Afterlives: allegories of film and mortality in early Weimar Germany

Abstract

Choe, Steve. Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 288pp. $120.00 (hardcover).An insightful contribution to our understanding of the phenomenology of film, this book examines how not only represent or enact certain philosophical principles, but are themselves philosophical texts. The goal here is not a disembodied abstract definition of the static essence of film, but rather an exploration of the ways the medium of film thinks through contemporary philosophical concerns and in doing so, creates an embodied experience that is historically and culturally contingent. Choe examines canonical (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nerves, Destiny, The Golem: How He Came into the World, The Nibelungen) as well as others that are often neglected in today's Weimar film scholarship (The Haunted Castle, Phantom, Warning Shadows). He deftly weaves an analysis of these with an examination of contemporaneous works of psychology, philosophy, film theory, and critical theory, revealing how the medium of film and its aesthetic and technical possibilities create their own unique mode of philosophical inquiry.The theme that ties all of these texts together is death and its relationship to life, and key to this investigation is Bergson's notion of intuition. As opposed to the purportedly mechanical and distanced nature of analysis, intuition is a subjective and affective experience that necessitates an interactive and invested relationship with the object and insists within this relationship on a fundamental inability to fully understand that object. Something always remains unsaid and unknown, and an awareness of this incompleteness is central to the relationship between life and death as it is understood in the Weimar Republic. Like Anton Kaes's Shell Shock Cinema, Choe's book examines loss as a central and everyday experience in post-WWI Germany, shifting the focus away from war and texts explicitly about war toward a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how, as Choe writes, films from the early Weimar period may be read as 'sites of memory' that negotiate the status of the dead for the living-ghostly afterlives that enable reflection upon loss, temporality and the ontology of the moving image for those who survived (11).The first three chapters focus on this everyday experience of loss and the resulting anxieties about death in the postwar survivor. Exploring the connections between Freud's writings and Robert Reinert's Nerves, Choe reads the inability of the male characters to mourn and come to terms with their past as corresponding to an ontology of film that attempts to create a cinematic wholeness in which death is elided. According to Choe, one can see this in Nerves' depiction of Roloff's delusional attempts at reconstructing a broken world and its blurring of reality, hallucination, past, and present through the use of montage and superimposition. By contrast, the character of Johannes sheds the past to start a new life and a new world with what Choe terms a triumphal attitude (55) that, in turn, corresponds to a distanced spectator and the notion of the camera as a mechanical and disinterested eye. Thus Choe links the narrative of Nerves with specific discourses about film as a means to preserve life, the spectator's relationship to the film as one of distance and objectification, and various strategies of masculinity in postwar Germany, all of which are based on a disavowal of death as a part of life. Choe argues, however, that the binaries seen in Nerves and these discourses-between victory and defeat, life and death-are compli- cated by other contemporary and texts such as F.W. …