The Oxford History of World Cinema (59 page)

documentaries, Prometheus made features such as the comedy Überflüssige Menschen

('Superfluous men', 1926) by the Soviet director Alexander Razumny, and Piel Jutzi's

proletarian melodrama Mutter Krauses Fahrt ins Glück ('Mother Krause's journey to

fortune', 1929). Not to be outdone by the Communists, the Social Democrats also

financed feature films, among them Werner Hochbaum's Brüder ('Brothers', 1929) and

several documentaries dealing with housing problems, anti-abortion legislation, and urban

crime. Earlier, the trade unions had sponsored Die Schmiede by Martin Berger ('The

forge', 1924), who also made Freies Volk ('Free people'), in 1925 and Kreuzzug des

Weibes ('Woman's crusade'), in 1926. However, Prometheus' best-known film was Kuhle

Wampe ( 1932), directed by Slatan Dudow from a script by Bertolt Brecht, which opens

with the suicide of an unemployed adolescent, and follows the fortunes of a young

working-class couple as they try to find jobs and a home in order to found a family,

finally realizing that only when marching with their fellow workers can they change the

world, and thus improve their own fate.

Very rarely did films with a party-political affiliation succeed in providing what critics

missed in almost all Ufa productions: 'realism', and a commitment to topics taken from

everyday life. Such a demand, comprehensible from a critical establishment still under the

impact of literary naturalism, was none the less not always compatible with the export

objectives pursued by Pommer. Abroad, the reality of Germany was still too much

associated with the World War for subjects with a contemporary setting to appeal to

international audiences. While before 1918 the German cinema extensively utilized

locations, realistic décor, and contemporary themes, after the war it was mainly

productions intended for the domestic market (comedies, social dramas, or Harry Piel

adventure films) which resorted to realist settings. Most of the prestige productions that

later became associated with the realism known as 'Neue Sachlichkeit', whether those by

G. W. Pabst ( Joyless Street (Die freudlose Gasse), 1925; Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney ('The

love of Jeanne Ney'), 1927; Pandora's Box) or Joe May ( Asphalt), remained, until the

coming of sound, wedded to the Ufa studio look, regardless of the period in which the

action was set.

THE END OF WEIMAR CINEMA

In the United States, by contrast, the complaint against German films was the absence of

strong plots, clear conflicts, but, above all, the absence of stars. The star system has

always been fundamental for international filmmaking, partly because the qualities and

connotations of a star transcend national boundaries in a way that setting and subject-

matter often do not. One of the problems Ufa encountered in this respect was that, as soon

as it developed stars, they tended to be wooed to Hollywood, following the example of

Lubitsch's first international discovery, Pola Negri. The only truly international star in the

1920s who also worked in Germany was Emil Jannings, and he was indeed a

commanding presence in a disproportionate number of Germany's American successes:

Madame Dubarry, Variete, The Last Laugh, The Blue Angel. Attempts to launch

international stars by importing American actresses in the latter part of the 1920s were

only intermittently successful. Louise Brooks never became popular in the 1920s, Anna

May Wong (directed by E. A. Dupont and Richard Eichberg) failed to catch the attention

of American audiences, nor did Betty Amann -- Pommer's American 'discovery' for May's

Asphalt -- develop her star potential. The cast of Murnau's Faust ( 1926, with Emil

Jannings, Yvette Guilbert, Gösta Ekman) was deliberately international, but the fact that

Camilla Horn was given the role of Gretchen, originally offered to Lillian Gish (to echo

her success in Griffith's Way down East, 1920, and Broken Blossoms, 1919), did not help

these transatlantic ambitions. It is even more remarkable that none of Fritz Lang's leading

men or women (including Brigitte Helm) ever became an international star. When he and

Pommer visited Hollywood, Lang was apparently irritated by Douglas Fairbanks insisting

that what mattered in American picturemaking was the performer, not the set, nor the

originality of the subject. Only with the coming of sound -and when importing an

American director like Josef von Sternberg -- did Ufa develop successful stars, such as

Marlene Dietrich, Hans Albers, Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch, or Marika Rökk, all of them

closely modelled on American stars of the early 1930s.

