Gerd Gemünden. Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933–1951.

Abstract

Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933–1951 investigates the significance of emigration and exile as articulated in the creative output of leading German film personnel who worked in Hollywood. It examines how German exiles are identifiable in their work through subject positions and ways of seeing and crafting that were distinct from those of Hollywood filmmakers. These identifiers resisted studio formulas and yet proved assimilable. Gerd Gemünden argues that the result was not an alternative or counter-cinema, but a hybrid exhibiting a “leftist-liberal bent” (p. 189). In a studio system that fostered apolitical, quasi-universal entertainment, German émigrés and exiles found space, admittedly circumscribed, to engage contemporary issues, above all the threat of fascism. Noting that the German contribution to Hollywood stood out in particular genres—horror, the biopic, comedy, anti-Nazi productions, and film noir—Gemünden selects one motion picture from each of these genres for detailed analysis. In addition he examines a film made in postwar Germany about the experience of re-emigration that was co-authored by, directed by, and starred Peter Lorre. In four instances the directors—Edgar Ulmer, William Dieterle, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fred Zinnemann—were émigrés of the 1920s. In the other two—Fritz Lang and Lorre—Hollywood offered escape from Nazi Germany. Despite very diverse pre-Hollywood careers, the shared element for all six directors was their experience in Weimar cinema. With respect to stylistic devices and sociopolitical awareness, the Weimar legacy, from expressionism to the new objectivity, figures prominently in the analysis.