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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - "As a Person I Am a Synthesis between Europe and America." Individualism and the Experience of Exile in the Films of Fred Zinnemann
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Ph.D. Thesis Project - "As a Person I Am a Synthesis between Europe and America." Individualism and the Experience of Exile in the Films of Fred Zinnemann
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“AS A PERSON I AM A SYNTHESIS BETWEEN EUROPE AND AMERICA.”1
INDIVIDUALISM AND THE EXPERIENCE OF EXILE IN THE FILMS OF FRED
ZINNEMANN
Imme Klages / Ph.D. Thesis Project 2
Ruhr – Universität Bochum




   Broadening the horizon of both film studies and social sciences approaches to the cultural and
creative industries by providing a historical perspective on an exemplary work biography in the
Hollywood system, this Ph.D. project focuses on the work of Fred Zinnemann, a director hither-
to neglected by film studies, in order to analyze the historical development of the modes of pro-
duction in the film industry from an insider’s point of view. The project aims to illustrate the con-
tinuities, but also the shifts and breaks between the conditions of the artistic production during the
classical Hollywood period and today’s creative industries’ production scenes. With its choice of
subject, the project also involves a particular focus on the question of exile, both as an element of
Zinnemann’s work biography and as a narrative trope in his films. At age 22, Fred Zinnemann
emigrated in 1929 from Vienna, Austria, to the USA. His original aim was to learn about
“American standard of talkies” in Hollywood and then return to his native Austria. Zinnemann
ended up by staying and working for over half a century for different American studios, starting
out as a studio director at MGM with a seven-year-contract and eventually becoming the director
and even producer of films he wanted to realize from the 1960s onwards. Given the long run of
his career which spans a number of major shifts in Hollywood’s modes of production combined
with the fact that the film industry has always been both a driver and a model for the creative
industries more generally, Zinnemann’s body of work and work biography provide us with a use-
ful pathway to the study of the developments in the cultural and creative industries over the course
of the 20th century, from the late Fordist models of the 1930s to the flexible specialization modes
of production of the 1960s and the increasingly globalized operations of Hollywood in the 1970s.
   Drawing on Sylvie Lindeperg’s approach of describing a film as a discrete historical document
as developed in her comprehensive study of Nuit et Brouillard 3 (Alain Resnais, 1955), my work
examines Zinnemann’s films and the archival sources connected with them as “historical docu-
ments” for the development of the creative industries throughout the 20th century. Zinnemann’s
personal and business correspondences, together with a series of contracts as well as censorship
and court cases documents, which so far have attracted little or no attention from film historians,
provide us with a rich base of archival materials for a study of this type4. Neglected by auteur
studies, but highly regarded as a practitioner of his craft inside the industry, Zinnemann’s papers
provide unique insights into the ways in which Zinnemann the artist operated and navigated
inside the industry. In particular his case provides a template for a study of creative work in an
industrial context that transcends the established analytical frameworks of art vs. commerce and
artist vs. producer that dominate auteurist studies of the Hollywood scene. One of my working
hypothesis is that Zinnemann’s case may be considered to be exemplary for an understanding of

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. IX, no. 13, Fall 2009                                                          115
IMME KLAGES

today’s more flexible and fragmented structure of creative industries as Zinnemann’s work biog-
raphy sheds light on the freedom and the necessities in the working processes inside this eco-
nomic body. Through an analysis of specific conflicts and their resolution, this study will recon-
struct the working conditions under which Zinnemann produced his films with the larger goal of
tracing the shift from film industry as a traditional cultural industry to a network-based creative
industry of the contemporary type, and from quasi-industrial modes of production to more strong-
ly individualized processes.
   Two levels are to be examined: first, the detailed research of the film production process will
trace the relation between the artist and the business of film production in the case of Zinnemann
as a paradigm for the change in film industries from the fordistic era to “Hollywood” as an inter-
national production mode. Second, a close analysis of the films themselves will form the point of
departure for a discussion on exile and individualism as topics of both Zinnemann’s films and his
work biography, thereby shedding new light on the debate about “film exile.” In an industry that
made more than a third of its profits from the foreign sale of films as early as the early 1930s, the
Hollywood mode of production tends to integrate rather than segregate filmmakers in exile, ben-
efiting from their cultural backgrounds and multi-faceted world-views in order to continue to
appeal to as broad a global audience as possible. The second focus of the project, then, is an
exploration of the experience of exile in film. Rather than focusing on the low-budget and art-
house films that Hamid Naficy has brought together under the umbrella term of “accented
Cinema”5 this project traces the experience of exile in Hollywood mainstream films and through
an analysis of their mode of production. One recurring motif in Zinnemann’s films makes his
work particularly germane for this kind of study. In a corpus of 40 films produced over 48 years
in a variety of genres and styles, almost all of his films – particularly the films where he acted as
a producer, but also a number of his earlier studio films or the Stanley Kramer-producer western
High Noon (1952) – deal with characters facing crucial lifetime decisions, usually decisions deal-
ing with the problem of individual liberty vs. potential loss of liberty. While these are situations
solidly grounded in mainstream American narratives of the victory of liberty over tyranny, and
while none of the films overtly talk about life in exile and only a few directly tackle the delusion6
of the Nazi era (such as The Seventh Cross, 1943, which is based on Anna Seghers’ novel about
seven prisoners fleeing from a concentration camp in pre-war Nazi Germany), Zinnemann’s films
tend to deal with characters that could be interpreted as characters with a war experience and not
wanting to go through the experience of 20th century totalitarianism again. Instead, these films
extol the virtues of individualism and moral integrity as a way of avoiding a return to the bar-
barism of totalitarian mass movements that led to the destruction of the European Jewry,
Zinnemann’s parents among them. By treating film characters as “symbols” and “negotiators” of
comprehensive messages in the sense of Jens Eder7, the project proposes to trace the experience
of exile through both the films and their production histories, thus combining historical archival
research with film analysis and a focus on film aesthetics. In so doing, the project ultimately aims
to provide a model of analysis for future research into both the working conditions of creative
industries and also the complex questions pertaining to the way in which an artist’s individual
experience in a globalized media environment expresses itself even in works that do not directly
deal with that experience.




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                                     AS A PERSON I AM A SYNTHESIS BETWEEN EUROPE AND AMERICA

1   Fred Zinnemann in his interview with Max Kade, Hollywood 1986, Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin
    Archiv.
2   Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger, Ruhr University; Co-Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Noah Eisenberg, New
    School for Social Research, New York.
3   Sylvie Lindeperg, Spuren, Dokumente, Monumente. Filmische Verwendungen von Geschichte, his-
    torische Verwendungen des Films, in Eva Hohenberger, Judith Keilbach (eds.), Die Gegenwart der
    Vergangenheit. Dokumentarfilm, Fernsehen und Geschichte, Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2003; Sylvie Lindeperg,
    Nuit et brouillard. Un film dans l’histoire, Odile Jacob, Paris 2007.
4   Zinnemann Collection, Margaret Herrick Library: “The Fred Zinnemann papers span the years 1923-
    1996 […]. The collection contains production files, television files, story material, correspondence, and
    subject files.” http://www.oscars.org/library/collections/special/index.html, last visit 9 May 2009.
5   Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton University Press,
    Princeton 2001.
6   Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (1969),
    Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2001.
7   Jens Eder, Die Figur im Film. Grundlagen der Figurenanalyse, Schüren, Marburg 2008.




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