By that time, the fortunes of the German cinema as a national and international cinema

had become even more closely allied to the fate of Ufa. Following severe losses in 1926

and 1927, the company's major creditor, Deutsche Bank, was prepared to force Ufa into

receivership, unless new outside capital could be found. Alfred Hugenberg, thwarted in

his ambitions when Ufa was first set up in 1917, seized his chance and acquired majority

holdings. His new director, Ludwig Klitzsch, set about restructuring the company,

following the Hollywood studio system. He introduced American management principles,

separating the finance department from production, reorganizing distribution, and hiving

off some of the subsidiary companies. Klitzsch thus brought to Ufa the central producer

system, overseen by Ernst Hugo Correll, who divided production up between different

heads of production (Produktionsleiter such as Günther Stapenhorst, Bruno Duday, and

Erich Pommer), thereby achieving both greater central control and greater division of

labour. If the Hugenberg take-over sealed the fate of Ufa ideologically, as most

commentators have argued, it is equally true that, from a business perspective, it was

thanks to Klitzsch that for the first time Ufa was run along strictly commercial lines.

The Klitzsch regime allowed Ufa, with remarkable speed, to catch up with the major

international developments, such as the introduction of sound, which the previous

management had been very slow to take an interest in. Ufa converted to sound production

within little more than a year, while the company was also able to avoid costly

competition by agreeing terms with its major domestic rival, Tobis Klangfilm. From

1930-1 onwards, Ufa once more began to show profit, not least because it proved a

successful exporter, aggressively marketing its foreignlanguage versions in France and

Great Britain, in addition to exploiting its gramophone and sheet music interest. However,

it was not with its star directors of the 1920s that Ufa achieved financial recovery:

Murnau had left for Hollywood early in 1927, Lang and Pabst were working for Seymour

Nebenzahl's Nero Film, while Dupont was working in Britain, as was Carl Mayer, who

after following Murnau to Hollywood had settled in London in 1931. Efficient genre

directors such as Karl Hartl, Gustav Ucicky, and above all Hanns Schwarz put Ufa back

in the black, the latter with six films, among them some of the biggest box-office

successes until then: Bomben auf Monte Carlo ('Bombs on Monte Carlo', 1931),

Einbrecher ('Burglar', 1930), Ungarische Rhapsodie ('Hungarian rhapsody', 1928), and

Die wunderbare Liige der Nina Petrowna ('Nina Petrowna's wonderful lie', 1929).

Musicals and comedies became the mainstay of the internationally minded German

cinema, with super-productions like Der Kongress tanzt ('The Congress Dances', 1931),

star vehicles like Die Drei von der Tankstelle ('Three from the petrol station', 1930),

screwball comedies like Viktor und Viktoria ( 1933), and domestic melodramas like

Abschied ('Departure') conveying quite a different image of the German cinema from that

of the 1920s. Even before the Nazi take-over in 1933 the transformations of the German

film industry from a twintrack 'artistic film'/prestige production cinema to a mainstream

entertainment cinema were well under way, forced by economic necessity and

technological change even more than by political interference. While the migration of

personnel to Hollywood, begun with Ernst Lubitsch in 1921 and followed by Murnau,

Dupont, and Leni, had also gathered pace by 1927-8, its motives were, at least until 1933,

personal and professional as much as political.

The German cinema on the eve of Hitler's rise to power confronts one with a paradox: the

narrative which attributes the rise of this cinema to the flourishing of talent in the creative

ferment of the Weimar Republic must perforce see its cinema enter into decline, as the

Republic disintegrates under the blows of the nationalist and Fascist right. The evidence,

however, does not bear this out, since if decline there was, it was due to the drain of talent

away to the richer pastures of Hollywood. If, on the other hand, one takes economic

performance as an indicator of success, it was only during the political upheavals of the

Republic's final years that the German film industry matured into a financially viable

business. Elsewhere in Europe, too, the days of an innovative art cinema were strictly

limited; what is remarkable about the German cinema is how long these days lasted right

at the heart of a commercial enterprise, which by its very nature should not have been

able to afford them at all.

