Ernst Lubitsch Research Articles

From Immersion in Labor “Vocation” to Resurrection of Libido and Life: Ernst Lubitsch’s Cognition, Impulsion and Catharsis Touch in Ninotchka

From Immersion in Labor “Vocation” to Resurrection of Libido and Life: Ernst Lubitsch’s Cognition, Impulsion and Catharsis Touch in Ninotchka

The Synchrony Era

The Synchrony Era

It’s not funny! – On Wes Anderson’s comedy and genre hybridizations

Wes Anderson is, arguably, the greatest heir to the traditional American comic genre in its different manifestations. Starting with the profound influence of the masters of comedy of the silent era, Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin, Andersonian comedy also lines up with the works of masters of classical American Comedy such as Frank Capra, George Cuckor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges, up to the existentialist tone of some of Woody Allen’s comedies. The present contribution analyses, from the perspective of the History of Cinema, the way in which Andersonian comedy draws on this long tradition, crystalizing in the coalescence of up to five comic subtypes: deadpan humour, slapstick, screwball comedy, verbal humour and parody. The latter is of particular significance, since it is the key to the hybridization of cinematic genres that is one of the traits of Anderson’s playful and postmodern approach as a postmodern auteur. Thus, the second part of the article will explore the genre hybridizations through which the Texan filmmaker resignifies the usual meaning of traditional genre conventions, often for the purpose of achieving a very particular comic effect.

Rethinking Inside and Outside: The Door in Ernst Lubitsch'sWhen I Was Deadand Charlie Chaplin'sThe Adventurer

The article investigates the function and signification of doors in two silent films, Ernst Lubitsch's 1916 When I Was Dead and Charlie Chaplin's 1917 The Adventurer. Taking a theoretical perspective provided by the field of intellectual inquiry known as cultural techniques ( Kulturtechniken), the door in these films is studied with respect to its procedural and functional operations. Specifically, the article focuses on the ways in which the employment of doors in each of the films relates to these films' configurations of inside and outside as conceptual realms. The analysis presented shows that Lubitsch and Chaplin engage doors in uniquely different ways. It further reveals that, while the operation of the door in When I Was Dead reinforces an exclusive binary of inside and outside, which itself can be traced back to the film's concern with sexual difference, the operation of the door in The Adventurer essentially deconstructs the inside/outside binary, an act that can be linked to a critique of contemporary notions of industrial management and the treatment of humans as machines.

Love Objects: Eros and the Materialistic Aesthetics of Ernst Lubitsch

This article explores the role of filmic objects within the romantic relationships featured in Ernst Lubitsch’s silent The Marriage Circle (1924) and the comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932). I argue that these objects reflect a unique engagement with the materiality of film décor, which makes use of the strong presence of objects to portray intimacy as the site of inconclusive meaning. By examining both films together, I demonstrate how the world of inanimate objects brings erotic undertones to the surface while challenging the material conditions of the erotic itself. In order to do so, I examine the ways in which Lubitsch relies on material details not only as functional narrative devices, but as elements that challenge and complicate our interpretations of familiar things. While the underacknowledged use of objects in The Marriage Circle illustrates the logic of displacement that stands at the center of the director’s style, Trouble in Paradise provides a framework for recognizing the critical role of objects in the structure of desire in his films. This article sets up a new reading of tactility and materiality in Lubitsch’s use of mise en scéne and seeks to give objects a prominent role in the analysis of his style.

