application/pdf
2036-461X
16576
29
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Lotte Eisner: Archivist and Curator
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
17
Projects & Abstracts
2017-10-01
2021-10-06
2017-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Julia Eisner
2017/10/01
King’s College, London
2036-461X
29
en
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Lotte Eisner: Archivist and Curator
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16576/17301
17
Lotte Eisner: Archivist and Curator
Julia Eisner / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
King’s College, London




   This thesis is a biographical study — an academic biography — exploring
the life and work of my great-aunt, Lotte H. Eisner, film critic, writer, curator,
archivist and with Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque française in
Paris. This will be the first serious full-length critical study of the life and work
of someone who is regularly named as a founding figure of post-war German
film studies, as a moving force in post-war art cinema (through her work as an
archivist at the Cinémathèque française) and as a key figure in exile intellectual
history. Lotte Eisner was born and educated in Berlin where, during the 1920s,
she worked as a film journalist until March 1933 when she was forced, after
the Nazi seizure of power, to flee to Paris where she eventually settled and
remained for the rest of her life, becoming a French citizen in 1955. After the
war, Eisner worked as Chief Curator at the Cinémathèque française for forty
years, responsible for building up an unrivalled collection of film and cinema
artefacts whilst at the same time established a career as a film critic, jurist and
writer, regularly contributing to established journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma.
Recognised by the French government in 1982 when she received the Chevalier
de l’Ordre National de la Legion d’Honneur and the Chevalier des Arts et des
Lettres, she is mentioned frequently in film studies literature and yet her presence
in film historiography remains insecure.
   When she died in 1983, Eisner left an extensive and as yet, unclassified archive;
material spread amongst institutions such as the Cinémathèque française in
Paris, the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin and the UCLA Library as well as a
large cache of personal papers. The correspondence, texts and artefacts held in
these collections reveals a vivid picture of Eisner and her work which, however,
contrasts sharply with her presence in film scholarship where her three books,2
numerous articles and film criticisms are cited and referenced frequently, various
interviews are uploaded and freely available online and where it is evident that


1
 Ph.D thesis supervised by Professor Erica Carter. For information: julia.eisner@kcl.ac.uk.
2
 Lotte H. Eisner, L’Ecran démoniaque, definitive edition (Paris: Eric Losfeld, Le Terrain vague,
1965); Lotte H. Eisner, F.W. Murnau (Paris: Le Terrain vague, 1964); Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang,
ed. by David Robinson (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1976).

                                                       Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 29, Fall 2017
                                           Julia Eisner


she is greatly admired and respected. Equally she is discovered and re-discovered
by generations of cinephiles in articles, books and blogs and yet, amongst all this,
there is almost nothing scholarly of any length about Eisner — not one article,
not one monograph and no critical biography.
   Rather, film scholarship takes a somewhat uncritical and overly reverential
approach to her, which in turn places a disproportionate emphasis on Eisner the
writer and film critic and dismisses or ignores her forty years professional role
as archivist and curator at the Cinémathèque française where she built up an
extraordinary collection of pre-war films, scripts, set designs, music, maquettes
and costumes. In fact one of the central points that will emerge is precisely
the symbiotic nature of Eisner’s work at the Cinémathèque française (her day
job) and its influence and underpinning of her first major piece of writing —
L’Ecran Démoniaque (The Haunted Screen). It was because she was able to
view the films that she was able to write the book. Aside from this forgotten
contribution to film archiving, Eisner is also habitually contextualised by,
and referenced in relation to, various charismatic male figures such as Henri
Langlois, Fritz Lang and Werner Herzog so it appears that film history scholars
have bypassed any intellectual engagement with Eisner’s writing, ignored her
life’s work in the film archives and as a result created a mythic, legendary figure
— a grande dame of German film history — who is venerated and who now
appears mainly as a reference or citation or as a great figure but in relation to
someone else.3

   So Eisner’s is a story in German film history in which paradoxically she is
both notably present and yet also notably absent. But this is not an argument or
a story of someone ‘lost and found’ in film history nor is it a case of a woman’s
‘hidden history’ being newly discovered, because Eisner was a conspicuous and
public figure and all the facts and information about Eisner’s life are available in
plain sight. Instead, by using correspondence from the Cinémathèque française
and from her personal papers, I will argue that Eisner throughout her life was
very visible but that her public role and day to day job as collector and curator at
the Cinémathèque française obscured the genuine contribution she was making
both to film history and to the film archives by laying down and ‘writing’ the
foundations of the archive itself. I will also suggest that this disregard of Eisner as
an important collector and archivist is symptomatic of a gender issue specific to
the historiography of film which has so far, failed to recognise the collaboration
and contribution of work carried out whilst overshadowed by a ‘great man’
and that as a result, once Eisner had developed a reputation as a writer she was
written out of film history as a collector.


3
  An example of this is Werner Herzog who was a close friend and who constantly refers to Eisner
in his writings and interviews explaining her significance to him and his filmmaking. As recently as
2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhc8u850eNk) he says: ‘[…] she was charismatic […]
she gave me courage, she gave me legitimacy’.

130
                          Lotte Eisner: Archivist and Curator


  Using material from archives across the world and her (recently obtained)
personal archive of papers, this thesis will be the first serious study to critically
address and attempt to counterbalance the uneven and unbalanced accounts
that frame Eisner’s life and work.




                                                                                 131