Bibliography

Bock, Hans-Michael, and Töteberg, Michael, (eds.) ( 1992), Das UfaBuch.

Cherchi Paolo Usai, and Codelli, Lorenzo (eds.) ( 1990), Before Caligari.

Eisner, Lotte ( 1969). The Haunted Screen.

Jacobsen, Wolfgang ( 1989). Erich Pommer.

---, Kaes, Anton, and Prinzler, Hans Helmut (eds.) ( 1993), Geschichte des deutschen

Films.

Kracauer, Siegfried ( 1947), From Caligari to Hitler.

Kreimeier, Klaus ( 1992), Die Ufa-Story.

Lamprecht, Gerhard ( 1976-80), Deutsche Stummfilme, 1903-1931.

Murray, Bruce ( 1990), Film and the German Left.

Petley, Julian ( 1979), Capital and Culture.

Petro, Patrice ( 1989), Joyless Streets.

Plummer, T., et al. ( 1982), Film and Politics in the Weimar Republic.

Rentschler, Eric (ed.) ( 1986), German Film and Literature.

Erich Pommer (1889-1966)

Erich Pommer was the most important person in the German and European film industries

of the 1920s and 1930s. He worked in Berlin, Hollywood, Paris, and London -

discovering talents, and forming technical and artistic teams which created some of the

most important films of Weimar cinema. He also introduced Hollywood production

systems to the European film industry, and was responsible for attempts to rebuild the

West Germa film after the Second World War. Pommer entered the film industry in 1907.

By 1913 he had become general representative of the French Éclair company for central

Europe. When war broke out, Éclair was put under forced administration by the German

government. To rescue his his business interests Pommer founded Decla (derived from

'Deutsche Eclair'). While Pommer served in the Prussian army, the new company,

managed in Berlin by his wife Gertrud and his brother Albert, successfully produced

comedies and melodramas for the booming German movie business.After Pommer's

return, the films became more artistically ambitious. At the end of 1919 a mixture of

commercial thrift, artistic daring, simple décor, and clever advertising strategy resulted in

the creation of a film legend: Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari ( 1919).In March 1920 Decla

merged with Deutsche-Bioscop. Pommer concentrated his activities on export - a crucial

aspect of film production in a period of economic crisis and booming inflation. A year

later the company was taken over by Ufa but continued to produce under the brand name

'Decla-Bioscop'. In 1923 he became head of Ufa's three production companies at the

studios in Neubabelsberg. There he tried to realize his vision of creative production,

combining art and business to create a total art form. Acting as executive producer, he

initiated big prestige productions aimed at the international market. Directors F. W.

Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ludwig Berger, Arthur Robison, and E. A. Dupont, writers Carl

Mayer, Thea von Harbou, and Robert Liebmann, cinematographers Karl Freund, Carl

Hoffmann, Fritz Arno Wagner, and Günther Rittau, art directors Robert Herlth and Walter

Röhrig, Otto Hunte, and Erich Kettelhut formed the reservoir of manpower from which

Pommer formed lasting artistic teams. They created film classics such as Destiny (Der

müde Tod, 1921), Dr. Mabuse ( 1922), Phantom ( 1922), Die Nibelungen ( 1924), Die

Finanzen des Grossherzogs ( 1923), The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924), Tartüff

( 1925), Variete ( 1925), Metropolis ( 1925), and Manon Lescaut ( 1926).Employing

foreign talent, such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Dinesen, Benjamin Christensen, and

Holger-Madsen from Denmark, and Herbert Wilcox, Alfred Hitchcock, and Graham Cutts

Great Britain, Pommer tried to strengthen international co-operation in what he called

'Film Europe' - a European force working against the American domination of the world

film market. Pommer's way of allowing his production teams great creative freedom to

perform their artistic and technical experiments led to over-extended budgets and

contributed to Ufa's growing financial crisis. When Pommer left Ufa in January 1926,