McCormick, Rick. Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch

McCormick, Rick. <i>Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch</i>

Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch by Rick McCormick

Reviewed by: Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch by Rick McCormick Rob McFarland Rick McCormick. Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch. Indiana UP, 2020. 357 pp. Paper, $48.00; cloth, $95.00. Every few years, a new anthology of films by the director Ernst Lubitsch appears on the market. These multiplying collections supply viewers with many of their favorite films, from the gender-bending Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918; I Don’t Want to Be a Man, 2005) to the antifascist To Be or Not to Be (1942). Recently, English-language historians and academics have been doing their part to digest Lubitsch’s huge cinematic oeuvre and to draw the prolific director into the center of scholarly discourse about Weimar-era film. There have been no fewer than five books in the last three years about Lubitsch, from Joseph McBride’s 2018 How Did Lubitsch Do It? to Sabine Hake’s excellent Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (2020). In this crowded territory, McCormick carefully stakes out his project: to explore the transnational nature of Lubitsch’s comedies. Calling his films “transnational” does not simply refer to Lubitsch’s emigration from Berlin’s UFA studios to MGM and Paramount Studios (among others) in Hollywood. As McCormick convincingly argues, Lubitsch’s mobility as a [End Page 125] filmmaker grew out of the cacophonous mixture of crossing and competing identities not only in his films but in his life as well. Growing up in his father’s clothing shop on Schönhauser Allee (a part of Berlin’s celebrated Jewish clothing industry), Lubitsch became fascinated with the all-encompassingefforts of assimilation. As an actor and later as a film-maker, Lubitsch created comedic characters who explore the status of the racial and economic outsider. First using a series of “bad boy” Jewish antiheroes such as the eponymous shoe seller in Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916; Shoe palace Pinkus) and later a host of “bad girl” characters epitomized in the roles of Ossi Oswalda, Lubitsch skewers Wilhelminian German—and later American—sexual, racial, and class hierarchies. His penniless antiheroes finagle their way up the social ladder and into the hearts and beds of middle-class shop owners’ daughters and wives, crass arrivistes invading old-money Europe across boundaries of race, language, manners, wealth, and morals. McCormick deftly places each film in its historical and cultural context. Lubitsch’s border-crossing characters appeared in a medium that was in its own transnational heyday. The 1920s saw the rise of unprecedented international collaboration in terms of film production and financing. Lubitsch was involved in such a company, the European Film Alliance. It is the international success of Lubitsch’s Berlin films that eventually brought him to the United States, a success based in no small part on the film’s transnational sensibilities. Although McCormick’s book is divided into two sections, titled “Berlin” and “Hollywood,” he does not separate Lubitsch’s two artistic homes with an ideological or biographical caesura. Whereas lesser storytellers might focus on the transatlantic break between the places of Lubitsch’s career, McCormick teases out the continuities between his earlier and later comedies. Among all of the recent books about Ernst Lubitsch, McCormick’s Sex, Politics, and Comedy stands out for two reasons. First, the book maintains a fine balancing act between academic prose and accessible, fascinating film history. In his discussion of the role of Pola Negri’s titular character in Madame Dubarry (1922), for example, McCormick carefully explores “the heavy risk involved in the meteoric rise of an outsider within a hierarchical society with little tolerance for the upward mobility of outsiders or anyone at the bottom of the hierarchy” (85–86). A second reason that the book stands out: all those who teach film will appreciate the way that McCormick backs up his compelling ideas with specific examples from the film’s cinematography, mise-en-scène, and editing. His reading [End Page 126] of scenes from The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927), for example, focuses on the makeup of the Mexican lead, Ramón Novarro, and the way Lubitsch deepens the character of the prince...

Dark Temporalities: Technologies of Race and Lighting in Ernst Lubitsch's &lt;em&gt;The Loves of Pharaoh&lt;/em&gt; (1922)

Dark Temporalities: Technologies of Race and Lighting in Ernst Lubitsch's &lt;em&gt;The Loves of Pharaoh&lt;/em&gt; (1922)

Jews, Germans, and Comedy: Re-viewing Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be

Jews, Germans, and Comedy: Re-viewing Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be

Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch by Rick McCormick

Sex, Politics, and Comedy: The Transnational Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch by Rick McCormick

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Wiersz o jesieni. O Frantzu François Ozona

Kozłowski Krzysztof, Wiersz o jesieni. O Frantzu François Ozona [A Poem on Autumn. Frantz by François Ozon]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 77–92. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.3.&#x0D; The film Broken Lullaby ([1932] Ernst Lubitsch) and the novel L’Homme que j’ai tué ([1921, 1925, 1930] Maurice Rostand) are seen to be the main inspirations for Frantz (2016) by François Ozon. On the basis of methodology broadly understood as the concept of bringing into relief (Domański, 1992, 2002), this article aims to demonstrate the means by which the French director expanded upon the literary-film material, imbuing it with a totally singular meaning. Ozon’s inventiveness did notlimit itself to transformations typical for adaptations, but ventured towards feature film understood as a synthetic work of art that by exploiting the audiovisual properties of the medium itself, acts as a unifying force of poetry (Verlaine, Banville), music (Chopin, Debussy) and painting (Manet). The famous poem recited by the heroine, Ann, Chanson d’automne (Paul Verlaine), serves as the analytical starting point for the above. It is thus used as a pivot for the entire film, a veritable lodestarfor guiding motifs, allowing important aspects of the film to be highlighted and consequently, bring its main theme to the fore.

