Weimar Cinema Research Articles

The Woman with Scissors and Glue: Film Editing and Radical Montage in Weimar Cinema

The Woman with Scissors and Glue: Film Editing and Radical Montage in Weimar Cinema

Revisiting Weimar Film Reviewers’ Sentiments: Integrating Lexicon-Based Sentiment Analysis with Large Language Models

Film reviews are an obvious area for the application of sentiment analysis, but while this is common in the field of computer science, it has been mostly absent in film studies. Film scholars have quite rightly been skeptical of such techniques due to their inability to grasp nuanced critical texts. Recent technological developments have, however, given us cause to re-evaluate the usefulness of automated sentiment analysis for historical film reviews. The release of ever more sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown that their capacity to handle nuanced language could overcome some of the shortcomings of lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Applying it to historical film reviews seemed logical and promising to us. Some of our early optimism was misplaced: while LLMs, and in particular ChatGPT, proved indeed to be much more adept at dealing with nuanced language, they are also difficult to control and implement in a consistent and reproducible way – two things that lexicon-based sentiment analysis excels at. Given these contrasting sets of strengths and weaknesses, we propose an innovative solution which combines the two, and has more accurate results. In a two-step process, we first harness ChatGPT’s more nuanced grasp of language to undertake a verbose sentiment analysis, in which the model is prompted to explain its judgment of the film reviews at length. We then apply a lexicon-based sentiment analysis (with Python’s NLTK library and its VADER lexicon) to the result of ChatGPT’s analysis, thus achieving systematic results. When applied to a corpus of 80 reviews of three canonical Weimar films (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Metropolis and Nosferatu), this approach successfully recognized the sentiments of 88.75% of reviews, a considerable improvement when compared to the accuracy rate of the direct application of VADER to the reviews (66.25%). These results are particularly impressive given that this corpus is especially challenging for automated sentiment analysis, with a prevalence of macabre themes, which can easily trigger falsely negative results, and a high number of mixed reviews. We believe this hybrid approach could prove useful for application in large corpora, for which close reading of all reviews would be humanly impossible.

Male and Female Villains in Weimar Cinema

Male and Female Villains in Weimar Cinema

Racially profiled?: ‘Jewish’ vampirism in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)

ABSTRACT Since 1947 and Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Weimar Film Studies has been dominated by discussions on the representation of power, which has only recently begun to fall away. This article breaks away from this tradition and contributes to a new range of approaches to Weimar cinema, which centre upon figures belonging to a group that has largely been excluded from the existing narrative: ‘the Jew’ . Though Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) does not contain any characters explicitly identified as Jewish, I consider how the titular character is imbued with antisemitic tropes and thus steps into a similar role as enemy of mainstream German society. This article thus explores the notion of antisemitism as a socially generated projection formulated in response to the social experience of modernity, projected onto a representative of ‘Jewishness’ as the ultimate enemy of the national community.

