The Oxford History of World Cinema (57 page)

peace between the social classes. An unusual blend of melodrama and lyricism can be

found in Wenn Völker streiten (When nations quarrel', 1914) as well as several other films

which take the war as subject (such as Alfred Halm's Ihr Unteroffizier ('Their non-

commissioned officer', 1915)). Among the melodramas, the most extraordinary is Das

Tagebuch des Dr. Hart ('The diary of Dr Hart', 1916), directed by Paul Leni and funded by

BUFA, the government-owned film propaganda unit. The story of two families with split

political loyalties and crossed love interests, Das Tagebuch is an anti-tsarist propaganda

film in the guise of championing Polish nationalism. But it also makes a strongly pacifist

statement through the realistic battle scenes, the depiction of the wounded in field

hospitals, and images of rural devastation.

However, films on war subjects were the exception. Serials featuring male stars made up

the bulk of the production, with the then-famous actors Ernst Reicher, Alwin Neuss, and

Harry Lambert-Paulsen enjoying a following that allowed them single-handedly to keep

their respective companies in profit. Female serial queens like Fern Andra and Hanni

Weisse were also prolific, while directors like Joe May, Richard Oswald, Max Mack, and

Otto Rippert would make an average of six to eight films a year, moving effortlessly

between popular films (Sensationsfilme) and art films (Autorenfilme). Rippert's six-part

Homunculus, starring yet another Danish import, Olaf Fons, was the super-hit of 1916,

and Oswald's Hoffmanns Erzählungen ('Hoffmann's tales'), an adaptation of three E. T. A.

Hoffmann stories, used outdoor locations most spectacularly. Both films have been seen

as forerunners of that prototypical art cinema genre, the fantastic or 'expressionist' film,

but they belong more properly to the multi-episode Sensationsfilme, not so different from

Joe May's Veritas vincit ( 1916), which was Italian-inspired, and later parodied by Ernst

Lubitsch, who himself acted in and directed about two dozen comedies, before he had his

first international success with Madame Dubarty in 1919.

To find the origins of the fantastic film, one has to return to the Autorenfilm, whose

outstanding figure was neither Hans Heinz Ewers nor Stellan Rye, but Paul Wegener. A

celebrated Max Reinhardt actor before he came to make films, between 1913 and 1918

Wegener created the genre of the Gothic-Romantic fairy-tale film. After The Student of

Prague he acted in and co-directed The Golem ( 1920), based on a Jewish legend and the

prototype of all monster/Frankenstein/creature features. There followed Peter Schlemihl,

Riibezahl's Wedding, The Pied Piper of Hamlin, and several other films exploiting the

rich vein of German Romantic legend and fairy-tales.

Wegener's work in the 1910s is crucial for at least two reasons: he was attracted to

fantastic subjects because they allowed him to explore different cinematic techniques,

such as trick photography, superimposition, special effects in the manner of the French

detective Zigomar series, but with a sinister rather than comic motivation. For this, he

worked closely with one of the early German cinema's most creative cameramen, Guido

Seeber, himself a somewhat underrated pioneer whose many publications about the art of

cinematography, special effects, and lighting are a veritable source-book for

understanding the German style of the 1920s. But Wegener's fairy-tale films also

promoted the ingenious compromise which the Autorenfilm wanted to strike between

countering the immense hostility shown towards, the cinema by the educated middle class

(manifested in the so-called 'Kino Debatte') and exploiting what was unique about the

cinema, its popularity.

The prevalence of the fantastic in the German cinema may thus have a simpler

explanation than that given by either Lotte Eisner or Siegfried Kracauer, who enlist it as

proof of the nature of the German soul. Reviving gothic motifs and the romantic

Kunstmärchen, the fantastic film achieved a double aim: it militated for the cinema's

aesthetic legitimacy by borrowing from middlebrow Wilhelmine 'culture', but it also

broke with the international tendency of early cinema, by offering nationally identifiable

German films. Up until the Autorenfilm, film subjects and genres were quasi-universal

and international, with very little fundamental difference from country to country: film-

makers were either inspired by other popular entertainments, or they copied the successful

film subjects of their foreign rivals and domestic competitors. With the Autorenfilm, the

notion of 'national cinema' became construed in analogy to 'national literature', as well as

a certain definition of the popular, in which the rural-völkisch and the national-romantic

played an important role.

The Wegener tradition thus set a pattern which was to repeat itself throughout the 1920s:

conservative, nostalgic, and national themes contrasting sharply with the experimental

and avant-garde outlook film-makers had with regard to advancing the medium's

technical possibilities. Seeking to define a national cinema by blending a high-culture

concept of national literature with a popular pseudo-folk culture, the Wegener tradition

tried to take the wind out of the establishment's critical sails. It is the combination of both

these objectives in the fantastic film that makes it such a mainstay of the German cinema

for at least a decade (from 1913 until about 1923), suggesting that the celebrated

'expressionist film' is the tail end of this truce between highbrow culture and a lowbrow

medium, rather than a new departure. What breathed new life into the vogue was, of

course, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, mainly because of its extraordinary reception in

France (and subsequently in the United States), which in turn made producers and

directors self-consciously look for motifs that the export market would recognize as

German.

