German National Cinema

Sabine Hake, Sabine Hake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136020544
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

German National Cinema is the first comprehensive history of German film from its origins to the present. In this new edition, Sabine Hake discusses film-making in economic, political, social, and cultural terms, and considers the contribution of Germany's most popular films to changing definitions of genre, authorship, and film form.

The book traces the central role of cinema in the nation's turbulent history from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Berlin Republic, with special attention paid to the competing demands of film as art, entertainment, and propaganda. Hake also explores the centrality of genre films and the star system to the development of a filmic imaginary.

This fully revised and updated new edition will be required reading for everyone interested in German film and the history of modern Germany.

1

Wilhelmine Cinema 1895–1919

Until recently, little was known about films from the Wilhelmine period, that is, the cinema before 1919. Some of the reasons for such neglect apply to other national cinemas as well: the large number of films lost or in danger of disintegrating; the inaccessibility of film copies, stills, and print sources from the period; and the limited resources available for preservation. But a renewed interest in early cinema, which peaked during the 1995 centennial of the invention of film, has finally brought more scholars to the archives and resulted in increased scholarly activity, published in journals such as KINtop: Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films. Archival research has drawn attention to previously unknown films, directors, and producers and revealed the richness and complexity of early cinema as a technology, business, industry, art form, and popular diversion. But the study of early cinema has also allowed scholars to question basic assumptions of film historiography such as the privileging of the feature film and of a nation-based model of analysis and to reject any claims to a normative film aesthetic in favour of the historical manifestations of authorship, spectatorship, and media specificity. Cultural-studies-based approaches have shed new light on the embeddedness of the feature film within a wide range of representational modes and exhibition practices and clarified the relationship of early cinema to other media and communication technologies, including its contribution to the making of a post-bourgeois public sphere. Moreover, because of its precarious position between local influences, national initiatives, and international developments, early film-making has drawn attention to the constitutive tension within German cinema between a basic openness toward heterogeneous influences and cross-cultural exchanges, on the one hand, and its enlistment in the discourses of nationalism and the making of national identity, on the other.

In the process, the study of early cinema has raised more fundamental questions about the functioning of film as a powerful technology for expanding the boundaries of time and place, producing new identities and subjectivities, cultivating new modes of perception and experience, and redrawing the boundaries of fantasy and reality. Questions asked in this context include: Which technological, economic, social, and cultural forces contributed to the invention of cinematography? Did the technology of film create new forms of diversion or was cinema an expression of, and a response to, dramatic changes in modern mass society? What is the relationship of early cinema to other mass media (illustrated press, photography), technologies of space (railway, telegraph) and the discourses of the body (medicine, ethnography, criminology)? In what ways does early cinema engage with the concomitant processes of urbanisation, massification, mechanisation, and industrialisation (Segeberg 1996 and 1998)? Must we conceive of cinema as a radically new cultural practice or an eclectic mixture of popular traditions, established conventions, and modern diversions? How did the rise of film affect the formal registers and social significance of literature and the other arts, and how did it alter the relationship between high and low culture? Where must we place early cinema in relation to urban culture, bourgeois culture, working-class culture, regional culture, and folk culture? What is its contribution to the contemporaneous discourses of colonialism and nationalism and the aesthetic projects of turn-of-the-century decadence and life reform? Did early cinema provide an alternative public sphere in which marginalised and suppressed voices found expression, or did it prepare the ground for both the commodification of culture described by Adorno and Horkheimer in their notion of the culture industry and the aesthetics of simulation evoked by many post-structuralist critics? Finally, where can we locate the emergence of national cinema out of the internationalism of the early film business and the syncretism of early film forms and styles?

Addressing many of these questions, film historians have turned their attention to the beginnings of German cinema, both to fill considerable historical lacunae and to develop new methods of inquiry (Usai and Codelli 1990, Kessler et al. 1992, Elsaesser 1996a, Elsaesser and Wedel 2002, Garncarz 2007). They have challenged earlier characterisations of Wilhelmine cinema as technically inferior and formally undeveloped on the grounds that the conventions of the classical Hollywood style had inappropriately served as the standard for all critical evaluation. Correcting the almost exclusive emphasis on Berlin as the capital and the centre of film production, scholarship on early cinema culture in other cities (e.g., Munich, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main) has shown regional influences working against the homogenising effect of the national in political debates and cultural practices. At the same time, studies on film exhibition in small towns and rural areas have documented how the cinema levelled the difference between city and country even where exhibition practices accommodated regional tastes and preferences (Warstat 1982). Feminist scholarship has shown the ability of early films to respond to the needs of women audiences, among other things through the heightened emotionality of the melodrama, and thus give rise to an alternative public sphere (Schlüpmann 1990). At the same time, detailed studies on local exhibition practices and early production companies have confirmed the socially integrative qualities of early cinema, especially during the transition from the short to the longer film, and thus put an end to persistent myths surrounding early cinema as a proletarian public sphere (Müller 1994).