The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden

Reviewed by: The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden Christian Rogowski The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder. By Paul Dobryden. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. Pp viii + 208. Hardcover $120.00. ISBN 978-0810144972. The late nineteenth century saw concerted efforts in Germany to mitigate the destabilizing effects of unfettered industrial capitalism, such as environmental pollution and the unsanitary living conditions of an immiserated urban working class, by seeking to optimize efficiency in production (for instance, by reducing harmful waste) and by aiming to improve working and living conditions (primarily in order to maintain a productive workforce). In his introduction to this fascinating book, Paul Dobryden outlines how the medium of cinema that emerged during that same period can be viewed as an “apparatus of modernity” (10) that participated in this pursuit of “hygiene,” defined broadly as a conglomerate of practices that “strove to produce a kind of order, which in turn was meant to stabilize social life” (14). The multiple crises that followed the defeat of Germany in World War I confronted Weimar-era [End Page 320] cinema with the challenge of counteracting “environmental disorder” by contributing toward reestablishing psychological, social, and political stability—hence the book’s somewhat enigmatic title and subtitle. The author’s highly original, eclectic, and thought-provoking approach, combining sophisticated theoretical reflection with impressive archival research, enables him to address a dazzling multitude of fascinating topics in the book’s five chapters. In a brief review such as this, it is impossible to convey the full complexity of the book’s multi-layered and nuanced overarching argument. The first chapter is dedicated to the connection between the moralizing concerns of the Kinoreform movement and debates over the design of exhibition spaces during the transition from storefront movie theaters to large-scale picture palaces. The close proximity with other people in the insufficiently ventilated and poorly lit cramped spaces of early storefront cinemas exposed moviegoers to multiple “threats”—to their physical health, to their moral fortitude, and to their political reliability (as spaces of collective experience that potentially engendered politicized solidarity). The cinema thus became “a site where experts in design, architecture, traffic, and urban planning articulated a narrative of hygienic modernization and demonstrated hygienic ways of thinking about, perceiving, and acting in the spaces of everyday life” (38). The second chapter discusses the quasi-documentary genre of the Kulturfilme, educational films that sought to transform audiences into communities of self-regulating “hygienic subjects” functioning optimally within an existing social order. Such films, Dobryden rightly points out, largely adhered to patriarchal and ableist norms. For instance, women were generally relegated to the domestic sphere, with housewives instructed in using the ergonomically designed “Frankfurt Kitchen” to maintain order at home, while public spaces were primarily construed as arenas for the circulation of able-bodied working males, with the “unproductive” parts of the population (children, the elderly, the physically or mentally handicapped) sequestered in special spaces that purported to best meet their specific needs. Chapter three reads F. W. Murnau’s film Faust (1926) as a kind of double allegory—of the environmental pollution wrought by unregulated industrial capitalism and of the redemptive power of the cinematic imagination. Smoke and vapor fill the screen, visualizing disease and the devil’s shape-shifting magic in a manner that, through visual distraction, makes possible a distinctly modern cinematic magic. The fourth chapter applies ideas about disability and aging developed in chapter two to a discussion of two canonical Weimar-era feature films. In Dobryden’s readings of Karl Grune’s Die Straße (The Street, 1923) and Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), the modern urban environment emerges as the site that mercilessly excludes those who do not or cannot any longer conform to the “hygienic” logic of moral self-regulation or to discriminatory standards of workplace efficiency. The final chapter discusses key leftist films from the late Weimar period, such as Phil Jutzi’s [End Page 321] Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (1932). Rather than participating in efforts to mitigate the detrimental effects of exploitative industrial capitalism, these films shift the focus to...

The Long Century's Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern By Kenneth S.Calhoun, University of Toronto Press. 2021. 267pp. $70.00 (hardcover or ebook)

The German QuarterlyVolume 96, Issue 1 p. 130-131 BOOK REVIEW The Long Century's Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern By Kenneth S. Calhoun, University of Toronto Press. 2021. 267pp. $70.00 (hardcover or ebook) Barbara Hales, Corresponding Author Barbara Hales [email protected] Department of History, University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, Texas, USA Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Barbara Hales, Corresponding Author Barbara Hales [email protected] Department of History, University of Houston-Clear Lake, Houston, Texas, USA Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 14 February 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12329Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume96, Issue1Winter 2023Pages 130-131 RelatedInformation

Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich by Viola Rühse

Reviewed by: Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich by Viola Rühse Frederic Ponten Film und Kino als Spiegel. Siegfried Kracauers Filmschriften aus Deutschland und Frankreich. By Viola Rühse. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Pp. 328. Paper €69.95. ISBN 978-3110705751. The main topic of Viola Rühse's book is Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) and his early occupation with film as a journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s in Frankfurt and Berlin, as well as during his exile as a freelance writer in Paris from 1933 to 1941. His escape to the USA after the German attack against France serves as a biographical endpoint of Rühse's study, even though Kracauer's later prominent book publications on film, such as From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film (1960), serve as a necessary horizon to understanding both continuities and ruptures in his work, most of which has been edited in the important Werkausgabe (2004–2012). The book neither aims to give an entirely new picture of Kracauer's early work, nor does it attempt to radically reorient views on Weimar cinema or 1920s film theory and largely follows in its general assessments the standard literature on the topic by Inka [End Page 167] Mülder-Bach, Miriam Hansen, and Helmut Stalder. In fact, the book's scope is pleasantly modest, as it promises to direct attention to some of the—so far—overlooked or underresearched Kracauer texts (and drafts) and their contexts. This leads Rühse, by examining archival materials in Kracauer's Nachlass and recently digitized collections of early twentieth-century journals and newspapers (19), to trace—with surprising intensity and depth—not only motifs in Kracauer's writing, but also social history, cultural history, media history, architectural history, and art history. The book sets off to a slow start: the introduction (chapter one) develops the topic of the book and mainly provides the state of the art of Kracauer research; the writing, particularly of the first pages, is unfortunately hindered by stylistic infelicities and would have benefitted from further copy-editing. The second chapter, the weakest of the seven chapters, highlights Kracauer's well-known reception of Karl Grune's film Die Straße (1923) in several publications. An excursus however, "die Analyse des Publikationskontextes des Aufsatzes 'Der Künstler in dieser Zeit'" (52), a text first published for the Jewish-German journal Der Morgen, adds an important piece to the puzzle of Kracauer's complicated relationship to his Jewish family background and the religious motifs in his thought. Chapter three dives into the social history of leftist film criticism and situates Kracauer's work on the spectrum of early political writing about film in Weimar Germany and shows for the first time the main quality of Rühse's book, which lies in its meticulous reconstruction of so far marginalized figures and voices that are in direct or indirect dialog with Kracauer's work. The same is true for the author's historicization of Kracauer's famous series of texts titled "Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino" (1927). Rühse is able to reconstruct—against Kracauer's stereotypical views of the young unmarried women working in low-paying sales jobs—a perspective of these women that entails far more agency and film critical competencies than the common view of the "shop girl," held by most male intellectuals in the 1920s. Kracauer himself, as Rühse points out (99), arrived only later at a more nuanced position in his article "Mädchen im Beruf" (1932). Chapter four, the strongest chapter of the book, takes on Kracauer, the trained architect-turned-journalist, and his perspective on historic cinematic spaces. Rühse provides important contextualizations of the history of cinema architecture and its social history for Kracauer's famous essay "Kult der Zerstreuung" (1926) and his article "Kino in der Münzstraße" (1932). Rühse sheds light on how to situate Kracauer's writings on the pompous UFA Lichtspielpaläste, and on the role of cinemas frequented by the working class, who were threatened by unemployment after the financial crisis in 1929. Chapter five presents the largely...

A View on Kracauer’s Concept of Found Story Through People on Sunday (1930)

Gerçekçi kuramcılardan Siegfried Kracauer, sinemaya toplumbilimsel açıdan yaklaşan ilk kuramcılardandır. Caligari’den Hitler’e (1947, 2011a) eserinde Weimar dönemi sinemasını incelemiş ve Nazi Partisi iktidara gelmeden önce filmlerde faşist eğilimlerin simgelerinin görülebileceğini dile getirmiştir. Sinemanın toplumu gerçekçi biçimde yansıtması gerektiğini ifade eden Kracauer, fiziksel gerçekliğin sinemada ‘bulunmuş öykü’ (found story) ile yakalanabileceğini belirtmiştir. Bulunmuş öyküde, hayatın doğal akışının yakalanması, belirsizlik gibi unsurlar önem kazanmaktadır. Bulunmuş öykü, sinemada gerçekliğe ulaşmada işlevsel bir biçim olmasına rağmen toplumun gerçekliğini yansıtmada tek başına yeterli değildir. Naziler iktidara gelmeden hemen önceki yılların Berlin’ini belgeleyen, sıradan insanların kendi gündelik yaşamlarını canlandırdığı Bir Pazar Günü (1930, R. Siodmak, E. Ulmer) filmi, Weimar dönemi sineması içerisinde çekim koşulları, belgesel ve kurmaca arasında kurduğu köprü açısından ayrıksı bir yerde dururken, filmde bulunmuş öykü yapısı görülmektedir. Aynı zamanda, Kracauer’in Caligari’den Hitler’e (2011a) kitabında eleştirdiği Weimar dönemi sinemasının ürünü olmasıyla, eleştirel bir okumaya imkân tanımaktadır. Bu çalışmada, bulunmuş öykü yapısını, sinema ve toplum ilişkisi bağlamında incelemek amacıyla Bir Pazar Günü filmi toplumbilimsel yöntemle analiz edilmiştir. Kracauer’in Caligari’den Hitler’e (2011a) kitabında eleştirdiği film, yazarın Film Teorisi (2015) kitabında ideal film biçimi olarak öne sürdüğü bulunmuş öykü yapısını taşısa da, bu yapının toplumun, dönemin gerçeklerini aktarmada tek başına yeterli olmadığı ortaya koyulmuştur.

