Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew

Abstract

Reviewed by: Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew Sean Lambert Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema. By Katharina Loew. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Paper €117.00. ISBN 9789463725231. As Katharina Loew points out in the introduction to Special Effects and German Silent Film, the term "effect" has a peculiar meaning in the context of film studies. Not only does it index a response to the provocation of a film, it also refers to a quality in the production itself. An image on-screen can not only have an effect on a viewer, [End Page 587] but can show, itself, an effect: "That 'special effects' … came to prevail in everyday language is likely due to the fact that that phrase seems to simultaneously refer to production and reception" (24). In this confusion of the categories of production and consumption—this short-cut or short-circuit in the "work" of filmmakers and film audiences—the special effect recalls Sianne Ngai's description of the gimmick: "devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but also working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention)" (Ngai, 2020). Just over a year after Ngai's groundbreaking work on gimmicks, Loew's new monograph directs our attention toward cinematic tricks and special effects. Like Ngai, Loew unpacks the cultural significance of these oft-overlooked devices, showing through extensive historical examples how special effects in German silent cinema intervened into debates about the artistic value of the cinematic apparatus and furnished filmmakers with an aesthetic vocabulary to respond to the conditions of modern life. Not only will this book be of great value to scholars of Weimar and early cinema, but for anyone interested in studying the interplay of film aesthetics, capitalism, and theories of modernity. The subtitle of Loew's monograph is "Techno-Romantic Cinema." Loew argues that special effects demonstrate the application of romantic ideas to the new technology of the cinematic apparatus. Loew sees special effects or cinematic "tricks" as intervening in a vital debate in the first few decades of cinema: is a film materialistic or idealistic? Does cinema lay bare the soulless "triumph of rationalization, mechanization and market economy" or offer an "imaginative refuge from the harsh realities of modern society" (13, 41)? In other words, is film an art or a technology? Loew argues that it was the special effect, which gestures doubly toward the hyper-material (the medium itself) and the immaterial (images with an ambiguous indexicality to the world) that allows cinema to develop a language to articulate "ideas in a sensual form" (25) and show that the cinematic apparatus is both mechanical and soulful: techno-romantic. The trick or special effect, Loew argues, demonstrated that films could be not only neutral disseminators of meaning, but could perform meaning through techniques or devices, like in theater or literature. A particularly important milestone in the establishment of cinema as an art form came from Der Student von Prag (1913), which Loew analyzes in detail in Chapter 3. The film's doppelganger effects went a long way toward persuading many critics for the first time of cinema's artistic potential: "the film not only succeeded in generating unusual affective responses, the doppelganger motif also evoked a range of readings related to notions about identity and self, demonstrating that a silent, visual medium was in fact capable of addressing philosophical questions" (26). Loew's methodology is rigorously historical, and frequently makes use of "both/and" arguments to resolve apparent impasses between sources. Is film art or technology? Special effects show that it can be both. Is the camera a piece of soulless machinery, [End Page 588] or can it be expressive and emotional? Special effects let cinema express emotions through machinery. Is film idealist or materialist? Via special effects, "machine technology fulfilled the requirements of idealist aesthetics" (22). The hyphen in the word "techno-romantic" can function as a figure for Loew's overall critical project: the excavation of hyphens in the archive that hold together seemingly contradictory ideas about the cinema. This structure of argument holds Loew, the critic herself, at a distance from the...