Paul Hindemith and the Cinematic Imagination

Abstract

For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. … The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. To a great extent, huge film “palaces” designed as splendid and glamorous buildings replaced the opera house during the Weimar Republic (1919–33).1 Unlike going to the opera or the theater, going to the movies was an activity that could be enjoyed by almost all social classes. Movie tickets were cheap enough that only the extremely poor were excluded, and artistic standards were such that the movies could also be attractive to the educated and wealthy. Thus, in the 1920s, cinema reached more people than any other entertainment form. Although feature films, often based on German literature, were produced in Germany in the 1910s, the German film industry made its mark internationally with a series of Expressionist films in the early 1920s. Expressionism in film was only loosely connected to the movements in painting and literature that originated shortly before the First World War, in that the films treated psychological or supernatural themes and relied on visual distortion. The plots and stories of Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, and betrayal, and psychological states were visualized by sharply exaggerated shadows, high-contrast lighting, and skewed set designs. But such topics as health, nature, culture, and history, and Bergfilme, films about mountain climbing and skiing, gained popularity. And most notably, the montage film emerged. German film directors were drawn to the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's montage technique after the release of his controversial film about a naval mutiny, Battleship Potemkin, in 1926. In contrast to the more political Russian films, however, the early German montage films were linked with contemporary photography and realistic Neue Sachlichkeit painting, patching together shots from daily life in rapid sequence. Though not to the same extent as their German counterparts, films produced in Russia, Italy, France, Denmark, and America were also shown in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Due to restrictions on the importation of international film, however, Hollywood never gained the same control of the German film market that it maintained almost everywhere else. The import ban was first lifted in 1920, and in 1925, a quota system was instituted that permitted the import of one international feature film for each domestic feature distributed in Germany. Shorts, however, were not subject to this quota. Slapstick comedy took Germany by storm, with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Fatty Arbuckle becoming household names.