Robert Dassanowsky, Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933–1938

The affinity between the Hollywood and Austrian film industries should not be surprising, as both had to cater to a multicultural population, and many Austrian-born artists went on to become household names in the USA – the directors Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Max Reinhardt, Alfred Zinnemann and Billy Wilder, the composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Julius Salter and Max Steiner, to name but a few. As Robert Dassanowsky explains in Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933–1938: When it came to direct relationships between Hollywood and the film industries of Austria and Germany in the 1920s and 30s, it was Austrian Cinema with its transcultural quality and internationalist style, blended with period opulence, that were most often considered properties for Hollywood remakes. The film style of Weimar Cinema may have ultimately influenced film noir and American melodrama through exiles fleeing Nazism, but remakes of German expressionism...

Response to Distinguished Lecture

Response to Distinguished Lecture Veronika Fuechtner Haakenson's lecture challenged all of us to carefully consider the place from which we are speaking. This resonated for me because my own university, Dartmouth College, was founded in 1769 on Abenaki lands by the minister Eleazer Wheelock under the patronage of the Earl of Dartmouth. Wheelock raised the funds together with his former student, the Mohegan minister Samson Occom, promising to Christianize Native American men. However, as Occom wrote, Dartmouth became quickly "too alba [white]," and those who it was intended to serve, did "never have much benefit of it."1 For almost two centuries, Dartmouth educated mostly Christian white men. It presents one of many examples of how the enterprise of the liberal arts in the US rests on a material history of violence and marginalization.2 This material history is inextricably intertwined with an intellectual history that encompasses colonial ideologies, theological antisemitism, the philosophical racism of the Enlightenment, and the scientific racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Universities and their scholars established, but also simultaneously questioned and undermined the tools of racist patriarchy. The reflection on what it means when these tools are used to examine their very creations must be part of any critical labor. Can the master's tools dismantle the master's house?3 Writing with livid clarity, the poet Audre Lorde didn't formulate this as a question. To her, they never could. Haakenson's talk addresses precisely this issue: How can the intellectual work of decolonization resist becoming a gesture of tokenism, or yet another form of "settler appropriation" as Tuck and Yang suggest? And I would like to add here: How can such intellectual work resist becoming another expression of a capitalist, neoliberal logic that establishes radical rhetoric in the mainstream as cultural currency, but contains its transformative power? Herbert Marcuse described so well how everything that starts as subversion will end up as a commodity, as radical chic.4 Think only of the Che Guevara T-Shirt worn by Prince Harry. Haakenson undertakes the work of decolonization for the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, for several decades now a very canonical field in US German studies—in fact at times seemingly the [End Page 355] only field present in ever-shrinking German departments. German studies in the US is often sold with the lights and shadows of Weimar Cinema, and the pensive walk of the flaneur, or even the flaneuse. So, how can we un-settle Weimar? How can we look up from the Asphalt and stop watching People—on a Sunday? How can we deal with what to us may be Weimar's other paradox? Haakenson described the first, historical paradox of the avant-garde with Jakobson and Stavrinaki as the push for "legalization of illegality" paired with the experience of the marginalization of the arts. But there is also the present paradox that has propelled an aesthetic conceived as subversive into the aesthetic of choice for German department websites and admission brochures. What are we selling, when we sell Weimar? And what would thinking another Weimar look like? Haakenson's talk provides answers by addressing the global circulation of visual references in Dada, as well as by bringing Dada into conversation with contemporary art, specifically with Adam Pendleton's brilliant unpacking of its colonial and racist baggage. But, as Haakenson makes clear in his reading, the work can't stop with pointing to this baggage and dwelling on the injustice of its weight. There is a possibility in the avant-garde once we consider its presentness, or as Haakenson writes, its "concern with ephemerality, iconicity, and time." Stephen Greenblatt has described how the viewer of a photograph senses the energy it extends beyond its formal boundaries, a "resonance" that makes its historical and situational context perceivable to the viewer.5 The relationship between the viewer and the photograph could also be described in psychoanalytic terms as an interplay of transference and countertransference. The viewer's imagination and photography's resonance not only speak to each other but condition one another and create a space that momentarily suspends the sense of progressive time.6 Pendleton's artistic...

