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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Heide Schönemann, Paul Wegener. Frühe Moderne im Film (Stuttgart-London: Axel Menges, 2003)
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2004-10-01
2022-11-21
2004-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Thomas Elsaesser
2004/10/01
2036-461X
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Heide Schönemann, Paul Wegener. Frühe Moderne im Film (Stuttgart-London: Axel Menges, 2003)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19066/16825
4
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light how movie going has an exemplar value          teenth century modernity: they do not have a
within the environment and circumstances             repressive character, but they equally make
where it takes place. Besides the suggested          use of techniques such as spatial division, seri-
periodization and the detailed analysis of each      alization of behaviour, definition of programs
phase, the work of the authors has the merit         of action, and so forth… Their intervention
of introducing some new or less explored             aims at making the body of the spectator
issues. Let’s take as an example the topic of        meek, in a situation where at the same time a
security and social control.                         wide range of freedom is guaranteed, favoured
   In 1910 a law is issued in Great Britain,         by the darkness of the theatre and the partici-
named Cinematographic Act, in order to guar-         pation in a strongly identifying spectacle.
antee the audience’s safety against the dan-         Thus we can well say that “discipline” and
gers of fire. The application of the law brings      freedom are both present in cinema, and that
as a result the construction of specific sites for   the consumer activity sets itself as the site
cinema viewing, a practice that thus moves           where the two terms literally negotiate their
from city fairs and cafés to the                     reasons. We will not go further in this sugges-
Cinematographic Theatres. But to a close look        tion, which is at the centre of the ongoing
the act leads to even larger consequences. The       research of the authors of this review.
distribution of licences shows a precise intent        Getting back to Jankovich and Faire, we
of social control over the spectator’s experi-       must add to the appeal of their book the con-
ence, one example being the setting of the-          junct use of more traditional sources of refer-
atres in upper class city areas, another being       ence, such as local newspapers, and personal
the imposition of a strict separation between        remembrances, collected with an advanced
the filmic spectacle and other forms of con-         and aware use of the ethnographic method.
sumer goods, such as food and alcoholic bev-           Therefore, this work presents itself as a vir-
erages. The regulation of the filmic spectacle       tuous example also in its ability of creating a
is a clue to the understanding of the growing        dialogue between different approaches and
popularity of cinema at the beginning of the         disciplines.
century, but also of the discomfort and social
tension produced by the urbanization process
over the previous decades. Security and con-
trol re-emerge in the study’s historical             SELECTED BY: LORENZO CUCCU
overview also in later phases: in the fifties and
sixties, for example, the perception of a dereg-     Vito Zagarrio, Cinema e fascismo. Film, model-
ulation of the suburbs contributes to the            li, immaginari (Venezia: Marsilio, 2004)*
abandonment of local cinemas; or, more
recently, the building of a multiplex, attract-      *   Lorenzo Cuccu si scusa per non aver potuto
ing crowds of young people, in the same area             inviare la sua recensione.
as the theatre and music hall, is perceived by
the local population as a destabilizing factor.
   We insisted on control and safety because it
represents an essential element of the cine-         SELECTED BY: THOMAS ELSAESSER
matographic experience. We could go further:
movie going can be seen as characterized by          Heide Schönemann, Paul Wegener. Frühe
the intervention of a series of “disciplines” in     Moderne im Film (Stuttgart-London: Axel
the sense given to the term by Foucault. These       Menges, 2003)
are of course disciplines of a different nature        It has always been axiomatic – and not only
from those defining seventeenth and eigh-            thanks to Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen –

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that if you look for a typically “German” film      Herrscher [1942] and Kolberg [1945]). And yet,
genre, the most likely candidate is the fantastic   to think of him as a convinced Nazi, or even an
film. What is less evident – especially in light    opportunist fellow-traveller neither captures
of Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler,    his philosophy of life, nor is it confirmed by
where the fantastic film is treated as the uncon-   his biography. Born in West-Prussia in 1874,
scious emanation of a troubled epoch and a          into an upper-middle class protestant family,
people – is the extent to which this genre origi-   Wegener died in 1948 in Berlin. One of his last
nated with a single individual, namely Paul         great roles was as Nathan, the Wise in G.E.
