Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 7, February 2004
Angelica Fenner
German Cinema History as Rhizome:
_The German Cinema Book_
Edited by Tim Bergfelder,
Erica Carter, and Deniz Goektuerk London: British
Film Institute,
2002 ISBN
0851709246X 302 pp. Arguably, amongst extant
historiographies of national cinemas, the German context
currently constitutes one of the most consolidated of
histories, its trajectory tracing divisions into epochs with
clearly delineated borders. The broader categories of Weimar
cinema, Nazi cinema, the New German cinema, and more
recently, Post-Wall cinema, conveniently correspond to
significant political regimes and social movements in the
broader history of the nation. The canonization of
particular films as benchmarks in German film history serves
as the inevitable by-product of such master narratives about
German cinema history. Similar trends are discernable in
other European cinema histories: in the French context, the
stylistic divisions into poetic realism, *cinema du
qualite*, New Wave, historical retrospectives, and the
*cinema du look*, seem similarly over-determined through the
master narratives of political history. Yet scholars are now
beginning to break from ossified trends and to explore
neglected eras and previously discounted film works: for
example, Thomas Elsaesser's anthology on early cinema,
_Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative_ (1990), is part of a
growing body of work, while Nora Alter's excellent book on
the 'film essay', _Projecting History: German Nonfiction
Cinema, 1967-2000_ (2002), is part of a growing trend to
reconsider the significance of individual genres. _The
German Cinema Book_ is unique in that it undertakes this
long-anticipated reterritorialization of German cinema
historiography under one book cover -- with contributing
essays subsumed under five overarching categories: Popular
Cinema; Stars; Institutions and Cultural Contexts; Cultural
Politics; and Transnational Connections. Such a
reconceptualization of German film need not abandon all
fealty to linear history, as editors Tim Bergfelder, Erica
Carter, and Deniz Goektuerk still manage to render topical
essays within each rubric into some sort of variegated
chronology. Thus, the rubric on Cultural Politics moves from
Marc Silberman's discussion of Weimar cinema, to Julian
Petley's discussion of policies in the Third Reich, to
Elsaesser's case study of Alexander Kluge, to Ulrike
Sieglohr's study of women filmmakers and the avant-garde via
the example of Ulrike Ottinger, and finally, Ian Garwood's
exploration of the genealogy of the *Autorenfilm*. Part
Three (Institutions and Cultural Contexts) offers insights
into a realm often neglected in national cinema histories,
namely considerations of how cinema as social institution is
inflected in specific national settings, and the productive
nature (in a Foucauldian sense) of state legislation,
censorship, and funding upon film content. This section of
the anthology similarly borders of the rhizomatic, advancing
from Joseph Garncarz's exegesis of the origins of film
exhibition in Germany, through Joseph Kessler and Eva
Warth's discussion of early cinema and its audiences, to
Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Toeteberg's history of Ufa, to
Horst Claus's elaboration on the stylistics and identity of
the DEFA as a studio that operated as an extension of the
state, and finally, Martin Loiperdinger's exploration of the
specificity of state legislation, censorship and funding in
a century of German cinema. In their Introduction the
editors offer an excellent summation of past and extant
trends in German film historiography. Until recently,
critical approaches to German cinema were often constrained
by certain assumptions about German culture, history, and
national character that were in high circulation within both
Germany and abroad. German culture has often been
effectively regarded as 'high culture', with the notion of a
popular German cinema dismissed pejoratively, whether it be
the *Heimat* films or the comedies of the 1990s. It has been
the fate of German high culture to be appropriated in the
curricula of Germanist and art history classrooms as
exemplary of a certain austere intellectualism and romantic
melancholy, captured in the expressionism of the 1920s, as
well as in the works of various *auteurs* of the New German
Cinema. Simultaneously, the perception of historical German
audiences as prone to the influences of totalitarianism has
been so well-reinforced through Nazi cinema, that the
narrativization of any cinematic movements in the postwar
era was virtually guaranteed to shy away from popular
culture elements, seeking refuge instead among the
intellectual mandarins of Young German cinema and beyond.
