lot else. The widely held view that the “flying” camera effect was

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inspired by Murnau’s wartime experience as a pilot is highly plausible. In the early days of aviation very few people knew what it looked and felt like to fly low over rooftops and treetops at moderate (by today’s standards) speed that actually allowed one to contemplate the landscape below.90 In Murnau’s film the modern airplane replaced, as a source of inspiration for this moving shot, “the chariot of cloud that carried me / Gently through sunlit skies, and over land and sea” from Goethe’s play.91 Up to this moment in Faust the camera has been stationary, all the movement within the frame being generated by human figures, billowing clouds of smoke, and flickering shadows. The magic flight sequence on the other hand seems to reveal Murnau’s desire to explore the possibilities of a mobile camera, which had its big-screen debut in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) two years earlier. For the night-flight effect in Faust a miniature roller coaster was constructed, allowing Carl Hoffmann to move along the entire length of the elaborate model landscape inspired, according to Siegfried Kracauer, by the work of the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Altdorfer.92 Bird’s-eye views of the landscape slipping underneath are intercut with the image of Mephisto and Faust standing on the magic cape and pushing their way through the intermittently bright and dark clouds, while down below white fog is rising along the rocky mountain tops. As a low-flying airplane of the kind used in the First World War would do in clear weather, the airborne companions in Murnau’s film cast their own gigantic shadows on the landscape under their feet. The lengthy air journey makes no substantial contribution to the plot, and is perhaps best understood as a pure celebration of cinema technology and an exploration of the medium for its own sake.93 Its purpose is clearly to mark a thematic transition from the story of the plague at the time of Faust’s old age to the tragic love story of young Faust and Gretchen played by Camilla Horn. The Gretchen story is stylistically different: it takes place mostly during the day, the scenes are shot using high-key lighting, and the only play of light and shadow is Impressionistic rather than Expressionistic, as when the sun pours in through cottage windows to create dappled patterns of light on walls. Otherwise sharp visual contrasts are avoided, gone is the mysterious and disquieting chiaroscuro of the plague sequence, and the full panchromatic grayscale seems to leave little to the imagination. While earlier darkness and smoke conveyed a sense of doom and death, now the brightness and clarity of the Gretchen sequence connote life, youth, purity, and innocence. The recurring scenes of children playing in the garden, with the maternal Gretchen in the middle, probably looked a bit too sentimental even at the time of the film’s release. If

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the description of Lotte surrounded by children in Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was authentically moving in 1774, by mid-1920s a picture of a young and pretty (if not necessarily sexy) maternal figure may have become a bit cheesy (it will be repeated in 1927 in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in the scene with Maria in the midst of children). In the Gretchen sequence all figures, including Faust, are dressed in bright, grayish clothes, except of course for Mephisto in his black slicker cape. It is Easter time with its positive, life-affirming connotations and traditional religious customs, which give the simple townsfolk a sense of reassurance and security. The only shadows are natural products of daylight serving a stylistic rather than dramatic or symbolic function: to model the surfaces of bodies and objects. In contrast to the plague sequence the air is clear, transparent, and wholesome. For the moment the only Expressionist element is suggested by the crooked and steep roofs of the cottages, clearly an echo from Dr. Caligari, which incline unsettlingly in anticipation of Gretchen’s “fall.” The transition into the Gretchen story thus separates the Expressionist drama of the plague from the Impressionist melodrama of doomed love, a shift supported by a stylistic change from the low-key “smoky” nocturnal chiaroscuro of the first part to the high-key diurnal small-town idyll (about to be disturbed by uncontrollable sexual desire) of the second part. Both stylistically and thematically therefore the two parts of Faust look really like two different films. The story of Faust’s seduction of Gretchen, paralleled by a farcical chase of Mephisto by the sexually aroused Aunt Marthe (Yvette Guilbert), brings the brightness of the day to a close. The night that witnesses the loss of Gretchen’s innocence also brings back the shadows and a more Expressionist townscape in anticipation of disaster. When a long detached human shadow wearing “horns” slowly approaches Gretchen’s cottage in the dark, we first expect it to belong to Faust as the girl’s lover, until the shadow’s owner is revealed as Mephisto, the verfluchte Kuppler (the cursed matchmaker). The image of Faust slowly pushing open a small window to Gretchen bedroom, with the girl too weak or too unwilling to resist the forceful entry, is a surprisingly bold and graphic culmination of the doomed love story. The violent developments that follow are heralded by a return to Expressionist effects in the cellar scene, where Gretchen’s brother, Valentin (Wilhelm Dieterle), is drinking with his merry company. The cavernous interior and the shapes of enormous wine barrels are visibly distorted, while a few candles in the foreground cast an enlarged shadow of Mephisto on the back wall. When Mephisto publicly divulges the loss of Gretchen’s honor, literally all hell breaks

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loose. A sudden gust of strong wind creates havoc in town in the middle of the night, bringing with it a social pestilence of shame, anger, violence, and death, when Mephisto treacherously drives his sword through Valentin’s back, and Gretchen’s mother dies from shock. The peaceful town is awakened in horror and panic by Mephisto’s cries of “murder,” reminiscent of a similar development in Dr. Caligari. Faust and Mephisto escape through the night sky amid billowing dark clouds, while the disgraced Gretchen is rejected by her family, publicly condemned and pilloried. In the final sequence the smoky Expressionism returns with full force as a style seemingly inseparable from tragedy in Murnau’s film. During the wake of the bodies of the two victims of Faust’s peccadillo the church is dense with incense. As the cheerful summer gives way to melancholy winter the falling snow restores the air, otherwise transparent, as a visible element. The deadly blizzard that the outcast Gretchen and her illegitimate child are exposed to offers the equivalent of the earlier pestilential dark smoke. Every time the air is made visible through smoke, clouds, fog, incense, or snow it does not just enhance the visual effect; it becomes a dramatic accompaniment of some calamity. The final display of Murnau’s smoky Expressionism comes in the scene when Gretchen, the alleged child murderer, is burned at the stake. The scene takes place at night to allow torches and firelights to create, in combination with the dark sky and snowy ground, the chiaroscuro setting suitable for the tragedy. With Faust now back to witness Gretchen’s death, the billowing smoke with which the film began now engulfs the two fated lovers. They subsequently ascend to heaven against the background of the radiant sun, while their tragic story confirms the divine message of love revealed in the middle of a cosmic cloud in an animated, almost abstract, image that ends the film.

Vampyr and the esthetics of white Made in France as a German-French collaboration ten years after Nosferatu by a Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr, Der Traum des Allan Gray (Vampire: The Dream of Allan Gray) is indirectly linked to Murnau’s horror classic by way of its literary inspiration. Dreyer’s film is loosely based on a collection of eerie stories entitled In a Glass Darkly (1872) by the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, which later inspired Bram Stoker’s vampire novel Dracula, the literary prototype of Nosferatu. Two of Le Fanu’s stories appear to lie behind the screenplay of Vampyr: the lesbian vampire story Carmilla and The

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Room in the Dragon Volant in which the young protagonist imagines himself buried alive and carried along in a coffin. Notwithstanding these inspirations Dreyer’s film is not an adaptation of any literary source. It borrows some motifs and plot situations from Le Fanu’s stories to create a highly original film in a horror genre popular in the cinema at the turn of the 1920s. More than to its literary source Vampyr seems to be indebted to such contemporary films as Jean Epstein’s poetic screen adaptation of E. A. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), to Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), and to James Whale’s classic Frankenstein (1931) starring Boris Karloff. These commercially successful films were followed by a whole host of vampire-werewolf films in the 1930s and 1940s.94 Unlike its contemporaries in the horror genre, however, Dreyer’s film was not a commercial success, although with time it did acquire a status as an auteur, art-house classic. After the film’s première at the UFA Theater in Berlin on May 6, 1932, Dreyer said that he had wanted to make a film different from other films, to break a new ground for horror cinema. Part of Vampyr’s avantgarde style is its vague plot; unorthodox editing, full of disjunction and spatial dislocation; its seemingly unmotivated but nonetheless unnerving panning and tracking camera movements; its “white” rather than dark visual style; and a sustained subjective point of view—all of which did not necessarily contribute toward narrative coherence. The viewers’ initial reception was, unsurprisingly, mixed. During the opening night in Berlin there was hissing and booing in the audience in equal measure with hurrahs. In Vienna the première caused something of a scandal, when the riotous public demonstrated noisily against the film and stormily demanded their money back, prompting the police to restore order. Vampyr was nonetheless well received in Denmark, Dreyer’s home country, but partly because of the mixed European reception the film was never shown commercially in America. Its cult status grew slowly. In 1972 the master of cinematic horror Alfred Hitchcock called Vampyr the only film worth seeing twice, and the master of cinematic surrealism Luis Buñuel named it as one of his favorite films. Dreyer himself was pleased with the film (he had enjoyed complete artistic control over its production), despite the fact that it was a financial flop and the backers lost nearly all their money on it.95 The mixed reaction to Vampyr may have to do not only with the deliberately disjointed editing but also with the vagueness of the plot. While in Nosferatu the story line, characterization, and themes, for all their poetry, are by and large clear and easy to follow, in Vampyr things often happen without apparent logic, which many viewers found frustrating and confusing. This narrative ambiguity was no doubt intended, a result of a consistently subjective point of view of

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the main protagonist. To emphasize this narrative feature the German release introduced the film as the protagonist’s dream (Der Traum des Allan Gray). The name “Gray” in turn, it has been suggested, may have been a nod toward the occultist Albin Grau (grau means gray in German), the designer and coproducer of Nosferatu and Schatten.96 The titular character was played (rather blandly) by an amateur actor, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg (using the name of Julian West), a young film enthusiast from a wealthy Belgian family, who financed Dreyer’s film with a proviso that he play the lead part. The story of Vampyr is thus an extended day-dream of a young man who, as the opening card explains, “engulfed himself in studies of demonology and vampire lore. Preoccupation with the crazed ideas of past centuries turned him into a dreamer and a fantasist, lost at the border between reality and the supernatural.”97 A dreamer with a passion for the occult in a sense invites the fantastic things that happen to him, and so Vampyr’s disjointed narrative style is essentially a projection of a young man’s overstimulated Romantic imagination fed on occult lore, as he wanders aimlessly by himself through the countryside. The eerie and inexplicable events involving Allan during his chance visit to a secluded riverside inn include shocking encounters with creepy residents and the appearance of menacing shadows cast by other mysterious characters. Indeed, Dreyer’s Vampyr contains some of the spookiest and most surreal cast shadows and light effects found in early horror cinema, a feat no doubt due to the contribution of the cinematographer Rudolf Maté and the art director Hermann Warm (one of the set designers in Dr. Caligari). Things may be happening without apparent narrative logic in Dreyer’s film, but the effect some of them produce—partly perhaps because of the absence of any identifiable dramatic motivation—is truly disquieting. For example, when the young man begins to explore the area around the inn after a night full of bad dreams, he seems to be guided by a mysterious reflection in the surface of the water of an invisible human form moving in dance-like steps along the river bank. We never find out who this figure was, nor does it matter as long as we accept the dreamlike, “anything-goes” logic of the story. Later in a nearby park Allan follows other anthropomorphic, ghost-like shadows skimming across the grass. Especially disturbing is the repeated shot of a shadow cast on the ground by a gravedigger swinging his spade in the air and “undigging” a grave (the effect is achieved by playing the shot in reverse). Interestingly, the spookiest things happen in the film not at night, as in a conventional horror film, but in broad daylight. Dreyer’s originality lies in creating an atmosphere of horror not through darkness and customary low-key

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lighting, but unusually through diffuse, foggy light. This “white” visual style was chosen by Dreyer apparently by accident during location scouting. Like Murnau’s Nosferatu ten year earlier, Dreyer’s fantasy film was shot on real locations which, unlike Nosferatu, included also the interior scenes. Largely because of financial constraints, the entire picture was filmed in real buildings which Dreyer had found in the French countryside. The locations included a dilapidated château at Courtempierre north of Paris, an old windmill, a broken-down icehouse, a fully operative plaster works, a vicarage, and a country tavern.98 It was only natural that the disused windmill, the icehouse, and the plaster factory, by virtue of their original purpose, should create a whitewashed style that makes Dreyer’s film so unusual in the horror canon. Even the shots of open spaces have a peculiarly pictorial, Impressionist quality. Their eerily gray, gauzy, delicate sfumato effect was achieved by Dreyer and Rudolf Maté by covering the camera lens with a piece of silk, which glowed slightly when the sun (or electric light) shone on it.99 This foggy light created a unique style and tone in outdoor spaces, and contributed to the film’s celebrated discomforting and uneasy quality of white in interior scenes. For the critics Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum, The white discomfort in Vampyr leaves the viewer feeling somewhat disoriented, less firmly attached to reality as he usually knows it, and sets up an atmosphere that makes easier the willing suspension of disbelief and the acceptance of the bizarre occurrences of the film as real. There is light, yet the usual feeling of safety and confidence that is present when the surroundings are light is missing, for this is a light that is not light.100

The feeling of “white discomfort” is apparent in several scenes. In a strange building where Allan followed the evil doctor (Jan Hieronimko), shadows detach themselves from mysterious human figures to perform a macabre dance on starkly whitewashed plaster walls. The effect was shot in an abandoned icehouse, which was additionally painted white for this scene. In a climactic episode at the end of the film, when the doctor is trapped in the mill with its white walls, he is buried in an avalanche of white powdery flour (the scene was later cut after an intervention from a German censor who thought it too horrific). In an interview from 1967 Dreyer said that the idea for this scene had come to him when he and his cinematographer had seen a small factory where plaster was reclaimed. The whole interior was white and the workmen were covered in white dust. This gave them the idea of using this sense of whiteness as a stylistic element in the film. Also, while living in Paris at the time of making Vampyr Dreyer could

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Figure 5.32 The detached shadow “re-connects” with the body in Vampyr, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer (1932).

not help being caught up in the excitement and the imagination stimulated by Cubism, Dadaism, surrealism and other artistic “isms” of the period. Dreyer was especially fascinated and influenced by abstract art and, as he admitted in an interview decades later, without at first realizing it in Vampyr he had managed to make an abstract film.101 The whitewashed style which was to give his horror film a unique visual stamp was apparently discovered purely by chance. An important consequence of choosing the white style for a horror film was that shadows obviously project well on white walls—an opportunity exploited with spectacular effect in Dreyer’s film. The viewer shares Allan’s bewilderment at seeing a disembodied shadow of a one-legged man in a soldier’s uniform carrying a rifle, and entering a derelict château (an old mill in reality) through the window and climbing a ladder—one of those unexpected surreal images of no apparent dramatic import. The detached shadow subsequently “re-connects” with the body of a man dosing on a bench (Figures 5.32 and 5.33) before an elaborate tracking shot reveals a weird host of other disembodied puppet-like shadows dancing merrily on walls to the tune of a shadow musical ensemble

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Figure 5.33 The detached shadow now “reconnected” with the body in Vampyr, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer (1932).

(Figure 5.34). This witches’ Sabbath comes to an abrupt halt when the old woman (Henriette Gérard), later identified as the vampire, raises her stick majestically and stills the danse macabre on the walls with a commanding “Ruhe!!!” (Quiet!!!). Following his unconscious wish nourished by occult literature, the young man had entered the realm of shadowy ghosts ruled despotically by a female vampire. It is her who gives poison to the evil doctor to administer it to Léone, the young daughter of the lord of the local manor, to make sure that she commit suicide and consequently suffer eternal damnation. Léone (Sybille Schmitz, the only professional actor in the film) is gravely ill with a mysterious disease that is daily draining her strength away. Her father is shot dead by an assassin revealed only by his shadow, which suggests the involvement of the vampiric old crone and her gang of shadowy ghosts (including the one-legged man with a rifle). The lord of the manor is killed probably because he has guessed the origin of his daughter’s illness: she was the victim of a vampire, whose scary story is recounted in local folklore. The cause of Léone’s illness becomes also apparent to Allan when he opens a parcel left to him by the girl’s father, which

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Figure 5.34 The Sabbath of puppet-like shadows dancing on the wall in Vampyr, dir. Carl Th. Dreyer (1932).

bears the inscription “To be opened upon my death.” The parcel contains an old leather book entitled Die seltsame Geschichte der Vampyre (The Strange Story of the Vampires), with tales of horrific demons that come out of their coffins at full moon to suck blood from children and young people, in order to extend the life span of their own shadowy existence (Schattendasein). Under the influence of a book in his favorite occult genre, Allan realizes that Léone’s illness is somehow connected with the vampire. This is indeed confirmed when Léone, weak as she is, slips out of her bed and disappears from the manor, only to be found later lying unconscious in the park, with the sinister old woman bent over her throat. Like Ellen in Nosferatu, Léone has yielded to a telepathic call of an old and decrepit vampire, this time a female one. While the vampire is always shown as deceptively corporeal, her ghostly cronies and associates are tellingly revealed by their shadows. This is why the evil doctor, sent by the vampire to poison Léone, is preceded by his detached shadow, a telltale sign of his demonic status.

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In fact, in Dreyer’s film even morally positive and “solidly” human protagonists like Allan are not exempt from “occult” experiences, in which the body and the shadowy soul temporarily part ways. The film is, after all, Allan’s fantasy and as such it follows its own unpredictable dreamlike logic. As he chases the evil doctor in the park, Allan trips and sits down to rest on a bench, falling into a slumber (a dream within a dream) in which his self leaves the body behind on the bench to continue the chase. It seems that for a human to enter the doctor’s demonic realm is only possible as part of an out-of-the-body experience. It is in the form of a semitransparent shadow that Allan finds a coffin with his own body in it, a motif borrowed from one of Le Fanu’s stories, here rather incoherently joined with the main vampire plot. The funeral of Allan’s body is presided over by none other than the vampire herself and her demonic associates, the doctor, and the one-legged soldier. For all its paleness and stillness Allan’s body in the coffin appears alive: his eyes are wide open and a series of point-of-view shots reveals his awareness of his last journey, as he peers through a small glass window in the lid of the coffin above his face. This nightmarish dream ends as suddenly and inexplicably as it began, but it paves the way for a graveyard scene, in which the old servant from the manor opens the grave of Marguerite Chopin, an old woman who died a quarter of a century earlier without sacraments after being accused of being a vampire during her life. The body in the grave is now revealed as the undead vampire still at large, the one responsible for Léone’s illness. The vampire’s heart is promptly pierced through with a stake (another shot cut by the German censor as too horrific), whereupon Léone wakes up in her bed, miraculously cured. The one-legged man falls down the stairs to his death frightened by the ghost of the lord of the manor, while the doctor drowns in the flour pouring down on him in an old watermill operated by the lord’s old servant. Both the apparent vagueness of Vampyr’s dreamlike story and the “white” esthetics as the film’s dominant style place Dreyer’s cinematic Expressionism à rebour in an idiosyncratic category of its own. In any case by 1932 Expressionism had long been a largely spent force in German cinema, superseded around the time of Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (1924) by the emerging New Objectivist style with its celebration of contemporary social realism and urban modernity. Elements of Expressionist esthetics such as nocturnal setting, low-key lighting with its accompanying shadows, distorted geometry of exterior and interior sets, the atmosphere of horror, and so on continue as available elements of style whenever a degree of formal exaggeration, non-realism, emotional intensity, or irrationalism is required. No longer dominant, these Expressionist elements

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occasionally appear in such films as Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), or Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (1930). However, from mid1920s onward mainstream German cinema moves away from the stylistic excesses of the Gothic and Romantic fantasies to focus more on contemporary life, as cinematic Expressionism yields before the urban realism of the New Objectivity.

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The culture of the Weimar Republic is often divided into three periods characterized by varying degrees of political and economic stability and its impact on the arts, including cinema. The first period (1918–23) followed immediately Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the imposition of the burdens and restrictions of the humiliating, as it was perceived in Germany, Treaty of Versailles. The young republic was formed by an alliance between the social democrats, parts of the army, and the old bureaucratic structures, which replaced the kaiser and the discredited German Empire. This turbulent period witnessed the threat from the political left in the form of the Spartacus revolt of 1919 and the central German rebellion of 1921, and the equally destabilizing political forces from the right, including the KappLüttwitz Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Putsch of 1923. Germany’s failure to keep up with the punitive war reparations caused a brief occupation of the Ruhr industrial region by the French, while the disastrous conditions of the country’s economy were exacerbated by the spiraling inflation and by a number of workers’ uprisings.1 At the same time the period from November 1918 to 1923, with the postwar trauma, the aborted revolutions, foreign occupation, political assassinations, and fantastic inflation, formed the background for wide experimentation in the arts, giving rise to the Expressionist style in painting, stage design, and film. In narrative arts the period was marked by a predilection for inner torment, insanity, the supernatural, Gothic fantasy, and horror. The destructiveness of the war, the disruptiveness of the revolution, and economic collapse somehow gave rise to a burst of artistic and intellectual creativity without parallel in the Western world, of which the Expressionist cinema has proved to be probably the most lasting legacy.2

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The New Objectivity: A visual style for the modern city In the autumn of 1923 the introduction of the Rentenmark by the center government led by Gustav Stresemann succeeded in halting the inflation, while the American led economic Dawes Plan fostered an industrial recovery and restored relative economic stability. What followed were the “golden twenties” between 1924 and 1929, when Germany enjoyed fiscal balance, reduction of political violence, renewed prestige abroad, and increasing prosperity at home. In parallel with the relative social stability the visual and narrative arts assumed a more realistic, matter-of-fact style known as die Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity (or Sobriety), largely as a way of distancing themselves from the turmoil of the inflation years and the psychological probings, irrationalism, and formal excesses of Expressionism. Against this background the New Objectivity offered a cooler, more detached style that had a more functional orientation and a concern with outward appearances of life, with people in contemporary urban settings, whether in grubby tenement slums or in spacious apartments with their fashionable Art Deco design. In cinema one of the trends usually linked to the New Objectivity were the so-called street films (Straßenfilme), in which characters from sheltered middleclass backgrounds are suddenly exposed to the shady environment of city streets, often at night, where they encounter representatives of various social ills such as prostitutes, gamblers, black marketeers, and con men. Street films were often identified by their titles, as in Karl Grune’s Die Straße (The Street) from 1923 or Georg W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) from 1925. If Expressionism sought irrationalism and formal abstraction, the cityfocused art of the New Objectivity was concerned first of all with social and psychological realism and the challenges of modernity such as economic crisis and social conflict. In cinema the New Objectivity encouraged realistic portrayal of contemporary problems rather than the fantastic, exaggerated, and stylized plots and imagery of the Expressionist years.3 The death in the autumn of 1929 of Gustav Stresemann, then the foreign minister perceived as guarantor of conciliatory international relations, combined with the outbreak of the world economic crisis and the resulting calling in of American loans led to a dramatic rise of unemployment, a decay of middle-class parties, and further radicalization of the political left and right in Germany. After the collapse of the coalition government led by social democrats, the National Socialist party became the second most powerful in the Reichstag. Politically motivated street violence increased amid the daily clashes of party militias.

