Weimar cinema
by Tom Ruffles
[ bookreviews ]
This collection of essays is not an overview of the cinematic output of the Weimar period in its entirety. It takes 16 iconic films from the period, all of which are available on video or DVD (at least in the USA), and subjects them to sustained analysis. This means that less readily available films are not examined, and most of the ones that are will be familiar, at least to buffs, and in some cases already have a substantial body of research behind them. The term "classic" implies, to an extent, that the choice is pre-made, and there will be no huge surprises here. The essays demonstrate the enormous influence that two books have had on the way in which the Weimar period is viewed by film scholars: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and to a lesser extent Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen (1952). This volume provides a nuanced approach to aspects of Weimar cinema based on more recent work in the field.
Each film is examined by a different author, which allows a multiplicity of views to emerge. A strength is that a number of the writers have a German background (though all bar one are academics in US institutions, and the exception is at Amsterdam), and it is useful to have references to the German-language literature. A number of English-language books on Weimar, however, have not been given their due weight, such as Kenneth Scott Calhoon's Peripheral Visions: the Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema (2001), and Frances Guerin's A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (2005), both of which cover a number of the films featured here. As surprising is the omission of any reference to Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann's Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear (2002), which even has a similar cover to this one's, a shot of evil Maria dancing with her gravity-defying nipple covers (and it's a treat to have this still rather than the one of Freder struggling with the arms of the giant clock device in the underground city which usually ends up as Metropolis's key image).
The films are dealt with chronologically, so reading from cover to cover provides a sense of how society, industry and aesthetics developed in the Weimar period. After a short introduction by editor Noah Isenberg, the first considered is Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). Stefan Andriopoulos relates the figure of the somnambule Cesare to medical debates over hypnotic control in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what were the limits of suggestion, and whether someone under hypnotic influence could be made to act against their true nature. Isenberg himself then writes on Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920), characterising its key elements as a mix of "soothsaying, mysticism, violence, supernatural creation, mad science, sexuality, and the occult", which makes it all sound rather more exciting than it is. Isenberg brings out its ambiguity well, the mixture of positive attributes - "capitalistic dominance, political prowess, and scientific insight" - and negative stereotypes - "stifling swarthiness, exotic practices, and ghetto sensibilities" - but above all the remarkable atmosphere generated by its urban architecture, and its reception at a time of large-scale immigration by Ostjuden, Jews from Eastern Europe - a portrayal, he argues, that while not inherently anti-semitic, nonetheless laid the foundations for a popular conception of Jewishness. Both of these writers draw attention to the reflexivity of the subject matter: somnambulism's similarity to the state of the spellbound cinema spectator hypnotised by the screen; and the parallel between Rabbi Löw manufacturing the Golem from clay and giving it life, and the act of making a film (rather less convincing).
Less well-known is The Indian Tomb (1921), an example of the sort of popular mainstream big-budget picture not often touched on in surveys of Weimar cinema, and therefore less assured of its 'classic' status than the others. Beginning with a wide-ranging discussion of German cinema before and after the First World War, and the economic and industrial conditions prevailing at the beginning of the 1920s, Christian Rogowski sketches in the background to this non-canonical production (and it is worth noting that 510 German full-length features were produced in 1920 and 370 in 1921, and although the numbers declined consistently to 114 in 1933, this is still an enormous body of work). Many of these, like The Indian Tomb, hid their roots to appeal to a wide international audience which might not be receptive to the product of a recent enemy.
Rogowski shows how the creation of über-film company Ufa distorted German production, and how Joe May, director of The Indian Tomb (and of the better-known Asphalt of 1929), constantly manoeuvred to retain as much independence as possible. Fritz Lang, May's assistant, makes one of his numerous appearances as this marked the first of his collaborations with Thea von Harbou, who became his wife. Lang was assigned to help von Harbou, who had written the serial, turn it into a scenario. He was also supposed to direct but May took it away from him, though Lang did direct a remake in 1959.