The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, with its notion
of a 'culture industry' as the all-pervasive expression of
manipulative capitalist ideology, has gone a long way to
reinforcing the binarisms of high (i.e. politically
resistant) and low (politically co-optive) culture prevalent
in German film histories. In turn, Kracauer's tome, _From
Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German
Film_ (1966), conjoined the framework of the culture
industry with specifically national characteristics, to
argue that textual features of narration and style reflected
and shaped the identity of the nation. The editors also offer an
overview of the different trajectories of film studies
within Germany, where it has not undergone the degree of
institutionalization common in the United States and Great
Britain. In Germany, film research often takes place under
the auspices of other disciplines, such as sociology, as
well as cultural, literary, and theatre studies. However,
Germany's network of film archives and research centers
(such as the DIF, or German Film Institute in
Frankfurt/Main) are becoming increasingly active in
generating both film journals (_FilmGeschichte_, _FilmExil_,
and _CineGraph_) and significant monographs. There has been
much transatlantic exchange of theory, with Anglophone
feminist film theory and spectator studies migrating into
Germany. Simultaneously, within the broader discipline of
film studies there has been a renewal of interest in
revisiting the Marxist film critical canon that predates
Adorno and Horkheimer's pessimistic regard for cinema's
relationship to politics and power. In the search for a more
dynamic concept that can link film art with social change,
scholars have turned to the Weimar era, to early Kracauer,
to Benjamin, Arnheim, and Balazs. What contemporary
historians have adapted from these theorists is their common
perception of cinema as a dynamic medium significant for the
manner in which it produces new modes of subjectivity in
specific historical moments of modernity. New methods of
seeing and showing, as exemplified in elements of film
language such as the close-up, are not only historically
unprecedented, they produce new ways of perceiving and
experiencing the world. This revisitation of the historical
basis of perceptual modes has offered a way out of the
methodological stranglehold of both social psychologies that
read German film as the mimetic reflection of what Kracauer
referred to as the *psychological dispositions* of a nation,
as well as Anglophone film-psychoanalytical strands that
reproduce universalized Oedipal structures of sexual
difference and visual pleasure. Weimar film theory has also
come to represent an ideal object choice at a moment in
which contemporary film scholars are rediscovering German
cinema's international dimensions -- consider recent
scholarship on emigre and exile cinemas, on transnational
co-productions, and post-Wall assessments of the influence
of globalization on media industries and forms of
representation. It should be noted that
the individual chapters are not intended to provide close
readings of specific films, but instead construct a
different paradigm through which to regard a broader
assemblage of film productions. While limitations of space
prevent me from reviewing all 23 chapters of the volume, I
will review one of the topical rubrics, namely that of
genre, to offer a more in-depth view of the approaches
represented in this volume. Among the contributors to this
topic, Johannes von Moltke's discussion of the *Heimat*
genre acknowledges the need to move beyond ahistorical and
totalizing approaches to these films. The genre is hardly
homogeneous; rather it is riddled with contradictory
ideological premises, and with ellipses and silences that
merit closer evaluation. Von Moltke is particularly
concerned to consider the *Heimat* film as a spatial genre
in the same sense as the Western or film noir. The images of
place conveyed through regional landscapes can ultimately be
seen to constitute historical responses to the ongoing
transformation of space in modernity, responses that reveal
the space of *Heimat* to be profoundly ambivalent,
encompassing the contradictions of the rural and the urban,
the provincial and the modern, the regional and the
cosmopolitan. Von Moltke also expands our understanding of
the genre beyond the confines of the 1950s, pointing to
examples of early cinema, as well as the *Berg* films and
novels of the 1920s. He furthermore disputes popular
assumptions that the *Heimat* films were spatialized
expressions of escape from the urbanization of West Germany;
closer inspection reveals them to negotiate, for example,
tourist plots that speak of a self-consciousness of a new
service economy. Jan-Christopher Horak's
chapter on German film comedy also seeks to reevaluate the
problematic relationship that is perceived to be harbored by
not only German cinema but German culture towards humor.
Horak follows Elsaesser's example in resituating the source
of this perception as inhering not so much in the culture
itself as in the intelligentsia that has traditionally
commented on and established the periodization of German
film history. Film comedy is now more fully recognized as a
site of ideological contestation, as either a control
mechanism for hegemonic forces or as a discourse that
subverts the institutional status quo. In reality, the
comedy has been the bread and butter of the German film
industry throughout its history, as evinced in the literally
thousands of comedies that have yet to be historically
evaluated. Inevitably, comedy in a nation that has dwelled
under the shadow of fascism is qualitatively different;
while comedies during the Kaiserzeit and Weimar period were
transgressive, Horak maintains that the monopoly capitalism
of German fascism held zero tolerance for subversive
discourses. (Here, I think Linda Schulte-Sasse's monograph
on Nazi cinema (1998) would probably counter any assumptions
that Nazi cinema was monolithically conservative and
repressive; her readings of individual films reveal a
surprising heterogeneity of competing discourses.) Horak's
primary focus is upon the influence of the German-Jewish
humor cultivated by Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder -- a
brand of humor which fed in particular upon gender
relations. It was the return of exiled filmmakers in the
1950s, and their influence on the Young German sex comedies,
that paved the way for the revival of humor in popular
cinema, as evinced in the relationship comedies that began
with Doris Doerries's _Maenner_ in 1986, and led to the
hetero/homoerotic complications present in many comedies of
the 1990s, such as Sonke Wortmann's _Der bewegte Mann_
(1994). Tim Bergfelder's
contribution, 'Extraterritorial Fantasies: Edgar Wallace and
the German Crime Film', looks at the fin-de-siecle British
crime novelist's impact on German cultural production.
