A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany Marta Braun (bio) A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany. By Frances Guerin . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Pp. xxxiv+314. $74.95/ $24.95. Until recently, most histories have accounted for the style and content of the films of the Weimar Republic either in terms of the political and economic crises of the postwar period or the darkness of the German soul, whose obsession with sex and death made it vulnerable to fascism. Frances Guerin's A Culture of Light, however, situates the history of 1920s German film within the technologies that produced modern industrialized urban culture, specifically electric and other forms of artificial light. Guerin, a lecturer in film studies at the University of Kent, claims that artificial light constitutes both the films' structure and their content: as an aspect of modernist composition that links film to other arts of its time, as a device that creates the temporally unfolding narrative, and, most importantly, as a representation of, and response to, the transformation produced by technological advances in Germany. Guerin begins with the unarguable thesis that electric light was one of the preeminent technologies underpinning the industrial growth that characterizes modernity. While most of Western Europe had adapted to these technologies by the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany embraced them somewhat later. Perhaps to compensate for this lag, once it did catch up, Germany made the production and display of electric light the symbol of its power, using it to publicize its claim as the leading industrial nation in Europe. Guerin argues that advances in lighting during the 1920s allowed narrative film to take up this symbolic power of electricity, using it not only to define the space or subject of the image, but to illuminate the very rupture it had brought to traditional society as well. For Guerin, the sociological and cultural changes brought about by modern technologies in Germany—the shift from a rural to largely urban population, the changes in the sexual, racial, and political climate—were translated through the innovative uses of film lighting into the very themes of the films themselves. In a first chapter tracing the history of the electrification of Germany, [End Page 435] Guerin contextualizes film within the artistic avant-garde of Wilhelmine society, showing how film's concern with light and its effects was shared by contemporary architecture, photography, and theater. She claims—mistakenly, I believe, and without evidence—that the aesthetics of films until the 1910s were "retarded by relatively unsophisticated technologies" (p. 49) and the use of lighting was unexceptional. The second chapter examines German films made before World War I in which the use of light as both metaphor and structuring principle prefigures that in the decade to follow. Guerin's focus is on the narrative film as an art form; all other types of films, including the documentary—apart from a single example discussed in this chapter—lie outside the book's argument. The rest of the book provides a close reading of eleven films that employ light to demonstrate "the conflict between the utopian aspirations for mythical cohesion and the recognition of the material rupture brought about by industrialization" (p. xxvi). As with modernity itself, the conflict in these films cannot be resolved. Varieté (1925) and Sylvester (1923) make the artificial illumination of the entertainment industry represent its sexual and moral perversions; Metropolis (1927), Siegfried (1922–24), and Faust (1924) use light as the embodiment of myth and the bearer of magic; while the light in Die Strasse (1923) and Am Rande der Welt (1927) divides public and private, urban and rural, and fragments space in an echo of the "spatial reorganization of technological modernity" (p. 156). This book began as a doctoral dissertation and has not fully emerged from that state, being still marred by academic jargon and a number of errors that should have been caught before publication (the most egregious being the mistranslation "coal arc" when "carbon arc" is meant). Nevertheless, Guerin's construction of materialist film history with its foundations in the technology of artificial light is innovative. Her story of how the...