The Oxford History of World Cinema (56 page)

tyrants, madmen, somnambulists, crazed scientists, and homunculi anticipate the horrors

that were to follow between 1933 and 1945? But why not assume that the films, even in

their own time, look back, cocking a snook at Romanticism and neo-Gothic? The standard

works on the subject, Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen ( 1969) and Siegfried Kracauer's

From Caligari to Hitler ( 1947), resolutely do not consider this last possibility, but opt, as

their somewhat lurid titles indicate, for seeing the films as symptoms of troubled souls.

Eisner's and Kracauer's powerful portraits left much else about the early German cinema

in the shadows. In some respects, the spotlight they cast on the early and mid-1920s only

deepened the darkness into which prejudice and physical destruction had already plunged

the first two decades of German film history. One point to make when reassessing the

earliest period is that Germany could boast, in the field of film technology, optics, and

photographic instruments, of a fair share of inventors and 'pioneers': Simon Stampfer,

Ottomar Anschütz, the Skladanowsky brothers, Oskar Messter, Guido Seeber, the

Stollwerck and Agfa works connote innovators of international stature, but also a solid

manufacturing and engineering basis. Yet Wilhelmine Germany was not a major film-

producing nation. Cultural resistance as much as economic conservatism caused film

production up to about 1912/13 to stagnate at a pre-industry stage. While the

Skladanowsky brothers' first public presentation of their Bioskop projector in November

1895 at the Berlin Wintergarten narrowly precedes the Lumière brothers' first public

demonstration of the Cinématographe, the lead in exhibition did not translate into

production.

THE WILHELMINE YEARS

Of the companies that established themselves mainly in Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich,

the firms of Messter, Greenbaum, Duskes, Continental-Kunstfilm, and Deutsche

Mutoskop und Biograph stand out. They were often family businesses, manufacturing

optical and photographic equipment, which entered into film production mainly as a way

of selling cameras and projectors. Oskar Messter appears to have been interested in the

scientific and military uses of the cinema as much as he was in its entertainment potential.

By contrast, the strategy of Paul Davidson, the other important German producer of the

1910s, was entirely entertainment-oriented. Originally successful in the Frankfurt fashion

business, Davidson built his Allgemeine Kinematographen Gesellschaft Union Theater

(later: PAGU) bottom-up, from the films to the sites and the hardware. In 1909 he opened

a 1,200seater cinema at the Berlin Alexanderplatz, and took up production, to

complement his supply of films from foreign companies, notably Pathé in Paris and the

Nordisk Film Kompagni in Copenhagen. While Messter was still experimenting with his

'Tonbilder' (arias from Salome, Siegfried, Tannhäuser filmed in the studio and

synchronized with sound cylinders for projection), Davidson, in 1911, took under contract

one of the Nordisk's major assets, Asta Nielsen and her husband-director Urban Gad.

By the outbreak of the war, no more than 14 per cent of the total films shown in German

cinemas were Germanproduced. The films that have survived from before 1913 reflect

this haphazard growth quite accurately. For the first decade, actuality films ( Berlin street

scenes, military parades, naval launches, the Kaiser reviewing troops), vaudeville and

trapeze acts (a boxing kangaroo, tumbling acrobats, cycle tricks), fashion shows, and

erotic bathing scenes make up the bulk of the films, along with comic sketches in the

Pathé manner, magic lantern or zoetrope slides transferred to film, trick films, and

mother-in-law jokes.

From 1907 onwards, one begins to recognize a certain generic profile: dramas featuring

children and domestic animals ( Detected by her Dog, 1910; Carlchen und Carlo, 1912),

social dramas centred on maid-servants, governesses, and shopgirls ( Heimgefunden,

1912; Madeleine, 1912), mountain films ( Wildschiitzenrache (A poacher's revenge'),

1909; Der Alpenjäger ('Alpine hunter'), 1910), love triangles at sea ( Der Schatten des

Meeres ('The shadow of the sea'), 1912), and marital dramas in time of war and peace

( The Two Suitors, 1910, Zweimal gelebt ('Two lives'), 1911). On the whole, the titles are

indicative of an ideologically conservative society, conventional in its morality, philistine

in its tastes, but, above all, family-oriented. Yet the films themselves, while often

ponderous and predictable, show that much care was taken over the visual mise-en-scène.

A number of films have the cinema itself as subject: Der stellungslose Photograph ('The

unemployed photographer', 1912), Die Filmprimadonna ('The film star'), and Zapata's

Bande ('Zapata's gang') (both with Asta Nielsen, 1913). They are almost the only

suggestion that German pre-war films, too, could communicate some of the modernity,

the zany energy, and raffish bohemianism to which the cinema owed its mass appeal and

which was so typical of French, American, and especially Danish films of the period.

As to German film stars, there is no doubt that the first one was Kaiser Wilhelm II

himself, always shown strutting with his generals and admirals. Asta Nielsen was soon

rivalled by Henny Porten (a discovery of Messter) as Germany's major female star of the

pre-war period, though she remained much less well known internationally. Messter, who

had begun to make longer films by 1909, proved adept at taking actors from stage and

vaudeville under contract, giving many later stars their début, among them Emil Jannings,

Lil Dagover, and Conrad Veidt.

The year 1913 was a turning-point for the German cinema, as it was in other film-making

countries. By then, the exhibition situation had stabilized around the threeto five-reel

feature film, premièred in luxury cinemas. German film production increased, developing

a number of genres that were to become typical. Outstanding among them were suspense

dramas and detective films, some of them ( Die Landstrasse ('The highway'), Hands of

Justice, Der Mann im Keller ('The man in the cellar')), showing a quantum increase in

cinematic sophistication, with remarkable use of outdoor locations and period interiors.