Wegener. A celebrated Max Reinhardt actor           Lessing’s eponymous play, German literature’s
before he came to make films, Wegener gave,         most eloquent plea for multi-ethnic tolerance
between 1913 and 1918, decisive impulses to         and religious emancipation.
the fairy-tale film, which in turn provided the        Thus, it is a rather patchy picture that we
templates also for the film of the fantastic and    have of Wegener, apparently full of contradic-
the uncanny. Best known, of course, is Der          tions: one of Germany’s foremost film pio-
Student von Prag (1913), which, although nom-       neers, who throughout his life remained
inally directed by the Dane Stellan Rye and         above all a man of the theatre; passionate
scripted by Hanns Heinz Ewers, was the brain-       about modern cinematic technology, but
child of its cinematographer Guido Seeber and       using it to give body to pre-industrial romantic
its leading actor, Paul Wegener, in the role of     and fairy-tale fantasies; a free spirit of vast eru-
the impoverished student and his fateful dou-       dition and culture, but seemingly willing to
ble. After the film’s enormous success,             lend his talents to a Fascist and racist regime.
Wegener acted in, co-wrote and co-directed Der      The much-needed re-assessment of Wegener
Golem (1914), which became the prototype of         has now begun in Germany, and a bright shaft
many subsequent “ambivalent-benevolent”             of illuminating light is cast on part of his early
creature feature films, not only in Germany.        work by Heide Schönemann’s new book.
There followed Rübezahls Hochzeit (1916), Der       Following on from her equally path-breaking
Yoghi (1916), Hans Trutz im Schlaraffenland         study Fritz Lang Filmbilder-Vorbilder (1992),
(1917), Der Rattenfänger (1918) and several         the large-format, quality-produced and well-
other films exploiting the rich vein of German      illustrated volume does not set out to be a
Romantic legends and folk-myths.                    biography, explaining or reconciling the ten-
   One of the reasons why, in film history,         sions just mentioned. Instead, it painstakingly
Wegener’s pioneering role has not always            and with great aplomb, reconstructs the life-
been fully appreciated may be that his explo-       worlds of the images, the ideas and friendships
ration of sorcerers, demiurges, tyrants and         that animated this restless intelligence, by
giants already the 1910s contradicted the idea      tracing a dense network of cross-references
of the German fantastic film as a post-World        between art-history and esoteric religion,
War One phenomenon, to fit the political the-       between a collector’s passions and colonial
sis of fascist premonitions. But more worrying      fantasies, between a generation’s questing
has been Wegener politically compromised            spiritual aspirations and an age of increasingly
position during the Nazi era. Between 1933          self-confident media technologies.
and 1945 he directing no fewer than seven fea-         For film historians, Wegener’s work in the
ture films (among them, Ein Mann will nach          teens is crucial for at least two reasons: he was
Deutschland [1934]; Moskau-Schanghai [1936];        attracted to fantastic subjects partly because
Unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit [1937])         they allowed him to explore different cine-
and starred, as a high-profie, celebrated “State    matic techniques, such as trick photography,
Actor,” in twenty more (including such infa-        superimposition, special effects in the man-
mous ones as Hans Westmar [1933]; Der Grosse        ner of Melies’ feeries, but with a stronger nar-

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rative motivation. For this, he worked closely      late visual moment, compositions or facial
with one of the early German cinema’s most          expressions in the films, and then try to identi-
creative cameramen, Guido Seeber, himself a         fy (in the vast and surprisingly diverse archive
still underrated pioneer whose many publica-        which is modern art) the recurrence or migra-
tions about the art of cinematography, special      tion of these same iconic or pictorial motifs.
effects and lighting are a veritable source-        Thus, for instance, she shows how certain of
book for understanding the German style of          the mirror scenes in Der Student von Prag have
the 1920s. But Wegener’s fairy tale films also      echoes in the drawings by Alfred Kubin and
promoted the ingenious compromise which             Max Klinger, how body postures in Wegener’s
the Autorenfilm wanted to strike between            films recall dance poses of then famous dancers
countering the immense hostility shown              such as Gertrud Leistikow, Dora Brandenburg
towards the cinema by the intelligentsia and        or Gret Palucca, and how important for his
the educated middle-class (manifested in the        sense of lighting and surface texture was his
so-called Kino Debatte) and exploiting the          collaboration with Lotte Reiniger (she did the
cinema as a popular medium.                         intertitles for Der Rattenfänger and a film-
   Schönemann, from a slightly different,           within-a-film for Der verlorene Schatten).
more art-historical perspective, sees Wegener       Reiniger in turn, felt inspired by Wegener’s cin-
as the chief exponent of what she terms “early      ema fairy-tales to extend her own silhouette
Modernism in film,” situated by her in a            work into feature-length films.