On Thomson's &lt;em&gt;Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio&lt;/em&gt;

On Thomson’s Warner Bros:The Making of an American Movie Studio Stephen J. Whitfield Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio. By David Thomson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. 220 pp., ISBN 978-0-300-19760-0 (hardcover). US $25.00. This sprightly volume is titled Warner Bros, not Warner Brothers, and the distinction is important. Although David Thomson has submitted an entry for Jewish Lives series, his book traces the history of a company—Hollywood studio Warner Bros.—and the legacy it gave moviegoers. The collective biographical portrait of Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack is rather sketchy when contrasted with the author’s analysis of films like Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) and East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), or with his account of the contribution made by Darryl F. Zanuck (the chief of production in the 1920s and early 1930s—and incidentally a Gentile) to the success of the studio. Though commerce and art are entwined in all sorts of intriguing ways in the annals of American film, a paradox must be noted: Warner Bros is not—as the title hints—an addition to the field of business history. The careers and roles of stars like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland—all the way to Clint Eastwood—pique the author’s curiosity far more than front-office machinations or stockholder reports. Despite the rubric of Jewish Lives, the rationale for this lack of balance is obvious. Sam Warner died a few hours before the premiere of The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), the first sound movie, which made the studio’s reputation. [End Page 107] Sam basically disappears from the book by page 63. Treasurer Albert Warner was essentially a silent partner who lived uneventfully in New York. He died four decades after Sam, after spending the day at the race track (his chief pleasure) in Miami. That left Harry, the president of the company, an upright, solid citizen and a committed Jew, and Jack, who succeeded Zanuck and Hal B. Wallis as head of production. Jack Benny’s quip (“Jack Warner would rather make a bad joke than a good picture” [33]) isn’t quite fair; just think of The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967). But when Thomson conjectures that Jack may be “the biggest scumbag ever to get into a Jewish Lives series” (2), his inclusion on a list made lustrous by Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, Primo Levi, and Rabbi Akiva isn’t the only reason Warner Bros belongs uneasily on the shelf of new releases from Yale University Press. The exact relation between the accountants and the artists in the evolution of Warner Bros. is not a subject Thomson tackles directly. The bottom line certainly had primacy. It could not have escaped the brothers that in making a dog known as Rin Tin Tin (who starred in twenty-seven silent films between 1923 and 1925) famous, they were getting a star who “never complained or got a lawyer or an agent” (69). At virtually the same moment, the studio lost Ernst Lubitsch to Paramount; his comedies, Harry Warner told the émigré director, were “too subtle” (66). Hard bargaining and excessive demands provoked George Jessel to spurn the offer to reprise his Broadway role as Jack Robin—but can anyone besides Al Jolson be imagined as starring in The Jazz Singer? For large sections of this book, while Thomson covers gangster pictures, Busby Berkeley musicals, and forlorn tales of vulnerable women requiring toughness to survive, the brothers disappear entirely from the text. When they (mostly Jack) happen to reemerge, the episodes do not inspire confidence that the art was appreciated or understood. (None of the brothers graduated from high school, so they might be given some slack.) Although Jack Warner had sold the controlling interest in the studio to Seven Arts Productions in 1966, pocketing $32 million for himself, he wanted to have a hand in Bonnie and Clyde. Producer Warren Beatty showed him the film. But Warner apparently found the change in tone from jaunty comedy to bloody violence baffling. In a famous exchange...

Film ChronicleYankee Doodle Dandy dir. by Michael Curtiz, and: Shoulder Arms dir. by Charles Chaplin, and: The Big Parade dir. by King Vidor, and: Westfront 1918 dir. by G. W. Pabst, and: La Grande Illusion dir. by Jean Renoir, and: Paths of Glory dir. by Stanley Kubrick, and: Oh! What a Lovely War dir. by Richard Attenborough, and: Frantz dir.

Film ChronicleYankee Doodle Dandy dir. by Michael Curtiz, and: Shoulder Arms dir. by Charles Chaplin, and: The Big Parade dir. by King Vidor, and: Westfront 1918 dir. by G. W. Pabst, and: La Grande Illusion dir. by Jean Renoir, and: Paths of Glory dir. by Stanley Kubrick, and: Oh! What a Lovely War dir. by Richard Attenborough, and: Frantz dir.