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Several elections in 1932 signaled a steady growth of political extremism, with the Nazis enjoying increasing support from more sectors of the society. On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed the charismatic leader of Nationalist Socialists Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, and Weimar Republic became history. In the words of the cultural historian Peter Gay, “the Republic was born in defeat, lived in turmoil, and died in disaster.”4 After the postwar crisis of the Expressionist years (1918–23), followed by the comparative stability of the New Objectivity period (1923–9), came the crisis years of 1929–33, characterized by renewed political turmoil and economic decline. As the New Objectivity style took center stage in Weimar arts in the mid1920s, it followed a similar developmental trajectory to prewar Expressionism. Both movements first emerged in painting and graphic arts, later to inspire theatrical stage design and finally film esthetics. The first Expressionist film, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, was made when the style was already declining in painting. The two movements overlapped briefly in the early 1920s, when the romanticism of the declining Expressionism was yielding before the realism of the ascending New Objectivity. The new movement’s subject matter, as reflected first in painting, was the realities of modern city life, often from a socially critical and satirical perspective. According to the art historian Sergiusz Michalski, Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] painting regarded the city less as the embodiment of a cheerfully greeted modernity; instead, it was seen first and foremost as the scene of the disintegration of social order. It is not the sophisticated side of the city which is displayed, but rather the cramped environment with its obstructed view of the sky, an accumulation of tenement houses and desolate corners.5

Michalski’s comprehensive study of the New Objectivity paintings, drawings, and photography from 1919 to 1933 includes the work of such artists as Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Max Beckmann, Christian Schad, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz, and many others, all of them inspired by the excitement and challenges of life in large cities such as Berlin, Dresden, Münich, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Düsseldorf, or Hanover. The scenes depicted by these artists are almost exclusively urban, picturing streets, buildings, pedestrians, nightclubs, cafés, and brothels, as well as still lives and portraits in modern interiors. The style of these paintings often borders on caricature and the grotesque, but at the same time it remains quintessentially figurative and realistic, in contrast to the Cubist abstractions and distortions of the Expressionists.6 In cinema the representation of contemporary city life in street films moved gradually away from social critique toward melodrama, best illustrated by Georg

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W. Pabst’s evolution from the radicalism of Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) to the sordid sensationalism of his Louise Brooks films, Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) and Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl), both from 1929. Even during the heyday of the New Objectivity, in mid-1920s, street films were often criticized for offering melodrama instead of proposing solutions to the social ills they depicted.7 Karl Grune’s Die Straße (The Street) from 1923 for example, a still half-Expressionist half-realistic film, depicts a city at night as a metaphoric vampire that seduces its middle-class victims into a brief spell of sinful pleasure, only to devour them in the end. Before the bored philistine in Grune’s film leaves behind the comfort and security of his plush parlor, he daydreams of the temptations of the big city in the form of moving hallucinatory images projected through the window onto the ceiling. Abstract at first, the images soon assume more concrete forms that include the shadow of a prostitute and her client, canted shots of rushing cars, fireworks, crowds of pedestrians, an amusement park, a circus clown making faces, a woman smiling invitingly, people dancing and enjoying themselves in fairground rides, and so on, all superimposed on one another in a phantasmagoric and delirious montage sequence that “plays on the dialectic of guilty voyeurism and repressed exhibitionism,” in Thomas Elsaesser’s phrase.8 In this film-within-a-film passing vehicles refract the light into myriad luminous rays and produce a flicker effect reminiscent of film projection. Compressed within a frame, these overlapping vignettes of the city produce, as in a Cubist painting, multiple perspectives, temporal simultaneity, and dizzying dynamics. In Die Straße the apartment window has become both the camera lens and the screen-within-the-screen, as the man watches the nighttime city spectacle in his own home, like the TV viewers from the future era.9

Weimar cinema and politics Interestingly, for all its critical engagement with contemporary life the New Objectivist cinema tended to be less politically committed than other arts such as painting or literature. A popular and primarily commercial medium of film probably could not afford the same level of social critique and political involvement as that found in the paintings of Georg Scholz or Otto Dix for example. In the commercial entertainment industry in what was still a democratic country antiradicalism seemed to be in the nature of the medium. Whereas books, written for a few thousand readers, could afford to be politically outspoken, extreme, or

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even perverse, mainstream Weimar cinema was designed to reach a public of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, which it intended to please and amuse rather than to indoctrinate.10 Catering for the broadest common denominator usually means avoiding as far as possible controversial issues, which probably holds true for popular art of any period anywhere. Whatever the nature of the relations between the arts, current politics, and the economic conditions of the Weimar Republic, in the main the politics of the German film world at the time remained surprisingly neutral, despite the pressures from both left and right. The communists criticized the film industry for its sham objectivity and lack of political commitment, while the Nazis aggressively denounced film industry as predominantly “Jewish.” Nonetheless, until the economic crisis of the late 1920s the majority of German filmmakers were essentially apolitical men with vague left-of-center, liberal sympathies. Even during the politically turbulent early 1930s only Slátan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe from 1932 can be classed as an openly communist film, and except for a few nationalist socialist documentary shorts not a single feature film directly endorsing the fascist ideology was made before Hitler’s seizure of power.11 According to the historian Walter Laqueur, there were no known Nazis in the film industry, except perhaps a few in subordinate positions.12 Fritz Lang’s story about obstacles caused during the production of M (1931) by a UFA manager with a Nazi badge behind his lapel can probably be regarded as apocryphal, like some of Lang’s other autobiographical tales.13 The anti-left bias became more pronounced only in a few films made in the last years of the Republic, when newspapers and the film industry ground out more right-wing propaganda and the country became inundated by the rising tide of Kitsch, much of it politically inspired.14 Censorship too was less strict in Germany than in other countries. For example, neither von Sternberg’s arch-decadent Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) from 1930 nor Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) from 1931, the latter with its Brechtian critique of capitalism, could be shown in France at the time, while Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) from 1925, in which a butcher sexually exploits women desperate to buy some meat, was banned in Britain. The relative autonomy of Weimar cinema from the political ups and downs has implications for today’s interpretation of the films’ themes and styles. While the cinema of the 1920s certainly belongs to the increasingly modern, industrial, and urbanized society, both as entertainment and as an art form, it depended only remotely on current political debates and controversies. The film historian Frances Guerin postulates accordingly that the separation of German film

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from the politically determinist history of the 1920s is crucial to the continued reassessment of German cinema.15 In his book A Critical History of German Film Stephen Brockmann similarly advocates a primarily esthetic approach to individual films treated first of all as works of art rather than as vehicles for political ideology.16 While the social contexts of the films’ plots, conflicts, and characterization often lend themselves to politicized interpretations, the formal and technical aspects of filmmaking such as set design, cinematography, lighting, and editing depend more on medium-specific esthetic principles than on current political debates.

Cinema as an urban phenomenon Before the street films of the 1920s drew attention to contemporary life in the modern city, urban settings had been part and parcel of what the camera recorded right from the very beginnings of cinema, and even earlier, if we include the development of photography. When toward the end of the nineteenth century photo emulsion became sensitive enough to allow for split-second exposures, photographers quickly became attracted to the hustle and bustle of city life, to moving crowds and vehicles. Already in 1859 New York stereographs (early three-dimensional photographs) took a fancy to the kaleidoscopic mingling of vehicles and pedestrians, and the late Victorian snapshots showed the same fascination with ephemeral urban life. Photographers such as Charles Marville, Alfred Stieglitz, Eugène Atget, and others acknowledged the city as a remarkably photogenic subject, and like their cinematic counterparts found the photographic medium uniquely equipped to record and reveal the fortuitous and fleeting contemporary urban reality (Figure 6.1).17 Photographic fascination with urban life had more to it than the fact that most of the early photographers and filmmakers happened to live in the cities, where they found carrying their bulky equipment less of a hassle than arranging a trip to the country. Just as Impressionist painting seems unimaginable without the plein air (open air) and the colors of the countryside, so early outdoor photography really came into its own in an artificial urban space organized by vertical and horizontal lines of buildings and streets, by ubiquitous right angles and occasional diagonals, by even surfaces of walls and pavements. Writing in 1914 the Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner described big-city landscapes as “battlefields filled with mathematical shapes,” in which “triangles, quadrilaterals, polygons, and circles rush out at us in the streets . . . straight lines rush past us

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Figure 6.1 The Panthéon, photograph by Eugène Atget, 1924.

on all side . . . [and] many-pointed shapes stab at us.”18 Urban geometric space understandably captured the imagination of photographers and filmmakers who, like the figurative painters before them, were eager to create the illusion of depth in their two-dimensional pictures.19 Equally exciting to photographers were clear, sharp, contrasty shadows of people, vehicles, and trees cast by the sun on bright and even surfaces of buildings and pavements. While social commentators bemoaned the poverty, a sense of alienation, criminality, and other social ills of modern city life, many artists found the urban environment exciting and esthetically irresistible. One of the founders of the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) movement in Germany, the architect and art critic August Endell (1871–1925), while admitting that urban life was beset by all sorts of drawbacks, nonetheless insisted that the big city was a beautiful and joyous place in which to live. In 1908 he wrote: The big city, despite all the ugly buildings, despite the noise, despite everything in it that one can criticize, is a marvel of beauty and poetry to anyone who is willing to look, a fairy-tale, brighter, more colourful, more diverse than anything ever invented by a poet, a home, a mother, who daily bestows new happiness in great abundance upon her children.20

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For Endell the modern city provided constant visual stimulation and excitement by its ever-changing sights and sounds, by the streets changing in appearance depending on whether they were viewed in the bright sun, through fog and mist, or with the aid of artificial lights at night. In addition to epitomizing the prestige and excitement of modern life as well as technological and social progress, urban space continued to inspire architects, painters, photographers, and filmmakers alike. Formal and esthetic reasons apart, the city as the most important form of modern social organization and the photographic media seem intimately and organically interconnected on a number of levels. The indexical nature of photographic images, in which the subjects are optically imprinted onto the picture, accounts for a historically unprecedented level of visual realism and objectivity, now employed to capture the wealth of material detail of urban life. The highly technological media of photography and film were able to record and document the minutiae of modern life with an exactitude and veracity never attained by the traditional media such as literature or painting. Also, because the film camera is designed to capture movement, only cinema was assumed to do justice to the speed and motion that characterize the intense rhythms of modern city life. Ezra Pound described cities as inherently “cinematographic,” just as he compared the life of a traditional village to a narrative.21 From the late 1920s onward the film’s ability to record the soundscape as well as moving objects further secured the bond between noisy cities and cinema. The people behind the new media, the photographers and filmmakers, both as city dwellers and by virtue of their occupation, have been constantly fascinated with the representation of distinctive spaces, lifestyles, social diversity, and business activity of the city. According to the stereotype that goes back to classical times, nature and the country are associated with tranquility, slow pace of life, and even boredom, whereas the city offers a lifestyle that is dizzyingly hectic, busy, exciting, and full of opportunity.22 The moving pictures of cinema seem ideally suited to capture the dynamic, ever-changing pulse of city life, its social and spatial diversity recorded and dramatized either on real location or in studio mise-en-scène with the help of lighting, cinematography, and editing.23 In the early twentieth century some intellectuals found metropolitan life to be characterized by the same overload of visual stimulation that also distinguished film from more traditional, static media of visual representation. The structural homology between cinema and the city was already noted before the First World War, and was later repeatedly scrutinized by members of the Frankfurt School, most forcefully by Walter Benjamin.24 The birth of the modern city of course

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predates cinema with its represented movement and visual overstimulation, but viewed in hindsight the medium was in a sense only waiting to be invented to mirror and record the speed and excitement of urban life. From an economic point of view too cinema has always played an important role in the cultural industries of cities all over the world, through the way films are produced, distributed, and exhibited. Film viewing was always as much an urban phenomenon as was filmmaking. The first kinetoscope parlors opened on Broadway in 1894. On November 1, 1895, the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowski organized the first projection of moving pictures to a paying audience in Europe at the Berlin Wintergarten Varieté, two months prior to the Lumière brothers’ debut of their cinematograph at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. After 1905 nickelodeon venues were springing up in major cities across America.25 What the viewers saw in the first moving pictures were not nostalgic and escapist vignettes of rural tranquility but the familiar bustle of city life, from Louise Le Prince’s Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge from 1888, with its multidirectional movement and the press of business, to the Lumière urban productions, including the celebrated La Sortie de l’Usine (Workers Leaving the Factory) from 1895, and various films made in the streets and parks of Paris or London. In 1896 New Yorkers were thrilled to see a short film called simply Broadway at Union Square, and the earliest films of Edwin S. Porter were documentary-style moving views of New York, including a 1903 panorama of the Brooklyn Bridge. Even when not directly shown on the screen, the city is always implicitly present in early films. With the exception of Hollywood, the main center of North American film industry after the First World War, filmmaking was always organized around big cities. The demand for the cinema in the teeming and prosperous national capitals meant that films were generally screened there first, so metropolitan taste exercised an important influence on the choice and treatment of topics, producing a degree of sophistication that impressed the provinces. When in the early 1900s public taste began to evolve toward fiction films, the necessary technical and acting personnel and supporting services for the newly built studios could most readily be secured only in the big cities. It was also in the city that directors, actors, writers, and composers could find the colorful and stimulating social life which they craved and enjoyed, and for which their growing earnings qualified them. The metropolitan location of studios also ensured that many films about contemporary life such as lower-class or drawing-room comedies, as well as stories about love or crime, tended to be set in the big cities. Throughout the twentieth century the city and the cinema as its main medium of representation developed together as two important signs of the modern age.26

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The Berlin renaissance The representation of the city in Weimar cinema was part of the same process of rapid urbanization and the growth of city culture that affected other Western countries in the early decades of the twentieth century. Between 1890 and 1940 the agglomeration of the Greater London grew from 5,638 million to 8,700 million, the Région Parisienne from 4,128 to 6,598 million, while the Großstadt of Berlin increased nearly threefold, from 1,579 to 4,332 million.27 Expansion of cities, migrations to urban areas, and general increase of population were, and still are, one of the most tangible expressions of the global industrial and technological progress. While in 1900 about 15 percent of the world population lived in cities, in 2008 for the first time in history the number of city dwellers worldwide exceeded the size of rural populations (locally, this happened for the first time in England in mid-nineteenth century).28 In 1920s Germany the idea of the “big city” (Großstadt), focused chiefly on the rapidly expanding capital, was central in the self-perception of Weimar Germans, especially in the context of the bruised national confidence following the defeat in the First World War. The historian John Bingham sums up the economic, social, and cultural importance of Germany’s growing urban landscape at the time: Germany’s large municipalities in the 1920s were celebrated showplaces of urban power and confidence in technology and progress, exemplars of still resonant associations of the modern metropolis. Competing with each other for prestige, publicity, and resources, they constructed lavish exhibition halls, extended road networks as automobile traffic increased, and built airports for burgeoning air travel; they financed and ran their own electricity, gas- and waterworks, and public transit corporations. Centers of cultural and esthetic experimentation, they were famous for their musical revues and cabarets, expressionism in the theater and visual arts, vital artists’ communities, and modernist literature. Some cities were sites of quasi-socialist housing cooperatives employing new architectural styles. The famous term, “Weimar culture,” invokes immediately the designs of the Bauhaus and the architect Bruno Taut, the theater of Max Reinhardt and Bertold Brecht, composer Paul Hindemith’s early experiments in tonality, the politically provocative art of Otto Dix, George Grosz, and the Dadaists, the cosmopolitan novels of Alfred Döblin, and a host of other. None of the works of these artists, their dozens of peers, or the artistic milieus that nurtured them, are conceivable outside of the urban environment.29

Despite the preeminence of metropolitan Berlin, Germany remained more evenly urbanized than neighboring France, where centralization traditionally

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maintained Paris as the focal point of culture. By contrast, no single German city during the Weimar Republic monopolized control of artistic and intellectual life. Theater, music, architecture, art, literature, and scholarship flourished in Dresden, Münich, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Hanover as well as Berlin. By the end of the Weimar Republic, fifty-five German cities contained more than 50,000 people, and ten contained over half a million. Still, no German metropolis enjoyed the cosmopolitan mythos more than did Berlin, which in the eyes of its inhabitants and visitors alike seemed synonymous with all that was most hopeful and exciting—or conversely troubling and dysfunctional—about Weimar culture. With well over four million inhabitants by the early 1930s, Berlin was nearly four time the size of the next largest metropolis, Hamburg.30 To live in Berlin in the 1920s was the dream of aspiring composers, journalists, artists, and actors. The largest city in Germany and the third largest in Europe, Berlin’s megalopolis attracted and repelled Germans and foreigners alike. With its superb concert halls, its forty theaters, and well over a hundred cinemas, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, and the talented, as well as for the adventurous and the unscrupulous. It had a glittering nightclub scene, including scores of gay bars.31 The writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) had this to say about the decadence and desperation he witnessed in Berlin at the time of the hyperinflation in the early years of the republic: Berlin transformed itself into the Babel of the world. Bars, amusement parks, pubs shot up like mushrooms. What we had seen in Austria proved to be merely a mild and trivial prelude to this witches’ Sabbath . . . Made-up boys with artificial waistlines promenaded along the Kurfürstendamm—and not professionals alone: every high school student wanted to make some money, and in the darkened bars one could see high public officials and high financiers courting drunken sailors without shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had not known orgies like the Berlin transvestite balls, where hundreds of men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes danced under the benevolent eyes of the police. Amid the general collapse of values, a kind of insanity took hold of precisely those middle-class circles which had hitherto been unshakeable in their order. Young ladies proudly boasted that they were perverted; to be suspected of virginity at sixteen would have been considered a disgrace in every school in Berlin.32

Berlin was also a great economic machine that churned out electrical goods, textiles, and confectionary products in huge quantities. It was the center of government, the home of the Reich Chancellery, the Foreign Office, and the Reichstag, the parliament building. It was a city of leisure, with elegant and

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wealthy neighborhoods and amusement parks, a zoo, and numerous lakes accessible by public transport to virtually all Berliners. At the same time its infamous tenement slums matched other great cities for their congestion, poverty, and social ills. With regard to the theater, music, literature, architecture, and film—indeed, in practically every area of the free and applied arts—Weimar Berlin was outstripping Paris and London as the cultural capital of Europe, if not of the world. Composers such as Arnold Schönberg, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Krenek developed radically new forms in music. In architecture Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe pioneered a new international style associated with the Bauhaus. In the natural sciences physicists like Albert Einstein and Max Planck opened up some of the secrets of the universe within the new frameworks of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. In philosophy Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger created major works on the problems of existence and phenomenology, while playwrights and directors such as Bertold Brecht, Ernst Toller, and Erwin Piscator made breakthroughs in modern theater. In cinema the best-equipped studios in Europe and a host of brilliant directors helped create a film industry to rival Hollywood on this side of the Atlantic.33 For the Expressionist artist Herwarth Walden (1879–1941) Berlin of the 1920s was effectively “die Hauptstadt der vereinigten Staaten von Europa,” the capital of the united states of Europe.34

Großstadt in Weimar cinema Given Berlin’s status it is no wonder that it should become the reference point for the representations of a generic metropolis in Weimar cinema, even if most of the exterior urban scenes in fiction films, especially in the early 1920s, were shot on studio sets rather than on recognizable locations around the capital.35 Location shooting to enhance realism in contemporary urban dramas became more common only toward the end of the Weimar period following improvements in camera equipment, with films such as Robert Siodmak’s and Edgar G. Ulmer’s Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) from 1930, or Gerhard Lamprecht’s Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives) from 1931 shot almost entirely in the streets of Berlin.36 In both films the metropolis not only provides the setting but its streets, shop windows, vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and so on, all filmed in a semidocumentary style, also become an active participant in the plot.37 In the immediate postwar years location shooting was sometimes a cheaper option in artistically ambitious but low-budget productions, such as Robert