Thomas Elsaesser writes on a film that is certainly iconic - FW Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), with a scenario by Henrik Galeen, who also wrote The Golem. Elsaesser discusses it in the context of the disasters which had befallen Germany, not only the trauma of defeat, but also famine and the Spanish ‘flu epidemic of 1918-19. He sees it as a demonstration of the colonisers' "bad dream" of reverse colonisation by their subjects: "That such an influx of the subjugated and exploited should be seen in terms of rats, contagion, and contamination speaks volumes: about the unselfconscious racism of the educated classes...". In a section called Six Degrees of Murnau, Elsaesser outlines the social networks within which Murnau (real name Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe) moved, and he dissects the hetero- and homosexual currents within the film in relation to Murnau's own sexuality and what Kracauer had noted as the male anxieties of the period. Unfortunately, the essay peters out in somewhat irrelevant psychoanalytic musings on Bram Stoker and Dracula.
Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) is dealt with by Tom Gunning. Directed by Lang with a screenplay by von Harbou, Gunning sees the Mabuse master-criminal's manipulation of interlocking technologies (train, telephone, car, pocket watch and so on) as emblematic of modern culture. While slyly noting the analogy between Mabuse as absolute master of his domain and the director as master of his, Gunning also links Mabuse's manipulation of the financial markets to German post-war chaos. In particular, by printing money to fund his nefarious schemes, Mabuse stands in for the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s. Gunning is at a disadvantage compared to his German-speaking fellow contributors, as he does not have access to the primary literature (though this did not stop him writing an entire book on Lang, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000)), but he still manages an insightful piece.
From master criminal (though one who is ultimately defeated) to buffoon (though one who is ultimately triumphant), Sabine Hake writes a somewhat rambling piece on the complexities of The Last Laugh (1924). Moving away from earlier auteur theory that stressed The Last Laugh in terms of Murnau's vision, though she does link its exploration of the modern city with his later Sunrise (1927), she examines The Last Laugh primarily in terms of its star. Emil Jannings' hotel porter's appearance is a synecdoche for the deposed Wilhelmine past, marginalised by a society that stresses youth and the future. His humiliation in being demoted to washroom attendant echoes that of the older generation in the post-war period, and the style overlays old and new, and the old and the young, on the contrast between the expressionist flats where the porter lives and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Realism or Objectivity) look of the hotel where he works. Even the double ending, the pessimistic decline supplanted by the implausible change of fortune, which conformed to, while simultaneously undermining, the Hollywood values to which the film aspires, highlighted the contradictions within Weimar's urban society.
Neue Sachlichkeit is also a feature of GW Pabst's The Joyless Street (1925), discussed by Sara F Hall. Based on an Austrian novel, though made in Germany, it falls into the genre of "street" films popular in the period, allowing a realistic examination - although incorporating a variety of styles - of life lived at different social levels within a single street, the title giving the tone away somewhat. Austria experienced similar economic and social problems to Germany after the First World War, and as well as examining how different classes were affected, and the flux and confusion that existed in social roles which before the war were relatively stable and predictable, the film particularly focuses on the problems facing women from all walks of life. Because of its explicitness in tackling these issues, it suffered from censorship at home and abroad. This led to multiple versions so that today the original is impossible to reconstruct, something not unique to The Joyless Street. As Hall concludes, Pabst posed hard questions, even if he did not provide answers.
From the New Realism back to the uncanny, Matt Erlin examines Murnau's final German film, Faust (1926). This was not popular on release in Germany, partly because of its eclectic mix of different renderings of the legend. Despite its 16th century origins, though, it spoke to Weimar society, with the depiction of plague (also a feature of Nosferatu) evoking memories of mass death in war and influenza epidemic, the crowds which were becoming an increasing feature of everyday urban living in Germany, and a feeling of impotence felt by ordinary citizens. Erlin sees Faust as a metaphor for the loss of authority suffered by high German culture in the post-war years, with the literary eclipsed by the visual, and as an attempt to draw a line between home-grown product and the increasing presence of Hollywood imports, reflecting the fierce cultural debates within the new republic. He also sees it as a film that foregrounds its own constructedness but at the same time bringing its disparate elements together into a logical whole.
