Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe Nancy P. Nenno (bio) Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema. By Steve Choe. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. vii+274. Cloth £80.00. ISBN 978-1441175380. Steve Choe’s Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema is a philosophical meditation on the function of cinema in a time of crisis. Drawing on a selection of art films from the early years of the Weimar Republic, Choe juxtaposes their representations of life and death in the aftermath of World War I [End Page 398] and the devastating Treaty of Versailles with philosophical and popular discourses to illuminate the ways in which the cinematic medium not only embodies the idea of mortality itself, but can catalyze a spectatorial positionality that encourages reflection and model an ethics of spectatorship. This dialogue between literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and historically grounded analysis and close readings of the films is the book’s strong point, as it reflects on the ways in which cinema itself constitutes a self-reflexive medium that is intimately tied to specific historical contexts. As such, his readings also interact with the Kinodebatte, the debate about film’s potential to become an artistic medium. The two pillars of Choe’s analyses are Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the analytic and intuitive attitudes toward time and change and Walter Benjamin’s understanding of allegory. Along the way, he brings an impressive array of other voices into dialogue through his discussions of cinematic depictions of death, loss, mourning, and revenge. Film critics from the period such as Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balász, philosophers Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and Georg Simmel, and poet Rainer Maria Rilke all contribute to his understanding of his primary themes: the experience of the animation of the inanimate as represented by film, and the struggle to understand life and death following World War I, ultimately culminating in what Choe terms the “ethics of survival” (10). Afterlives opens with a beautifully nuanced close reading of a scene from Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in which he argues that the somnambulist Cesare functions as an allegory of the cinema itself insofar as he is “reawakened” or reanimated from the dead. These moments of self-reflexivity appear in most of the films Choe analyzes, from the origins of cinema in the traveling fair depicted in Caligari to the play of shadows in Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923). There is a distinct narrative in the study which progresses from initial reactions to the war experience to those of mourning and loss to the projection of the future through the remembrance of the past. Chapter 1 focuses on two possible reactions to having survived the war. Here, Choe contrasts the two male figures in Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919) to demonstrate how they enact diametrically opposed approaches to dealing with postwar trauma. Chapter 2 undertakes a complementary reading of Murnau’s films The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922) in order to understand the ways in which the topos of haunting functioned in the immediate postwar period. Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) is the focus of the third chapter, which underscores the relationship between the duration of the film experience and the experience of lived human life. The fourth chapter focuses on Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) and its explicit allegory of cinema as the animation of the inanimate as a means to posit the possibility of an ethical relationship to the other. In the final chapter, which deals with Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), Choe demonstrates how the theme [End Page 399] of revenge can lead either to a sense of life as predetermined or as open ended and potentially utopian. While the stated focus of Afterlives is early Weimar cinema, it is not entirely clear what the historical parameters of “early” Weimar cinema are, nor how he has chosen these films rather than others. Although there are references to Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), it seems odd...