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Reinert’s psycho-thriller Nerven (Nerves) from 1919 shot in Münich, Friedrich W. Murnau’s horror Nosferatu (1922) filmed in Slovakia and northern Germany, or Curt Goetz’s biopic Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend (1923) shot in and around Stuttgart. In better-funded productions shooting in the streets of real cities was generally avoided, as pedestrians and traffic refused to be directed during the staging of complex scenes. In the early days filmmakers could get away with shooting simple comic chases in and around the cities (as in Walter R. Booth’s short slapstick The (?) Motorist from 1906), but dramatically elaborate scenes required full control of the mise-en-scène that only a studio set could provide. For example, a nighttime car chase through the city after the criminal mastermind Mabuse in Fritz Lang’s 1922 thriller was shot—precisely for reasons of dramatic control—in the studio, with the added train passing over a bridge seen at the top of the frame. The realistic effect of cars with glaring lights speeding under the train viaduct is compelling enough, even when we learn that the documentary look of this shot resulted from a skillful combination of studio shooting and trick photography by Carl Hoffmann. The elevated train, which so thrilled contemporary spectators, was in fact a toy train filmed in the studio and subsequently superimposed on the previously shot studio scene of a street at night.38 Early in Lang’s film a staged car crash at a street junction (staged in two senses: both by Lang on the set and by the arch-criminal Mabuse within the story) allows Mabuse to switch vehicles as part of his strategy to constantly change identities to evade recognition and capture.39 In this scene the set of a generic street is open to the sky to avail of daylight and natural shadows for enhanced realism. Extras follow the director’s instructions rather than go about their own business or look curiously at the camera, the way real passers-by often do in documentary films. As a rule dramatically complex exterior scenes had to be staged in the studio rather than improvised on location. In Lang’s film the final suspenseful street battle between Mabuse’s gang and the police, precisely because of its dramatic complexity, could only be directed on a studio set. Only occasionally could directors get away with improvising simple scenes in real streets by daylight. In Heinz Schall’s Das Eskimobaby from 1916 Asta Nielsen plays an Ivigtut woman brought to Berlin by an explorer from an expedition to Greenland. One day the “wild” Eskimobaby disappears to venture on her own around the metropolis. In a candid camera experiment well ahead of its time, a shot from within a real women’s fashion shop shows Asta Nielsen in an “Eskimo” costume crossing a busy street junction in complete disregard of the traffic, and stopping at the shop window amid the genuine surprise and curiosity of the pedestrians.40 Mixing studio sets with recognizable city locations

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to enhance naturalism in contemporary dramas was still only sporadic in the early 1920s, but became more frequent as the New Objectivity spirit began to dominate the screen later in the decade. In Gerhard Lamprecht’s Die Verrufenen (known as “The Slums of Berlin”) from 1925 a petty criminal and his prostitute sister run away from the law on a real barge sailing down the Spree River in Berlin. Lamprecht’s Unter der Laterne (Under the Lantern) from 1928 dispenses entirely with outdoor sets and includes several scenes (some shot from a handheld camera, catching the pedestrians unawares) of real Berlin courtyards, streets, squares, and factories (e.g., the Borsig-Werke producing locomotives) in a documentary style reminiscent of Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin.41 Such manifestations of city life as the spontaneous behavior of pedestrians or the unstructured movement of vehicle traffic with its cars, buses, trams, trains, motorbikes, bicycles, and so on simply could not be recreated convincingly in the studio. The few improvised exterior scenes in Unter der Laterne anticipate Lamprecht’s earlier mentioned sound film Emil und die Detektive from 1931, in which the German metropolis is just as important as the film’s fictitious story with its children characters. A similar affect was achieved in Siodmak’s and Ulmer’s silent, avant-garde, documentary-style, low-budget Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) from 1930, which anticipated the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) by nearly thirty years. The film’s loosely knit narrative involves amateur actors who play what they are in real life: a cab driver, a record store assistant, a traveling wine merchant, and an aspiring model. The largely improvised, casual scenes are filmed in Berlin and its environs by a candidstyle, seemingly unmotivated camerawork that exploits the textures of relaxed metropolitan life, with its cafés, boulevards, lakes, and beaches, more to produce atmospheric moods than to propel narrative action.42 In Georg W. Pabst’s 1927 Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney) the heroine (played by Édith Jéhanne) and her lover (Uno Henning) escape from postrevolutionary Russia to Paris, where a series of semidocumentary candid camera shots shows the couple strolling by the Seine, along picturesque innercity lanes and busy thoroughfares, through railway stations and marketplaces of the French capital. These improvised exterior shots alternate in Pabst’s film with staged interior scenes, injecting a degree of urban realism rarely found in studio films at the time. A similar realistic effect was sometimes achieved by combining documentary shots with matching staged scenes. In the sports films such as Die elf Teufel (Eleven Devils) by Zoltan Korda and König der Mittelstürmer (King of the Center Forwards) by Fritz Freisler, both made in 1927, staged shots of football matches are mixed (almost) seamlessly with documentary footage of real stadium games.

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In Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies), from 1928, some exterior shots with simple dramatic content, such as a police motorbike chasing a getaway car through the streets of Berlin, are intercut with a studio scene in which the vehicles, actors, and extras obey the director’s instructions to create a dramatically complex situation, here the getaway car crashing into the revolving door of a hotel while the criminals exchange fire with the police. In this sequence fast action matched by fast cutting effectively obliterates the difference, at least on the dramatic level, between location and studio shots. The need for full control over the mise-enscène, sometimes including the sound, often necessitated the use of exterior sets in otherwise highly “documentary” productions such as Fritz Lang’s crime thriller M from 1931. Realistic and accurate in its interior scenes, especially in those showing the work of the police department (based on the Berlin police headquarters in Alexanderplatz), Lang’s film is least documentary in exterior scenes, mainly because of the difficulty of re-creating convincingly in the studio the authentic light of the city. The almost empty street intersection where the child murderer (Peter Lorre) is chased by the gangsters is shot from above, with the street appearing like a model or a quasi-realistic theatrical set (Figure 6.2). The New Objectivist “city jungle” in M, a visual geometric construct designed by the architects Emil Hasler and Karl Vollbracht in the UFA studio, looks in some shots as anemic and inauthentic as some of today’s digital special effects.43

Figure 6.2 A quasi-realistic set of a street in M, dir. Fritz Lang (1931).

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Figure 6.3 A high-angle shot of a Berlin street covered with elongated shadows in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), dir. Fritz Lang (1933).

It is clear, however, that a real city location with its spontaneous flow of traffic and freely moving pedestrians, to say nothing of inadequate lighting at night, would not have permitted the careful choreography of actors and extras to create the desired dramatic effect. For the same reason in Lang’s last German film, the 1933 Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), nearly all exterior street scenes are staged in the studio, except for one beautiful shot taken from a high floor of a building, showing a real Berlin street bathed in the morning (or afternoon) sunlight and adorned with long shadows (Figure 6.3).

Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt At the end of the silent era it was increasingly difficult to continue using artificially lit sets for exterior scenes in city films without creating a stagy effect, except of course when artificiality was key, as in the studio-built imaginary city of the future in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). In contemporary dramas, however,

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viewers expected more naturalism and authenticity that only real locations and natural light could provide, especially after the release of Walther Ruttmann’s landmark feature-length experimental documentary Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, a City Symphony) in 1927. A remarkable feature of Ruttmann’s film is that it offers—much in the style of the director’s abstract animated shorts from the early 1920s—a montage of images connected formally through external similarity and contrast rather than by theme, story, or social analysis. The result was what the film historian Jerzy Toeplitz deemed the best cinematic expression of the New Objectivity approach, a plotless visual symphony of a modern city but without the accompanying sociological, political, or economic commentary.44 When the city is not just a backdrop for a melodrama or crime story, the celebration of its organic complexity can become the camera’s primary focus. In Ruttmann’s Berlin dramatic plot is accordingly replaced with a mélange of visual impressions of the urban environment: streets, buildings, waterways, barges, bridges, railway viaducts, parks, factories, cafés, restaurants, shops, vehicles, and of course people, the rich and the poor, at work and at play, all illuminated by natural light during the day and by street lamps and neon lights at night. Once narration and characters are removed from film, the camera can bring out the “thing-in-itself ” from every decontextualized and de-dramatized object, by revealing its photogenic potential in an exercise of pure cinema. This is what was also achieved in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera from 1929, a Russian experimental documentary inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin. Vertov’s film similarly dispenses with dramatic action, dialog, actors, and sets, to offer a dawn-to-dusk celebration of modern city life “based on the absolute separation from the language of theater and literature,” as the film’s opening card explains. Similar plotless and impressionistic cinematic “city symphonies” were made in the late 1920s in America, France, Brazil, and Japan.45 The historian and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson, British envoy to Berlin in the late 1920s, remembered the German capital first of all as a city of restless energy and light: What on earth is it which gives this town its charm? Movement in the first place. There is no city in the world so restless as Berlin. Everything moves. The traffic lights change restlessly from red to gold and then to green. The lighted advertisements flash with the pathetic iteration of coastal lighthouses. The trams swing and jingle. The jaguar in the zoo paces feverishly all night.46

Ruttmann’s Berlin captures the city’s rhythm right from the start, as a fast-moving train passes through the landscape of the capital’s suburbs and the colonies of

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allotments, before arriving at the railway terminus near Potsdamer Platz, one of Berlin’s iconic locations. In Joe May’s urban melodrama Asphalt from 1929 the high-angle shot of Potsdamer Platz, with its first-in-the-world system of traffic lights, appears at the end of a dizzying montage sequence of city traffic that opens the film. This fast-edited sequence consists of shots very similar to those of Ruttmann’s Berlin, some of them canted or in crisscrossing superimpositions, taken from a moving car or from low-angles, some filmed in the streets and some evidently in the studio, showing vehicles and pedestrians converging into abstract geometric patterns.47 The opening sequence in Phil Jutzi’s 1931 Berlin Alexanderplatz follows the pattern of Berlin and Asphalt by similarly introducing the metropolis through a disorienting pattern of movement. The ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (played by Heinrich George), just released from Tegel prison, is confused and bewildered by the sights and sounds of the busy metropolis as he arrives, mentally exhausted, in the city center on a tram. Foreshadowing the neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini from the late 1940s, Jutzi’s film mixes staged scenes with documentary footage of Alexanderplatz, then under reconstruction, to achieve a matter-of-fact, journalistic narrative style.48 In Ruttmann’s Berlin the train journey establishes the editing rhythm for the entire film by marking the phases of the day’s work in the big city: beginning of work, city traffic, commuters, bustle of street life, a short respite at lunch break, and finally the end of work and the beginning of evening entertainments, in which again the urban rhythm accelerates.49 Also, by a curious process of photogeny, things that are ordinary, often unattractive and even ugly when seen with a naked eye, such as tenement buildings, drab railway stations, offices, factories, garbage, sewer grates, and gutters, suddenly become eye-catching and interesting simply because they have been filmed. The familiar objects which we ignore or look away from in real life acquire strange significance once they are mediated.50 Candid location shooting naturally captured the ambient daylight and, whenever sensitive enough film stock was used, the electric and neon lights at night. While there are limits to which natural light can be controlled for dramatic or stylistic effects, it tends to inject realism and authenticity, whether in documentary or in drama film. On a purely esthetic level natural light can also enhance the impressionistic effect of a scene, especially in shots taken at break of day, both in early morning and in late afternoon. One of the early shots in Ruttmann’s Berlin depicts a perspective of an almost empty street at dawn, with the mistiness of the morning sky and the gradation of gray values on the fronts of buildings, from dark gray in the foreground to soft gray in

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the background. In the distance two silhouettes of men walking down the empty street—workmen on their way to the factory—stand out against the gray background (Figure 6.4). The contrast between the dark silhouettes and the surrounding mistiness and grayness provides a reference point for the soft intermediary state between light and darkness in the early morning golden hour so beloved by photographers. In other shots of Berlin the rising sun breaks through the morning mist and casts long shadows which, together with the parallel lines of the street converging in the distance, become cues of depth that help separate the dark human figures from the gray scenery. In the afternoon similar long shadows cast by the setting sun are like the hands of a sundial indicating the time of a romantic afterwork stroll in the park (Figure 6.5). In exterior shots natural shadows appear as a matter of course on sunny days, but a perceptive cameraman can sometimes opportunistically single them out as independent motifs. A playful shot in Franz Fielder’s short documentary Alt Berlin (Old Berlin) from 1930 reveals a moving shadow of a horse-drawn carriage (Figure 6.6). In another scene in Fiedler’s film a ghostly shadow of a human figure standing on a bridge next to a street lamp is reflected in the rippling surface of the river below.

Figure 6.4 A misty street at dawn in the documentary film Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, a City Symphony), dir. Walther Ruttmann (1927).

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Figure 6.5 Long shadows during an afternoon romantic walk in the park in the documentary film Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, a City Symphony), dir. Walther Ruttmann (1927).

The use of a newly invented high-sensitive panchromatic negative film (Agfa Pankine) enabled Ruttmann to produce in Berlin some of the most impressive nighttime shots in cinema at the time.51 Contrasts between light and darkness deepen as electric lights are switched on at dusk in shop windows and neon signs. As observed in Chapter 4, the motif of switching electric lights on and off, both in- and outdoors, as a sign of modern independence from natural light and of technological convenience of city life became fashionable in contemporary dramas from the late 1910s onward. In Ruttmann’s Berlin the chiaroscuro world of artificial light signals the start of an exciting time of evening entertainments in cinemas, theaters, cabarets, pubs, nightclubs, and sports and dance halls. Outside, cars with headlights on drive by, casting shiny reflections on the wet dark surface of the street, while pedestrians lose their surface features and turn into spectral dark silhouettes, as in a shadow theater (Figure 6.7). The writer Franz Hessel (1880–1941) remembers the visual transformation of Berlin at night: The best thing . . . was the wonderful light which flickered over the boulevard. In the twenties there was much less bad and cheap lighting. There were

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Figure 6.6 A panning camera follows the shadow of a horse-drawn carriage in the short documentary Alt Berlin (Old Berlin), dir. Franz Fielder (1930).

candelabras on the Kurfürstendamm. The tree tops filtered the light and glimmering reflections of the advertisements gave the boulevard an intimate feel, which made every woman’s face come alive. The streets did not thunder, they played music, a love song to the women of Berlin. In the twenties, Berlin was a gallant city.52

Electricity and its power to illuminate the city at night, in defiance of nature, became one of the more spectacular and impressive signs of the modern age. In Germany since the 1890s electric lights were replacing the earlier, comparatively dimmer gaslight, while electric power was transforming almost every aspect of urban life. The first overhead transmission line was created in 1891 in conjunction with the International Electricity Exhibition held in Frankfurt that year, when alternating current was introduced for the first time. Very quickly central power stations, electric trams, lighting systems, telephones, window displays, and later neon advertisements made their way into city life. The giant electrical enterprises such as Siemens and the AEG (Allgemeine ElektricitätsGessellschaft) emblematized Berlin’s transformation from a city of manufacture (Handwerkstadt) into Elektropolis. Electricity radically transformed the outlook

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Figure 6.7 A shadow theater of pedestrians in nighttime Berlin in the documentary film Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, a City Symphony), dir. Walther Ruttmann (1927).

of Berlin in the 1920s, which with its neon advertising became known as “the new City of Light in Europe.” Not only did electricity alter the city’s physiognomy, but it also changed everyday life. While in 1914 only 5 percent of Berlin households had electricity, this had increased to 50 percent by the end of the 1920s. Electricity accelerated the spread of information by telegraph, telephone, and radio. It also altered the mobility of the urban dweller, so that the “Berliner Tempo” became inseparable from the city’s modern self-image.53 Ruttmann’s Berlin celebrates the city’s progress toward the electric age with an ingenious framing device. The film’s opening shot shows the sun describing halfcircles over a body of water, as if indicating the natural and eternal recurrence of time. By contrast, the closing shot presents an animated radio tower casting powerful searchlights across the urban landscape. Back in 1881 the prominent French architect Jules Bourdais had a visionary idea to erect a gigantic lighthouse in the center of Paris, equipped with arc lights strong enough to illuminate the entire city at night. The project was never realized but the very idea bespeaks the powerful legacy of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, with their preoccupation to “enlighten” the dark spaces and disperse the gloom of the pre-

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electric age.54 Writing in 1926 the journalists Ernst Engelbrecht and Leo Heller commented on the benefits of electrically lit nightlife of Berlin: The people of the provinces already lie in the arms of Morpheus and the streets and squares have become empty and lonely, but a lively commotion still reigns in the streets of the metropolis Berlin. Cars and buses pass by and sleepy carriages rock down the streets at an easy trot. Crowds often jam the sidewalks of the thoroughfares, people gently pushing their way through. No one is hurried and no one thinks of going home to bed. Amusement is in order, something to experience, for the nightlife of Berlin has begun.55

The nighttime amusements, the two journalists tell us, are provided by “respectable establishments” with nude female dancers, as well as by slightly less respectable gambling clubs, opium dens, and nightclubs with prostitutes, pimps, and criminals. Gerhard Lamprecht’s melodrama Unter der Laterne (1928) re-creates on studio sets the shady nocturnal delights of Berlin, including prostitutes soliciting their clients while standing under the titular Laterne, the street lamps. No such establishment features in Ruttmann’s city symphony, but its nighttime scenes, shot by Karl Freund and Reimar Kuntze with the aid of the newly developed high-sensitive film stock, affirm nonetheless the modern city’s liberation from the natural rhythm of day and night.56

Shadows in the tenements In his Spazieren in Berlin (Walking in Berlin) published in 1929 the bohemian and flâneur Franz Hessel, a patron of the fashionable pleasure spots of the German metropolis, records also his experience of tenement courtyards and their working-class residents: Sometimes I like to go into the courtyards. In old Berlin life around the courtyards off the street becomes denser and more heartfelt, which makes them rich, the poor courtyards with the bit of grass in the corner, the stands for beating rugs, the garbage can, and the wells left over from days before the water system was installed. I manage it in the morning hours, when singers and fiddlers appear, or the organ grinder who adds to his music a tune whistled on a couple of free fingers, or the astonishing man, playing two drums at once, one in front and one on his back . . . The windows are all bear. Only one in the second-to-last story has curtains; a bird cage hangs in that one, and when the fiddler sobs of broken hearts and the organ-grinder drones his lament, a canary begins to sing, the only voice from the mute stare of the windows. That is nice. But I would also like

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to have my share of evenings in these courtyards, the last game of the children being repeatedly called up to bed, and experience the young girls coming home and wanting to leave again. Alone, I have neither the courage nor an excuse for intruding; my status as trespasser is too easily seen.57

The places that Franz Hessel describes with such warmth were part of the Mietskaserne (rental barracks), a four- or five-story apartment houses arranged around a courtyard, often extended into the interior of the block by a series of back courtyards, with access to the street only from the first court. The vast areas behind the front buildings came to be densely filled with factories, workshops, and low-grade tenements. A characteristic working- and lower-middle-class residence, the Berlin Mietskaserne were built as part of the housing project devised by Police-President James Hobrecht in 1858 to expand the peripheries of the metropolis, by providing accommodation for the growing urban population. The plan was designed to achieve a measure of social integration, with rich and poor in the same block, but the scheme only produced miserable congestion for the poor. By the early twentieth century this urban development created the most compact and overcrowded city in Europe. Whereas in London in 1891 the average number of inhabitants to a building was 7.6, in Berlin it was 52.6. Indeed, the population of Berlin was growing at almost American speed, nearly doubling within twenty years: from a little less than two million in 1890 to almost four million in 1910. After the First World War the population of Greater Berlin rose further to 4.3 million, making it the third largest in the world after New York and London.58 Notwithstanding the scale and speed of urbanization in Germany (by the mid1920s the population was divided roughly equally between the big cities and the countryside and small towns), living conditions in German cities were among the worst in Europe. Cramped and unsanitary apartments often housed more than one family, while some tenants resided in dwellings judged uninhabitable even by the lax standards of local housing authorities. During the war hardly any new apartments were built and this fact, combined with rising energy costs and the influx of veterans to large cities after 1918, transformed what had long been a problem into a public crisis. By 1929 an estimated shortage of apartments in the urban jungle of Berlin was as high as 200,000 units.59 The congestion, poor sanitation, and poverty of the Mietskaserne could be mitigated in some measure by communal spirit. The extended tenement complex was rather like a village, where everybody knew everybody else, and everybody’s life was a public secret. The buildings were large, but most of the inhabitants lived around a single courtyard that could be observed from every

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apartment. Everyone knew when everyone else left for work or returned home, and everyone could see everyone else beating carpets or literally hanging their wash out to dry. It was even possible to imagine what was going on down in the courtyard and inside the building just by listening to the sounds, as the writer Christopher Isherwood recalls: Lying in bed, in the darkness, in my tiny corner of the enormous human warren of the tenements, I could hear, with uncanny precision, every sound which came up from the courtyard below. The shape of the court must have acted as a gramophone-horn. There was someone going downstairs: our neighbour, Herr Müller, probably: he had a night-shift on the railway. I listened to his steps getting fainter, flight by flight; then they cross the court, clear and sticky on the wet stone. Straining my ears, I heard, or fancied I heard, the grating of the key in the lock of the big street door. A moment later, the door closed with a deep, hollow boom. And now, from the next room, Frau Nowak had an outburst of coughing. In the silence which followed it, Lothar’s bed creaked as he turned over muttering something indistinct and threatening in his sleep. Somewhere on the other side of the court a baby began to scream, a window was slammed to, something very heavy, deep in the innermost recesses of the building, thudded dully against a wall. It was alien and mysterious and uncanny, like sleeping out in the jungle alone.60

