Weimar Cinema and After

Germany's Historical Imaginary

Thomas Elsaesser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135078591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

German cinema of the 1920s is still regarded as one of the 'golden ages' of world cinema. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Dr Mabuse the Gambler, Nosferatu, Metropolis, Pandora's Box and The Blue Angel have long been canonised as classics, but they are also among the key films defining an image of Germany as a nation uneasy with itself. The work of directors like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst, which having apparently announced the horrors of fascism, while testifying to the traumas of a defeated nation, still casts a long shadow over cinema in Germany, leaving film history and political history permanently intertwined.
Weimar Cinema and After offers a fresh perspective on this most 'national' of national cinemas, re-evaluating the arguments which view genres and movements such as 'films of the fantastic', 'Nazi Cinema', 'film noir' and 'New German Cinema' as typically German contributions to twentieth century visual culture. Thomas Elsaesser questions conventional readings which link these genres to romanticism and expressionism, and offers new approaches to analysing the function of national cinema in an advanced 'culture industry' and in a Germany constantly reinventing itself both geographically and politically.
Elsaesser argues that German cinema's significance lies less in its ability to promote democracy or predict fascism than in its contribution to the creation of a community sharing a 'historical imaginary' rather than a 'national identity'. In this respect, he argues, German cinema anticipated some of the problems facing contemporary nations in reconstituting their identities by means of media images, memory, and invented traditions.

Part I
Haunted Screens

Caligari's cabinets and a German studio system

1
Introduction

Weimar cinema’s impersonations

The Möbius strip: German cinema and its double

The German cinema of the Weimar Republic is often, but wrongly identified with Expressionism. If one locates Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau on the mental map of Berlin in the twenties, home of some of Modernism's most vital avant-garde directors, then Expressionist cinema connotes a rebellious artistic intervention. If one sees their films grow from the studio floors of the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), the only film company ever to think it could compete with Hollywood, this golden age of silent cinema takes its cue more from commerce and industry than art. Either way, coming so soon after a catastrophic military defeat and a failed socialist revolution, the emergence of a national cinema of international fame in Germany was as unexpected as it proved to be exceptional. No single stylistic label could hope to cover the many innovative ideas about film decor, the distinctive mise-en-scène of light and shadow, or the technical advances in cinematography usually attributed to Weimar film makers. And yet, in retrospect, a unity imposed itself on the films, their subjects and stories. Unique among film movements, Weimar cinema came to epitomise a country: twentieth-century Germany, uneasy with itself and troubled by a modernity that was to bring yet more appalling disasters to Europe. This legacy, embodying the best and worst not only of a national cinema, but of a nation and its people is largely the consequence of two books: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen. Their works, more than any other, have encouraged a potent analogy between film culture and political history, where experience (of key films) so uncannily matches expectation (of what German cinema should 'reflect') that the convergence of image with its object has for nearly fifty years seemed all but self-evident.

The present study wants to take a new look at Weimar cinema. Since the films refuse to be divorced from the history of their reception as masterpieces of film art and their reputation as social sensors — identifications that now belong inseparably to Weimar cinema — the new look cannot be with fresh eyes, and this book cannot but begin with a re-reading of Kracauer and Eisner. If, as their different arguments imply, the German nation is haunted by its cinema screen, and the films are haunted by German history, then their books are themselves haunted by the history that came after the films. The Zeitgeist said to be speaking from their images and stories is thus a doubly mediated one, refracted across two defeats, in 1918 and 1945, and their books 'successfully' write the second disaster into the aftermath of the first. This casts over the whole enterprise a Freudian Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, as if an event was looking for its cause, of which it could claim to be the consequence. And vice versa: their interpretations make such a perfect fit that the films appear as the books' illustrative evidence, retrospectively becoming the effects of a narrative of which they started out being the cause. A Möbius strip is forming before one's eyes, which catches a nation's history in a special kind of embrace. Whether there is an appropriate term for such a screen history (here, of Weimar cinema) onto which other histories and screen memories (here, persecution, exile, trauma) project themselves or are being overwritten, I am not sure. Weimar cinema is not just (like) any other period of German cinema, it is this cinema's historical imaginary, which suggests that it is 'the German cinema and its double': in fact, it became a Doppelgänger of its own pre-history: foreshadowed in the 'kino-debate' of the 1910s, it shadowed the Nazi cinema that selectively tried to (dis)inherit it in the 1930s. On the other side of the Atlantic, in the 1940s, it legitimated — almost equally selectively, as film noir - the work of German émigré film makers, before it was dug up again in the 1970s, to lend a historical pedigree to the New German Cinema of Syberberg, Herzog and Wenders.