Lulu's Smile: An Archive of Trauma in Die Büchse der Pandora (1929)

This article focuses on Lulu, the protagonist of G. W. Pabst's 1929 film Die Büchse der Pandora, and argues that her frequent smiles are a post‐traumatic affect. From the little information that the audience is given about Lulu, it can be deduced that she is a survivor of sex trafficking. Lulu's smile, with its incongruity and automatic nature, is where her past becomes most legible. I read Lulu's smiles throughout the film as an archive of trauma, as conceptualized by scholars from queer studies and Black studies such as Ann Cvetkovich, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya Hartman. While Weimar film scholarship often considers Lulu as a femme fatale or a Neue Frau, her implicitly traumatic past is seldom addressed, let alone read as a central trait of her character. This article presents a new reading of Lulu in relation to trauma studies.

One of the Boys: The Smug, Patriarchal Undertones of Anders als die Andern (1919)

Modern audiences and critics are fascinated by Anders als die Andern (1919), widely considered the first feature film to focus on a homosexual relationship. The film is as exceptional for its progressive plot as it is for its miraculous survival – a large fragment of the film survived because it was hidden from the Nazis within another film. Even so, upon closer examination, it is clear that there are many misogynistic aspects of Anders that mirror elements and themes found in other Weimar films. While Anders is certainly novel in its queer subject matter, the film remains profoundly influenced by the patriarchal forces that dominated Weimar culture.

Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema

AbstractCentered on Richard Dyer’s model of pastiche, this essay posits that the German television series Babylon Berlin engages in a unique and timely practice of cultural reproduction shaped by a specific combination of historical subject matter and the present media-historical moment. Through digital effects, narrational layering, and multivalent location choices, Babylon Berlin pastiches Weimar cinema, and self-consciously invites comparisons between the so-called golden age of German cinema and the present. It activates cinephilic recall, establishes an intermedial dialogue between analog and digital forms, and affectively engenders a historically oriented conversation about the fragility of modern democracy in the Brexit/Trump era. The cultural work of pastiche it performs warrants the series’ inclusion in the conversation around the European remake.

From Weimar to Winnipeg: German Expressionism and Guy Maddin

Abstract The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin’s mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin’s work as well as argue that Maddin’s films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.

Fiancées and widows: women’s encounters with death in the silent films of Fritz Lang

Kłys Tomasz, Fiancées and widows: women’s encounters with death in the silent films of Fritz Lang. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 155–162. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.10.
 In the silent Weimar films of Fritz Lang, the heroines have sudden encounters with Death, conceived both as an allegorical figure and as an unexpected violent end of the life of their fiancé, husband or loved one. The nameless Maiden, the main heroine of Der müde Tod (The Weary Death, known in English-language countries as Destiny, 1921), while looking for her fiancé, who was kidnapped by Death, tries three times to regain his life and finally, overcome by Death, commits suicide. Two queens of Burgundy in Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs, 1924), Kriemhild and Brunhild, motivated by resentment and vengeance, as well as by unfulfilled love, finally appear to be zombie-like self-destructive monsters, destroying the social and political order, and the lives of many human beings. The paper, with the use of the psychoanalytic concepts of melancholy and the mourning “not-worked-out” by the persons who have lost their loved ones, analyses the ambiguous attitudes and self-destructive acts of these “women in black”..