European context (Symbolism, Art nouveau,              Famous names from the art world that turn
Jugendstil, Arts and Crafts, as well as the         up – apart from the usual suspects Pieter
Scandinavian painters, novelists and drama-         Breughel, Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David
tists of anti-naturalism). Consequently, she        Friedrich – are Felix Valloton, Lovis Corinth,
concentrates on the years from 1913 to the          Hans Thoma, Ferdinand Hodler, Moritz von
1920s, culminating in Wegener’s (third)             Schwind, Heinrich Vogeler and many other
Golem film (Der Golem wie er in die Welt            artists now barely remembered. Lotte Eisner
kam, 1920), and concluding with a picture epi-      had already done similar work, notably on the
logue of Lebende Buddhas, a film from               films of Lang and Murnau, comparing motifs
1923/25, presumed lost, since only a fragment       in painting and film. Where Schönemann
has survived, along with a series of produc-        extends and also differentiates Eisner’s con-
tion stills, reproduced over twenty-four pages.     ventional method of tracing influence, is in
Not unexpectedly, Schönemann considers              her deeper analysis of such networks – point-
Wegener’s early work to have inspired Fritz         ing out biographical as well as philosophical
Lang (Der müde Tod, 1921), F.W. Murnau (Der         links – and secondly, by giving more attention
Knabe in blau, 1919), Arthur Gerlach (Zur           to spatial composition and architecture.
Chronik von Grieshuus, 1925), as well as G.W.          To cite an example of the first: one of the
Pabst’s Der Schatz (1923). She also mentions        many filiations that bind Wegener to his gen-
Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, as well as     eration of artists is the monumentality and sin-
Febo Mari’s Il fauno (1917), claiming in all        gularity of his own appearance. From early on,
cases a common artistic sensibility rather          the massive body and above all, the striking
than direct “influence.”                            face identified Wegener as a star, a towering
   Although an art historian by training,           presence, destined to distinguish himself. His
Schönemann, is generally less interested in         face was often seen as “Asiatic” or “Slav,” with
(classical) links of influence, (modernist) cita-   all the cliché associations of inscrutability, of
tion or (postmodern) appropriation. The             erotic danger and allure, of lurking cruelty and
strength of her method – derived from Erwin         the hidden access to supernatural wisdom as
Panofsky and recalling Aby Warburg – is to iso-     well as power. Schönemann is able to docu-

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ment how this face became a kind of icon or          Saarinen, or her discussion of a grave in
brand-name, caricatured in the newspapers or         Dresden designed by Max Taut and decorated
featured on posters by the artist Zajac, his sil-    by Otto Freundlich, which suddenly opens up
houette made famous by not only Lotte                into a brief but harrowing account of persecu-
Reiniger’s paper cut-outs, while the actor’ head     tion and death. That Schönemann can raise the
served almost a dozen sculptors as their model.      delicate question of the “typically Jewish”
It notably haunted Ernst Barlach, who did sev-       iconography in Poelzig’s designs, without skirt-
eral busts of Wegener. Not satisfied with enu-       ing the question of (negative) stereotyping
merating these instances, Schönemann digs            indicates her sensitivity and sure historical
further and produces evidence from Wegener’s         grasp, while leaving open to what extent the
correspondence and private papers (to which          legend of the Golem can be interpreted as a cre-
she had unprecedented access) that he himself        ation myth, a robot story with anti-semitic
was profoundly troubled by his own face. This,       traits, or as a narrative of Jewish “survival” in a
she interprets as the source for his choice of       hostile, intolerant environment, retracing the
career (he broke off his studies as a lawyer to      heroic – and historic – struggle for Jewish
train in acting, much to the disappointment of       emancipation around the figures of Rabbi Löw
his father) and for his life-long fascination with   and the Emperor Rudolf II. In the chapter on
mirror-images, doubles, split personalities and      Der Golem – although it deals with Wegener’s
the “Other” within the self. Finally, the striking   most important and best-known film (attesting
face of Wegener elicits a meditation on the          to the dignity, sympathy and respect the direc-
emergence of a new aesthetic type – what             tor had for the central figure) – Schönemann,
Schönemann calls the “new ugliness.” There,          perhaps surprisingly, makes Wegener the
she detects a fundamental shift in the canons        director recede into the background, barely vis-
of (not only) masculine beauty, away from the        ible in the tapestry she weaves of references
Greek or Nordic type to the more earth-bound,        and echoes that easily cross from architectural
chthonic physiognomies, with Slav, Asian (and        theory to narratology, from German-Jewish
Jewish) faces receive a new, positive valorisa-      relations to theatre history.