Not surprisingly, there exists some disagreement on the meaning of new historical knowledge and its impact on periodisation and canonisation. Two basic models can be found: one based on continuous progression, and one defined through breaks and ruptures. Scholars either treat the cinema from 1895 to 1919 as a prehistory of the classical silent cinema or, conversely, see it as radically different in its approach to narrative continuity, psychological motivation, and visual spectacle. In the first case, the styles of the 1920s provide the normative standard for evaluating earlier film practices as deficient and flawed. Within a comparative framework, such evolutionary models are frequently evoked to explain alleged instances of retardation in the German cinema before 1919. Accordingly, some critics have described expressionist cinema as the result of yet insufficiently developed filmic techniques (Salt 1979). Taking a very different approach, other scholars have used early cinema and its presumed otherness to think about the formal shift from ‘showing’ to ‘telling’ as an abandonment of the subversive qualities derived from the greater emphasis on visual spectacle and the cult of attractions.

In most cases, film-making before 1919 has been examined as inseparable from the larger concerns of Wilhelmine culture and society and its constitutive tensions and contradictions: between an authoritarian state and its nationalist ideology and the democratising effects of civic involvement and social activism, between the modernising forces of industry and technology and the oppressive effects of a rigid class system, and between an official culture of pompous pretension and countless new initiatives for artistic innovation and cultural reform. The years between the founding of the Reich in 1871 and the collapse of the monarchy in 1918 brought dramatic changes in every area of public life, from belated industrialisation and urbanisation and the rise of a powerful working class to significant advances in social legislation and political representation. The Wilhelmine Empire under Emperor Wilhelm II was held together by the nationalist fervour and imperialist ambition that culminated in the cataclysm of the First World War, but it also saw the emergence of new industries and corporations and the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that, among other things, made possible the advent of cinema. Its earliest attractions appeared during a cultural period that thrived on conventionality, sentimentality, materialism, and kitsch. In the educated middle classes, moral double standards dominated social interactions, and public debates exuded pretentiousness and hypocrisy. The provocation of naturalism and, later, expressionism, attested to the need for more fundamental changes in the existing power structures and the cultural institutions and practices that supported them. Around the turn of the century, new artistic movements began to challenge the sharp division between high and low culture, while progressive social movements worked to improve the living conditions of the lower classes. Committed to the idea of reform, these groups ranged from working-class cultural organisations to alternative lifestyle movements but also included activist groups fighting for better housing, sex reform, and women’s rights. As an integral part of these developments, early cinema became a privileged symbol both of the destructive and constructive effects of modernisation and modernity.

Cinema: A new Technology, Industry, and Mass Medium

Playfully eclectic and unabashedly populist, early cinema exposed the shortcomings of high culture and, through its embeddedness in everyday life, brought into sharp relief the enormous power and appeal of modern mass culture. The strong resistance to the new medium among members of the educated middle class was based not only in their anxieties about the levelling effect on cultural life but also their fears of the modern masses for whom the cinema became a preferred form of entertainment. Strongly influenced by other public diversions such as the variety, the circus, the fairground, and the panorama, the first films had little need for, and even less interest in, the formal conventions of literature and bourgeois theatre. Cultivating decidedly modern sensibilities trained in the big cities and at the new places of work, the cinema quickly became an integral part of modern consumer culture and soon joined forces with other mass-produced forms of diversion such as illustrated magazines and trivial literature. But in contrast to the latter, cinema became a popular attraction through its double status as a technology in the narrow sense of machines and mechanisms and in the broader sense of producing and displaying illusions, a dynamic already apparent in the early phase of invention and experimentation.