Lighting, camera movement, and editing began to be deployed as part of a recognizable

stylistic system, which compares interestingly with the handling of space and narration in

American or French films of the time.

A scene from Leni's "Expressionist" Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924)

Adapted from Danish and French serials, the crime films often featured a star detective

with an Anglicized name, such as Stuart Webbs, Joe Deebs, or Harry Higgs. As private

detective and master criminal try to outwit each other, their cars and taxi-rides, railway

pursuits and telephone calls convey the drive and energy of the new medium. The films

cast a fascinated eye on modern technology and urban locations, on the mechanics of

crime and detection, while the protagonists revel in disguise and transformation,

motivating spectacular stunts, especially in the frequent chase scenes.

A distinct vitality and wit exudes from the cinema of Franz Hofer ( Die schwarze Kugel

('The black ball')) and Joseph Delmont, whose feeling for the excitement of the

metropolitan scene makes him depict Berlin, in Das Recht auf Dasein ('The right to live'),

gripped by a construction and housing boom. Henny Porten and Asta. Nielsen were no

match in popularity for the first matinee idol superstar, Harry Piel, specializing in daring

adventure and chase films. An exception to the rule that Germans have no film humour is

the comedies of Franz Hofer ( Hurrah! Einquartierung and Das rosa Pantöffelchen),

which prove worthy antecedents of Ernst Lubitsch's farces from the mid-1910s, with their

tomboyish, headstrong heroines.

These popular genres and stars have often been neglected in accounts of the period,

because of the more commented-on aspect of 1913, namely, the emergence of the so-

called Autorenfilm ('author's film'). Initiated under the impact of the French film d'art, the

aim was to profit from the established reputation of published or performed authors, and

to persuade the leading names of Berlin's theatres to lend cultural prestige to the screen.

Not only were popular but now forgotten writers such as Paul Lindau and Heinrich

Lautensack signed on, but also Gerhard Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur

Schnitzler. Because of an acrimonious union dispute in 1911, actors had been

contractually forbidden to appear in films, but when in 1913 Albert Bassermann agreed to

star in Max Mack's adaptation of the Lindau play Der Andere ('The other one', 1913),

others followed suit. Davidson took under contract the star-maker par excellence, Max

Reinhardt, who directed two films, Eine venezianische Nacht (A Venetian night', 1913)

and Insel der Seligen ('The island of the blessed', 1913), full of mythological and fairy-

tale motifs which were liberally borrowed from Shakespeare's comedies and German fin-

de-siècle plays.

The most militant advocate of the author's film was the cinema owner and novelist Hanns

Heinz Ewers, who with Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye made The Student of Prague (Der

Student von Prag, 1913), which, because of the motif of the double, has often been

compared to Der Andere. The Danish influence is no accident, since Nordisk was one of

the prime forces behind the Autorenfilm, producing two of the genre's most costly

ventures, Atlantis ( 1913, based on a Hauptmann novel) and Dasfremde Mädchen ('The

foreign girl', a 'dream play' specially written by Hoffmannsthal). Another firm

specializing in literary adaptations was Heinrich Bolten-Baeckers's BB-Literaria, founded

as a joint venture with Pathé, in order to exploit Pathé literary rights in Germany. Such

moves underscore the international character of the German cinema in 1913, with actors

and directors from Denmark ( Viggo Larsen, Valdemar Psilander) undoubtedly exercising

the strongest influence on domestic production, while France, Britain, and America

supplied the majority of non-German films shown in the cinemas.

GERMAN CINEMA AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

The upturn and consolidation of German film production was thus already well under way

when war broke out, and the immediate effect of hostilities on the film business was

mixed. With an import embargo in force, some firms, such as PAGU, suffered substantial

losses before they were able to organize new sources of film supply. But there were also

winners for whom the confiscation of property from the foreign firms operating in

Germany, and the soaring demands for films, signalled a unique opportunity. A new

generation of producers and producer-directors made their breakthrough, after the

government had lifted the initial ban on cinema-going. Erich Pommer, a young sales

representative for the French firms Gaumont and Éclair, seized his chance and formed

Decla ('Deutsche Éclair'), which was to become the key producer of German quality

cinema after the war. Among the new firms which flourished was that of producer-

director Joe May, soon the market leader in detective serials and highly successful with

his 'Mia May films', melodramas featuring his wife. In his case, too, it was the war years

which laid the foundation of his post-war fame as Germany's chief producer of epics and

spectaculars. Similarly, the director-producer Richard Oswald, one of the most competent

professional film-makers of the 1910s, was later epitomized as 'war profiteer', when after

the abolition of censorship in 1918 he spotted a niche for his highly successful

'enlightenment films' (moralizing sex melodramas). To give an indication of the scale on

which the German film industry expanded during the war: in 1914, 25 German firms

competed with 47 foreign ones; by 1918, the relation was 130 to 10.

The quality of German films from the war years has rarely been assessed impartially.

Some featuring the war, and often dismissed as patriotic propaganda films or 'fieldgrey

kitsch', turn out to be major surprises. Thus, the films of Franz Hofer (e.g.

Weihnachtsglocken ('Christmas bells'), 1914) are stylistically sophisticated, projecting a

feel both distinctively German and free of jingoism, as they plead for self-sacrifice and