Why historians, soon after the end of the monstrous realities of Hitler's rule, should have seized on the cinema, even more than on literature, philosophy or politics for explanation of the inexplicable is perfectly understandable. Kracauer, for one, gives an elaborate justification for his methodology. What my opening chapters try to address, however, is a slightly different question: was there something about this cinema that allowed such a 'fit' between film and history to remain convincing for so long? Can one pinpoint particular features in the films usually cited, such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Dr Mabuse the Gambler, Nosferatu, Warning Shadows, Metropolis, Faust, Pandora's Box, M or The Blue Angel, that warrant or encourage the kind of slippage between cinematic representation and a nation's history, and consequently produce a historical imaginary? It seems that, starting with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the films usually indexed as Weimar cinema have one thing in common: they are invariably constructed as picture puzzles. Consistently if not systematically, they refuse to be 'tied down' to a single meaning. One could say that thanks to a film language that resists reference, Weimar cinema has allowed all kinds of 'realities' (including an all too real history) to shape a special semblance of sense: 'from Caligari to Hitler'.¹ Kracauer's Möbius-strip effect, it will be argued, is due to a set of formal and stylistic devices, whose equivalences, inversions and reversals facilitate but also necessitate the spectator constructing 'allegories of meaning': the political meaning offers itself first, perhaps because of the energy still absorbed into the 'black hole' that Nazism has been for the twentieth century.

The second part of my argument follows from the first, in the form of a question: why should it be Weimar cinema that encourages such special hermeneutic activity? The tentative answers given are not always as interesting as the question. Apart from the ambiguity after which all art strives, Weimar cinema's rebus images — readable, like Wittgenstein's duck—rabbit picture as either one or the other, but not both at the same time — have to do with mundane matters of film economics and marketing, with the film industry and its objectives and constraints. These function as the 'historical symbolic', the limits and horizons that oudine and yet vanish in the historical imaginary. Historians of Weimar cinema are, in a sense, fated to already 'know' what these films are about and how one is to experience them, making it difficult to cast off the notion that film history is necessarily the metaphoric double of another history, rather than driven by its own determinants, or merely the story of its films and its makers. On the other hand, it cautions against treating them as 'mere entertainment'.²