The conjunction of a boom in demand and a war economy had, by the end of the war, led

to an unsustainable number of small, undercapitalized production firms competing with

each other, some of which had tried to gain an advantage via mergers or takeovers. The

first such association of small producers was the Deutsche Lichtbild A.G. (Deulig),

formed in 1916, backed by heavy industry interests in the Ruhr, and headed by Alfred

Hugenberg, then a director of Krupp, and also owner of a newspaper and publishing

empire. One of Hugenberg's chief lieutenants, Ludwig Klitzsch, saw the advantage of

diversifying into a potentially profitable medium. He also had a veritable mission to use

the cinema as a promotional tool for both commerce and lobby politics. Klitzsch occupied

a leading function in the German Colonial League, one of the two nationally organized

initiatives-the other being the German Navy League -- which had, from about 1907

onwards, relied heavily on the cinematograph in order to promote its aims. The Navy

League especially provoked the anger of cinema exhibitors, since it provided unfair

competition by getting free advertising for its shows in the local press, and captive

audiences from school officials or local army commandants.

UFA, DECLA, AND THE WEIMAR CINEMA

The Deulig initiative led to a counter-offensive by a consortium of firms from the

electrical and chemical industries, headed by the Deutsche Bank. They were able to

persuade military circles to use the government-owned film propaganda unit, the Bild und

Film Amt (BUFA), to front a large-scale merger operation. Under considerable secrecy,

the Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) was founded in December 1917, combining

the Messter GmbH, PAGU, Nordisk, along with a handful of smaller firms. The Reich

provided funds to buy out some of the owners, while others were offered shares in the

new company, with Paul Davidson becoming the new firm's first head of production. The

establishment of a horizontally and vertically integrated company of this size meant not

only that Deulig was dwarfed, but that a great many other middle-size companies became

increasingly dependent on Ufa as Germany's chief domestic exhibitor and export

distributor.

Neither the strategy of such a merger, nor the use of a special interest group for the

purposes of creating a film propaganda instrument, were the invention of Ufa's backers.

Both obeyed a certain commercial logic, and both belonged to the political culture of

Wilhelmine society, making Ufa an expression not so much of the war, as of a new way of

thinking about public opinion and the media in general. By the time Ufa became

operational, however, Germany had been defeated, and the new conglomerate's goal was

to dominate the domestic as well as the European film market. Its chief assets were in real

estate (extensive studio capacity, luxury cinemas all over Germany, laboratories and

prime office space in Berlin), while owning Messter brought Ufa horizontal

diversification into film equipment, processing, and other cinema-related service

industries, and the Nordisk stake both extended the exhibition basis already present from

PAGU and gave Ufa access to a world-wide export network.

Louise Brooks with Kurt Gerron in G. W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (Das Tagebuch

einer Verlorenen, 1929)

Production at first continued under the brand names of the merged firms: PAGU, Messter,

Joe May Film, Gloria, BB-Film, some using the new purpose-built studios in Babelsberg,

soon to become the heart of Ufa and the German film industry. The PAGU team around

Davidson and Lubitsch rose to international fame with a series of historical spectaculars

and costume dramas, often based on operettas (e.g. Madame Dubarry, 1919). Specializing

in exotic Großfilme (Das indische Grabmal ('The Indian Tomb'), 1920), Joe May's multi-

episode serials like Die Herrin der Welt ('The mistress of the world') proved particularly

popular to Germany's war-exhausted spectators, not least because each episode featured a

different continent, with the heroine travelling from China to Africa, from India to the

United States.

Among the firms which initially did not form part of the Ufa conglomerate, the most

important was Decla, headed by Erich Pommer. Decla's first major films after the war

were Die Spinnen ('The spiders', 1919), an exotic detective serial written and directed by

Fritz Lang, and Die Pest in Florenz ('The plague in Florence', 1919), a historical

adventure directed by Rippert and scripted by Lang.

Together with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Carl

Mayer and Hans Janowitz, these three films made up a production programme which

defined the course that the German cinema was to take in the early 1920s. Popular serials,

with exotic locations and improbable adventures, historical spectaculars, and the 'stylized'

(or 'expressionist') film were the backbone of a concept of product differentiation, carried

by such directors as Lang and Wiene, Ludwig Berger and F. W. Murnau, Carl Mayer, Carl

Froelich, and Arthur von Gerlach.

Given the decisive role of Caligari in typecasting the German cinema, it is remarkable

how unrepresentative it is of the films made during the years of the Weimar Republic. Its

explicitly 'expressionist' décor remained almost unique, and the few German films that

were able to repeat its international commercial success were each very different:

Madame Dubarry, Variete ( 1925), The Last Laugh, Metropolis. Yet in one respect

Caligari does illustrate a common pattern for the period. For in so far as one production

strand, strongly though not exclusively identified with Pommer and the Decla-Bioskop

label, has an identity as an 'art cinema', its films have a remarkably similar narrative

structure. The 'lack' which, according to narratologists, drives all stories, centres in the

Weimar cinema almost invariably on incomplete families, jealousies, overpowering father

figures, absent mothers, and often is not remedied by an attainable or desired object

choice. If one takes a dozen or so of the films still remembered, one is struck by their

explicitly Oedipal scenarios, by the recurring rivalry between fathers and sons, by

jealousy between friends, brothers, or companions. Rebellion, as Kracauer has already

pointed out, is followed by submission to the law of the fathers, but in such a way that the