A gloomy tenement house crowded with lower middle-class residents is one of the two main locations (the other being a palace hotel for the rich) in Friedrich W. Murnau’s 1924 Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh). The film turned out to be Murnau’s most famous collaborative effort with the screenwriter Carl Mayer and the cinematographer Karl Freund, and it made the director famous in America, paving the way for his migration to Hollywood two years later. In Der letzte Mann the link between the two contrasting social milieus is an elderly doorman (Emil Jannings), who works at the luxurious hotel but lives in the backyard tenement slum surrounded by working-class and petit bourgeois neighbors. Wearing his impeccable uniform with dignity and pride, he not only ushers the rich guests through the revolving door of the hotel, but also offers candies to the children of the tenement courtyard and enjoys the admiration and awe of his neighbors, for whom his gold-braided livery seems to confer a mystic glamor upon their modest existence.61 Siegfried Kracauer was among the first critics to notice that in Murnau’s film the two urban settings are differentiated not only sociologically but also stylistically, in the sense that the “bizarre” lower middle-class scenes were counterbalanced by “the film’s concessions to the realistic current gaining

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momentum in 1924.”62 In other words, the resplendent downtown hotel with its high life reflects the emerging realistic style of the New Objectivity, while the dark and cheerless décor of the dingy tenements is supported by stylized low-key lighting typical for cinematic Expressionism.63 The film’s year of production is often cited as a dividing line between the imaginary worlds, often associated with the past, attempted by Expressionism and the rediscovery of the contemporary physical reality by the writers, painters, photographers, and filmmakers associated with the New Objectivity. As also noted by Sabine Hake, the story of Der letzte Mann represents this Expressionist–New Objectivity divide along generational and emotional lines as well as in the juxtaposition of style and mise-en-scène. The New Objectivist tendencies are accordingly identified with wealth, superficial consumerism, and youth personified by the hotel manager, but also with arrogance and emotional coldness. Expressionist tendencies on the other hand are associated with such stylistic elements as distorted, subjective, or visionary shots; suggestive chiaroscuro lighting with symbolic shadows; unusual (high and low) camera angles; mobile (entfesselte, “unchained”) camera; and insistence on imagery and object symbolism. The human Expressionist elements on the other hand include old age, poverty, traditional communal life, and a rich range of emotions including pride, awe, empathy, humiliation, envy, ridicule, and Schadenfreude (malicious pleasure).64 In fact, Der letzte Mann probably marked the end of Expressionism as the dominant style in Weimar art-house cinema, as film directors began to engage more with contemporary social issues, mostly in an urban context. A film often compared with Der letzte Mann was Gerhard Lamprecht’s Die Verrufenen (Der fünfte Stand) from 1925, shown to much success in the United States as The Slums of Berlin.65 Inspired by the sympathetic caricatures of Berlin workingclass milieu by the illustrator and photographer Heinrich Zille (1858–1929),66 Lamprecht’s film leaves most of the Expressionist tricks behind and offers instead a naturalistic picture of the slums and their dwellers (the “fifth estate,” der fünfte Stand), poor but cheerful and compassionate, whose life is contrasted with the “respectable” but boring and aloof existence of their middle-class counterparts. Extras selected for their authentic “working-class” looks and real locations including factories, workshops, shelters for the homeless, cramped working-class flats, outdoor cafés, smoky pubs, and tenement courtyards with ever-present children at play left little room for stylization and “atmosphere,” providing instead an almost anthropological, semidocumentary record of everyday life. Only occasionally in Die Verrufenen are Expressionist motifs such

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Figure 6.8 An Expressionist shadow in a violent scene at night in the film Die Verrufenen (Slums of Berlin), dir. Gerhard Lamprecht (1925).

as cast shadows used to heighten the drama, as when petty criminals mug in a dark lane a bourgeois owner of a fat wallet (Figure 6.8). Another stylistically transitional film of the mid-1920s was Georg W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street), made in the same year as Die Verrufenen and concerned with the economic chaos, pauperization, depravity, and despair of the postwar inflation years. The film’s melodramatic content was potentially suitable for a more Expressionist treatment, but Pabst’s style remains for the most part realistic and New Objectivist. Lighting is used chiefly to illuminate the mise-en-scène and advance the narrative rather than to create poetic Stimmung (mood). At the same time occasional Expressionist side- and backlighting of figures against dark backgrounds effectively enhances space and image texture. On a more dramatic level the lighting style in Die freudlose Gasse is also employed to differentiate between dramatic spaces and themes, like in Murnau’s Der letzte Mann. High-key illumination tends to be associated with money, corruption, and the decadent pleasures of smoke-filled bawdy houses, while the Expressionist chiaroscuro emphasizes the gloom of decrepit, povertystricken flats, staircases, and back-alleys, producing also a few decorative cast shadows without, however, any discernible symbolic connotations (Figure 6.9).67

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Figure 6.9 Expressionist staircase and atmospheric chiaroscuro lighting in Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street), dir. Georg W. Pabst (1925).

Pabst will repeat this correlation between lighting styles and dramatic locations in his sordid melodrama Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) from 1929, in which the social decline of the femme fatale Lulu (Louise Brooks) is punctuated by changing visual atmosphere: from the brightness of the spacious modern apartment where Lulu lives as a kept woman, through the semidarkness of a boat concealing an illegal gambling den cum brothel where Lulu hides from the law, and finally to the classic Expressionist chiaroscuro of a squalid London slum where Lulu is murdered by Jack the Ripper. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann can likewise be seen as a stylistically transitional film, part Expressionist and part New Objectivist, as reflected by its two main settings. The modern city in the film remains anonymous, but it is implicitly Berlin. It required the construction of massive sets, including a tenement courtyard, the luxury hotel in which part of the action takes place, and electrically lit fashionable streets at night, complete with futuristic skyscrapers. As we shall see below in the section on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, there was a heated public debate in the 1920s about building skyscrapers, New York style, in Berlin to relieve overcrowding, but eventually none were built.68 The sets for

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Der letzte Mann were constructed on UFA’s large outside lot in Babelsberg under the supervision of the art directors Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig. Hundreds of extras and a large number of cars and buses were brought in to shoot the busy street life in front of the Atlantic Hotel. Taking full advantage of the laws of perspective to create an illusion of depth, the set designers even incorporated children and puppets on conveyor belts as background pedestrians, as well as model and toy cars. The row of houses on the lot decreased from eight to four meters, while the skyscrapers in the distance were in fact no taller than twelve meters. The resulting effect of realistic urban space astonished Hollywood and surpassed anything seen in cinema at the time.69 As Robert Herlth later recalled, during the filming of Der letzte Mann “there were endless discussions over every effect of lighting . . . For Murnau the lighting became part of the actual directing of the film. He would never have shot a scene without first ‘seeing’ the lighting and adapting it to his intentions.”70 Part of Murnau’s design was to use light not only atmospherically to create Stimmung but also symbolically, for example to associate light with wealth and success and darkness with poverty and failure. The electric brilliance of the New Objectivist city center by night is thus contrasted with the outmoded gas lamp casting a dim glow over the Expressionist tenement courtyard. When the hotel doorman is demoted, for reasons of old age and frailty, to the position of lavatory attendant, his stooped, humiliated figure, now stripped of the prideful uniform, is shown leaving the brightly lit hall through a symbolic gate leading into the dark lower regions of the hotel (Figure 6.10). When the old man sneaks up at night to steal his uniform to continue the pathetic pretence of still holding the former job, he tries to escape discovery by moving from light into darkness, evading the flashlight of the night watchman and turning into his own shadow—a dark, degraded, insignificant figure. Even the nighttime street outside the hotel, normally full of light and animated with cars and pedestrians, is now dark and empty to emphasize the old man’s isolation and despair. At home, as the full realization of the fall from grace continues to dawn on the old man, his shadow as a sign of his lost status grows larger than his body (Figure 6.11). In two separate scenes the ex-doorman, wearing a stolen uniform, returns to his tenement house preceded by his own large shadow—a grand illusion followed by a stooped and broken old man. Back at home the ex-doorman’s niece is celebrating her wedding but to the  old man, still in a state of shock, the reflection of the wedding party in the  apartment windows appears more like an unreal shadow theater. In an

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Figure 6.10 Condemned to darkness: the demoted porter (Emil Jannings) leaves the brightly lit hall to enter the dark basement of the hotel in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1924).

Figure 6.11 A grand illusion: the ex-porter preceded by his own enlarged shadow in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1924).

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Figure 6.12 The light of truth: a spotlight on the old man’s face confirms his status as an outcast in Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1924).

alcohol-induced subjective montage sequence, in which the luxurious hotel blends with the tenement slum, the old man dreams of being a doorman again and of guarding the hotel’s revolving door which now assumes cathedral proportions. In his delirious vision the old man lifts heavy chests with superhuman strength to the applause of the combined audience of hotel guests and tenement dwellers. The next morning, with a terrible hangover, he hurries back to the hotel to resume his degrading duties in the lavatory, leaving the uniform in care at the railway station. But a nosy housekeeper pays him a surprise visit, only to discover his demotion. The news quickly spreads through the tenement, and when the ex-doorman returns home in his stolen uniform he is jeered at by his neighbors and even rejected by his own tearful niece. Finally reconciled with his degradation, the former porter returns at night to the hotel to give up his uniform to the security watchman, who illuminates the old man’s face with a torch (Figure 6.12). The spot of bright light—a negative shadow that reveals rather than hides—finally confirms the truth of humiliation and degradation, while the surrounding darkness implies symbolic death by social exclusion and obscurity.

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Murnau’s German film in Hollywood When William Fox, head of Fox Film Corporation, saw Der letzte Mann he invited the director to come to Hollywood to make any film he wanted, with practically unlimited funds. The script was written in 1927 in German by Carl Mayer, Murnau’s long-standing collaborator and veteran of German cinematic Expressionism. It was based on a story by the German novelist Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) about a married farmer who becomes involved in an obsessive, adulterous affair with a woman from the big city. Murnau took the treatment to Hollywood and developed it into his American debut, Sunrise. Murnau took full advantage of the unprecedented artistic freedom that Fox had given him and made a film that can be regarded, both thematically and stylistically, as de facto European, or German.71 The film had been planned down to the last detail in Berlin before Murnau departed for California. In addition to the German literary inspiration and screen adaptation, the production involved a host of European collaborators and technicians, including the German production designer Rochus Gliese (who had worked with Paul Wegener on Der Golem) and the English cameraman Charles Rosher (who had spent a year in the UFA studios in Berlin serving as a consultant on Murnau’s last German film, Faust). Rosher later claimed that he had learned a great deal from Faust’s German cameraman, Carl Hoffmann, including a trick used in Sunrise of camera on a dolly suspended from railway tracks in the ceiling. In 1927 Rosher went again to Berlin to work with Murnau over the details of lighting and camera setups for Sunrise.72 While in Fox studio Murnau’s control over production also included the final cut: no one—not even the studio head—had the right to watch the rushes except the director himself, the cinematographers, and the editor. For their work on the film, both Rosher and the American cameraman Karl Struss received the first Academy Award ever given for cinematography, while Rochus Gliese was nominated for artistic direction. (Sunrise was also awarded Oscars for Unique and Artistic Picture and for Janet Gaynor as Best Actress.73) A transitional film as far as the director’s career is concerned, Sunrise can effectively be regarded as Murnau’s last German film—thematically, technically, and stylistically still rooted in the esthetics of cinematic Expressionism and the New Objectivity that combined so beautifully in Der letzte Mann. The latter film’s chiaroscuro formula to contrast the dark Expressionist tenements with the brightly lit New Objectivist downtown hotel was reworked in Sunrise as an opposition between the village and the city.74 Commenting on

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Figure 6.13 The vamp from the city (Margaret Livingston) is dark-haired and dressed in black, and appears by moonlight in Sunrise, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1927).

Murnau’s achievement the cinematographer Nestor Almendros has identified other pairs of visual opposites in this “dialectical movie”: the city woman (Margaret Livingston) is dressed in black (including her dessous), she is a brunette, and her clothing shines like a snake’s skin (Figure 6.13). On the other hand the peasant woman (Janet Gaynor) is pale and blonde, and is dressed in light, soft tones. The territory of the “bad” woman from the city consists of swamps and the river, while the “good” country woman has farmland, domestic animals, and flowers around her. The city woman is sexually emancipated, free, but egocentric; the country woman is maternal, domestic, and caring. The former acts by moonlight; the latter by sunlight.75 But the symbolic opposition between the country and the city in Murnau’s film is more complex and ambiguous. The generic German village may stand for the coziness and stability of a traditional way of life, but in most scenes the village is shown in semidarkness, as if to emphasize a sense of parochial and claustrophobic entrapment that the young farmer (George O’Brien) tries to escape by having an affair with a liberated woman from the city. The studio-built village looks artificial and oppressive, devoid of the warm and nostalgic connotations of

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the Biedermeier small towns from Nosferatu or Faust. In Sunrise the country represents, mentally and technologically, the backward past, while the city stands for the exciting present and the promising future. The medieval semidarkness of the village, for all its picturesqueness, implies that it is still firmly rooted in the preelectric age. Vacationed in a peasant cottage the sophisticated city woman lights her cigarette—a symbol of female emancipation at the time—from the candle that faintly illuminates her room. Lack of electricity also means boredom after nightfall. The mirage of the city with which the vamp tempts her country lover is full of bright lights and glittering nighttime entertainments. It is at night by the dark village swamp that the plan to drown the farmer’s wife is hatched, and it is by daylight and on the way to the city that the husband—his dark, zombielike figure towering menacingly over the light-colored, gentle figure of his wife— finally abandons the murderous plan (Figure 6.14). In fact, the journey of the terrified wife and her guilt-ridden husband to the city proves liberating for both. By contrast to the village gloom the city streets and squares are bathed in light. This is where the estranged husband and his hitherto neglected wife rediscover each other, renew their marriage vows, and rejuvenate their relationship. The

Figure 6.14 A large, dark figure of the husband (George O’Brien) contrasts with a light-colored, tiny figure of his wife (Janet Gaynor) in Sunrise, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1927).

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couple’s redemption is celebrated in another big-city mirage sequence, this time full of sunlight and joy rather than artificial lights and nighttime decadence, in which bright images of the city blend with the sun-drenched flowery beauty of the countryside. The optimistic brightness of the city provides the background for the couple’s second honeymoon, just as the depressing darkness of the village formed the backdrop for their marital crisis. Sunshine covers the city streets in warm glow just as the heavy Expressionist mood of the village yields before the New Objectivist lightness, comedy, and joy of the city. The café and the dance hall are full of light and space, with glass walls extending the interior space outward into the street, while the modern transparent glass architecture looks as if designed in Bauhaus.76 But far from simply offering a superior alternative to the country, a day out in the city enriches the couple’s life by allowing for a fusion of the urban with the rural, best seen in the earlier mentioned montage sequence in which city streets merge through a dissolve shot with a bucolic fantasy of a flowery field. As the farmer and his wife relax and begin to enjoy the city’s entertainments, their country ways fuse with urban popular culture: in the amusement park the husband wins a piglet, a quintessential farm animal, and the couple entertain themselves and others with a folk dance. The urban chaos with its busy traffic and honking cars may be at times overwhelming, but the two locales become forever blended in the couple’s experience.77 Chiaroscuro lighting and menacing darkness momentarily return on the way back to the village across the lake, when a fierce storm breaks out, the night sky is crisscrossed with dramatic zigzags of lightning, the couple’s boat is overturned, and the wife is presumed drowned after all. The “evil” woman from the city is also back, still on holiday in the village and still hoping to ensnare the farmer. But the redemptive experience of the city has both reunited the married couple and changed the man, who now would have strangled his former lover but for the happy news that his wife is alive and well. The titular sunrise which ends the film (Figure 6.15) replaces the former Romantic image of a moody, moonlit landscape with happier if sentimental picturesqueness, suffused with optimistic light which the reunited couple seem to have brought with them from the city. The thematic and stylistic interplay between the country and the city returns in an inverted form in Murnau’s third film made for Fox studio, City Girl, from 1929. The critic Adrian Danks suspects in the latter film’s consistency and symmetry a self-conscious and even critical relationship to Murnau’s earlier production. In its opening moments City Girl seems to evoke a key plot element of Sunrise, when an innocent country boy (Charles Farrell) is approached by a “vamp” on a train ride to the city, only for him to ignore her advances. As in Sunrise, the city is

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Figure 6.15 The titular sunrise brings the light of the city to the village in Sunrise, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1927).

defined by its hectic movement and modernity, but unlike in the earlier film it also projects a subtle desperation and melancholy that are new in Murnau’s cinema.78 In contrast to the sophisticated but superficial “woman from the city” in Sunrise, the titular city girl (Mary Duncan) actually longs for a romantically idealized country life as a more meaningful alternative to her humdrum urban existence. Between a disheartening waiting job in a diner and a drab bed-sit, the city girl’s only link with nature is a meager and dusty flower pot and a mechanical bird. But as in Sunrise, Murnau avoids simplifications. The city and the country are shown as related through parallel social hierarchies, mutual prejudices, and entrenched value systems. Neither the country nor the city is viewed sentimentally as a haven of domestic or romantic harmony and happiness, but rather as a site of challenge and struggle. As the city girl quips (in an intertitle), “Guess one place is good as another. It’s all a wash-out, if you ask me!” In Sunrise the symbolic opposition between brightness and darkness correlated with the two locales was made possible by full control over lighting on studio-built sets. In City Girl only the city scenes (the restaurant, the street, the railway station, the bed-sit) were shot in the studio, whereas the vast fields of wheat in the country scenes are real (with a farm specially built for the film),

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as is the hard harvesting work and the severe patriarchal rules that regulate the farming household. Unlike Sunrise therefore the latter film generally avoids the stylistic and symbolic differentiation between the two locales. Until the dramatic events in the last part of City Girl, in both city and country scenes Ernest Palmer’s cinematography follows consistently the mainstream Hollywood preference for high-key, shadowless lighting. The change of mood and rising dramatic tension toward the end of the film are signaled by Murnau’s characteristic Romantic pictorialism: the full moon casting a glow over the farm house—a self-conscious echo of similar painterly scenes from Nosferatu, Faust, and Sunrise, films in which the full moon had been associated with gloom and foreboding. The semidarkness provides an Expressionist setting for the unresolved conflicts in the rural household to come out to the open: the puritanical father’s distrust of the “hussy” from the city, the resulting argument between father and son, the temporary estrangement between the young couple, and the jealous taunts from the farmhands. The girl’s detached shadow at night highlights her isolation and loneliness, while the moving shadows cast by the kerosene lamp carried round the house reflect the  rising domestic tensions, exacerbated by the fear of the wheat crop being ruined by the coming hailstorm (Figure 6.16). In the event the familial, marital,

Figure 6.16 The young wife’s detached shadow highlights her isolation and loneliness on the farm in City Girl, dir. Friedrich W. Murnau (1930).

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and farming problems are resolved in an almost obligatory American happy ending. The girl remains loyal to her husband by resisting the advances of a farmhand, the young husband proves his manhood by teaching the farmhand a lesson and making up with his wife, and the father admits his mistake of distrusting the girl and makes up with his son after nearly shooting him dead, while everybody else braves the storm to save the wheat.

Expressionist echoes in Der Blaue Engel Like Murnau’s city films discussed above, Josef von Sternberg’s talking (and singing) Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) from 1930 was made primarily for the American market. Born in Vienna, the director was in fact American (he moved to the United States with his family when he was a boy). In 1929 he was invited to Germany by UFA to direct Der Blaue Engel and to demonstrate to Hollywood Germany’s ability to compete in the artistic use of sound in cinema. As was typical for early sound films made in Europe, Der Blaue Engel was shot in two language versions, German and English, but it was the domestic version rather than the English one that became a classic, and in the end it was in Germany rather than in America that the film became a hit.79 One of the film’s attractions was its literary inspiration, the 1905 novella Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), one of Germany’s internationally celebrated intellectual heavy weights. On the cinematic level Der Blaue Engel took advantage of the uniquely German quality that made Weimar cinema so popular internationally in the 1920s, namely its Expressionist legacy. In his autobiography published in 1965 von Sternberg spoke at some length about his experience with cinematic lighting, which he understood in terms of creative use of contrast between light and shadow. “Shadow is mystery and light is clarity,” and “a shadow is as important in photography as the light. One cannot exist without the other,” are just some of the esthetic sentiments that von Sternberg expressed on that occasion, as he had earlier employed them in Der Blaue Engel.80 From the very beginning of the film the Expressionist play of light and shadow provides a general sense of foreboding, plus the more specific connotations with cultural decadence and individual self-destructive folly. In the opening shot, strongly reminiscent of Dr. Caligari, the rooftops of a small town by night look unrealistically jagged and out of proportion, as if to foreshadow the dissolution of Professor Rath’s (Emil Jannings) personality, respectability, and social status. A ghostly cast shadow accompanies the professor as he walks through the dark

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narrow streets toward the seedy nightclub, where he meets a seductive songstress (Marlene Dietrich of course) whom he later marries (Figure 6.17). In anticipation of that fateful encounter the professor’s shadow seems to project his still unrealized vulnerability and insecurity, soon to materialize in a personal catastrophe. Another dramatic cast shadow, Caligaresque in style if not in actual horror, reflects an assailant with outstretched arms and fingers, looming over a terrified student awakened in his bed at night. Reminiscent of the murder scene in Dr. Caligari (Figure 5.5), this Expressionist shadow is part of a relatively harmless prank by fellow students to teach the professor’s pet a lesson. Also harking back to the Expressionist style is Emil Jannings’s emotive acting, here enhanced by voice. In the most excruciating moment toward the end of the film, Professor Rath reaches rock bottom of indignity by being reduced to a pathetic clown trying to crow like a rooster before a laughing audience. His tortured cock-adoodle-doo expresses far more powerfully than articulate language all the pain and torment of his humiliated soul.81 Like Murnau’s and Pabst’s films from the late 1920s, Der Blaue Engel mixes the darkly symbolic Expressionist style with lighter, brighter, and modern New

Figure 6.17 The professor’s shadow accompanies him to the seedy nightclub in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), dir. Josef von Sternberg (1930).

