The Oxford History of World Cinema (58 page)

rebels are haunted by their shadow, their double, their phantom selves. This cluster of

motifs can be found in Fritz Lang's Destiny and Metropolis, in Arthur Robison's Schatten

('Shadows', 1923) and Manon Lescaut ( 1926), in E. A. Dupont 's Das alte Gesetz ('The

old law', 1923) and Variete ( 1925), in Paul Leni's Waxworks ( 1924) and Hintertreppe

('Backstairs', 1921), Lupu Pick's Scherben ('Fragments', 1921) and S ylvester ( 1923),

Murnau's The Last Laugh and Phantom, in Karl Grune's Die Strasse ('The road', 1923),

and Robert Wiene's Orlacs Hände ('The hands of Orlac', 1925).

These obliquely symbolic conflicts correspond to indirect forms of narration via

flashbacks, framing devices, and nested narratives, as in Caligari, Destiny ( 1921),

Variete, Nosferatu, Zur Chronik von Grieshuus ('The chronicle of Grieshuus', 1925), and

Phantom. This often makes the films' temporal structure difficult, if not impossible, to

reconstruct, changing by that very fact the viewer's understanding of character and

motivation. At the same time, the editing often obscures rather than expresses continuity

and causal links between segments or even between shots. Hence the impression of

interiority, of the uncanny and the mysterious, since so much of the action and the

protagonists' motivation has to be guessed, presumed, or otherwise inferred.

For many of the stories of Weimar cinema one can identify sources and intertexts from

other media. Besides the folk-tales and legends already mentioned in connection with

Wegener -- to which one could add Lang's Destiny and The Nibelungen ( 1923), Ludwig

Berger's Der verlorene Schuh ('The lost shoe', 1923), and Leni Riefenstahl's Das blaue

Licht ('The blue light', 1932) -- the sources are serialized novels from newspapers ( Dr

Mabuse, Schloss Vogelöd, Phantom), middlebrow entertainment literature ( Der Gang in

die Nacht ('The walk in the night'), Variete) and adaptations of authors identified with

Germany's national literature (Goethe, Gerhard Hauptmann, Theodor Storm). These

cross-media influences are indicative of the vertical links already at that time existing

between film production and the publishing industries, suggesting that choice was

determined by economic factors, exploiting the popularity and notoriety of the material.

Yet they also continue the middlebrow, consensus-fostering, canon-forming notion of a

national cinema, borrowing from literature and a common stock of cultural references.

A particularly striking feature is that among the films most often cited as symptomatic for

the inner state of Germany, a surprising number were written by just two script-writers:

Carl Mayer and Thea von Harbou. With regard to genre and story material, it is almost

entirely their films that define the 'identity' of Weimar cinema, in particular for the period

up to 1925: Mayer's Kammerspiel- films ( Genuine, Hintertreppe, Scherben, Sylvester,

The Last Laugh, Tartüff, Vanina), and Thea von Harbou's racy adaptations of classics,

bestsellers, and national epics (all of Fritz Lang's and three Murnau films, as well as ten

by other directors).

The inordinate influence of a few individuals indicates the existence of a fairly close-knit

creative community, with the same names turning up repeatedly among the directors, the

set designers, the producers, the cameramen, and script-writers. Barely two dozen people

seem to have made up the core of the German film establishment of the early 1920s.

Largely formed around Ufa and a few other Berlin-based production companies, the

groups can be traced directly to the formation of producerdirector units around Joe May,

Richard Oswald, Fritz Lang, Friedrich W. Murnau, and the PAGU-Davidson group.

This focuses attention once more on Ufa, and Erich Pommer, who, after taking over as

Head of Production, seemed unwilling to impose the kind of central-producer system

practised by that time in Hollywood. Pommer's production concept had two salient

features. With his background in distribution (Gaumont, Éclair) and export (Decla),

Pommer -- like Davidson -- conceived of production as driven by exhibition and export.

He recognized the importance that export had for the domestic market itself, as shown in

his efforts as deputy director of the Exportverband der deutschen Filmindustrie, founded

in May 1920, to put pressure on 'the internal organisation of the market, if necessary by

sidestepping the people who currently feel themselves to be in charge of the German film

business' ( Jacobsen 1989 ).

Madame Dubarry in the USA and Caligari in Europe were the two export successes which

broke the international boycott of German films. On their basis, Pommer developed his

concept of product differentiation, trying to service two markets: the international mass

audiences, firmly in the hands of Hollywood, and the international art-cinema outlets,

where what he called the 'stylized film' generated the prestige which became linked to the

German cinema. Yet the initial export successes were greatly facilitated by hyperinflation,

since depreciation automatically amortized a film's production cost: in 1921, for instance,

the sale of a feature film to a single market like Switzerland earned enough hard currency

to finance an entire new production. But with the stabilization of the Mark in 1923, this

trading advantage disappeared for German production, and Pommer's twin strategy

became increasingly precarious.

In response Pommer tried to establish a common European film market dominated by

Germany and Ufa. He entered into a number of distribution and co-production agreements

under the banner 'Film Europe', demonstrating his awareness that, despite its size and

concentration, Ufa on its own was in no position to brave Hollywood even in Europe, not

to mention penetrating the US market. Despite its ultimate failure, the Film Europe

initiatives laid the groundwork for the very extensive contacts that were to exist

throughout the late 1920s and lasting well into the 1940s, between the German and

French and British film-making communities.

Until 1926, when he left for the United States, Pommer's original production system at

Ufa remained the directorunit system, giving his teams, most of which dated from the

Decla-Bioskop period, great creative freedom. The benefits of this policy are well known:

they made up the grandeur of the so-called Ufa style, with scope for technical and stylistic

experimentation and improvisation at almost every stage of a project. This led to heavy

reliance on studio-work, which Ufa's admirers thought 'atmospheric', and others merely

'claustrophobic'.

