Augmenting cinema: the Kino-Variété (1913-14)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Efforts to lend cinema-going a sense of liveness and cinematic projections a bodily presence are in vogue today. The recent rise of phenomena like ‘augmented cinema’ or ‘event cinema’ has largely been framed as responses to digitalization, home media consumption, and an experience economy in the digital age. However, they possess a long genealogy. This article examines the German Kino-Variété of the years 1913–1914, which conceptualized cinema not as a two-dimensional virtual window but as a multi-media embodied performance. Combining film and live performance, Kino-Variété productions sought to intensify filmic images through texture, depth, and various combinations of virtual and physical attractions. While the transitional era of film history has received attention primarily as a period of narrative integration, the Kino-Variété testifies to opposing tendencies gaining traction as well. The years before World War I set the course for cinema’s future: Should the medium become a feature-length form of bourgeois fiction or remain a physical, sensual, and diverse realm of short-subject variety? Although the Kino-Variété can be seen as a failed response to the specific challenges of its time, it was not merely an empirical phenomenon, but embodied an idea of cinema, an imagined future for a kaleidoscopic medium with unanticipated prescience for our own era of cinema events.