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Objectivist elements.82 The film’s opening shot of an Expressionist cityscape with its twisted roofs and crooked smokestacks is immediately followed by a humorous scene, in which a matter-of-fact washerwoman cleans a window and tries to imitate the provocative pose of the cabaret songstress Lola Lola. The emancipated songstress represents the modern New Woman: unsentimental, hedonistic, and liberated from Romantic illusions. As she stands on the stage before a male audience, swaying her hips nonchalantly and belting out one of her trademark ballads, the one in which she is “von Kopf bis Fuß” (from head to toe) in love, Lola Lola self-consciously highlights the boldness and unbridled sexuality of the New Woman, a female symbol of modern decadence and a stock character of Weimar visual arts, often found in the paintings of Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Christian Schad, or Rudolf Schlichter.83 In von Sternberg’s film the New Woman wins over the aging professor, just as the New Objectivity had superseded Expressionism. As Lola Lola triumphantly sings her anthem of sexual emancipation and personal freedom sitting in the limelight astride the chair, the defeated professor staggers through the narrow streets at night back to his old school, there to expire behind his desk. On his way to school the humiliated professor is filmed from behind, his faceless dark silhouette duplicated by his shadow that accompanies and often precedes him (Figure 6.18). Like the demoted hotel porter from Der letzte Mann, the once respected gymnasium professor, now at the end of his long and painful psychological and social descent, has lost his public identity and has become, to use again the clichéd but apt phrase, the shadow of his former self. His symbolic demise in the classroom echoes the penultimate scene from Der letzte Mann, in which the humiliated ex-porter returns to the hotel washroom at night to collapse. In both scenes the school janitor/night watchman follows the intruder with a flashlight and illuminates the motionless and defeated body of a onceproud man, confirming his personal tragedy of degradation and social death.

Metropolis, or the shadows of the future The contrast and transition between Romantic Expressionism and modernist New Objectivity also inform the dark vision of the dystopian future in Fritz Lang’s mega-production Metropolis from 1927—the most expensive and ambitious European film production to date. Metropolis begins with a New Objectivist display of orderly precision and high technology demonstrated by the machinery and machine-like workers of the underground engine room that powers the

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Figure 6.18 The disgraced professor reduced to his own insubstantial shadow in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), dir. Josef von Sternberg (1930).

futuristic city, and ends with scenes of revolutionary chaos and anarchy, in which the workers destroy the machines of which they had previously seemed to be a part. The early scenes, in which the rhythmic, repetitive movements of the machines are synchronized with the equally robotic, jerky movements of the workers, suggest a pragmatic if worryingly dehumanized reconciliation between humanity and technology to rule in the ultramodern society of the future. On the other hand the final scenes of anarchy seem to reflect the Expressionist end-ofthe-world vision of urban turmoil, as illustrated for example by Ludwig Meidner’s 1913 painting Apokalyptische Landschaft (Apocalyptic Landscape), and by Ernst Toller’s 1922 play Die Maschinenstürmer (The Machine Breaker) with its violent rejection of technology. However, in Metropolis the New Objectivist futuristic outlook appears in the end to win over anarchic Expressionism, as pragmatism and social reconciliation triumph over chaos and emotion. In the electric vitality of the futuristic city the human and mechanical energies are finally fused together, “animated more by high-voltage fluorescence than Expressionism’s dark demonic urges,” in Thomas Elsaesser’s phrase.84 The sheer scale of production, the eclecticism of the story line (based on Thea von Harbou’s novel), and the hype accompanying its release make

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Metropolis impossible to ignore in any study of Weimar cinema. But reactions to the film were and continue to be mixed. Costing the unprecedented 5.3 million Reichsmark (almost four times its original budget), the production required the building of gigantic sets and employed 36,000 extras, including 7,500 children, and 200,000 costumes. The epic picture was eagerly awaited in Germany as a futuristic sequel to Lang’s successful earlier mega-production, the two-part Die Nibelungen, which had established the director as the most daring filmmaker of the 1920s both in visual style and in ideological ambition. Metropolis premièred at the UFA-Palast am Zoo on January 10, 1927, before 2,500 guests, including the Reichskanzler and the leaders of finance and industry. Afterward the film played at the newly refurbished UFA Pavillon at the Nollendorfplatz for several months.85 What many viewers noticed at the time was that the strikingly innovative visual style of Lang’s film went hand in hand with its unwieldy narrative eclecticism and with what was perceived as anachronistic, almost reactionary, ideology. The papers on the morning after the opening night were almost unanimous in their disapproval. The literary critic Willy Haas wrote in his review in Film-Kurier: Taking well-measured doses of world history and mixing them together as allusion and allegory is not the way to do it: a bit of Christianity with its concept of the mediator, the religious service in the catacombs, the holy mother Maria; a bit of socialism with its shiny new cult of the machine, the enslavement of the soulless proletariat, and the fully actualized “accumulation of capital,” to speak in Marxist terms, which makes a single human being the unseen master of the world; then throw in a dash of Nietzscheanism with the deification of the ruling class. Everything is so carefully blended together that any other more cohesive idea slips past by a hair’s breadth. And heaven forbid that the film should have any meaningful currency of ideas . . . But that is exactly the curse of the largescale production, that is the reason why nine-tenth of the enormous set design of every such film seems empty and superfluous: because it is precisely the largescale production, the spectacle, that carefully calculates its appeal to everyone, that avoids offending anyone, is evasive and gives plenty of nothing.86

Other reviewers saw the proposed utopian solution to the plight of the working class (namely, to be oppressed by a kinder management) as either too facile or too cynical, just as the romantic story of a son rebelling against a rich father to win the hand of a working-class girl seemed incongruous with the film’s technological fetishism. The young filmmaker Luis Buñuel called the film’s romanticism “trivial, pretentious, pedantic, [and] hackneyed,” while for the writer H. G.

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Wells Metropolis was “the silliest film” he had seen: “I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier . . . It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.”87 The German public were generally impressed by the film, but the habit of slating Metropolis continued among the critics. In 1947 Siegfried Kracauer suggested that the film’s fairy-tale message—that the heart (the son of the ruler of Metropolis) mediate between hands (the workers) and the brain (the ruler)—could well have been formulated by Dr. Goebbels (he and Hitler saw Metropolis in a small town when the film was first released and both were reportedly very impressed).88 Over forty years after the release of Lang’s opus magnum the cultural historian Peter Gay echoed the earlier criticisms by calling Metropolis “a repulsive film,” whose “action is confused and not worth retelling in detail”: Metropolis is a fantasy without imagination, a picturesque, ill-conceived, and essentially reactionary tale which has only a few good shots of mass movement and rising waters to recommend it; the film sees the class struggle as science fiction and draws the kind of conclusion that can only be called a studied lie: Metropolis is the city of the future, where brutally enslaved workers toil, often unto death, in underground factories, while a small elite of workers enjoys leisure and irresponsible pleasures on vast estates and in ornamental gardens, complete with fountains and peacocks.89

In an interview published in 1960 Fritz Lang recalled half-apologetically that the main thesis of Metropolis was Thea von Harbou’s (whom the director had divorced in 1933), “but I am at least fifty per cent responsible because I made the film.”90 As with Lang’s earlier films made in collaboration with his wife, the sentimentality and melodrama came from von Harbou’s script, while the visual style, fascination with modern technology, and the precision of the mise-enscène reflected Lang’s artistic temperament. Part of it was the New Objectivist “machine esthetics” of the kind also found in Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, with its images of machines presented as “kinetic sculptures performing a mechanical ballet,” in which rotating large wheels and rhythmically moving pistons seem to move in time to a musical score.91 In the same interview Lang admitted that he had been “very interested in machines,” as indeed is illustrated by the abstract montage sequence at the beginning of Metropolis, where close-ups of moving pistons and a turbine engine turning in opposite directions built to a crescendo

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as more gears and movements are incorporated. The sequence culminates in a hallucinatory vision of the gigantic turbine transforming itself into the gaping jaws of a monster, identified in a title card as the biblical god Moloch demanding its human sacrifice. In 1936 Charlie Chaplin alluded to this motif in a more playful and comic way in Modern Times, in which the machine Charlie operates first swallows him and then spits him out unharmed. For the critic Klaus Kreimeier Lang’s visual fascination with machines reflects a wider “UFA esthetics” and its “philosophy,” involving a market strategy as well as relation to mass consciousness and to the political power structure of the Weimar Republic. Lang’s film, argues Kreimeier in his magisterial study of the history of UFA, could have been made only in Germany, only at the zenith of the republic, and only in the Neubabelsberg studio. Metropolis contains all the elements that had made possible UFA’s dominance of the German film industry since 1917, had contributed to its triumphs and, after the financial excesses of Metropolis, brought the studio to the brink of bankruptcy. According to Kreimeier, UFA’s vast resources were squandered carelessly in large-scale organization, in its devotion to artistic excellence and its perversion in empty perfectionism, with its delight in the imaginative use of technology and in its reverse, which was mere technical slickness; a quest for philosophical power, but pursued in an intellectual vacuum; a “will to form” that produced an amorphous ruin; craftsmanship, imagination, and diligence, and the waste of all those virtues through intellectual arrogance and the lack of a governing concept. In many respects, the fate of Metropolis symbolized the fate of Germany’s first republic.92

Whatever anxieties about the future of civilization hide behind the dystopian vision of Metropolis, they are overshadowed by the visual extravaganza and the fascination with modernity, urbanization, and technology for which Lang’s film is most remembered and admired. Siegfried Kracauer reports personal communication with Lang, in which the director related that he had conceived the idea of Metropolis when he first saw New York from ship-board, arriving in October 1924 with the producer Erich Pommer to attend the American première of Die Nibelungen.93 What Lang saw was a nocturnal sky-rise city glittering with myriad lights: “I looked into the streets—the glaring lights and the tall buildings—and there I conceived Metropolis,” wrote Lang upon his return in a travelog in the leading German trade journal Film-Kurier. In it he outlined his first impressions of New York, giving a description that already mirrors his

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vision of the city of the future, a sort of super–New York full of light, which he wanted to turn into a film: [Where is] the film about one of these Babylons of stone calling themselves American cities? The sight of Neuyork [sic] alone should be enough to turn this beacon of beauty into the centre of film. Streets that are shafts full of light, full of turning, swirling, spinning light that is like a testimony to happy life. And above them, sky-high over the cars and trams appear towers of blue and gold, in white and purple, torn by spotlights from the dark of night. Advertisements reach even higher, up to the stars, topping even their light and brightness.94

In an interview from 1975 Lang further described the luminosity of nighttime New York as he remembered it from his original visit in the city back in 1924. He spoke of streets lit “as if in full daylight by neon lights, of oversized luminous advertising, moving, turning, flashing on and off, spiraling—something which was completely new and near fairy-tale like for a European in those days.” The high-rise buildings seemed to Lang (who had studied architecture) to be “a vertical veil, shimmering, almost weightless, a luxurious cloth hung from the dark sky to dazzle, distract, and hypnotize. At night the city did not give the impression of being alive; it lived as illusions lived. I knew then that I had to make a film about all these sensations.”95 Even the most superficial glance at Metropolis confirms the profound inspiration that New York had on the film’s visual design. The obvious influence were the city’s trademark skyscrapers, then still non-existent in Europe. First constructed in Chicago in the mid-1880s, high-rise buildings were based on a new construction technology relying on the steel-frame structure rather than on the traditional masonry. The skyscrapers that Fritz Lang and Erich Pommer would have seen in New York on their visit in 1924 included the Flatiron Building (twenty-two stories), the Singer Building (forty-seven stories), and the Woolworth Building (fifty-five stories, 236 meters high), to name but the most famous.96 To every traveler to America in the early twentieth century the experience of New York must have been overwhelming, even if not everyone was positively impressed. Many European architects and town planners, especially in Germany, regarded the idea of high-rise building with conservative reserve.97 The urban landscape of Berlin was expanding almost as dynamically as that of New York at the time, to the extent that in the 1920s comparisons between the two cities became established clichés in Germany, with Berlin often referred to as “ein europäisches New York” (European New York).98 For contemporary German writers such as Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, Richard Huelsenbeck, and

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Bertold Brecht America was the only progressive alternative to the still semifeudal lifestyle of Germany. America, more than revolutionary Russia, was consistently represented as the New World and antithesis to the Old Europe, as a vehicle for a radical modernization and democratization of German life and culture. American popular culture in particular, with Charlie Chaplin, the cinema, jazz music, boxing, and other spectator sports represented modernity and the ideal of living in the present. The urban way of life and consumer culture of Wilhemine and Weimar Berlin seemed to be modeled more on America than on Western Europe. The painter Georg Grosz remembered that he could buy an original American suit in Berlin and feel himself “ganz amerikanisch” (quite American).99 At the same time Americanism became increasingly associated in Europe with what was perceived as excessive technological progress, materialistic values, and dehumanizing industrial rationalization. In the economic sphere Americanism, epitomized in the industrial methods advanced by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, meant efficiency, discipline, and control, but also degrading and repetitive working regime under the dictates of the clock, as satirized in Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The stylized, robotic movements of the underground workers in Metropolis owe something to these negative perceptions of American industrial progress. The conservative cultural critic Adolf Halfeld reflected the fear of American materialism in his polemical book Amerika und der Amerikanismus published in 1927, in which he contrasted the traditional culture of Europe, in particular of Germany, with America’s focus on material values and the mechanization of life. “Rationalization in the American example triumphs,” he wrote, “even if it kills the human side of humankind.”100 One of the effects of this cultural skepticism and resistance to things American was a vigorous debate conducted in postwar Germany on the possibility of highrise residential building to relieve the housing problem. The debate inspired, among other things, a prestigious architectural competition organized in 1921 for a high-rise building at the Friedrichstraße innercity railway station. To build a skyscraper right in the middle of the German capital was to be a proof of the modernity, vitality, and confidence of the new republic. More than a hundred architects (including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Hans Poelzig, and Hans Scharoun) presented plans for such a skyscraper, and the first prize was awarded to an Expressionist design by J. Brahm and R. Kasteleiner. It was, however, never realized, both for lack of funds and also for structural reasons: unlike Manhattan, which is built on granite rock, Berlin is largely situated on sand.101 Interestingly, the best-known of the Friedrichstraße entries today was one ignored by jury at the time: Mies van der Rohe’s very “Newyorkian” steel and

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glass tower. In his design van der Rohe is said to have been inspired, like Lang in his film, by seeing American skyscrapers. Their steel-frame construction had by that time become a popular symbol of progressive building technology, still awaiting an adequate esthetic expression. An enormous glass wall of van der Rohe’s design was to reflect the sunshine during the day and the artificial city lights at night. Reliance on glass and light was to symbolize the progress of civilization and “a denial of the tectonic principle in architecture.”102 While it seemed logical to exploit the vertical dimension to solve the problems of urban overcrowding, the idea was in the end rejected for Berlin both for the abovementioned structural reasons and on the grounds that American high-rise building was motivated solely by profit, not by the comfort of the inhabitants.103 Fritz Lang and his production designers Erich Kettelhut, Otto Hunte, and Karl Vollbrecht were no doubt aware of the high-rise debate, which must have contributed at least as much to the art design of Metropolis as the founding myth, propagated by the director himself, of the Manhattan skyline as the main source of inspiration.104 The idea of the “vertical city” may have been defeated in real life at the time, but not in Lang’s imaginary metropolis of the future (Figure 6.19). Whatever weaknesses (mainly arising from Thea von Harbou’s script) have been

Figure 6.19 The futuristic city by night in Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang (1927).

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identified by the critics in the plot of Metropolis, they were in the end more than compensated by Lang’s preoccupation with images. Luis Buñuel, although critical of the plot, nonetheless called Lang’s film “the most marvelous picture book imaginable,” the visual exuberance that Thomas Elsaesser later praised as “an art director’s Aladdin’s cave to steal from.”105 Shortly after the film’s release the editor of the journal Die Filmwoche, Paul Ickes, congratulated Lang on setting greater store by images than by ideas, as evidenced earlier by Die Nibelungen. Now in Metropolis Lang seemed to be concerned more with the plastic form and visual composition than with characters, which in any case were used more as elements of “menschlichen Architektur” (human architecture) than as personalities.106 Lang’s urban vision inspired by Manhattan skyscrapers was thus flying in the face of German urban experts, who predicted horizontal growth, mass transport, and a suburban sprawl as the more likely solution to the housing problem of the growing urban working class. Moreover, Lang’s grand vertical metaphor seemed also to fly in the face of the cinematic medium itself with its horizontal screen, on which Lang devised to convey the sense of a future city with the new Tower of Babel stretching to the sky, and its inhuman machine halls situated deep below the ground. The vertical metaphor also marks Fredersen’s (the ruler of Metropolis) journey from hubris to the humility of the cathedral steps, as well as the children’s progress from the Workers’ City below to the Eternal Gardens above. Fritz Lang’s urban design may have lagged “behind” that of German city planners at the time, but the director was also ahead of them: from the 1970s onward all over the world tall buildings became the universally accepted architectural language of civic aspiration and corporate identities.107 The tectonic principle may have been denied in the end by modern architecture’s insistence on height, glass surface, and light, just as it was denied in Lang’s futuristic vision of the resplendent vertical city extending “high above the earth.” At the same time Lang reserved the Expressionist “tectonic” principle to differentiate between the glittering metropolis above the ground and the infernal City of the Workers “deep beneath the earth.” The former is either drenched in direct sunlight (vide the sports stadium of the “Sons’ Club”), or is awash with night-defying electric lights, Manhattan style. On the other hand the underground City of the Workers is completely deprived of natural light, remaining dimly illuminated by cheerless industrial lights. The multistory workers’ city underground, with its monotonous cubic buildings and uniform rows of windows, would also have reminded the original audiences of Berlin’s depressing barrack-like tenement houses and their impoverished dwellers familiar from Murnau’s Der letzte Mann.108

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The architectural chiaroscuro principle also applies to the appearance of the inhabitants of the respective domains: the hunched and physically exhausted workers wear dark, drab, uniform industrial clothes, while the privileged sons enjoying their recreational sports in the stadium are handsomely dressed in impeccable white, like the British social elite on the cricket field. The two dressing styles clash directly when white-clad Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), the son of the president of Metropolis, descends underground in search of Maria (Briggitte Helm), and witnesses an explosion in the machine room which leaves several workers dead and injured. Freder’s stunned and motionless figure crouching in the background is contrasted with the dark silhouettes of workers moving slowly across the screen in the foreground, as the bodies of the dead and injured are being removed from the scene of the disaster (Figure 6.20). The shot parallels a similar contrasting composition in a scene from Die Nibelungen introducing the Burgundian court (Figure 5.18)—a formal resemblance possibly inspired by the cameraman Günther Rittau, who worked on both films. In Die Nibelungen the bright-clad royals proceed at a slow and dignified pace across the frame in the background, while the imposing, motionless, dark silhouettes of the guards in the foreground provide a sense

Figure 6.20 The workers’ self-shadows help separate grounds and enhance space in Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang (1927).