The October Garbo: Classical Hollywood and the Revolution

I propose to discuss Ernst Lubitsch’s decision to tailor Ninotchka (1939), his film with Greta Garbo, to Garbo in the role of a Soviet revolutionary, which — given the overwhelming importance of Garbo to classical Hollywood — is how the October Revolution is situated at the heart of American cinema at the time while Garbo’s proverbial cinematic melancholia is shown to entail the structures of affect residual to revolutions. Moreover, by divorcing Garbo’s revolutionary melancholia from melodrama and attaching it to comedy, Lubitsch extricates this particular psychopolitics from the fact of genre, now as an insight into the construction of film. Finally, I show how Lubitsch engages Russian literature, especially Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as a code-holder for Hollywood iconicity.

Trouble in Paradise: Political Economy and Cultural Criticism: Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek’s title Trouble in Paradise is also the name of a 1932 movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch, a movie which Žižek begins discussing as his first topic in his introduction. But the title obviously also reflects the notion that there is a difference between the superficial appearances of social life (often publically attractively depicted, with supporting justifications, sustaining collective illusions) and a time of deep societal troubles. Žižek says about his own title: “The ‘paradise’ in the title of this book refers to the End of History (as elaborated by Francis Fukuyama: liberal democratic capitalism as the finally found best possible social order), and the ‘trouble’ is, of course, the ongoing crisis that compelled even Fukuyama himself to drop his idea of the End of History” (7). This is a switching of perspectives between what we might call “cultural” interpretation and criticism and critical examination and advocacy about the more overt power systems of political economy. Such switching of perspectives, which we do not object to, but which we wish to emphasize, recurs throughout the book.

Ernst Lubitsch &amp; the Transnational Twenties: The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (USA 1927)

Ernst Lubitsch epitomized the transnationalism of the cinema in the 1920s as the first German director to come to Hollywood and one who brought over a number of German film artists to Hollywood over the course of the decade. In America he followed developments in German cinema in terms of technical innovations and popular genres, and he published in the German film press. The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg was meant to compete with similar silent operetta films being made in Germany, and making the film, Lubitsch had the chance to return to Germany for the first time since 1922. The film was transnational not only because of its connection to the movements of artists, technicians, ideas, styles, and genres back and forth across the Atlantic, but also for the ethnic, gender, and sexual politics of the film and its production itself: e.g., the “migration background” not just of Lubitsch but also of the film’s male star, Ramón Novarro.

“Clearly it’s nothing alarming … It’s only Shakespeare”: Conjuring the Shakespeare Specter in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be

“Clearly it’s nothing alarming … It’s only Shakespeare”:Conjuring the Shakespeare Specter in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be Kristin N. Denslow “… We’re in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. It’s August 1939. Europe is still at peace. At the moment, life in Warsaw is going on as normally as ever. But suddenly something seems to have happened. Are those Poles seeing a ghost? Why does this car suddenly stop? Everybody seems to be staring in one direction. People seem to be frightened, even terrified. Some flabbergasted. Can it be true? It must be true, no doubt. The man with the little moustache, Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler in Warsaw when the two countries are still at peace and all by himself? He seems strangely unconcerned by all the excitement he’s causing. […] How did he get here? What happened? Well, it all started in the general headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin.” Thus begins the structurally dizzying opening to Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film, To Be or Not To Be, a film concerned simultaneously with the ghosts of Hitler and Shakespeare. The film opens on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.1 Through a series of misdirections, Lubitsch plants an actor playing Hitler on the streets of Warsaw days before the September Campaign, and the narrator frames this as an appearance of a “ghost,” a ghost that the Poles may or may not have been expecting. Thus, like Hamlet, the film begins with waiting and expectation. Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, writes that in Hamlet, “everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition. […] Still more precisely, everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play” (2). Derrida’s specter is outside of [End Page 421] time, and its appearance is concomitant with its re-appearance. For Lubitsch’s setting of 1939 Poland, the specter of Hitler is particularly vexed; in the imminence of war, the Poles are “waiting for this apparition.” Yet, in the film’s diegesis, that specter has arrived and stands placidly outside of a delicatessen. Yet again, the final reveal demonstrates that this is not, in fact, the “man with the little moustache” himself. Rather it is an actor, Bronski, out to prove a point about doubling and representation: his director, Dobosh, has questioned whether Bronski really resembles Hitler. The possibility for likeness is deferred repeatedly; when Dobosh says that Bronski should look more like the on-stage photograph of Hitler, Bronski retorts that the photo was taken of him. Here, as Derrida remarks in Of Grammatology, “Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where […] one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer” (36). In this film, then, Hitler is conceived of as a shadow, or ghost, of Bronski. And this ghost is doubled yet again when Bronski is compared to his own photograph. This type of spectral appearance and deferral of identification and presence appears frequently in Lubitsch’s film in the context of not only Hitler but also Shakespeare. The film repeatedly appropriates the mechanism of the joke in order to continue this deferral of meaning and play of presence and absence. By deploying similar strategies in how it copes with the “imminence” of Hitler’s arrival and the arrival of Shakespeare by way of quotation and citation, the politics of To Be or Not To Be arrive through, not in spite of, its humor. Though the film’s early critics accused it of insensitivity regarding Poland, this insensitivity paradoxically yields a more sympathetic understanding of Polish miseries.2 The presence of jokes about Hitler and Shakespeare reflect the political and adaptive resistance of the film so that by engaging with these figures through two repeated gags—a joke comparing Hitler with a piece of cheese and the humorous interruption of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy—the film foregrounds an atmosphere of death. That these jokes are not just told but retold, recontextualized, and subsequently repressed...