Wallace's books were adapted for the German screen during
the 1920s, and resurfaced in the 1960s to become the bread
and butter of the German film industry. Bergfelder points
out that while Wallace seemed to represent the quintessence
of British ambience, there was really not that much
specifically British about the novels, which rendered them
ideal for cultural appropriation in Germany and the United
States. Bergfelder traces the manner in which Wallace's work
was variously shaped and readapted in various eras of German
history. During the Weimar era, Wallace's work fitted right
in among the crime films preoccupied with serial killers,
such as in G. W. Pabst's rendition of John Gay's _Beggar's
Opera_ (1928), Fritz Lang's _M_ (1931), or Robert Weine's
_Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari_ (1920). Under the Nazi
takeover, the crime genre fell into decline as they put many
Jewish artists, managers, and publishers out of business,
and furthermore regarded the crime genre as a corrupting
influence on the public readership. During the 1950s the
appreciation for Wallace's British ambience came to be
regarded as indicative of Germany's normal status vis-a-vis
other nations. Many Wallace adaptations during the 1960s --
internecine feuds about inheritances shot in the
labyrinthine settings of country mansions harboring
subterranean hideouts and trapdoors -- were among the
top-grossing films in Germany during that era. These
adaptations -- peopled with stereotypes about the class
system, Dickensian characters, dotty old ladies, and
subversive butlers -- were a form of distraction or escape.
Bergfelder summates the appeal of these films among West
Germans as a form of progressive nostalgia, because the
historical reference point for these films was a period
untainted by the fascist past, yet the pleasures gained from
the consumption of these narratives were intended to be a
substitute for a sense of national identity repressed by
realpolitik of the contemporary era. Robert Kiss offers an
overview of queer traditions in German cinema. In taking
stock of some of the more widely known early depictions of
homosexuality, transvestism, and lesbian desire (i.e.
Richard Oswald's _Anders als die Andern_, Wilhelm Bendow's
_Aus eines Mannes Maedchenzeit_, Leontine Sagan's _Maedchen
in Uniform_, and Murnau's _Nosferatu_). What Kiss is
particularly concerned to show is that these depictions are
bound up with a paradigm of 'sexual intermediacy' ('sexuelle
Zwischenstufen'), which maintained the existence of a third
sex, one in which the blend of physical, psychological, or
behavioral traits were ambiguously situated somewhere
'between' those of men and women. Yet even after the
ascension of Nazi power, some unambiguously queer works
managed to surface, such as Reinhold Schuenzel's _Viktor und
Viktoria _ and Zarah Leander's portrayals of socially
excluded women, with which gay men, lesbians, and
transvestites identified. Even images celebrating Nazi
social organization, such as the scene in Riefenstahl's
_Olympia_ where nude male athletes gather in the sauna, seem
defined through a homosocial or homoerotic subplot. In the
postwar years, with both East and West Germany accepting and
actively prosecuting under Paragraph 175, queer portrayals
were more subdued; and remakes of several Weimar classics
excised ambiguous sexual roles almost completely. Only Veit
Harlan's _Anders als du und ich_ seemed to prefigure the
tactics of post-1968 directors such as Rosa von Praunheim
and Heiner Carow, in seeking from works of the Weimar era
strategies and traditions that could be synthesized with a
surface discourse of emancipation. This volume's lasting
usefulness is further enhanced by a comprehensive appendix
of reference works and resources. The compilation of data
encompasses encyclopedias, dictionaries, magazines and
journals, CD-Roms, web sites, databases, and archives. The
bibliography itself is subdivided into such areas as
national and regional film histories, stars, genre studies,
and periodized histories. Additionally, addresses are
provided of key distributors for film rental and purchase. I
will express only in passing my bewilderment at the
inclusion of resource lists for Switzerland and Austria,
which draws attention to a lacuna within the overall volume,
which has nothing to say about Austrian or Swiss film
productions or their location within the broader
reterritorialization of Germanophone cinema. In this regard,
the volume's title has to be taken literally and in its most
limited sense. Indeed, book titles tell all: the use of the
definite article in 'The German Cinema Book' might at first
glance seem presumptuous, given the plethora of other books
on German cinema, and yet this anthology is indeed (to date)
singular in its approach and in its multivalent agenda. With
its pointed exclusion of the usual transcendental signifier
of *history* and the qualifier of the *national*, the
simplicity captured in the title _The German Cinema Book_
speaks to the manner in which revolutions in academic
discourse need not be loud and demonstrative, instead
persuading us with a certain quiet
sophistication. Ontario, Canada Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Angelica Fenner, 'German
Cinema History as Rhizome: _The German Cinema Book_',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 7, February 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n7fenner>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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