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of privileged protection and security. In a parallel shot composition from Metropolis the grounds are also separated by dark/bright contrast of the figures, but the opposition between movement and stillness is reversed: here it is the dark, dejected silhouettes of the faceless workers that move slowly, as in a funeral procession, across the screen in the foreground, while the white-clad Freder, his face toward the camera and his hand on his heart, remains motionless in the background, still recovering from the shock of the explosion and the tragedy he has witnessed. The chiaroscuro esthetics of the dark, Expressionist world underground versus the bright, New Objectivist city aboveground is sustained throughout the film in principle, but the two elements also frequently blend and interpenetrate. The compassionate Freder changes places (and clothes) with an exhausted worker, who leaves the underground city and, now sporting Freder’s bright silken attire, promptly allows himself to be lured into the worldly delights of the decadent Yoshiwara Club. The Expressionist and New Objectivist styles also mix on the architectural level: the bright, ultramodern high-rise city aboveground conceals a centuries-old dark, squat, gingerbread cottage straight from the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales. It belongs to the mad inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), dressed in black and fitted with a black false hand, after he lost his real one during one of his experiments. Both the cottage and its sinister inhabitant hark back to German Romanticism and the Faust legend: Rotwang is an embodiment of the evil magician who appears frequently in German fairy tales, and who had surfaced in such early Expressionist films as Der Student von Prag and Dr. Caligari. His archaic house looks completely out of place in the futuristic world of Metropolis; it is a remnant from an earlier age, just as fantastic with its pentagrams and Frankensteinian lab as the high-tech brave new world that surrounds it.109 Rotwang’s Expressionist cottage is also directly linked, via a system of downward spiraling stairs, with the ancient catacombs, where the latterday slaves find spiritual comfort in the good news of Maria’s sermon about Metropolis as a reincarnation of the arrogance and godlessness of the biblical Tower of Babel. This is also where the solution (found so cheesy by the critics) is first suggested that the mediator between the brain and the hands should be the heart, whereupon “divine” light descends on Freder as the future savior of Metropolis. To subvert this noble plan Rotwang and Fredersen contrive to kidnap Maria, so that her face could be given to the Man-Machine that Rotwang constructs in his lab. The sequence in which Maria, lighting her way with a candle, tries to escape the shadowy figure of Rotwang chasing her through the

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dark labyrinthine warren of subterranean caves is probably the most classically Expressionist part of Lang’s film, reminiscent of the Jack the Ripper episode from Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks). The extinguishing of Maria’s candle and its substitution by Rotwang’s searching torchlight marks a turning point in the chase: Maria has effectively lost her freedom and become a victim, with a symbolic hint of bodily violation by the male assailant as the shaft of light physically pins her to the wall in a tight corner (Figure 6.21). In this scene the evil magician’s searchlight becomes a negative version of the shadow of the vampire’s hand clutching at Ellen’s chest in Murnau’s Nosferatu, before the female victim yields to her assailant in her bed. Maria’s capture by Rotwang has no obvious sexual connotation (for the moment) and is motivated politically: her evil double created in Rotwang’s lab is to be used as agent provocateur to subvert the good Maria’s gospel of peace and hope, by enticing the workers to anarchy and self-destructive rebellion. Apart from Rotwang’s cottage another incongruous architectural element in Metropolis is the Gothic cathedral, a symbol of premodern spiritual values introduced by Maria’s sermon in the catacombs. After Maria’s abduction the cathedral assumes the role of the spiritual center of Metropolis. It is here that

Figure 6.21 A shaft of light from Rotwang’s torch pins Maria (Brigitte Helm) to the wall in Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang (1927).

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Freder looks for Maria after her disappearance, hears a monk’s sermon, this time about the Whore of Babylon (who soon materializes as the evil Maria), and confronts his soul with the allegorical statues of the seven deadly sins. The medieval cathedral also becomes the site of Rotwang’s another chase after Maria, this time motivated sexually, as the mad inventor now mistakes Maria for Hel, Freder’s mother he once loved. This is also where the climactic fight between the evil magician and Freder, Maria’s rescuer, takes place, watched by Freder’s father (Alfred Abel) kneeling in despair outside the cathedral amid the rebellious but now compassionate workers. In fact, the entire story of Metropolis draws to its conclusion on the steps of the cathedral, whose traditional spiritual character on the one hand and the high-rise Gothic architecture on the other hand make it a fitting place of reconciliation, however unconvincing to many, between the workers from “deep beneath the earth” and the management from “high above the earth” (not to mention the promise of a fairy-tale marriage between the working-class heroine and the president’s son). *** The sheer scale of production and the accompanying publicity make Metropolis the high point of Weimar cinema, although the republic itself lumbered on for another six years and good films continued to be made in Germany. The production that effectively ended the golden age of German cinema was, as discussed in Chapter 3, Fritz Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, released just as the Nazis seized power and promptly banned the film for diagnosing all-toocorrectly the strange fascination that many Germans had at the time with mad geniuses wielding hypnotic powers. After the horrors of the Second World War it was probably not that difficult for Siegfried Kracauer to read retrospectively the appeal of charismatic, authoritarian figures into the key “prophetic” arthouse films from the Weimar period. From Caligari to Hitler, Kracauer’s critical assessment of the dark shadow in the German collective psyche following the country’s defeat in the Great War, has imposed itself more than any other single book on post–Second World War debate on Weimar cinema. With the memory of that war still fresh in mind it was tempting to see the rise of Nazism reflected in the series of deranged mind controllers parading across the cinema screen, from Caligari, Orlok, Mabuse, Hagen, Mephistopheles, and Rotwang to Haghi. The physical shadows that often accompanied these characters, especially in films influenced by Expressionist esthetics, were seen as indexes of the villains’ concealed or repressed psychopathological tendencies.

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The signs of social anomie and the rise of urban brutality and crime that became institutionalized under Nazism had already been diagnosed by Lang in M, two years before the director put Nazi slogans in the mouth of Dr. Baum in his second Mabuse film. In M Lang seems to be interested as much in individual psychopathology as in the effects of anonymous murders on the fabric of society, as paranoid neighbors begin suspecting each other of heinous crimes amid a general erosion of public trust in authority. As the film progresses and the atmosphere of nervous agitation and fear thickens, distinctions between fact and rumor, suspicion and guilt, civility, and violence become ever more blurred. The real subject of Lang’s crime thriller is not the crimes themselves or even the criminal’s motives, but rather the society’s reactions to these crimes. As the critic Anton Kaes reminds us, M was made at the time of widespread political violence, when lynch mobs and hit commandos engaged in open manhunts, intimidating political enemies and spreading terror among the population. The newspapers were filled with daily reports of violent clashes and attacks by the paramilitaries from both extremes of the political spectrum. On the far right the SA, Hitler’s private army, had by 1931 become a major underground force with more than 100,000 men, who controlled the streets and harassed anyone thought to be the enemy of the Nazi doctrine. Even during the première of M on May 11, 1931, at the largest and most prestigious cinema in Berlin, the UFA-Palast am Zoo, unruly mob clashed with the police outside the cinema, unwittingly reproducing the scenes from the film playing inside.110 The complex reasons for the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism are still being debated by historians. For Fritz Stern for example the darkest twelve years in Germany’s history remain an intellectual conundrum that despite massive research and vigorous national debate has remained incompletely answered.111 The fateful turn taken by German politics in 1933 continues to intrigue professional historians and the general public alike, with subjects such as Nazi Germany, the Third Reich, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and so on constantly present in academic scholarship, school curricula, and public media. Our chase after shadows on the Weimar cinema screen ends on April 21, 1933, when Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse was released, nearly three months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. The film’s première took place in Budapest, because Dr. Goebbels, who had previewed Das Testament in late March, had decided to delay the release of the film in Germany for “technical reasons.” Two years earlier, in 1931, the political darkness descending on Germany was uncannily intimated in the closing shot of Georg W. Pabst’s screen adaptation of

230

The Semiotics of Light and Shadows

Figure 6.22 A crowd of beggars walk into the darkness in the film Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), dir. Georg W. Pabst (1931).

Bertold Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). As the criminal boss Mack the Knife, the beggar king Peachum, and the chief of police Tiger Brown seal their final agreement amid the illusion of general harmony, a crowd of beggars (meaning all of us) slowly walk from a brightly lit square into impenetrable darkness full of uncertainty and menace, where they disappear from view (Figure 6.22). The accompanying lyrics by Bertold Brecht confirm the gloom of the visual metaphor: Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln, Und die andern sind im Licht. Und man siehet die im Lichte, Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

(For some are in darkness, / And others are in light. / We see the ones in the light, / But those in darkness we cannot see.112)

Notes Introduction 1 Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry: An Autobiography (New York: Collier, 1965), 311–12; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 7th edn (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 191. 2 Information is equivalent to a difference between physical states, for example between light and darkness. Intentionally generated differences between physical states, as in bright and dark elements of a painting, become semiotic signs. See Piotr Sadowski, From Interaction to Symbol: A Systems View of the Evolution of Signs and Communication (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2009), 29–31. 3 Colin Harding and Simon Popple, In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (London/Madison & Teaneck: Cygnus Arts/Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 8.

Chapter 1 1 Roberto Casati, “Are Shadows Transparent? An Investigation on White, Shadows, and Transparency in Pictures,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (Spring–Autumn, 2009): 329. 2 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley–Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 252. 3 Homer, The Odyssey, trs. Walter Shewring (Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 115; Victor Ieronim Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion, 1997), 18. 4 The Portable Dante, Purgatory, trs. Mark Musa (New York–London: Penguin Books, 1995), canto II, ll. 80–1. 5 James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 224. 6 Roberto Casati, The Shadow Club, trs. Abigail Asher (London: Little, Brown, 2003), 21–4; David Currell, Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play (Ramsbury : Crowood Press, 2007), 7. 7 Qtd. in Ernst H. Gombrich, Shadows. The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995), 17.

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Notes Carl Gustav Jung, The Essential Jung, ed. Anthony Storr (London: Fontana Press, 1998), 65. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 150–1. Casati, The Shadow Club, 22; Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 258. Plato, The Republic, trs. Desmond Lee (1955; London: Penguin Books, 2003), Bk vii, 514a–c; Nathan Anderson, Shadow Philosophy: Plato’s Cave and Cinema (London– New York: Routledge, 2014), 34–55; Casati, The Shadow Club, 5–9. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 5.5.24–6; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (1979; London–New York: Routledge, 1991), 5.1.207, 409. Lauralee Sherwood, Human Physiology: From Cells to Systems, 3rd edn (London– New York–Toronto: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1997), 168. Richard L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, 5th edn (1966; Oxford–Tokyo: Oxford University Press, 1998), 189. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998), vol. II, 143, 161–5; Tony Jappy, Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics (London–New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 84–90; Sadowski, From Interaction to Symbol, 34–6. Light and Shadow: On the Film Set of the Weimar Republic (Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek-Museum für Film und Fernsehen, 2014), 8. Henry Plotkin, The Nature of Knowledge: Concerning Adaptations, Instinct and the Evolution of Intelligence (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 103. Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). G. M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness: How Matter Became Imagination (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000), 77–80. Sadowski, From Interaction to Symbol, 169–70. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 103–34. Henry James, The Short Stories of Henry James (New York: Random House, 1945), 194. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985), 189. Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow : HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 1135. Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Essays by Richard Dawkins (London: Phoenix, 2003), 125. Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18. Plotkin, The Nature of Knowledge, xiv; John D. Barrow, The Artful Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4, 246; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York–London: Penguin Books, 2002).

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28 John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–136. 29 Nancy Easterlin, “Making Knowledge: Bioepistemology and the Foundations of Literary Theory,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32, no. 1 (March 1999): 131–47. 30 David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3; Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 108–19. 31 Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 12–57. 32 Jappy, Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics, 79–84; Sadowski, From Interaction to Symbol, 36–8. 33 Piotr Sadowski, “The Iconic Indexicality of Photography,” in Semblance and Signification, ed. Pascal Michelucci, Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg (Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011), 355–68; “Between Index and Icon: Towards the Semiotics of the Cast Shadow,” in From Variation to Iconicity: Festschrift for Olga Fischer, ed. Anne Bannink and Wim Honselaar (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2016), 331–46. 34 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1973; London: Allen Lane, 1978), 57. 35 Wilde, Complete Works, 17–159. 36 J.-M. Chauvet and E. B. Deschamps, Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings (London: Thames & Hudson/New York: Abrams, 1996), 79. 37 André Leroi-Gourhan, The Art of Prehistoric Man in Western Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), 148.

Chapter 2 1 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 253–4, 260–1. 2 Amedeo Maiuri, Pompeian Wall Paintings (Berne: Hallwag, 1960). 3 Miriam Schild Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting and the Forerunners of Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 27–8. 4 Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 1997), 3–4. 5 Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 191, 194; Kris Malkiewicz, Cinematography: A Guide for Film Makers and Film Teachers (1973; New York–London–Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 80; John Alton, Painting with Light (1949; Berkeley–Los Angeles– London: University of California Press, 1995), 29–36. 6 J.-M. Chauvet, E. B. Deschamps and C. Hillaire, Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 104–10.

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Notes Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 256; Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment, 14–15. Gombrich, Shadows, 19; Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory of Shadow Projection,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 258. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trs. John R. Spencer (New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 1966), 39, 43. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 1990), 9. Casati, The Shadow Club, 69–84. Luciano Bellosi, Giotto (Florence: SCALA Group, 2003); Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927; New York: Zone Books, 1991), 55; Kemp, The Science of Art, 9–11; Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 136–7; Ernst Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaidon Press Limited, 1982), 21–2. Discussed in Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 45–8. Qtd. in Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows,” 260. Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Irma A. Richter (1952; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 223, 135. Vinci, The Notebooks, 129. Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows,” 268. Vinci, The Notebooks, 124–43; Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows,” 269. Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, trs. John Francis Rigaud (London: George Bell & Sons, 1877), 71–2. George Holmes, Renaissance (London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1998), 152–4. Jean-Claude Frère, Early Flemish Painting (Paris: Éditions Terrail/Édigroup, 2007), 72, 63. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (1933–8; Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1957), 66–7. Frère, Early Flemish Painting, 48–9. Albrecht Dürer, Die Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und richtscheyt, in Linien, ebnen unnd gantzen Corporen, Nuremberg 1525, in Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows,” 273. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trs. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1987), vol. II, 87; Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (London: The British Museum Press, 2002), 189. John R. Clarke, “Expressionism in Film and Architecture: Hans Poelzig’s Sets for Paul Wegener’s The Golem,” Art Journal 34, no. 2 (winter 1974–5): 115, 121; Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy, 189. Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows,” 276.

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28 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 263. 29 Qtd. in Robert Enggess and Jonathan Brown, Italy and Spain 1600–1750: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), 79. 30 Timothy Wilson-Smith, Caravaggio (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1998), 5–6. 31 C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 15. 32 Kemp, The Science of Art, 189–91; J. G. Links, Canaletto (1982; London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2005), 118; Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 2nd edn (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2006), 5. 33 Norbert Wolf, Caspar David Friedrich, 1774–1840: The Painter of Stillness (Köln: Taschen, 2012); Ulrich Finke, German Painting: From Romanticism to Expressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 22–30. 34 For example, Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of the Day, 1914 (Brazil: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de Sâo Paolo). 35 Dietmar Elger, Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art (Köln: Taschen, 2007), 6, 19, 25, 59, 82, 121. 36 Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Art and Photography in Weimar Germany 1919–1933 (1994; Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 2003), 15. 37 Michalski, New Objectivity, 9. 38 See for example Rudolf Schlichter’s Dada Roof Studio (Dada-Dachatelier), 1920 (Berlin, Galerie Nierendorf ); Passers-by and the Imperial Army (Passanden und Reichswehr), 1925/26 (Karlsruhe, Kunstcabinett Mirko Heipek); Hans Baluschek’s By the Railway Track (An der Bahnstrecke), 1932 (Berlin, Bröhan Museum); Georg Schrimpf ’s Still Life with Cat (Stilleben mit Katze), 1923 (Munich, Bayerische Staadsgemäldesammlungen); Georg Scholz’s Level-Crossing Keeper’s Hut (Bahnwärterhaus), 1924 (Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof ), in Michalski, New Objectivity.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4

5 6

Francis Steen, “A Cognitive Account of Aesthetics,” in The Artful Mind, ed. Mark Turner (Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66–7. Pliny the Elder, Natural History (London: Penguin Books, 1991), xxxv, 14, 187. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 12. Alberti, On Painting, 61, 64; Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (x, ii, 7); see also Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows,” 262; Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 38–41. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, vol. I, 27. Giorgio Vasari, The Origin of Painting, 1573, fresco in Casa Vasari in Florence, discussed in Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 40.

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Notes Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 42–3; Gombrich, Shadows. The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art, 30. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (London– Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 5; Rudolf Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley–Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 186. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 11. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 11, 13. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 133; Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. A. Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 199–216. Hubert Damish, “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London–New York: Routledge, 2003), 88. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 23; Michel F. Braive, The Era of the Photograph: A Social History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), 261; Arnheim, Film as Art, 8–9; Kracauer, Theory of Film, 21–2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” Alexander’s Weekly Messenger (January 15, 1840), qtd. in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Trachtenberg, 38. Jonathan Friday, Aesthetics and Photography (Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2002), 39; John Szarkowski, “Introduction to The Photographer’s Eye,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Wells, 97. Sontag, On Photography, 154. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 32. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 246–50. Wilhelm Kästner writing in Fotografische Rundschau 5 (1929): 93, qtd. in Michalski, New Objectivity, 182. Casati, The Shadow Club, 18–19; Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, 17, 27. Qtd. in Lotte Reiniger, Shadow Theatres and Shadow Film (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1970), 15–16. Currell, Shadow Puppets and Shadow Play, 9, 12. Reiniger, Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, 30. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 56–72; Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis–London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 98. Thomas Elsaesser, “No End to Nosferatu (1922),” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 88–9. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 114.

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27 Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 1, 5; David Perrett et al., “When Is a Face Not a Face?” in The Artful Eye, ed. Richard L. Gregory et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 103. 28 J. C. Lavater, Essays on Physiology: For the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trs. Thomas Holcroft (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, PaternosterRow, 1799), 53. 29 John Willats, “The Draughtsman’s Contract: How an Artist Creates an Image,” in Images and Understanding, ed. H. Barlow et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 235. 30 Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 111. 31 Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1976), 129. 32 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Inside the Vault,” in Spione DVD, dir. Fritz Lang (Eureka Masters of Cinema Series, 2005), 9. 33 Lenin and Trotsky have also been suggested as physiognomic inspirations of Haghi, Rosenbaum, “Inside the Vault,” 9, 15–16; Eisner, Fritz Lang, 96. 34 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 150. 35 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.21–2.

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Arnheim, Film as Art, 15. Norbert M. Schmitz, “Licht als Mittel und als Zweck. Zum Verhältnis des filmischen Lichts im Avant-gardefilm und im Kino,” in Ästhetik der Schatten: Filmisches Licht 1915–1950, ed. Connie Betz, Julia Pattis and Rainer Rother (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2014), 119–23. C. W. Ceram, Archeology of the Cinema (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 84. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 17, 42. Guerin, A Culture of Light, xiv; Richard Blank, Film & Light: The History of Filmlighting Is the History of Film, trs. Catherine Morgan (Berlin–Köln: Alexander Verlag, 2012), 20. Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 33; Ralf Forster, “Licht, Licht, auf alle Fälle! Techniken der Filmbeleuchtung in Deutschland 1915 bis 1931,” in Ästhetik der Schatten: Filmisches Licht 1915–1950, ed. Betz et al., 136. Daisuke Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadows: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Durham– London: Duke University Press, 2013), 2, 47–9; Kristin Thompson, Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I (Amsterdam:

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Notes Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 28; Peter Baxter, “On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 90; Blank, Film & Light, 9, 12. Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers DVD (London: British Film Institute, 2005). Thompson and Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 46. Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers DVD. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley– Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 337. Thompson and Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 2nd edn, 46. Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 69. Qtd. in Forster, “Licht, Licht, auf alle Fälle!” 135. Guerin, A Culture of Light, 8, 72; Baxter, “On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting,” 91. Urban Gad, Der Film. Seine Mittel-seine Ziele (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1921), 108–9; Corinna Müller, “Licht–Spiel–Räume,” in Babelsberg 1912–1992: Ein Filmstudio (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1992), 14. Heide Schlüpmann, “27 May 1911: Asta Nielsen Secures Unprecedented Artistic Control,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2012), 45; Baxter “On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting,” 91. Müller, “Licht–Spiel–Räume,” 15–18. Frank Brenner and Annette Groschke, “From Teenager to Tycoon—Asta Nielsen in 4 Film,” in Vier Filme mit Asta Nielsen DVD (München: Edition Filmmuseum 67, 2012). Müller, “Licht–Spiel–Räume,” 20–1; Janet Ward, “Kracauer versus the Weimar Film-City,” in Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema, ed. Kenneth S. Calhoon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 21. Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London–New York: Routledge, 2000), 44; Blank, Film & Light, 23. Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010), 30–4. Martin Loiperdinger, “Travelling Cinema,” in Crazy Cinématographe: Europäisches Jahrmarktkino 1896–1916 DVD (München: Edition Filmmuseum 18, 2012). Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994), 5–6; Marc Silberman, “Industry, Text, and Ideology in Expressionist Film,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (London: Croom Helm Limited, 1983), 376. Casati, The Shadow Club, 23–4. Müller, “Licht–Spiel–Räume,” 24.

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27 Heide Schlüpmann, “The First German Art Film: Rye’s The Student of Prague (1913),” in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York–London: Methuen, 1986), 10; Stefan Drössler, “A Film in Various Versions,” in Der Student von Prag DVD (Edition Filmmuseum München 80, 2016). 28 Arnheim, Film as Art, 17, 74–5; The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1982), 36, 42–3, 52. 29 Metz, Film Language, 94; Szarkowski, “Introduction to The Photographer’s Eye,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Wells, 100. 30 Alberti, On Painting, 56; Arheim, The Power of the Center, 51. 31 Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 149. 32 Qtd. in Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 69.