tion in the arts of the teens and early twenties –      One welcome consequence of Paul Wegener
in contrast to the revival of the Nordic type in     Frühe Moderne im Film is that in further helps
the thirties by Nazi artists such as Arno Breker     to disengage early German cinema from its tra-
or Josef Thorak.                                     ditional role as merely the precursor of
   The second example – a closer consideration       Expressionism, giving both narrative and visu-
of architecture and design – would be the chap-      al elements their own stylistic signature as
ter on Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. The        part of a distinct neo-Romantic legacy, with
highlight of the book, it is a genuine tour de       roots in the 19th century and its diverse image
force. Schönemann’s detailed description of          cultures. From the methodological point of
architect Hans Poelzig’s plans, and the analysis     view, her “thick” biographical description of
of the narrative meanings encapsulated in            professional networks, friendships and per-
every building, the streets and the interior ele-    sonal contacts, combined with an equally
ments (stairs, balconies, windows and arches)        exacting eye for Warburg’s “pathos-forms”
are a model of textual analysis in the language      enriches film history with a new historical
of architectural style and plastic forms.            depth, and adds texture to our current pre-
Embedded into her account of the provenance          occupation with “visual culture.” Con-
of the film’s formal repertoire are biographical     vincingly demonstrating how motifs can
vignettes, such as Poelzig’s use of a spiral motif   migrate between the period idioms and across
ascribed to Hermann Obrist, a vegetal door           the arts, the book stresses the subtly modify-
frame cross-referenced to the Finnish architect      ing but also amplifying resonances that such

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transpositions engender in cultural meanings.
Whatever the heady mix of a difficult person-           Love Rules offers a rather unique contribu-
ality (he was married five times) and of cloudy      tion to current American film history. This
metaphysics (Northern Protestant attracted to        work poses a rather unique situation, uncom-
Buddhism), Wegener’s enabling role in the            mon in our somewhat young field of film his-
arts of his time and his curiosity for the tech-     tory, of a work whose thesis I feel is ultimately
nical media which brought so many other cre-         wrong, but whose clarity in stating this thesis,
ative forces into the films, ensure that his         depth of research in arguing it, and careful
work contributes to a modernity in many              analysis of film form as part of its argument
ways just as radical as Expressionist storm-         makes it a book which would be dismissed by
and-stress, while cautioning us from conflat-        our field only at the peril of ignoring one of the
ing his philosophy with the “reactionary mod-        more serious and ambitious forays into
ernism” of the late twenties and early thirties.     American film history made in the last decade.
   It would be pleasing to think that Paul              Recent works on American film history
Wegener frühe Moderne im Film could find a           have shown a certain modesty and mostly
publisher able and willing to produce also an        have maintained a clear separation between
English (or French or Italian) edition. While        stylistic evolution and the social uses of film
waiting for such an eventuality, funds should        as a medium. Thus we have on the one hand
be found to translate at least the chapter on Der    laudable works like Charlie Keil’s recent
Golem, for it is difficult to think of the work of   American Cinema in Transition that provides
many other scholars working in the field, per-       an excellent and nearly quantifiable survey of
haps with the exception of Yuri Tsivian, who         the changes in narrational style during the
like Heide Schönemann combine an extensive           period from about 1907 to 1913. On the social
knowledge of art history and cultural studies        front, the continued feminist concern with
with such a fine eye for filmic images and their     film history, including such fine works as
multiple reverberations.                             Shelly Stamp’s Movie Struck Girls, has inves-
                                                     tigated not only issues of representation, but
                                                     also film-going practices and uses of cinema
                                                     in the transformations of gender occurring at
SELECTED BY:                                         the same time as film radically altered its
ANDRE GAUDREAULT                                     social identity. But no one has offered the sort
                                                     of overview of cinema’s relation to society in a
Jacques Malthête, Laurent Mannoni sous la            manner which takes as seriously the evolu-
dir. de, Méliès, magie et cinéma (Paris: Musées,     tion of film form as Cooper does whose thesis
2002)*                                               gives film form a crucial role in shaping
                                                     American attitudes.
*   André Gaudreault apologizes for being unable        The book simultaneously describes
    to send his review.                              changes in American society in the late 1910s
                                                     and 1920s, which the author relates primarily
                                                     to the rise of the professional managerial
                                                     class, and the establishment of the Holly-
SELECTED BY: TOM GUNNING                             wood feature film which the author claims
                                                     achieved stability in this era through a partic-
Mark Garrett Cooper, Love Rules: Silent              ular visualization of a romance plot. The
Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial             romance plot, which Cooper claims rules the
Class, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota         vast majority of American feature films, con-
Press, 2003)                                         sists not only of the traditional formula – sep-

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