Anton Kaes takes on a tough job, analyzing probably the best known film of the entire Weimar period, Lang's Metropolis (1927). Taken from a script by von Harbou, it was seen as a riposte to Hollywood films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Ben Her (1925) and followed Lang's own successful 1924 two-part The Niebelungs. The workers as cogs in the city's machine, and the facile philosophy, have been well covered by earlier commentators, but Kaes looks more generally at the issues Metropolis raised for Weimar society: from "technology, modernity, and dehumanisation of labor to class, gender, and generational conflict, and finally to war and revolution." Weimar filmmakers were nothing if not thorough. Machines were of interest to Lang, and resonated to a generation that had so recently encountered hostile machinery on the battlefield. Robot Maria can be seen as a response to the growth of feminism, and the robotic workers as reflecting unease at the influence of American mass-production and, by extension, the problems of modernity. The film, unsurprisingly, was marketed as an event, but the clash between the stunning mise-en-scène and the conservative ideology left its first audiences cold. Famously, though, the Nazis liked it, as it conformed to what Goebbels would term "steely romanticism", a mix of modernism and myth, a standard to which Metropolis conformed precisely.
From science fiction featuring a remarkable city to a noted example of a "city film", Nora M Alter writes about Walter Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927). After a brief overview of Ruttmann's career, including his later willingness to work under the Nazi regime, Alter examines the film, not just as a valuable document of the city, much of which was in ruins fewer than 20 years later, but the way in which it is rhythmically edited in terms of a musical composition. She teases out the tensions between the experimental forms employed by Ruttmann and Berlin's situation within the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. She also highlights how it both self-reflexively comments on the act of film making by incorporating a variety of genres, and on the consumerism which had turned the city into a place of spectacle. The fetishisation of technology at the expense of the city's human inhabitants threatens to unbalance the content by overemphasising the formal properties, but Ruttmann provides a study of a city populace grappling with a fast-changing society, and one which, like other city films, becomes ever-more fascinating as its year of manufacture recedes.
The face that is associated perhaps more than any other with Weimar cinema (leaving aside robot Maria) ironically belonged not to a German but to an American. Margaret McCarthy looks at Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929). This was actually the third remake of Frank Wedekind's play but Brooks put her stamp on it. For McCarthy, her performance was an example of alternative roles for female viewers, but she also highlights the damaged male psyche within Weimar society that warmed to Lulu's fearless autonomy as much as to her/Brooks' obvious sexual attraction. This was a dangerously subversive autonomy, however, and one which was eventually recuperated by Lulu's murder, leaving masculine power restored. There is a merging here between perceptions of actress and character, and McCarthy examines Brooks' star power and the film within her career. Pandora's Box, like Metropolis, can be seen in terms of male unease regarding the New Woman. One might take issue with the characterisation of Lulu as "androgynous", but she certainly "embodies the democratizing tendencies of Weimar's polymorphous perversity", which makes her an ancestor - along, more obviously, with Marlene Dietrich, who lost the part to Brooks - of Sally Bowles.
A breath of fresh air, and as if tracking in to examine more closely a handful of the city inhabitants from Berlin: Symphony of a City at play, People on Sunday (1930) follows four ordinary young urbanites as they spend a day out together by a lake. Famous now for the people who worked on it, many of whom were to have significant careers in Hollywood - Billy Wilder, Robert and Kurt Siodmak, Edgar G Ulmer, Fred Zinemann, Eugen Schüfftan - the cooperative method undercuts the notion of auteurism in the sense of a film as the product of a single artistic vision. People on Sunday was warmly received on its release for an open shooting style that incorporated unmotivated shots which built a mood, and a feeling that it embraced the random rather than adhering to a linear plot. Often regarded as neorealist before its time, it looks forward, too, to the New Wave. Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler's chief ideologue, didn't like it, but it has attracted an enthusiastic following since reunification for its evocation of a peaceful interlude shortly to be overtaken by the traumas of totalitarianism, war and division.
Patrice Petro picks up issues raised by a number of the films in this collection in analysing Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930). These include a critique of the authoritarianism and patriarchy of Wilhelmine Germany, the portrayal of gender relations and the New Woman, age versus youth, high and low culture, the star persona of Dietrich, and German-American competition/collaboration in the film industry. Made with synchronised sound, it was shot in two versions, German and English, so has a dual identity as a domestic and international product as well as being a synthesis of German and American styles, the aim of producer Eric Pommer, and paralleling the cinematic identity of Dietrich herself. The situation is complicated by von Sternberg's status as a Hollywood director coming back to Germany - reversing the usual trend of emigration - and the two versions as both original, rather than one being a copy of the other. Since its initial release(s) it has been reedited for different times and places, resulting in a number of variants which makes an assessment of what is an original problematic. It was supposed to consolidate Emil Jannings' international reputation, but instead he was overshadowed by Dietrich, rather like the relationship of their characters.