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Martin Koerber, “Metropolis: Reconstruction & Restoration,” in Metropolis DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2010), 47–9; Die Reise nach Metropolis (Journey to Metropolis), documentary film, dir. Artem Demenok, in Metropolis DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2010). Joseph Garncarz, “Art and Industry: German Cinema of the 1920s,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (London–New York: Routledge, 2004), 399. Paul Harris, “Library of Congress: 75% of Silent Films Lost,” Variety Media, online film magazine: http://variety.com/2013/film/news/library-of-congress-only-14 -of-u-s-silent-films-survive-1200915020/ (accessed January 3, 2017). Katja Nicodemus, “Rette sie, wer kann!” Die Zeit 6 (January 30, 2014): 53. Garncarz, “Art and Industry: German Cinema of the 1920s,” 389; Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 24; The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 1994), 617. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trs. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 171; Ward, “Kracauer versus the Weimar Film-City,” in Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema, ed. Calhoon, 26; Dennis Sharp, The Picture Palace and Other Buildings for the Movies (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1969), 152, 157. Qtd. in Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton–Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 236–7.

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Notes Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 52–4; Silberman, “Industry, Text, and Ideology in Expressionist Film,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Bronner and Kellner, 374; Eckhardt Köhn, “Konstruktion des Lebens. Zum Urbanismus der Berliner Avantgarde,” Avant-Garde: Revue interdisciplinaire et internationale 1 (1988): 53. Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 44, 53; Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 101–2; Klaus Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945, trs. Robert and Rita Kimber (1992; Berkeley–Los Angeles– London: University of California Press, 1999), 123. Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 7, 18. Qtd. in Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 22. Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (1952; Berkeley–Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 18, 310. Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writings on Film in Germany 1907–1933 (Lincoln–London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 109–10. Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 6, 121–2. Qtd. in George A. Huaco, The Sociology of Film Art (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 35–6. Paul Dobryden, “23 May 1920: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari Brings Aesthetic Modernism to the Fairground,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Kapczynski and Richardson, 81. Ian Roberts, German Expressionist Cinema: The World of Light and Shadow (London: Wallflower, 2008), 25; Christian Kiening and Ulrich Johannes Beil, “Nachwort,” in Rudolf Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film (1926; Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2007), 162–3. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. R. Dixon Smith, “The Kingdom of Ghosts: Paul Wegener’s The Golem and the Expressionist Tradition,” in Der Golem DVD (Eureka Video, 2007); Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films. Band 1: 1895–1928, trs. Lilli Kaufmann (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1975), 223; Olaf Brill, “Die Caligari-Legenden: zur Enstehungsgeschichte von Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari,” in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari DVD (Transit Classics-Deluxe Edition, 2014), 3. Blank, Film & Light, 30. Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film, 54–5; Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 219–22; Kiening and Beil, “Nachwort,” 170; Stefan Andriopoulos, “Suggestion, Hypnosis, and Crime: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Isenberg, 16. Wilhelm Heizer, “Architektur und Film,” in Baukunst II, no. 10 (1926): 291; Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 20.

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23 Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 167; Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film, 20–1, 24–5. 24 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 69; Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 217. 25 Lenny Rubenstein, “Caligari and the Rise of Expressionist Film,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Bronner and Kellner, 364–6; Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 18, 21; Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918–1933 (1974; London: Phoenix Press, 2000), 234; Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, 166. 26 Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (1964; London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), 99. 27 Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 217; Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 60–2. 28 Eisner, Fritz Lang, 61–3; Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 228; Mabuses Motive, documentary film, dir. Hans Günther Pflaum, in Fritz Lang Collection DVD (Transit Classics, 2007/2011). 29 E. Ann Kaplan, “Fritz Lang and German Expressionism: A Reading of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Eric Bronner and Kellner, 403. 30 Peter Baxter, “On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 98. 31 Guerin, A Culture of Light, 255; Roberts, German Expressionist Cinema, 25. 32 Brill, “Die Caligari-Legenden,” 4–5. 33 Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 79–80, 89–90. 34 Michael Bockemühl, Rembrandt, 1606–1669: The Mystery of the Revealed Form (Köln: Taschen, 2004), 39, 50. 35 David Cairns, “You Must Become Caligari,” in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari DVD (Eureka Video, 2000). 36 Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film, 73; Hans Helmut Prinzler, Sirens and Sinners: A Visual History of Weimar Film 1918–1933 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 86. 37 Special feature in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari DVD (Kino International Corp., 2002). 38 Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film, 75–9; John D. Barlow, German Expressionist Film (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 56; Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 102. 39 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 141. 40 Paul Leni, article in Kinematograph, No. 911, 1924, qtd. in Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 127. 41 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 115–16. 42 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 122. 43 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 86–7. 44 Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film, 69.

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45 Inge Degenhardt, “Heimkehr in Zeitlupe,” in Von morgens bis mittenachts DVD (München: Edition Filmmuseum, 2010), 2–3. 46 Jürgen Kasten, “Film as Graphic Art: On Karl Heinz Martin’s From Morn to Midnight,” in Expressionist Film: New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer Inc., 2003), 170–2. 47 A feature in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari DVD (Kino International Corp., 2002); Forster, “Licht, Licht, auf alle Fälle! Techniken der Filmbeleuchtung in Deutschland 1915 bis 1931,” in Ästhetik der Schatten: Filmisches Licht 1915–1950, ed. Betz et al., 145. 48 Guerin, A Culture of Light, 11–15; Roberts, Ian, German Expressionist Cinema, 34. 49 Kurtz, Expressionismus und Film, 83. 50 Qtd. in Noah Isenberg, “Of Monsters and Magicians: Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World,” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 47, 49. 51 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 58; Kreimeier, The UFA Story, 105. 52 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 49–51. 53 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, ed. Gilberto Perez (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 28. 54 Christopher Frayling, “On Nosferatu,” in Nosferatu DVD (London: British Film Institute, 2001). 55 The Language of the Shadows: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and His Films, documentary film, dir. Luciano Berriatúa, in Schloss Vogelöd: Die Enthüllung eines Geheimnisses DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2011). 56 Elsaesser, “No End to Nosferatu (1922),” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 88–9. 57 Frayling, “On Nosferatu.” 58 The Language of the Shadows, dir. Berriatúa. 59 Perez, The Material Ghost, 28; Wolf, Caspar David Friedrich, 1774–1840: The Painter of Stillness; Elsaesser, “No End to Nosferatu (1922),” 13; Angela Dalle Vacche, Cinema and Painting: How Art Is Used in Film (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), 162. 60 Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 169–70. 61 Vacche, Cinema and Painting, 182–3. 62 Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Hodder Arnold, 2002), 89. 63 Perez, The Material Ghost, 29–30; Elsaesser, “No End to Nosferatu (1922),” 15. 64 Elsaesser, “No End to Nosferatu (1922),” 14–15. 65 Judith Mayne, “Dracula in the Twilight: Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922),” in German Film and Literature, ed. Rentschler, 29–30; Jones, Horror: A Thematic History, 89. 66 Roberts, German Expressionist Cinema, 46–7; Perez, The Material Ghost, 55. 67 Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 75–7. 68 The Language of the Shadows, dir. Berriatúa. 69 Adeline Mueller, “14 February 1924: Die Nibelungen Premières, Foregrounds ‘Germanness,’” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Kapczynski and Richardson, 136.

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70 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 93. 71 Jan-Christopher Horak, “Die Nibelungen,” in Die Nibelungen DVD (Kino International Corp., 2002); Blank, Film & Light, 67–9. 72 Eisner, Fritz Lang, 76. 73 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 153. 74 Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 27. 75 Eisner, Fritz Lang, 69–73. 76 Walther Ruttmann, “Compilation of Excerpts from Interviews and Articles 1927– 1937,” in Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt DVD (München: Edition Filmmuseum 39). 77 Malkiewicz, Cinematography, 124. 78 The Heritage of Die Nibelungen, documentary film, dir. Guide Altendorf and Anke Wilkening, in Die Nibelungen DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2012). 79 Anke Wilkening, “Produktion und Restaurierung,” in Die Nibelungen DVD (Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, 2010); “The Colour Question: On the Tinting of the Restoration of Die Nibelungen,” in Die Nibelungen DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2012), 45–7. 80 Eisner, Murnau, 87; R. Dixon Smith, “‘The Vanity of Earthly Things’: Style as the Servant of Meaning in F. W. Murnau’s Tartuff,” in Tartüff DVD (Eureka, 2005/2012), 7. 81 Loiperdinger, “Travelling Cinema,” in Crazy Cinématographe: Europäisches Jahrmarktkino 1896–1916 DVD. 82 Tartüffe, der verschollene Film, documentary, dir. Luciano Berriatúa, in Tartüff DVD (Eureka, 2005/2012); Eisner, Murnau, 160; Smith, “The Vanity of Earthly Things,” 14. 83 Susanne Marschall, “Friedrich Schiller—The Poet as a Young Man,” in Friedrich Schiller—Eine Dichterjugend DVD, München: Edition Filmmuseum, 2005, 3. 84 Keating, Hollywood Lighting, 65. 85 Guy Barefoot, Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood (New York–London: Continuum, 2001), 36; Baxter, “On the History and Ideology of Film Lighting,” 84. 86 Elger, Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art. 87 R. Dixon Smith, “F.W. Murnau’s Faust: How Many Versions, How Many Negatives?” in Faust, Eine deutsche Volkssage DVD (Eureka, 2006), 26; Forster, “Licht, Licht, auf alle Fälle!” 86. 88 Peter Spooner, “Faust,” in Faust, Eine deutsche Volkssage DVD, 12. 89 Spooner, “Faust,” 9. 90 David Ehrenstein and Bill Krohn, audio commentary, in Faust, Eine deutsche Volkssage DVD. 91 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy in Two Parts, trs. John R. Williams (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2007), part II, act IV, ll. 10041–2. 92 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 148. 93 Matt Erlin, “Tradition as Intellectual Montage: F. W. Murnau’s Faust (1926),” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 164.

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94

Casper Tybjerg, visual essay in Vampyr. The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2008). 95 Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer (Lanham, Maryland–London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2000), 151; Tony Rayns, audio commentary, in Vampyr. The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray DVD. 96 Tybjerg, visual essay. 97 Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1971), 85. 98 Drum and Drum, My Only Great Passion, 155; Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, 47, 50. 99 Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, 87; Martin Koerber, “Some Notes on the Restoration of Vampyr,” in Vampyr: The Strange Adventure of Allan Gray, 58. 100 Drum and Drum, My Only Great Passion, 157. 101 Drum and Drum, My Only Great Passion, 152, 162.

Chapter 6 1

2 3 4 5

6

7

8

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968; New York–London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 11; Thomas Koebner, “Der Schock der Moderne: Die Stadt als Anti-Idylle im Kino der Weimarer Zeit,” in Dschungel Großstadt: Kino und Modernisierung, ed. Irmbert Schyenk (Marburg: Schüren, 1999), 76. Weitz, Weimar Germany, 27, 39. Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 423; R. Dixon Smith, “UFA Style and the End of Silent Cinema in Joe May’s Asphalt,” in Asphalt DVD (Eureka, 2005), 6–7. Gay, Weimar Culture, 2, 120. Michalski, New Objectivity, 176; Bernhard Schulz, “Hochhäuser im märkischen Sand: Berlin und New York von der Jahrhundertwende bis 1933: Eine Wahlverwandtschaft,” in George Grosz: Berlin-New York, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Berlin: Neue Nationalgalerie, 1995), 84–5; Frank Whitford, “The City in Painting,” in Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, ed. Edward Timms and David Kelley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 45–57. Elger, Expressionism; Whitford, “The City in Painting,” 63; Herbert van Rheeden, “Metropolis, the 1920s Image of the City,” in Metropolis. Avant Garde, Interdisciplinary and International Review, ed. Michael Müller and Ben Rebel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 17. Hall, “Inflation and Devaluation: Gender, Space, and Economics in G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925),” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Isenberg, 147–8. Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London–New York: Routledge, 2000), 90.

Notes 9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23

24

245

Anthony Sutcliffe, “The Metropolis in the Cinema,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1984), 153; Prinzler, Sirens and Sinners, 126; Anton Kaes, “29 November 1923: Karl Grune’s Die Straße Inaugurates ‘Street Film’, Foreshadows Film Noir,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Kapczynski and Richardson, 124. Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918–1933, 231–2, 242. Reinhold Happel, “Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt—Eine exemplarische Analyse,” in Film und Realität in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Helmut Korte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 174–7; Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Michael D. Richardson, “An Introduction to A New History of German Cinema: 1932,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Kapczynski and Richardson, 1; Marc Silberman, “Whose Revolution? The Subject of Kuhle Wampe (1932),” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 311–12. Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 228. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 219. Gay, Weimar Culture, 120. Guerin, A Culture of Light, xxiii. Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 2–4. Damisch, “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Wells, 88. Ludwig Meidner, “An Introduction to Painting Big Cities,” Kunst und Künstler xii (1914): 299, qtd. in Voices of German Expressionism, ed. Victor H. Miesel (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), 113. Arnheim, Film as Art, 11–13; Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, 23; Theda Shapiro, “The Metropolis in the Visual Arts: Paris, Berlin, New York, 1890–1940,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Sutcliffe, 96, 101–2. August Endell, Die Schönheit der grossen Stadt (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1908), qtd. in Andrew Lees, “The Metropolis and the Intellectual,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Sutcliffe, 78. Edward Timms, “Introduction: Unreal City—Theme and Variations,” in Unreal City, ed. Timms and Kelley, 3. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 1. Mark Shiel, “Cinema and the City in History and Theory,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001), 1–2. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trs. J. A. Underwood (1936; London: Penguin Books, 2008); Carsten Strathausen, “Uncanny Spaces: The City in Ruttmann and Vertov,” in Cinema and the City, ed. Shiel and Fitzmaurice, 24–5.

246

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25 Janelle Blankenship, “1 November 1895: Première of Wintergarten Program Highlights Transitional Nature of Early Film Technology,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Kapczynski and Richardson, 23–5. 26 Sutcliffe, “The Metropolis in the Cinema,” 151; Murray Pomerance, “Cities and Cinema,” The Canadian Geographer 53, no. 1 (2009): 117. 27 Peter Hall, “Metropolis 1890–1940: Challenges and Responses,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Sutcliffe, 19; Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press, 2006), 20–1; Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918–1933, 25; An Paenhuysen, “Berlin in Pictures: Weimar City and the Loss of Landscape,” New German Critique 37, no. 1 (2010): 12. 28 Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), 289; Williams, The Country and the City, 217; Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), 525–67. 29 John Bingham, Weimar Cities: The Challenge of Urban Modernity in Germany, 1919–1933 (New York–London: Routledge, 2008), 1; Horst Matzerath, “Berlin, 1890–1940,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Sutcliffe, 298; Shapiro, “The Metropolis in the Visual Arts,” 103; Rainer Metzger, Berlin in the Twenties: Art and Culture 1918–1933 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 155–78; John Willet, The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), 110–43. 30 Kaes et al., ed., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 412; Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 181–2. 31 Hans Christian Adam, Berlin: Porträt einer Stadt–Portrait of a City–Portrait d’une ville (Köln: Taschen, 2010), 143, 164. 32 Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), 1942, qtd. in Gay, Weimar Culture, 129–30; Rory MacLean, Berlin: Imagine a City (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014), 172–4. 33 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 41; Watson, The German Genius, 519–30; Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 48. 34 Müller and Rebel, ed., Metropolis Avant Garde, Interdisciplinary and International Review, 5; Schultz, “Hochhäuser im märkischen Sand,” 84; MacLean, Berlin: Imagine a City, 189–90. 35 Noah Isenberg, “Introduction,” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 7; Geoffrey Nowel-Smith, “Cities: Real and Imagined,” in Cinema and the City, 100. 36 Kreimeier, The UFA Story, 113, 196–7. 37 Light and Shadow; Hans Helmut Prinzler, Sirens & Sinners: A Visual History of Weimar Film 1918–1933 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 266; Adam, Berlin, 254. 38 Eisner, Fritz Lang, 64. 39 Tom Gunning, “Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922): Grand Enunciator of the Weimar Era,” in Weimar Cinema, Isenberg, 109.

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40 Frank Brenner and Annette Groschke, “From Teenager to Tycoon—Asta Nielsen in 4 Films,” in Vier Filme mit Asta Nielsen DVD. 41 Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen, “Humanity: The Dimensions of Gerhard Lamprecht’s Film Narrative,” in Die Verrufenen (Der fünfte Stand) DVD (München: Edition Filmmuseum, 2012). 42 Lutz Koepnick, “The Bearable Lightness of Being: People on Sunday (1930),” in Weimar Cinema, Isenberg, 240–3, 250–1; Noah Isenberg, “4 February 1930: Menschen am Sonntag Provides New Model of Cinematic Realism,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Kapczynski and Richardson, 202–5. 43 Klaus Kreimeier, “Strukturen im Chaos: Wie Fritz Lang Ordnung in den Dschungel bringt,” in Dschungel Großstadt, ed. Schenk, 59; Anton Kaes, M (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 17, 41; Eisner, Fritz Lang, 113–16; Sutcliffe, “The Metropolis in the Cinema,” 157. 44 Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 431; Nora M. Alter, “Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927): City, Image, Sound,” in Weimar Cinema, Isenberg, 196; Matthew Bernstein, “Visual Style and Spatial Articulations in Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927),” Journal of Film and Video 36, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 7. 45 Alter, “Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927),” 196. 46 Sir Harold Nicolson, “The Charm of Berlin,” Der Querschnitt 9, no. 5 (1932): 345–6, qtd. in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes et al., 425; Paenhuysen, “Berlin in Pictures,” 13. 47 Dixon Smith, “UFA Style and the End of Silent Cinema in Joe May’s Asphalt,” 11–12. 48 Ulf Zimmermann, “Expressionism and Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Bronner and Kellner, 218–27; Köhn, “Konstruktion des Lebens: Zum Urbanismus der Berliner Avantgarde,” 54–5. 49 Martin Gaugham, “Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a ‘Hollow Space’?” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London–New York: Verso, 2003), 44; Schmitz, “Licht als Mittel und als Zweck. Zum Verhältnis des filmischen Lichts im Avant-gardefilm und im Kino,” in Ästhetik der Schatten: Filmisches Licht 1915–1950, ed. Betz et al., 125. 50 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 54–5. 51 Forster, “Licht, Licht, auf alle Fälle! Techniken der Filmbeleuchtung in Deutschland 1915 bis 1931,” in Ästhetik der Schatten: Filmisches Licht 1915–1950, ed. Betz et al., 148. 52 Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (1929), qtd. in Weitz, Weimar Germany, 46; Federle, “Picture Postcard: Kracauer Writes from Berlin,” in Peripheral Visions: The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema, ed. Calhoon, 46. 53 Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 15–22, 184; Strathausen, “Uncanny Spaces,” 15, 27. 54 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley : The University of California Press, 1988), 128.

248

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55 Ernst Engelbrecht and Leo Heller, “Nachtgestalten der Großstadt,” in Kinder der Nacht: Bilder aus dem Verbrechenleben (Berlin: Hermann Paetel Verlag, 1926), 21–5, reprinted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes et al., 724. 56 Köhn, “Konstruktion des Lebens: Zum Urbanismus der Berliner Avantgarde,” 70. 57 Qtd. in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes et al., 421–2. 58 Matzerath, “Berlin, 1890–1940,” 295–7; Peter Hall, “Metropolis 1890–1940: Challenges and Responses,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Sutcliffe, 21, 32–3; Anthony Sutcliffe, “Introduction: Urbanization, Planning, and the Giant City,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Sutcliffe, 4–5. 59 Kaes, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 454; Whitford, “The City in Painting,” 51–2. 60 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939 (London: Vintage Books, 1998), 147–8. 61 Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 71–2; Tony Rayns, “Der letzte Mann,” in Der letzte Mann DVD (Eureka, 2008), 13–14. 62 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 100–2; Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 231. 63 Blank, Film & Light, 84. 64 Sabine Hake, “Who Gets the Last Laugh? Old Age and Generational Change in F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924),” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 125; R. Dixon Smith, “Expressionism and the Kammerspiel Tradition in F. W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann,” in Der letzte Mann DVD, 6–8; Der letzte Mann. Das Making of, documentary film, dir. Luciano Berriatúa, in Der letzte Mann DVD. 65 Aurich and Jacobsen, “Humanity: The Dimensions of Gerhard Lamprecht’s Film Narrative.” 66 Heinrich Zille, Das alte Berlin: Photographien 1890–1910 (1993; München: Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, 2004); Das große Zille-Album, ed. Matthias Flügge and Hein-Jörg Preetz-Zille (Köln: Komet, 2004). 67 Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 131, 140, 256; Hall, “Inflation and Devaluation,” 140–2, 147. 68 Lars Olof Larsson, “Metropolis Architecture,” in Metropolis 1890–1940, ed. Sutcliffe, 206–8; Kreimeier, The UFA Story, 100. 69 Eisner, Murnau, 67; Der letzte Mann. Das Making of, documentary film; Kreimeier, The UFA Story, 100. 70 Qtd. in Eisner, Murnau, 68. 71 Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, 213–14. 72 Kevin Brownlow, “Fotografisch Denken: Amerikanische Kameramänner in der Stummfilmzeit,” in Ästhetik der Schatten. Filmisches Licht 1915–1950, ed. Betz et al., 61–5. 73 Lucy Fischer, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 12–15; Nestor Almendros, “Sunrise,” American Cinematographer 65, no. 4 (April 1984): 28; R. Dixon Smith, “‘A Song of Two Humans’: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise,” in Sunrise DVD (Eureka, 2005), 7.