Justice in Crisis? On the Popular Jurisprudence of Weimar Film

Abstract This article explores how a selection of films produced in Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic represent and critique the criminal justice system. Its starting premise is that the cinema of the era emerges as an important site for the negotiation of the contemporary crisis of law and justice outside the parameters of official legal procedure and politics. Focusing on a set of key legal and ethical dilemmas surrounding particular paragraphs of the German Criminal Code (§ 218 on abortion, § 175 on homosexuality, § 51 on criminal responsibility attribution), the aim is to exemplify how certain representative films contain and disseminate a popular jurisprudence that both reflects and contributes to contemporary legal-political debate.

Re-Configuring the New Women - Female Screenwriters and Street Films in Weimar Republic

This article traces the history of early female screenwriters in Germany and highlights the influence of professional female screenwriter Ruth Goetz and her movie Die Dirnentragödie (also: Women without Men, 1927). It shows how the movie represented certain political, cultural and legal debates on the New Woman and reconfigured the myth by implementing ambivalent gender roles in the plot. Furthermore, the representation of the role of female sex workers in Weimar society in Weimar street films is described and the way of transforming cultural and political discourses about gender equality into silent movies is discussed. Ruth Goetz and her professional screenwriting work is revisited through the lens of New Film History and the importance of the early professional female screenwriters’ contribution in Weimar cinema is underlined.

Paul Leni’s Waxworks: Writing Images from Silence, through Media and Philosophy

Abstract The so-called German Weimar Cinema encompasses a profusion of films that used frame narratives. In the case of Paul Leni’s Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924), as the framing stems from a literary act (the stories are framed by the act of narration), the film proposes the mise-en-abyme technique as a sort of immersion into the intermedial when it deals with notions like speaking, writing, silence, image and cinema. In the case of silent cinema, and especially in Waxworks, the presence of a perverse relation with the medium of writing becomes noticeable (producing a fantasy of writing), since every effort to represent the literary act on film results in an infinite production of silent images, creating a parody effect and even postulating an act of aggression against writing. This confrontational relation between the writing code and the code of the mute image in silent cinema allows us to suggest that there is an inherent inflexibility in the language of silent cinema which does not allow the coexistence of written and spoken word as complementary codes. On the contrary, in silent cinema, the image and the silence of the film seem to work against the word, the spoken word being set forth against silence, and the written word against images.

Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe

Reviewed by: Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema by Steve Choe Nancy P. Nenno (bio) Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema. By Steve Choe. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. vii+274. Cloth £80.00. ISBN 978-1441175380. Steve Choe’s Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Cinema is a philosophical meditation on the function of cinema in a time of crisis. Drawing on a selection of art films from the early years of the Weimar Republic, Choe juxtaposes their representations of life and death in the aftermath of World War I [End Page 398] and the devastating Treaty of Versailles with philosophical and popular discourses to illuminate the ways in which the cinematic medium not only embodies the idea of mortality itself, but can catalyze a spectatorial positionality that encourages reflection and model an ethics of spectatorship. This dialogue between literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, and historically grounded analysis and close readings of the films is the book’s strong point, as it reflects on the ways in which cinema itself constitutes a self-reflexive medium that is intimately tied to specific historical contexts. As such, his readings also interact with the Kinodebatte, the debate about film’s potential to become an artistic medium. The two pillars of Choe’s analyses are Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the analytic and intuitive attitudes toward time and change and Walter Benjamin’s understanding of allegory. Along the way, he brings an impressive array of other voices into dialogue through his discussions of cinematic depictions of death, loss, mourning, and revenge. Film critics from the period such as Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balász, philosophers Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and Georg Simmel, and poet Rainer Maria Rilke all contribute to his understanding of his primary themes: the experience of the animation of the inanimate as represented by film, and the struggle to understand life and death following World War I, ultimately culminating in what Choe terms the “ethics of survival” (10). Afterlives opens with a beautifully nuanced close reading of a scene from Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in which he argues that the somnambulist Cesare functions as an allegory of the cinema itself insofar as he is “reawakened” or reanimated from the dead. These moments of self-reflexivity appear in most of the films Choe analyzes, from the origins of cinema in the traveling fair depicted in Caligari to the play of shadows in Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923). There is a distinct narrative in the study which progresses from initial reactions to the war experience to those of mourning and loss to the projection of the future through the remembrance of the past. Chapter 1 focuses on two possible reactions to having survived the war. Here, Choe contrasts the two male figures in Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919) to demonstrate how they enact diametrically opposed approaches to dealing with postwar trauma. Chapter 2 undertakes a complementary reading of Murnau’s films The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922) in order to understand the ways in which the topos of haunting functioned in the immediate postwar period. Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) is the focus of the third chapter, which underscores the relationship between the duration of the film experience and the experience of lived human life. The fourth chapter focuses on Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) and its explicit allegory of cinema as the animation of the inanimate as a means to posit the possibility of an ethical relationship to the other. In the final chapter, which deals with Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), Choe demonstrates how the theme [End Page 399] of revenge can lead either to a sense of life as predetermined or as open ended and potentially utopian. While the stated focus of Afterlives is early Weimar cinema, it is not entirely clear what the historical parameters of “early” Weimar cinema are, nor how he has chosen these films rather than others. Although there are references to Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), it seems odd...