Conference Report

Frigid temperatures and Halloween festivities did not deter nearly 300 scholars from attending the ninth 'Film & History' conference, held at the Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor's Club. Sponsored by Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal and organised around the theme 'Golden Ages: Styles & Personalities, Genres & Histories', the conference consisted of eighty-five panels of papers in addition to a workshop on publishing scholarship, information sessions by associates of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and the Media History Digital Library, and a keynote address by illustrious professor Tom Gunning.Papers were organised into topical areas, such as 'Women in the Film Industry', 'Auteurs and Authorship', 'Black Hollywood', and, the focus of this report, 'Sound Is Golden: Case Studies of Industry Practices'. Co-convened and chaired by doctoral candidates Eric Dienstfrey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Katherine Quanz (Wilfrid Laurier University, CA), the 'Sound Is Golden' area consisted of twelve presentations, spread across four panels, which addressed the influence of economic and institutional mechanisms on the nature and function of film sound in a range of genres, modes of production, and historical periods, though emphasis was given to practices of classical Hollywood sound. In addition, it seemed to me that one upshot of the area's focus on a particular element of film style-rather than, say, filmic representations of identity politics- was that the constituent papers tended to privilege close, formal analysis over cultural or ideological readings. This is not to say that the area lacked breadth, and I hope to give a sense of the diversity of papers by summarizing each one rather than elaborating on a select few.The first panel aimed to challenge conventional histories of film sound. In 'The Golden Age of Sound Effects?', Dong Liang (University of Chicago) discussed film sound in the nickelodeon period, when the increasing differentiation of sound effects and music as forms of accompaniment to silent cinema owed to at least two factors: changes in the hierarchy of exhibition labour practices and changes in aesthetic norms, such that sound effects were no longer used for achieving fidelity but rather to convey narrative intelligibility. Next, equipped with his violin and his new book After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934 (Columbia University Press, 2014), Michael Slowik (San Diego State University) challenged the gilded status accorded to Max Steiner's score of King Kong (1933), long considered a pioneer work for its use of music as a narrational force that cues plot events and articulates character emotions. Slowik argued that this 'assertive score' was anticipated by Hollywood's earliest musicals, exemplified by Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929), whose indebtedness to musical theatre's presentational aesthetic accounts for the nondiegetic music's capacity to serve explicitly commentative purposes.In 'The Night They Invented the Golden Age: Revising the Historiography of the Hollywood Musical', Amanda McQueen (University of Wisconsin-Madison) ably interrogated the established rise-and-fall story of the film musical's history, the apex of which is usually considered to be the musicals of the 1940s and 50s. McQueen's deft analysis revealed how studio executives retroactively generated a Golden Age by providing audiences in the 1960s and 70s with a curated canon of studio-era musicals through several means, including the release of compilation soundtrack albums and films as well as topical film festivals and retrospectives. The animated discussion instigated by McQueen's paper in the panel's Q&A session testified to the present-day entrenchment of the musical's standard story, incomplete though it may be.A second panel presented case studies on economic factors that shape film sound. In 'Paying the Piper at Paramount: How Mitchell Leisen Squeezed His Music Budget on Midnight (1939)', Jeff Smith (University of Wisconsin-Madison) asked how budget constraints influenced the score for a high-budget production whose music expenditures occupied just over 1 percent of the film's total production cost. …

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

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.