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74 Lucy Fischer, “City/Country,” in Sunrise DVD (Eureka, 2005), 35. 75 Almendros, “Sunrise,” 32. 76 Koebner, “Der Schock der Moderne,” 73; Lotte H. Eisner, “The American Début,” in Sunrise DVD (Eureka 2005), 17. 77 Fischer, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, 39. 78 Adrian Danks, “Reaching Beyond the Frame,” in City Girl DVD (2003; Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2011), 8. 79 Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 98. 80 von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, 312; Miyao, The Aesthetics of Shadow, 2–4. 81 Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 104. 82 Patrice Petro, “National Cinemas/International Film Culture: The Blue Angel (1930) in Multiple Language Versions,” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 255, 261. 83 Isenberg, “Introduction,” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 1–3. 84 Thomas Elsaesser, Metropolis (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 7; Anton Kaes, “Metropolis (1927): City, Cinema, Modernity,” in Weimar Cinema, ed. Isenberg, 173–4; Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 85–6. 85 Karen Naundorf, “The Metropolis Mystery,” in Metropolis DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2010), 30. 86 Willy Haas, Film-Kurier, no. 9 (January 11, 1927), qtd. in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes et al., 624–5. 87 Kaes, “Metropolis (1927): City, Cinema, Modernity,” 175, 189; Elsaesser, Metropolis, 7, 15, 17; Luis Buñuel, “Metropolis,” in Metropolis DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2010), 22; Holger Bachmann, “The Production and Contemporary Reception of Metropolis,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Camden House, 2000), 9–10. 88 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 150, 163–4. 89 Gay, Weimar Culture, 141. 90 Qtd. in Kaes, “Metropolis (1927): City, Cinema, Modernity,” 177. 91 Alter, “Berlin, Symphony of a Great City,” 201. 92 Kreimeier, The UFA Story, 151–2. 93 Die Reise nach Metropolis, documentary film, dir. Artem Demenok, in Metropolis DVD (Eureka Entertainment Ltd., 2010; Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, 2011). 94 Fritz Lang, “Was ich in Amerika sah,” Film-Kurier (December 11, 1924), qtd. in Bachmann, “The Production and Contemporary Reception of Metropolis,” 4. 95 Interview with Fritz Lang, Focus on Film in 1975, qtd. in Elsaesser, Metropolis, 9; Kaes, “Metropolis (1927): City, Cinema, Modernity,” 174. 96 Dirk Stichweh, New York Skyscrapers (Munich: Prestel, 2009), 6–8. 97 Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, 161–2.

250 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

Notes Schulz, “Hochhäuser im märkischen Sand,” 89. Schulz, “Hochhäuser im märkischen Sand,” 79. Qtd. in Kaes, “Metropolis (1927): City, Cinema, Modernity,” 183. Schulz, “Hochhäuser im märkischen Sand,” 82. Larsson, “Metropolis Architecture,” 206–8. Matzerath, “Berlin, 1890–1940,” 300. Elsaesser, Metropolis, 65–6. Buñuel, “Metropolis,” 22; Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After, 148. Paul Ickes, Die Filmwoche 10.1, no. 3 (1927), qtd. in Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 426. Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 62. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 225. Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 91; Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, 65; Elsaesser, Metropolis, 21–2. Kaes, M, 17, 22; Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, 119. Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (1955; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 195. Bertold Brecht, Die Dreigrischenoper (1928; Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp, 1955), 126.

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Index Note: Page number in bold refer to headings. Abel, Alfred (actor) 108, 113 Agfa Pankine (film stock) 196, 199 Alberti, Leon Battista 38, 54 Allan, David (painter) 55 Almendros, Nestor (cameraman) 209 Alt Berlin (dir. Franz Fiedler) 195 Altdorfer, Albrecht (painter) 166 Americanism 221–2 Andreiev, Andrej (set designer) 123 Annabelle Dances and Dances (Edison film) 86–7 Arnheim, Rudolf (critic) 40, 101 art, def. 17, 18–19 Asphalt (dir. Joe May) 6, 78–81, 194 Atget, Eugène (photographer) 182–3 Babelsberg studio 91, 93, 94, 97, 205 Bangville Police (dir. Henry Lehrman) 32–3 Barbaro, Daniele (architect) 44 Battle between Alexander and Darius (Roman mosaic) 29–30 Bauhaus 211 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro (painter) 45 Benjamin, Walter (critic) 184 Berlin 106, 186–8, 193. See also Großstadt in cinema 188–99 electricity in 196–9 tenements 199–201 Berlin Alexanderplatz (dir. Phil Jutzi) 6, 194 Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (dir. Walther Ruttmann) 5, 190, 192–9, 219 Biedermeier style 136, 210 Bitzer, Billy (cameraman) 3, 91 Black Marias 86 black screen (“slug“) 81–3 Blaue Engel, Der (dir. Josef von Sternberg) 214–16

Blaue Reiter, Der (art movement) 127 Böcklin, Arnold (painter) 142 Bordwell, David (critic) 21–3 Bourdais, Jules (architect) 188 Brecht, Bertold (playwright) 188, 230 Brockmann, Stephen (critic) 182 Brooks, Louise (actor) 33, 123, 204 Brown, Karl (cameraman) 140 Brücke, Die (art movement) 127 Büchse der Pandora, Die (dir. Georg W. Pabst) 14, 33, 123, 204 Bunim, Miriam Schild (critic) 30 Buñuel, Luis (film director) 169, 218, 224 Cabaret (dir. Bob Fosse) 63, 64 Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Das (dir. Robert Wiene) 4, 33–4, 75, 95, 107, 110–18, 120, 123, 129, 131, 142, 168, 215, 226 Cairns, David (critic) 118 Caligarisme 110, 119–21 camera obscura 47–8, 53 Campin, Robert (painter) 40, 41 Canaletto (painter) 47–8, 53 candles (motif) 151–2, 153, 155–7, 210 Caravaggio (painter) 14, 44–6 Casino Royal (dir. John Huston) 110 Chamisso, Adalbert von (writer) 3, 99 Chat-Noir, Le (cabaret) 63 Chauvet cave 18, 24, 27, 31 chiaroscuro in film 13–14, 31–2, 41, 114, 124, 126, 128, 143, 153, 159, 162, 196, 203–4, 208, 211, 225 in panting 29–30, 43–5 Chinese shadows 63, 68 Chirico, Giorgio de (painter) 14, 15, 49, 50, 136 cinematic frame 100–3 Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles) 32, 35–7, 164

268

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city 182–6, 190, 192–9, 209–11. See also street films City Girl (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 211–14 consciousness 17 country 209–14 Courbet, Gustave (painter) 48 Cronjager, Henry (cameraman) 91 daguerreotype 56 Danks, Adrian (critic) 211 Dante Alighieri 8 David, Gerard (painter) 40, 42 Dawkins, Richard 19 Derain, André (painter) 50 Deutsch, Ernst (actor) 126, 128 Dietrich, Marlene (actor) 215 Dix, Otto (painter) 51, 180, 216 Doppelgänger 3, 9, 99, 120 Doré, Gustav (illustrator) 140 Dreigroschenoper, Die (dir. Georg W. Pabst) 181, 229–30 Dupont, E. A. (dir. of Varieté) 30–1 Dürer, Albrecht (painter) 43–4 Dutton, Denis (philospher) 17 Easterlin, Nancy (critic) 20–1 Edelman, Gerald M. (biologist) 17 Edison, Thomas 86 Einstein, Albert 188 Eisner, Lotte H. (critic) 108, 124, 130, 142, 150 Ekman, Gösta (actor) 162 electric lighting (in film) 86, 88–97, 129, 196, 205 elf Teufel, Die (dir. Zoltan Korda) 190 Elsaesser, Thomas (critic) 97, 109, 138, 180, 217, 224 Emil und die Detektive (dir. Gerhard Lamprecht) 6, 188 Endell, August (designer) 183–4 Engelbrecht, Ernst (journalist) 199 Eskimobaby, Die (dir. Heinz Schall) 94, 189 evolutionary theory of film 16–21 Expressionist art 110, 112, 158 in cinema 98–9, 107, 109, 110, 113, 124, 125, 129, 202, 208, 214–16 in painting 49–50 Eyck, Jan van 41, 43

Fall of the House of Usher, The (dir. Melville Webber, J. S. Watson) 120–2 Faust (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 5, 6, 158–68 Feininger, Lyonel (painter) 112, 127 fiction 17–20 film 61 editing 19 noir 45 studies 20–1 Film im Film, Der (dir. Friedrich Porges) 129 Fox, William (film producer) 208 Frankfurt School 184 Frayling, Christopher (critic) 133 Frère, Jean-Claude (critic) 41 freudlose Gasse, Die (dir. Georg W. Pabst) 181, 203 Freund, Karl (cameraman) 130, 151, 199, 201 Friedrich, Caspar David (painter) 48–9, 136 Friedrich Schiller–Eine Dichterjugen (dir. Curt Goetz) 155–8, 189 Fritsch, Willy (actor) 77 Gad, Urban (film director) 92–3 Galeen, Henrik (screenwriter) 133, 134, 135 gas lighting 205 Gay, Peter (critic) 219 Gaynor, Janet (actor) 208, 209, 210 Genuine (dir. Robert Wiene) 121–2 Giotto 37, 38 Gliese, Rochus (set designer) 208 Goebbels, Joseph 141, 219, 229 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 159, 163, 166, 167 Golem, Der (dir. Paul Wegener) 4, 43, 45, 111, 129–33 Gombrich, Ernst H. (critic) 37–8 Gorky, Maxim (writer) 2 Grau, Albin (designer) 65, 133–5, 137, 140, 170 Griffith, D. W. (film director) 86 grisaille 40, 56, 85 Grodal, Torben (critic) 20 Gropius, Walter (architect) 188

Index Großstadt 186, 188–92 Grosz, Georg (painter) 51, 216, 222 Guerin, Frances (critic) 181–2 Gunzburg, Nicolas de (actor) 170 Haas, Willy (critic) 218 Hades 8 Hake, Sabine (critic) 108, 202 Halfeld, Adolf (critic) 222 Hameister, Willy (cameraman) 111 Harbou, Thea von (writer) 141, 217, 223 Hasler, Emil (set designer) 191 Haunted Spooks (dir. Harold Lloyd) 140 Hauptmann, Gerhart (writer) 113 Heemskerck, Martin van (painter) 115–16 Heidegger, Martin (philosopher) 188 Heller, Leo (journalist) 199 Hepworth, Cecil (film director) 90 Herlth, Robert (set designer) 205 Herr Tartüff (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 150–4 Hessel, Franz (writer) 106, 196, 199 Histoire d’un crime (dir. Ferdinand Zecca) 90 Hitchcock, Alfred 169 Hitler, Adolf 141, 179, 219 Hobrecht, James (Police-President) 200 Hoffmann, Carl (cameraman) 95, 126, 147, 164, 166, 189, 208 Hollywood 91–2, 140, 185, 188, 201, 208 Homer 8 Horn, Camilla (actor) 166 100-to-One Shot; or, A Run of Luck, The (film, 1906) 90 Hunte, Otto (set designer) 143, 223 Husserl, Edmund (philosopher) 188 Ickes, Paul (critic) 224 icon (semiotic sign) 23–4 iconic media 53–4, 56 iconic index (semiotic sign) 24–7, 53, 56 iconic-indexical media 61 Impressionism 182 index (semiotic sign) 13, 23, 53–4, 58, 141, 184 INRI (dir. Robert Wiene) 129 Intolerance (dir. D. W. Griffith) 91, 114–15 iris shot 82 Isherwood, Christopher (writer) 201

269

Jack the Ripper 14, 33, 123, 124–5, 204, 227 James, Henry (writer) 18 Jannings, Emil (actor) 30–1, 108, 124, 153, 159, 163, 165, 206, 214–15 Japanese silent cinema 89–90 Jaspers, Karl (philosopher) 188 Jones, Darryl (critic) 137 Joyce, James 8 Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) 183 Jung, Carl Gustav 9 Kaes, Anton (critic) 229 Kammerspiel 150 Kaplan, E. Ann (critic) 114 Keating, Patrick (critic) 89, 91, 140, 155 Kettelhut, Erich (set designer) 143, 223 kinetoscope 86, 185 Klein, César (painter) 122 Klein-Rogge, Rudolf (actor) 75, 77, 108, 226 König der Mittelstürmer (dir. Fritz Freisler) 190 Kracauer, Siegfried (critic) 69, 77, 101, 110, 112, 124, 142, 166, 201, 219, 220, 228 Krauss, Werner (actor) 123 Kreimeier, Klaus (critic) 220 Kubin, Alfred (painter) 133 Kuhle Wampe (dir. Slátan Dudow) 181 Kuntze, Reimar (cameraman) 199 Kurtz, Rudolf (critic) 122, 125, 130 Lang, Fritz (film director) 111, 219, 220–1 Laqueur, Walter (historian) 181 Last of the Mohicans, The (dir. Maurice Tourneur) 155 Last Supper, The 39–40. See also Vinci, Leonardo da Lavater, Johann Kaspar (scientist) 70 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan (writer) 168–9 Leni, Paul (film director) 46, 123–4 letzte Mann, Der (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 6, 166, 175, 201–7, 224 Liebe der Jeanne Ney, Die (dir. Georg W. Pabst) 190 Liesegang, Franz Paul (filmmaker) 91 Looney Tunes 23 Lorre, Peter (actor) 14 Lumière brothers 86–8, 185

270

Index

M (dir. Fritz Lang) 14, 78, 191, 229 Mabuse, der Spieler, Dr. (dir. Fritz Lang) 73–4, 111, 113–14, 147, 189 Mahabharata 9 Malevich, Kazimir (painter) 1 Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov) 193 Mann, Heinrich (writer) 214, 221 Marc, Franz (painter) 127 Marlowe, Christopher (playwright) 163 Masaccio 9 Maté, Rudolf (architect) 170, 171 Mayer, Carl (screenwriter) 111, 121–2, 150, 151, 201, 208 Meidner, Ludwig (painter) 50, 127, 182, 217 Méliès, George (film director) 1, 85 Menschen am Sonntag (dir. R. Siodmak, E. G. Ulmer) 5, 188, 190 Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang) 6, 78, 105, 107, 143, 167, 192, 216–28 Metzinger, Jean (painter) 50 Michalski, Sergiusz (critic) 179 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig (architect) 188, 222–3 Mietskaserne (rental barracks) 200, 224 mirror reflection 9, 14 Miyao, Daisuke (critic) 89 Modern Times (dir. Charles Chaplin) 220, 222 Monet, Claude (painter) 49, 50, 88 monochrome pictures 85, 126, 127 (?) Motorist, The (dir. Walter R. Booth) 189 müde Tod, Der (dir. Fritz Lang) 137 Müller, Corinna (critic) 94 Murillo, Bartolomé Estebán (painter) 55 Murnau, Friedrich W. 135–6 National Socialism 76, 110, 181, 228–9 Neppach, Robert (set designer) 126, 127 Nerven (dir. Robert Reinert) 33, 189 New Objectivity 48, 49, 50, 151, 175, 178–9, 190, 193, 202, 208, 215–17, 226 New Photography 61 New Woman 216 New York 220–1, 222, 224 Nibelungen, Die (dir. Fritz Lang) 5, 141–50, 220, 225

Nicolson, Harold Sir (diplomat) 193 Nielsen, Asta (actor) 92–3, 94, 189 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore (photographer) 56 Nosferatu (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 4, 9, 24–5, 35, 121, 133–40, 141, 227 O’Brien, George (actor) 209, 210 painted light (in film) 90 painting, myth of origin 53–4 Palmer, Ernest (cameraman) 213 Paolo. Giovanni di (painter) 38 Pascal, Blaise (philosopher) 18 Phantom (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 113 photography 41, 56–8, 73, 85, 182–4 def. 26, 27 versus painting 58–60 Picture of Dorian Gray, The 26 Piscador, Erwin (theater director) 188 Pittura metafisica 50 Planck, Max (physicist) 188 Plato 11 Pliny the Elder 54, 70, 71 Poe, Edgar Allan 59, 95, 119, 140, 169 Poelzig, Hans (architect) 111, 129–30, 222 Polanski, Roman (film director) 9 Pommer, Erich (film producer) 109, 115, 221 Porter, Edwin S. (film director) 185 Potsdamer Platz 194 Pound, Ezra 184 Raskolnikow (dir. Robert Wiene) 123 Reinhardt, Max (theater director) 99, 124, 130–1 Reiniger, Lotte (film director) 62, 63, 64 Rembrandt van Rijn (painter) 14, 116–17, 160 Rescued by Rover (dir. Lewin Fitzhamon) 90 Richter, Paul (actor) 142, 144, 145 Rittau, Günter (cameraman) 225 Romantic painting 135 Rosenbaum, Jonathan (critic) 77 Rosher, Charles (cameraman) 91, 208 Rossellini, Roberto (film director) 194 Ruttmann, Walther (film director) 86, 145

Index Schad, Christian (painter) 216 Schatten: Eine Nächtliche Halluzination (dir. Arthur Robison) 4, 63–9, 155 Schlemihl, Peter. See Chamisso, Adalbert von Schlichter, Rudolf (painter) 216 Schloß Vogelöd, Die Enthüllung eines Geheimnisses (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 119 Schlüpmann, Heide (critic) 99 Scholz, Georg (painter) 50, 180 Schreck, Max (actor) 137, 141 Seeber, Guido (cameraman) 93, 94, 99 semiotics 13 shadow accidental 34–5, 86–8 archetype 9 in art 29–30, 37–43 attached (self-shadow) 31–2 (see also silhouette portraits) cast 13, 26, 29, 34–5, 47–8, 54, 85, 137 def. 2, 7–8, 43 of Dr. Caligari 9–10 in folklore 8–11, 137 human “shadow” in Hiroshima 13 natural shadows 2, 3, 7 painted (in film) 111, 112, 114–5, 118, 126, 128 as part of film technology 2, 11, 65 portraits (see silhouette portraits) in Renaissance science 38–9 shading 12–3, 29–31, 37, 39, 40–1 theater 8, 61–3 types 34–5, 39, 56 unwanted 35–7 in visual perception 12–3 Shakespeare, William 11–12, 82 Shamus O’Brien (dir. Otis Turner) 91 Shelley, Mary (writer) 132 shock shot 82 silhouette portraits 70–3 in film 73–5, 91 Sisley, Alfred (painter) 88 Skladanowski, Max and Emil (filmmakers) 185 skyscrapers 204, 220–1, 222–3, 224 smoke (motif) 158–64, 168 Sontag, Susan (critic) 26, 60 Spione (dir. Fritz Lang) 6, 76–8, 191 Stern, Fritz (historian) 229

271

Sternberg, Josef von (film director) 1, 214 Stieglitz, Alfred (photographer) 91, 182 Stoichita, Victor I. (critic) 102 Stoker, Bram (writer) 133, 168 Straße, Die (dir. Karl Grune) 180 street films 178, 179–80 Streetcar Named Desire, A (dir. Elia Kazan) 36 Struss, Karl (cameraman) 208 Student von Prag, Der (dir. Hanns Heinz Ewers) 94–5, 97–9, 226 Sudermann, Hermann (writer) 208 Suffragette, Die (dir. Urban Gad) 94 Sunrise (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 208–12 Talbot, William Henry Fox (photographer) 60 Tartüff, Herr (dir. Friedrich W. Murnau) 5, 150–4 Telltale Heart, The (dir. Charles Klein) 119–20 tenebroso 46, 152 Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Das (dir. Fritz Lang) 6, 75–6, 81–3, 192, 228, 229 Third Man, The (dir. Carol Reed) 101, 102 three-point lighting 30–1, 90 tint (in film) 69, 85, 141, 146–7, 151, 155 Tintoretto (painter) 39 Toeplitz, Jerzy (critic) 193 Toland, Gregg. See Citizen Kane Toller, Ernst (playwright) 188, 217 Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (dir. Louise Le Prince) 185 UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) 91, 97, 107, 109, 129, 191, 208, 220 Unheimliche Geschichten (dir. Richard Oswald) 93–4, 95–7 Unter der Laterne (dir. Gerhard Lamprecht) 156, 190, 199 urbanization 186, 200, 220 Vacche, Angela Dalle (critic) 136 vampires 9 Vampyr (dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer) 5, 168–75 Vasari, Giorgio (architect) 43, 54–5 Veidt, Conrad (actor) 33–4, 111 Verrufenen, Die (dir. Gerhard Lamprecht) 190, 202

272

Index

Vigée-Lebrun, Marie-Louise Elisabeth (painter) 116 Vinci, Leonardo da 38–9 visual perception 7, 12, 29, 82, 100 Vollbrecht, Karl (set designer) 191, 223 Von morgens bis mitternachts (dir. Karheinz Martin) 125–9 Wachsfigurenkabinett, Das 46–7, 123–5, 227. See also Leni, Paul Wagner, Fritz Arno (cameraman) 135, 141 Wagner, Richard (composer) 141 Walden, Herwarth (writer) 188

Wanderkino 98, 150 Warm, Hermann (set designer) 103, 112, 113, 170 Wegener, Paul (film director) 95, 99, 130 Weimar Republic 4, 177, 181, 220, 229 Welles, Orson. See Citizen Kane Wells, H. G. (writer) 218–19 Wenders, Wim (film director) 14 Wilde, Oscar (writer) 18 Zille, Heinrich (photographer) 202 Zweig, Stefan (writer) 187