Weimar Cinema, Embodiment, and Historicity

Cultural Memory and the Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch

Mason Kamana Allred

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415349185
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351858472
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In its retrieval and (re)construction, the past has become interwoven with the images and structure of cinema. Not only have mass media—especially film and television—shaped the content of memories and histories, but they have also shaped their very form. Combining historicization with close readings of German director Ernst Lubitsch's historical films, this book focuses on an early turning point in this development, exploring how the medium of film shaped modern historical experience and understanding—how it moved embodied audiences through moving images.

1 Screening Pasts through Carnal Presence

“We think that we don't believe in a bunch of things with our intellect, but our body still believes in them, and it is always more powerful.”

—Egon Friedell, 1921¹

When The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots was staged as a fully “fleshed-out” beheading on film in 1895, the distinct elements of visualizing history and appealing to the body were combined.² The early historical film, with severe time constraints and budgetary limitations, realized the most bang for the buck was to stage a scene of gruesome history. The trick film's eighteen seconds include costumed historical figures at the site of a beheading and conclude with a masked executioner lifting the queen's severed head triumphantly for the full view of the camera. The exploitative potential of historical film was already evident at its inception.³ Always interested in addressing bodily concerns, it is no surprise that nearly twenty-five years later, the German director Ernst Lubitsch ended his film of the French Revolution with Madame Dubarry's grisly execution at the Guillotine. Lubitsch's film presented bodily fragmentation as historical display for audiences already over two decades into their habituation to cinematic experience.

In the final scene of Madame Dubarry (1919), a matte shot parts like a curtain and the camera positions the audience in an iconic relationship with the yelling masses on screen (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The platform of the guillotine is, like the screen in the cinema, slightly elevated and the clear center of attention. In the American edit, Dubarry pleads, “One moment more. Life is so sweet,” reminding the audience of just what is at stake when temporality and fatality collide. The film displays Dubarry being strapped to the death machine and then abruptly cuts to the candle representing her glowing life, as it is extinguished. In the original German version, no title cards invade the screen to prolong Dubarry's life. The film simply cuts to a close-up of the blade plummeting down the frame. The blade drops, closing the contraption's cavity for a head, recalling the fact that “the term ‘guillotine’ also refers to a kind of drop shutter found in nineteenth-century cameras”⁴ and that the technical term for the executioner even became “photographer.”⁵ Putting these elements into motion the film continues, cutting from the blade to a long shot of the executioner, or photographer, retrieving Dubarry's head from the platform. He then tosses the severed head to the ecstatic crowd and a final close-up reveals the head, captured by living hands and the magic of film. History is placed in the hands of the masses.

Figure 1.1 Eager for a spectacle, the masses congregate and yell around the guillotine platform. Madame Dubarry, 1919. Image courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

Such depictions of historical bodies, in grave and sensational settings, constituted a qualitatively new mode of history that appealed to modern embodied viewers. Whereas, traditional historicism should edit the human body out of the historical process through “Selbstauslöschung” (or extinguishing of self for objectivity),⁶ film functioned precisely by appealing to the emotions, movements, and experiences of audience's bodies. History on film engaged audiences in their material reality—in their “skin and hair.”⁷ Allowing an embodied audience to view and experience historical bodies fragmented on screen, whether through simulated dismemberment or editing techniques, updated the cultural sense of history. This was the carnally charged history reaching audiences across the globe and eclipsing novels, monographs, and magazines.

Figure 1.2 Dubarry faces her executioner. Madame Dubarry, 1919. Image courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

For more critical viewers, such portrayals of the past were difficult to accept as history. In his 1947 assessment of Weimar German film, cultural critic Kracauer described Lubitsch's history films, in particular, as “nihilistic.” For Kracauer, Lubitsch's “cynicism and melodramatic sentimentality … characterized history as meaningless.”⁸ The type of history produced by Lubitsch could certainly be construed as irresponsible or even meaningless, yet it is the very “spectatorial experience that resists co-optation by meaning” that produced a radically modern type of history.⁹ Recognizing the potential threat of what appears under the lens of historicism as “soft” history,¹⁰ it is nevertheless necessary to investigate the experience of such a metaphorically textured approach to the past, especially considering the films' international reach and ubiquity. This chapter then uses the reception and event of Madame Dubarry to traverse the modern, cinematically structured historical experience that historicism methodologically neglects.

