Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 5 No. 43, December 2001
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Re-imagining German Film History
Thomas Elsaesser _Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's
Historical Imaginary_ London and New York: Routledge,
2000 ISBN 041501235X 480 pp. The German cinema of the 1920s is
generally pigeon-holed as part of the culture of the Weimar
Republic (1919-33). And because Weimar culture -- described
variously as 'radical', 'lively', and 'decadent' -- is seen,
along with the republic's unstable political institutions,
as paving the way for the Nazism which followed, it is not
surprising that the German silent cinema has been saddled
with a dubious reputation. Two famous books, Lotte Eisner's
_The Haunted Screen_ and Siegfried Kracauer's _From Caligari
to Hitler_, each in different ways explore the connections
between German cinema of the 1920s, the culture of the
Weimar Republic, and emergent Nazism. Kracauer's was first
published in New York in 1947, Eisner's in Paris (under the
title _L'Ecran Demoniaque_) in 1952. The presuppositions of
both books are very much of their time. Both authors were
Jewish emigres from Germany, concerned to understand and
then explain what went wrong with their country during the
horror years of 1933 to 1945. Eisner's and Kracauer's books cast a
long shadow. Together they have helped to form what Thomas
Elsaesser in his long awaited _Weimar Cinema and After_
calls the 'historical imaginary' of German cinema. There are
in fact many other ways in which one might conceptualise
German cinema of the pre-Nazi period. It was for example
industrially the strongest cinema in Europe and the only one
with the potential to compete with Hollywood in either the
domestic or the international marketplace. It was also an
aesthetically distinct cinema which had succumbed less than
most to what Tom Gunning has called narrative integration.
German films of the 1920s were often in a pure sense
spectacular; they defied realist convention even when they
aimed at psychological truth; and they preserved many
elements of what Gunning saw as characterising cinema prior
to the rise to dominance of the integrationist mode, the
fairground values of the 'attraction'. On the face of it there is a strong
case for dispensing with the Kracauer/Eisner mode of
retrospective interpretation and looking at the history of
German cinema with fresh eyes. But easier said than done.
Even if we did not already have Kracauer or Eisner to guide
our thinking, the brute fact of Nazism, interposed between
us and the world of _Caligari_, _Metropolis_ or _Pandora's
Box_, makes a virgin vision impossible. We must accept that
German cinema lives in the contemporary mind in a
historically shaped imaginary form. No critic can write
about German cinema, no composer can prepare a new score to
accompany a German silent film, without retrospect cutting
in to influence how they do it. The first great merit of Elsaesser's
_Weimar Cinema and After_ is that it recognises this
fundamental fact. Elsaesser himself wishes to present German
cinema differently -- among other things as a canny and
self-conscious commercial business. But he knows that in
order to make his alternative vision carry conviction he
must first explore the conditions that have led to the
popular picture of German cinema as precursor of the Nazi
nightmare. The first problem in decoupling
pre-1933 German cinema from its Nazified succession is that
there is no other succession to couple it to. Nazism split
German cinema in two. A number of leading figures in the
German cinema -- Lubitsch and Murnau being the most
prominent -- had already left Germany for America in the
1920s. After 1933 others were to follow, either taking a
more or less direct path to the United States or getting
there via a staging post in Paris or London. By 1941 a
substantial portion of the German cinema was a
cinema-in-exile in Hollywood: producer Erich Pommer;
producer-director Ernst Lubitsch; directors Fritz Lang,
Edgar Ulmer, Max Ophuls, Detlef Sierck (Douglas Sirk),
Robert Siodmak; writers Curt Siodmak and Billy Wilder;
cinematographers Eugen Schufftan, Curt Courant, and Franz
Planer, were all in happy or unhappy exile in
California. But unlike exiled German or Austrian
writers -- Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan
Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger and others -- who continued in
their absence from their homeland to contribute to *German*
literature, writing in German for a German-speaking public,
the film emigres by contrast, if they found work at all,
contributed to *American* cinema. They could not return in
1945 and resume activity as if they had never been away.
Many indeed did not return at all. Lang stayed in America;
Ophuls returned to Europe in 1950, but to France first and
to his native Germany only for the last two years of his
life. And German cinema went through new upheavals making
restoration of anything like continuity impossible. Both the
western Allies and the Russians insisted on de-Nazification.