Richard W McCormick tackles transgressive sexuality of another kind in his essay on Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform (1931), which brings together issues of antiauthoritarianism, sexual politics and the Neue Sachlichkeit, all within a society undergoing another financial crisis in the early 1930s and facing the rise of Nazism. The school stands in for rigid social conventions subverted by the emotional attachments formed by the schoolgirls, but the film has been debated since its first release between those critics who read it as avowedly lesbian and antifascist, and those who feel that the political content is timidly expressed. The producer, Carl Froelich, was not politically progressive, and he had a major role in shaping the structure and look, for example substituting a "femme" actress in the role of sympathetic teacher for the "butch" one who had played her in the play on which the film was based, thus muting the lesbianism. Mädchen in Uniform was very successful on release, which suggests that Froelich's commercial instincts were sound, but the result allowed the central relationship between the teacher and pupil to be read in motherly rather than romantic terms. The film makers may have been working at cross-purposes, as McCormick says, but the result is a subtle depiction of a society trying to find a stable identity, and personal freedom.
Possibly "the most critically acclaimed German film ever", according a 1995 poll conducted by Deutscher Kinematheksverbund, M (1931) was Lang's first sound film, and Todd Herzog highlights his masterful use of sound and image to reinforce each other, and to convey unease. It is also a curious experience for those viewers more used to hearing Peter Lorre speak English in his idiosyncratic accent. The degree to which Peter Kürten, the "Vampire of Düsseldorf" was the inspiration for Lorre's child murderer, despite Lang's later denial, is examined. Contemporary critics were sure he was, and M was attacked on release for tastelessness which, as Herzog points out, indicates that although now a classic, it was initially seen in "movie of the week" terms. The most important element though is the question of police effectiveness versus that of the mobilised populace, and it is an irony that the criminals keeping their ears open (literally - the murderer is identified by a blind beggar) are more effective than the police, for all their clues and archives and painstaking methods. That Lang picked up the dark side of mob justice and hysteria in the American-made Fury (1936) indicates that he reconsidered the implications of M. Goebbels liked M, seeing it as a statement "against humanitarian soppiness", perhaps somewhat misreading it, but Herzog thinks it simplistic to see it as either proto- or anti-Nazi as neither interpretation does justice to its complexity. Rather it shows a society in which traditional police methods are hopelessly outdated, and the twin edge of community engagement as a means of compensating for their shortcomings - an issue that still surfaces occasionally in the context of vigilante action.
The final film considered is probably also the most poignant. Kuhle Wampe (1932) was made by a small group of committed left-wing activities, among them Bertolt Brecht, and funded by the Communist Party's film arm, Prometheus. Brecht co-wrote the script and although Slatan Dudow is credited as director, it was effectively co-directed by Brecht as well. Marc Silberman considers it in the context of left-wing production in the Weimar period, and the problems faced by non-mainstream producers. Kuhle Wampe differed from other left-wing films by acknowledging the apolitical character of many sections of the working class, rather than taking a didactic vanguardist approach, and stressed the need for collective action. By the time it was finished, Prometheus was bankrupt, and although successful on release, that run was short as it was overtaken by political events at the beginning of 1933. This was one that Goebbels did not like, and it was withdrawn as soon as the Nazis gained power. It remains, however, Brecht's most important contribution to cinema, and became an influence on radical directors from the late 1960s onwards. Its question, "Who will change the world?", with the response: "Those who don't like it", is as pertinent today as in 1932.
Useful as this collection is, unfortunately, only a small pool of personnel is covered (half of the films were directed by Lang, Murnau and Pabst), and there are many interesting but neglected films and directors from the Weimar period that deserve to be highlighted. But that is not to minimise the book's strengths. It cuts through some of the easy assumptions about Weimar and its perceived decadent sleaziness which coalesce around the image of Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in The Blue Angel sitting provocatively on a barrel with her knee up. As Isenberg suggests in his introduction, Weimar Berlin (and in today's popular English-thinking imagination was there anywhere else in Weimar Germany than Berlin?) now tends to be represented not by anything made in the period itself but by the louche figure of Joel Grey as the MC in Cabaret (1972). These essays show that there was a lot more to the period than the Kit Kat Club and green nail polish.