A study of Weimar cinema easily becomes a meta-critical discourse, and this book is no exception. Although I offer close readings of individual films and of individual directors, these interpretations have themselves a symptomatic character, taking as their starting point the observation that many of Weimar cinema's classics are films about film making itself, that is, self-referential. Such 'reflexivity' is, however, in this case due less to the directors belonging to a specific aesthetic avant-garde and pursuing a modernist agenda. Instead, I see it as evidence of a historical conjuncture in which a prominent segment of the Weimar film community (counting next to producers, directors and screenwriters also set designers and cameramen) found itself in an intense dialogue or even struggle on at least two fronts: domestically, they had to compete with the other, more established arts and their social institutions, and internationally, with the permanent threat of Hollywood hegemony, both on the German market and in the rest of Europe. This twofold contest over cultural recognition at home and commercial sucess abroad forms a background to all the chapters. The first two chapters also trace a shift among the films' target audiences, as early Expressionist cinema modulates into late Weimar cinema, and the battle between popular culture and high culture tilts notably in favour of the popular. One could say that from the mid-1920s, the films address not only a different social class (the so-called Angestellten, i.e. the white-collar workers of the emerging service industries), but also a different gender mix, reversed by Kracauer when he shifts attention from the 'little shopgirls at the movies' (in his writings from the late 1920s) to the anxious males of the immediate post-1918 years, 'tossed between rebellion and submission' (in From Caligari to Hitler in 1947). But this is itself a highly metaphoric argument, which the first chapter tries to nuance, by also re-reading Lotte Eisner's essentially stylistic history. Her argument about Romanticism, Expressionism and the 'will to style' is reviewed across another paradigm altogether: that of style as design, and of design as at once a form of disguise and enhancement, suggesting that so-called 'Expressionism' in Weimar cinema has determinate modernising or constructivist functions, creating for the cinema a space not only among the arts but making it a vehicle also of the emergent lifestyle technologies and leisure industries, such as fashion, decor and display. That Expressionism also served internationally as a brand-name recognition for the 'better' Germany - Initially a pariah nation after the First World War — merely underscores its strategic use in designating Weimar cinema as a whole. The high-culture associations, however, also help to explain why at mid-decade, with the growing success of UFA productions in Europe and its ambitions about breaking into the US market, Expressionism as a label was abandoned in favour of other, more Americanised marketing strategies, associated with big-budget special-effects productions on national themes, such as The Nibelungen or Faust, and futurist visions such as Metropolis and The Woman in the Moon.

One of the most persistent imaginaries of the German cinema as a national—nationalist cinema thus focuses on the leading company, UFA, the giant studio machinery and media empire, whose military origins are taken as proof of its right-wing influence on German picture-making and politics. The chapter entitled 'Erich Pommer: "Die UFA' and Germany's bid for a studio system' (Part I, Chapter 4, this volume) challenges this causality and tries to reconstruct another possible logic, one that first of all suggests that UFA was a modern multi-national company and media conglomerate and second, that it was a company so aware of Hollywood that it constantly tried to emulate it, rival with it or differentiate itself from it — contradictory objectives that had paradoxical results. When one examines UFA's production strategy and corporate policy, one notes that it was organised according to principles of product differentiation and niche marketing, with the so-called stylised film a deliberate attempt to create an art cinema for export, while a domestic genre- and star-based commercial cinema was to be the economic bedrock, and a palette of super-productions (Groβfilme), designed and budgeted also with export in mind, aimed to break into the American market (rarely achieved after 1923). For especially these last objectives, it was essential that nationalist or propaganda aims should be kept well in the background, at least as far as the production of feature films was concerned. UFA's market dominance was in any case due to its hold on distribution, its export network and its early diversification into many merely film-related services, rather than based on the number of films it made. This also revises the orthodox account, according to which the company's nemesis was a consequence of its success; that in its bid to enter the world market and rival the Americans, UFA overreached itself with super-productions like Metropolis. By considering its management practices and policy objectives, other explanations can be put forward for the financial difficulties it encountered around 1925—7, when it came so perilously close to bankruptcy.

Economically and institutionally, the most appropriate criteria for an international perspective on the Weimar film business are thus industrial indicators: division of labour and management practices, markets and exports, diversification of services and product differentiation, advertising and distribution, infrastructural investment in plant and new technologies. How different really was the German cinema from Hollywood by such a comparison? The similarities outweigh the differences, and the relative ease with which, once they were given the chance to work, German émigré directors, cameramen, set designers, composers and even screenwriters were able to adapt to Hollywood studio practice confirms the parallels between the respective film industries.

The story of UFA as a diversified media company also brings to the fore another dial...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Part I Haunted Screens Caligari's cabinets and a German studio system
• Part II In the Realm of the Look Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau and Pabst
• Part III Transparent Duplicities Comedy, opera, operetta
• Part IV After Weimar Avant-garde and modernisation, emigration and film noir
• Bibliography
• Index of Films
• General Index