There were drawbacks, too: often it seemed that, with perfectionism and the craft ethos

permeating all departments, time and money were no object. Furthermore, the refusal to

divide and control the labour processes of film production as was standard practice in

Hollywood often came into conflict with a production policy geared towards exhibition

schedules. Given the German film industry's chronic over-production, few of Ufa's more

expensive films could be fully exploited, making Pommer's production concept deficit-

prone, and, as illustrated by the loan and distribution agreement concluded with US

majors (the Parufamet Agreement), ultimately fatal to Ufa's fortunes as a manufacturing

company run on industrial lines with commercial imperatives. The aesthetic and stylistic

results of Pommer's concept, on the other hand, were more lasting: revolutionary

techniques in special effects ( Destiny, Faust, Metropolis), new styles of lighting

( Phantom, the Kammerspiel films), camera movement and camera angles ( Variete and

The Last Laugh), and set design fully integrated into style and theme (as in Die

Nibelungen). These achievements gave Ufa film technicians and directors their high

professional reputation, making the German cinema of the 1920s, paradoxically, both a

financial disaster and a film-makers' Mecca (Hitchcock's admiration for Murnau,

Bufiuel's for Lang, not to mention the influences on Joseph von Sternberg, Rouben

Mamoulian, Orson Welles, and on Hollywood film noir of the 1940s).

Yet fending off American competition was not the only front on which the German

cinema did battle in the 1920s, and, while it dominated exhibition, Ufa did not make up

much more than 18 per cent of the national production. The smaller firms not distributing

via Ufa, such as Emelka, Deulig, Südfilm, Terra, and Nero, tried to maintain their own

exhibition network by entering into agreements with American and British firms, thus

further splitting the German market, to the ultimate advantage of Hollywood.

As a capitalist conglomerate, Ufa was the target of critics on the left, foremost among

them writers from the liberal and social-democratic press, whose cultural distrust of the

cinema was hardly less pronounced than that of their conservative colleagues, but for

whom Ufa was clearly a tool in the hands of the nationalist right. The feuilleton critics

also showed a somewhat contradictory attitude to the popular: denouncing 'artistic' films

as 'Kitsch', they despised popular or genre films as 'Schund', thus operating a concept of

film art where in the mid-1920s only Chaplin and in the late 1920s only the Soviet cinema

could pass muster.

The predominantly critical attitude of the intelligentsia towards both the nation's art

cinema and commercial cinema led to another paradox: discussions about the cinema, its

cultural function, and aesthetic specificity as an art form were conducted at a high level of

intellectual and philosophical sophistication, giving rise to theoreticians and critics of

distinction: among them Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Siegfried Kracauer. Even

daily journalism produced outstanding essays by Willy Haas, Hans Siemsen, Herbert

Jhering, Kurt Tucholsky, and Hans Feld.

Another group to interest themselves ideologically in the cinema were professional

pedagogues, lawyers, doctors, and the clergy of both Protestant and Catholic

denominations. As early as 1907 they promoted debates about the dangers of the cinema

for youth, work-discipline, morals, and public order, the so-called 'anti-dirtand-smut

campaign'. The aim was not to ban the cinema, but to promote cultural' films, that is,

educational and documentary cinema, as opposed to fictional film narratives.

POST-WAR FERMENT

After the war, the strict Wilhelmine censorship was abolished, but, given the climate of

revolutionary ferment and sexual licence, the industry soon found itself under fire once

more, and film-makers had few friends who defended their freedom of expression when

parliament reimposed partial censorship in May 1920: even Bertolt Brecht thought that

the 'capitalist smut-merchants' had to be taught a lesson. What caused more serious

divisions inside the film industry was the local entertainment taxes levied on cinemas and

depressing their economic viability. At the same time, legislation adopted to protect

national producers from Hollywood competition was as ingenious as it was ultimately

ineffectual: if import restrictions and quota regulations (the so-called Kontingentsystem)

helped boost production of 'quota-quickies', they also not only hurt distributors wanting

American films for their audiences, but aggravated the glut of films generally. In other

respects, too, politicians wielded only a blunt instrument: although the government

occasionally banned uncomfortable films on the grounds that their showing might

threaten public order (as happened in Berlin in the case of Battleship Potemkin, 1925, and

All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930), it could do little to foster a prosperous and united

national film business, since import restrictions and the entertainment tax invariably

played one section of film industry (the producers) off against another (the exhibitors).

There is, then, a Weimar intellectual legacy which, although hostile to German films,

none the less helped to foster an informed, discriminating, and heavily politicized film

culture, implied in the term 'Weimar cinema'. Although the film business was

ideologically and economically embattled, it was also a political fact, not only because it

appealed to the government for assistance, but because both the intellectual-liberal and

the anti-democratic forces took the cinema seriously.

The organized radical left was, throughout most of the decade, almost uniformly hostile

towards the cinema, lambasting Ufa for poisoning the minds of the masses with

reactionary celebrations of Prussia's glory (e.g. Die Tänzerin Barberina ('The dancer

Barberina') by Carl Boese, 1921 and Fredericus Rex by Arzen von Czerepy, 1922), while

chiding the masses for preferring such films to party meetings and street demonstrations.

Only after the successful screening of the so-called 'Russenfilme' in 1925 did Willi

Münzenberg, the left's most gifted propagandist, find support for his slogan 'Conquer the

Cinemas', the title of a pamphlet in which he argued that films were 'one of the most

effective means of political agitation, not to be left solely in the hands of the political

enemy'. Münzenberg's International Workers' Aid set up a distribution company,

Prometheus, to import Russian film and also finance its own productions. Apart from