What follows is not an attack on historicism and its emphasis on narrative. To be sure, the presence of historicism or other strands of academic history is necessary. These serve as reflective structures in a discursive realm that can orient the present in empirical ways. They can also serve the important function of correcting dangerous inaccuracies of looser engagements with the past, which films generally pursue. In this way, academic historical discourse works to “correct, critique, or even include” film as it does with collective memory.¹¹ The subsequent chapters will further treat this constant appeal to historicism in order to understand cinematic history. However, as Paul Riceour insightfully concedes, although “history can expand, complete, correct, even refute the testimony of memory” (and I would include here films) “regarding the past; it cannot abolish it.”¹²

The precise way in which historical films came to appeal to the human body for experiencing what is “historical” helps to highlight the significant role of cinema in the construction of a cinematic regime of historicity. The technological and historically specific mode of address suffusing this experience produced “new history,” by updating history's reception through the cinematic medium. To this end, it is helpful to revisit Kracauer's trepidation toward photography and history (before his damning analysis of Lubitsch's films after World War II). Doing so elucidates how Lubitsch's history of Madame Dubarry, as a typification of the genre of history film at the time, may have been cynical and even sentimental, but made history sensual, specifically for modern embodied viewers.

Thawing Historicism

Kracauer's valid concern with the photographic medium was that it only offers surface and thereby buries history “under a layer of snow.” Because of the ontological realism of the camera, this blizzard effect would be the inevitable result if only Lubitsch-type history films were linking present to past. For Kracauer, these couldn't do real history since the historian's task, as he later articulated it, lies in “penetrating [the past's] outward appearance, so that he may learn to understand that world from within.”¹³ By only providing the outward appearance, the destructive and eclipsing forces of photographic media were “sweeping away the dams of memory.”¹⁴ Even though these media showed more, society came to know less.

Whereas Kracauer's concern with Lubitsch's films in 1947 was narrative implication, his interwar reflection was based on the medium itself. This is an important distinction in the effort to describe historical experience rather than the “meaning” of historical accounts per se. Certainly, for a German émigré after World War II, the meaning and narrative of history films could not be ignored. His focus on finding the rise of Hitler in feature films clouded his earlier radical reflections. But, as Kracauer had realized in the 1920s, the problem preceding narrative was that although the blizzard effect created an opportunity for new encounters with nature the unacceptable trade-off was surface, a mere “spatial continuum.”

On the other hand, the historicist tradition, stemming from the Enlightenment, precipitated its own blizzard effect. As Dutch Novelist Nicolaas Beets put it, “the temperature decreased from that of human blood to that of frost. It literally snowed big ideas. It was a fresh but, in the end, uncomfortable cold.”¹⁵ This chilling historicism banished the experience of the past in favor of objectivity and distinction. The necessary critical distance was achieved through the emphatic construction of a “frame” between past and present. Like the frame of an artwork, this temporal frame kept the past at bay, as an object of study. By creating concepts like nation, state, era, and century and by eschewing notation in favor of pure predictive writing, historiography after the “Enlightenment” (an important example of one such creation) emphasized the difference and distance between past and present.¹⁶ Even if the past only led to the present, they were divided by the past's very narration.

Recent scholarship on “collective memory,” especially since Pierre Nora's and Yosef Yerushalmi's groundbreaking studies, gives credence to this cold characterization of historicism that supplanted more intimate and experiential ties to the past.¹⁷ In similar terms, Beet's conception of the Enlightenment and historicism was a cold, scientific, negative disenchantment of the world, whereas Kracauer's photographic snow represented the loss of depth and distinguishing traits concealed under a “jumble that consists partially of garbage.”¹⁸ Both Beets' and Kracauer's forecasts, while revealing the limits of each mode of representing the past, were metaphorical polarities devoid of carnality, experience, and sensation. Where photography required no human intervention, historicism privileged logical thought over affect. Both poles extracted the warmth of sensing bodies in the historical process.

Set against the freezing pole of historicism, Dutch historical theorist Ankersmit has recently explored what he terms “subjective” and “sublime” historical experience. He explicitly stated his aim as replacing “the intellectual bureaucracy of ‘theory’” with a “romantic” notion of experience. By turning away from a focus on narrative and textuality, Ankersmit celebrates the way the historian, as an “oracle” of sorts, works through personal historical experience to produce historiography. Maintaining the elitist focus on historians as the practitioners of history, Ankersmit describes this process as occurring in the historian's mind, where “the drama of world history is enacted.”¹⁹ Thus, the historical experience, germinating in the imagination, precedes narrative and linguistic articulation. It is also clear that history is always something that is subjectively “seen,” whether it becomes translated and disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cinematic Historicity
• 1. Screening Pasts through Carnal Presence
• 2. Entangling Histories
• 3. History Class at 16 fps
• 4. Clio in Crisis
• Bibliography
• Index