The first cinematographers took full advantage of this unique convergence of perception and technology by exhibiting new optical devices (for example, Ottomar Anschütz’s Tachyscope) and by presenting their ‘magic tricks’ as an integral part of the cinema of attractions. The move from scientific experimentation to public entertainment was completed when, from February to March 1895, Anschütz showed his ‘living photographs’ to a paying audience, thus also for the first time privileging collective over individual forms of reception (Rossell 2001). Max Skladanowsky, one of the many showmen and inventors from the period of early cinematography, usually gets credited with having organised the first public film screening as part of a variety show in the Wintergarten in Berlin on 1 November 1895. Emulating the variety format, the programme consisted of acrobatic acts, animal scenes, folk dances, and artistic presentations. A later series of Skladanowsky shorts from 1896 was more documentary-like and included street scenes from the neighbourhood around Alexanderplatz. Both programmes must be described as aesthetically and technically inferior to the actualities first screened by August and Louis Lumière in Paris on 28 December 1895. Because of its high-quality products, the Cinématographe Lumière soon achieved a dominant position on European markets, whereas the German competition remained small and underfinanced.

Most technological advances during the early years were connected with Oskar Messter and Guido Seeber. Messter was a talented cinematographer who not only improved the mechanics of cameras and projectors but also successfully marketed his products (Kessler et al. 1994a and 1994b, Rossell 1998). The Maltese cross for flicker-free projection is his invention as are the popular Ton-Bilder (sound images) that, through a gramophone, synchronised sound and image for short musical numbers. Messter made countless fictional shorts for Messter Film GmbH and, as early as 1897, began producing regular newsreels following the popular success of a documentary short about the centennial of the birthday of Emperor Wilhelm I. After 1914, these newsreels appeared weekly as the famous Messter-Woche. Like Messter, Seeber combined business acumen and technological know-how with an almost intuitive grasp of the camera’s artistic possibilities. Known for his innovative camerawork on Der Totentanz (The Dance of Death, 1912) and other films by Urban Gad, he specialised in trick photography and published the earliest manual on cinematography. Working for the Deutsche Bioscop, Seeber in 1912 also oversaw the construction of the Babelsberg studios, soon to become the famous Ufa-Stadt, the German Hollywood, on the south-western outskirts of Berlin.

In general, Wilhelmine cinema can be divided into three phases: the early years of emergence and experimentation (1895–1906), a phase of expansion and consolidation (1906–10), and the process of standardisation that gave rise to the longer feature film (1910–18). An often accelerating and sometimes retarding factor in this process was the alignment of cinema with national interests and its separation from international developments as a result of the First World War. During the period of travelling cinemas, which lasted until 1906 (and until 1915, in some rural areas), exhibitors either purchased or produced their own films and travelled from town to town to present their ‘theatre of living photographs’. The programme usually included newsreels, nature scenes, humorous sketches, acrobatic acts, dramatic recitations, and documentary shorts about local events. Two filmic styles, respectively associated with the names of Lumière and Meliès, prevailed: a realist style, with the camera recording the visible world and favouring a mode of representation located in the pro-filmic event; and a fantastic style that took advantage of the camera’s ability to create new imaginary worlds and overcome the limitations of everyday perception. Newsreels and documentaries increased the audience’s interest in physical reality and confirmed to them the beauty of everyday life. By contrast, the tableaux vivants (staged group scenes) and the féeries (fairytales), as well as the popular shorts with musical numbers and acrobatic presentations, continued to adhere to the conventions of the proscenium stage, from the framing of the scenes to the frontal positioning of actors and performers. This celebration of an unabashedly sensationalist cinema modelled after the variety was most apparent in the fantastic effects achieved through trick animation, tinting or toning and had a lasting impact on the visual conventions of the early social drama and detective film.

Weekly changes in movie programmes and improvements in the design of exhibition spaces contributed to the cinema’s growing popularity. Beginning in 1905, more and more storefronts, pubs, and coffee houses were converted into stationary cinemas, from then on alternatively referred to as Kino, Kientopp or Kintop. With the increase in numbers – in Berlin, from 165 cinemas in 1905 to 206 in 1913 – came greater attention to comfort and luxury, as evidenced by early spectacular movie palaces like Berlin’s Marmorhaus. Usually located in the downtown areas, on the large thoroughfares, and near railway stations and shopping districts, these new cinemas catered to a diverse audience, from workers, employees, and middle-class women to adolescents, artisans, and the unemployed. In the big cities, screenings took place from eleven o’clock in the morning to ten at night, with patrons coming and going on a continuous basis. Programmes lasted approximately 15 minutes and almost always included piano or organ music accompaniment and, not infrequently, explanations by a commentator. Usually limited to the evenings, the more ambitious Kinobühnenschauen (cinema stage shows) offered an entertaining mixture of short films and live acts; these programmes remained popular until the late 1920s.