Although Pommer's skills were called upon by the Americans
to assist in recreating a purified industry, the conditions
under which he was asked to work makes one wonder why they
bothered. German film-makers who had worked in the Nazi
period had difficulty getting work; those who had emigrated
were in no hurry to come home. Post-1945 German cinema was also cut
into two by the Cold War, with neither East nor West
managing either to create a distinctively new cinema (as
happened in Italy) or to reconnect successfully with the
past (as in France). West German cinema was particularly
feeble. It had no industrial base and little in the way of
ideas. Some of its genres show an affinity with traditional
entertainment models which were also popular during the Nazi
period, but it would require a very broad definition of Nazi
culture to include these films within its domain. Another difficulty with uncoupling
Weimar cinema from the Nazi cinema which followed it lies in
the fact that there are real and undeniable continuities
between the two. This is hardly surprising. Although the
German industry was heavily leant on by the Nazis throughout
their period in power, it retained its basic structure and
most of its non-Jewish personnel throughout the 1930s.
'Decadent' films were discouraged, of course, but to a great
extent the production of the early Nazi period continued
traditions already established in the preceding
decade. Though it may be difficult to think
about Weimar cinema separately from Nazism, it is not
necessarily impossible. Theoretically at least, one can
attempt to make one's mind a clean slate. By looking only at
documents prior to 1933 -- at the films themselves, at press
reports, at industry papers and so on -- one can construct a
picture of German cinema as it was seen by film-makers and
audiences at the time. Such a reconstruction might give a
small part to the views and activities of certain right-wing
politicians on the make, but that part would not be a
prominent one. It would produce a view unencumbered by
hindsight. It would not force the material into a mould
dictated by what happened after, but it would also be
implicitly counter-factual. It would have to be based on a
wilful pretence that what everyone knows happened after
never happened. Such counter-factual history can be useful.
It can remind one, for example, that what happened was not
necessarily destined to happen and that something that now
seems to us irrational was not so at the time. Elsaesser shies just short of writing
a counter-factual history. But, while remaining alive to the
facts of what came after, much of his effort is devoted to
explaining Weimar cinema in terms relatively unclouded by
retrospect. This is particularly valuable when it comes to
assessing the industrial and entertainment sides of Weimar.
We are now used to thinking of most European cinemas as
mainly purveyors of 'art cinema', since most of what we now
see -- whether ancient or modern -- falls into that
category. It is therefore very useful to be reminded that
this is, historically at least, a misleading viewpoint. In
the case of Weimar, what are memorialised are the 'classics'
-- _Caligari_, _Metropolis_, _Joyless Street_, etc. -- put
together under the heading of Expressionism. In fact, as has
already remarked by Barry Salt and other writers, not many
films of the period can be accurately described as
Expressionist. More interestingly, Elsaesser observes that
those few that can be so described tend to use
'Expressionism' more as a marketing device than as something
integral to their artistic structure. _Metropolis_, for
example, uses Expressionist devices in a manner which falls
not far short of camp. These are, in fact, commercial films,
equipped with a certain nod-and-a wink knowingness which
was, Elsaesser suggests, as much characteristic of Weimar
culture as the taste for the demonic noted by Eisner in
1952. If one looks at German cinema of the
1920s as a resolutely commercial cinema a lot becomes
clearer. This was a culture not yet dominated by Hollywood.