Film and Media Studies

Film and Media Studies Gerd Gemünden (bio) Since its beginning in the mid-1970s, the German Studies Association has actively promoted embracing cultural studies in order to take leave of a more traditionally minded notion of Germanistik, particularly its branding as “Auslandsgermanistik,” a term still widely used when I first entered the University of Tübingen in 1980 as an aspiring student of German and Philosophy. As Sara Friedrichsmeyer states, together with Women in German (WiG), the German Studies Association has “infused immense energy into the study of German literature and culture.”1 As a result, areas of research and teaching such as critical theory, particularly of the Frankfurt School variety, feminism, Jewish studies, studies of the Holocaust, and studies of the history and culture of the German Democratic Republic have become prominent disciplines that both benefitted from and contributed to a dramatically changing field of German studies in North America. Among these disciplines, perhaps no other has experienced a more dynamic development than the study of film and media. As Sabine Hake, the editor of the German Studies Review (GSR), noted in this journal in 2013, German film studies has seen a remarkable growth over the past three decades, a growth that can be measured by the number of scholarly publications and presentations at conferences, and that is most obvious in the full integration of film in the teaching and research agenda of German departments in North America and Great Britain.2 It must be stated that the purpose for Hake’s assessment was not self-congratulatory but rather to take issue with a series of problems that have come with success, a point I will return to later. For now, however, I want to briefly chart the trajectory of this growth since the mid-1970s, as well as my own position within it, which is very much shaped by the developments of the field and probably representative for many scholars of my generation. I can date my own entry into the world of German film and media studies rather precisely—it was the fall of 1983, and I had just arrived as an exchange student from [End Page 541] Tübingen at the University of Oregon as a graduate teaching fellow in the German Department. Scouring the course offerings of the various humanities departments, I came across the Department of Rhetoric, which for someone from the University of Tübingen meant the Department of Walter Jens, but here it was an umbrella term for housing the programs in speech, theater, and film studies. This was a real discovery—the academic study of film as a medium with its own history, theory, and methodology hardly existed anywhere in Germany at the time. The Film Program’s small core faculty included its charismatic founder, Bill Cadbury, and Ellen Seiter, an expert in television studies and in children and visual media who would later become part of my dissertation committee. While the dual demands of being both a student and a language teacher in the German Department were considerable, I managed to audit a number of courses in the Film Program—an experience that ultimately had a formative influence for my post-PhD areas of interest and research. It was in Cadbury’s classes that I discovered Italian neorealism, Godard, Bertolucci, and the films of the New German Cinema, a term I had never heard in Germany. Particularly memorable were Bill’s lectures on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s History Lessons and Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, both films whose titles I was familiar with but had never seen. (One of my first published scholarly essays would deal with Kings of the Road.) As the year of my exchange visit drew to a close, I decided to apply to the PhD Program in Comparative Literature, at the time Oregon’s most vibrant department in the humanities, and the rest, as they say, is history. Indeed, the mid-1980s were a time when the study of film within German studies began to develop some traction. By then, a number of English-language monographs on German film had already been published, predominantly devoted to Weimar cinema and...