Movie audiences often came from the lower classes, but it would be misleading to characterise them as working-class or think of early cinema only in class-based terms. Sociological studies from the period, including Emilie Altenloh’s Zur Soziologie des Kino (On the Sociology of the Cinema, 1914), described very heterogeneous groups, characterised above all by their precarious social positions and brought together by shared experiences of discrimination and marginalisation. Because of its provocative qualities, the new medium was regularly discussed in the antagonistic terms of class, with writers and critics frequently denouncing the movies as a threat to bourgeois culture and society. As such a potential source of social unrest, the cinema had to be controlled through various legal and administrative measures on the local, state, and federal levels. Initially the police had been responsible for making preventive censorship decisions, a practice which allowed for significant variation among municipalities. The introduction in 1906 of official pre-censorship, and the requirement of a censor’s certificate after 1907, greatly simplified this process, with Prussia publicising its censorship decisions as a guideline for the other states. Additional new measures included admission monitoring for children and adolescents and the enforcement of city ordinances about safety standards and health codes. Eventually, municipalities found a workable compromise between controlling the cinema’s presumably detrimental effect on public morality and profiting from its mass appeal through a local entertainment tax, from then on a major source of revenues (Kilchenstein 1997).

The cinema’s rise from a small business to a national industry came about through the concentration of all resources, including financial capital, production facilities, and technological know-how, in the hands of fewer and larger companies. Additional factors included a more effective division of labour among film production, distribution, and exhibition; further specialisation in the film-related professions and industries; and technical and artistic standards and greater product differentiation. In 1913 alone, more than 350 new films were released nationwide. The founding of the Geyer printing lab in 1911 gave German companies some degree of independence from their French competitors. Known for its lively cultural scene, Berlin emerged as the centre of film-making, with the cafés and restaurants around Friedrichstrasse functioning as a kind of employment exchange, and with most of the studios located nearby in Tempelhof, Weissensee, and Babelsberg (Hanisch 1991). Der Kinematograph and Die Lichtbild-Bühne, the earliest trade papers, were founded in 1907 and 1908, respectively, to improve communication among the various branches of the industry and to offer advice on technical, financial, and legal questions. The first serious reviews in daily newspapers appeared around 1913 and were followed by extensive debates on the artistic merits of film in most mainstream publications.

Production companies from these early years include Jules Greenbaum’s Deutsche Bioskop (1902) and Deutsche Vitascope (1909), as well as the first film producer who also functioned as a distributor, Alfred Duske’s GmbH (1905). Exploring the possibilities of vertical integration, Paul Davidson first acquired a cinema chain in 1906, the ubiquitous Union-Theater, before creating the first German joint-stock film company, the Projektions-AG Union (PAGU), in 1909. Founded in 1915, Erich Pommer’s Decla contributed to this process of economic concentration by operating on a national level from the very beginning. Like Paul Davidson of PAGU, Decla’s Pommer belonged to a new generation of producers who believed in improving the technical and artistic quality of their products and in striving toward a broader social acceptance of the movies. In order to minimise financial risks, some companies experimented with restrictive practices such as the monopoly films, films available through only one distributor. The Asta Nielsen star vehicle Der Abgrund/Afgrunden (The Abyss, 1910), a Danish production, was distributed as a monopoly film. Practices such as blind booking and block booking had a similarly stabilising effect; so did advertising campaigns that made films part of other forms of cultural consumption. Commodity tie-ins appeared for the first time when the chocolate manufacturer Stollwerck & Co. in Cologne, distributor of the Cinématographe Lumière since 1896, installed vending machines in its cinemas (Loiperdinger 1999).

Responding to such developments, even conservative political groups and public institutions discovered film’s untapped possibilities as a modern mass medium. The royal family turned to film as a promotional tool for the monarchy. Beginning with the grand opening of the Nord-Ostsee Canal in 1895, Wilhelm II repeatedly appeared in newsreels featuring military parades, victory celebrations, and manoeuvres of his beloved Royal Navy. For the celebrations surrounding the twenty-fifth anniversary of his rule, eight different production firms joined forces to produce Der deutsche Kaiser im Film (The German Emperor on Film, 1912). The enlistment of cinema in the scenarios of German nationalism, militarism, and monarchism, did not remain limited to the...