Native traditions were strong and the percentage of box
office taken by American films was lower than in most other
European countries. But the industry was alert to the danger
of American competition and takeover. It needed to maintain
its box-office share on the domestic market and to export
German films as widely as possible, even to America. To this
end it adopted a characteristic European strategy of the
period. It marketed itself as quality. Or rather as quality
abroad and tradition at home. Home audiences would be
reassured, while those abroad would -- it was hoped -- be
seduced by the artistic gloss of the export product that
they were buying into a superior form of cultural
experience. Conducted on a small scale, such strategies have
often proved successful in other branches of the economy, at
least for a while. But producing films is not like
hand-crafting beer mugs for tourists. And producing films as
the German industry conceived it was not a low-cost
enterprise on the neo-realist or New Wave model. The
strategy was high investment and high risk. In the end the strategy failed. This
was not inevitable. It is rather that at the end of the day
too many circumstances stacked up against it. But the
circumstances needed only to be slightly different for the
German cinema to have not only survived but to have
dominated Europe with substantial exports to the USA as
well. Attempts to make the German cinema dominant in Europe
continued well into the 1930s, and were revived, in a new
and sinister form, during the Second World War. _Weimar Cinema and After_ looks both
at the 'classics' -- the Langs, Lubitsches, Murnaus, Pabsts,
etc. -- and at the kind if cinema that is now lesser known
though at the time was of course extremely popular. There
was never a strict divide between the two types. Indeed the
very idea that there should be is an example of the harmful
effects of retrospect. Nevertheless there were differences,
both between upmarket and downmarket genres and within each
one. Although there were ways in which German films in
general differed from American films in general, Elsaesser
does not attempt to locate a unitary 'Weimar' style
equivalent to the 'classical Hollywood' style identified by
David Bordwell and others as having characterised the bulk
of American cinema from the 1920s onwards. Indeed his study
of the specific traits of different film-makers suggests
that to search for such a style would be a wild goose chase.
Even 'classical Hollywood' is not such a tight unity as all
that, but it is arguable that what distinguishes the
American *cinema* (rather than just American films) is that
it did develop a collective style, whereas European cinemas,
with their looser modes of organisation, also allowed more
stylistic variation. The German Lang, Murnau, Lubitsch, and
Pabst are distinguishable from each other to a far greater
degree than equivalent American directors of the 1920s.
(Lubitsch and Lang subsequently Americanised successfully;
Murnau, carrying the burden of the individuality for which
Fox had hired him, had more trouble adapting.) Elsaesser's analysis validates some --
though by no means all -- of Eisner's and Kracauer's
anxieties about Weimar cinema's perverse and dangerous
trends. But he is particularly interested in the kinds of
film which could only with great difficulty be subsumed
under an 'ideological' argument. Not that politically-minded
critics haven't tried and sometimes even succeeded in making
all films, plays, operas, symphonies, pop songs, comedy
routines or whatever it might be subserve the cause of a
reading implicating them in some ideological enterprise or
other. Elsaesser is more circumspect. If there is a
political subtext behind the comedy of Reinhold Schuenzel or
the operetta films of Walter Reisch he waits for it to
reveal itself in whatever way it may rather than forcibly
unmasking it. The treatment of Reisch is
particularly interesting. Reisch was an Austrian Jew who
emigrated to Berlin in the 1920s and became a scriptwriter
for UFA. Socially conservative and politically quite naive,
he was very shocked to find himself in 1931 branded as a
far-right-winger because one of the operettas he had written
painted a reasonably attractive portrait of Frederick the
Great. Interviewed by Elsaesser in his home in Los Angeles,
Reisch gives a rosy picture of life in the German film
industry as of one great happy family in which the Jews
tended to write the scripts and the Gentiles directed them
(rather as one family member might be assigned to wash the
dishes and another to make the beds). [1] I have to
say I find this account on the one hand a splendidly good
read, as film people's memoirs often are, and on the other
hand deeply implausible. The interviewer, it should be said,
is not unaware that his subject is spinning him a yarn and
projecting a version of Weimar that he (Reisch) knew to be
something of a romance, but he reckons that the yarn is
worth retelling because it is more truthful than not. I must
admit that I am more sceptical. Reisch's story is
interesting because it contradicts received wisdom about
Weimar cinema, and UFA in particular, but his portrayal of
life in Berlin also contradicts a lot of contemporary
testimony about how unpleasant life had become in Berlin
during the rise of Nazism, and not only for the Jews. If
Reisch is wrong about the one he might well be wrong about
the other. Memories are rarely reliable. Elsaesser's big book on Weimar, little
book on _Metropolis_, [2] and interview in _Pix_,
between them mount a big challenge to the orthodox versions
of film history, and do so without parading their
'revisionism', which is welcome. University
of Luton, England Footnotes 1. Elsaesser interviewed Reisch for
the magazine _Pix 3_, edited and published by Ilona
Halberstadt (London: British Film Institute,
2001). 2. Thomas Elsaesser, _Metropolis_, BFI
Film Classics (London: British Film Institute,
2000). Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2001 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 'Re-imagining
German Film History', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 5 no. 43,
December 2001
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol5-2001/n43nowell-smith>.
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