Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
peace between the social classes. An unusual blend of melodrama and lyricism can be
found in Wenn Völker streiten (When nations quarrel', 1914) as well as several other films
which take the war as subject (such as Alfred Halm's Ihr Unteroffizier ('Their non-
commissioned officer', 1915)). Among the melodramas, the most extraordinary is Das
Tagebuch des Dr. Hart ('The diary of Dr Hart', 1916), directed by Paul Leni and funded by
BUFA, the government-owned film propaganda unit. The story of two families with split
political loyalties and crossed love interests, Das Tagebuch is an anti-tsarist propaganda
film in the guise of championing Polish nationalism. But it also makes a strongly pacifist
statement through the realistic battle scenes, the depiction of the wounded in field
hospitals, and images of rural devastation.
However, films on war subjects were the exception. Serials featuring male stars made up
the bulk of the production, with the then-famous actors Ernst Reicher, Alwin Neuss, and
Harry Lambert-Paulsen enjoying a following that allowed them single-handedly to keep
their respective companies in profit. Female serial queens like Fern Andra and Hanni
Weisse were also prolific, while directors like Joe May, Richard Oswald, Max Mack, and
Otto Rippert would make an average of six to eight films a year, moving effortlessly
between popular films (Sensationsfilme) and art films (Autorenfilme). Rippert's six-part
Homunculus, starring yet another Danish import, Olaf Fons, was the super-hit of 1916,
and Oswald's Hoffmanns Erzählungen ('Hoffmann's tales'), an adaptation of three E. T. A.
Hoffmann stories, used outdoor locations most spectacularly. Both films have been seen
as forerunners of that prototypical art cinema genre, the fantastic or 'expressionist' film,
but they belong more properly to the multi-episode Sensationsfilme, not so different from
Joe May's Veritas vincit ( 1916), which was Italian-inspired, and later parodied by Ernst
Lubitsch, who himself acted in and directed about two dozen comedies, before he had his
first international success with Madame Dubarty in 1919.
To find the origins of the fantastic film, one has to return to the Autorenfilm, whose
outstanding figure was neither Hans Heinz Ewers nor Stellan Rye, but Paul Wegener. A
celebrated Max Reinhardt actor before he came to make films, between 1913 and 1918
Wegener created the genre of the Gothic-Romantic fairy-tale film. After The Student of
Prague he acted in and co-directed The Golem ( 1920), based on a Jewish legend and the
prototype of all monster/Frankenstein/creature features. There followed Peter Schlemihl,
Riibezahl's Wedding, The Pied Piper of Hamlin, and several other films exploiting the
rich vein of German Romantic legend and fairy-tales.
Wegener's work in the 1910s is crucial for at least two reasons: he was attracted to
fantastic subjects because they allowed him to explore different cinematic techniques,
such as trick photography, superimposition, special effects in the manner of the French
detective Zigomar series, but with a sinister rather than comic motivation. For this, he
worked closely with one of the early German cinema's most creative cameramen, Guido
Seeber, himself a somewhat underrated pioneer whose many publications about the art of
cinematography, special effects, and lighting are a veritable source-book for
understanding the German style of the 1920s. But Wegener's fairy-tale films also
promoted the ingenious compromise which the Autorenfilm wanted to strike between
countering the immense hostility shown towards, the cinema by the educated middle class
(manifested in the so-called 'Kino Debatte') and exploiting what was unique about the
cinema, its popularity.
The prevalence of the fantastic in the German cinema may thus have a simpler
explanation than that given by either Lotte Eisner or Siegfried Kracauer, who enlist it as
proof of the nature of the German soul. Reviving gothic motifs and the romantic
Kunstmärchen, the fantastic film achieved a double aim: it militated for the cinema's
aesthetic legitimacy by borrowing from middlebrow Wilhelmine 'culture', but it also
broke with the international tendency of early cinema, by offering nationally identifiable
German films. Up until the Autorenfilm, film subjects and genres were quasi-universal
and international, with very little fundamental difference from country to country: film-
makers were either inspired by other popular entertainments, or they copied the successful
film subjects of their foreign rivals and domestic competitors. With the Autorenfilm, the
notion of 'national cinema' became construed in analogy to 'national literature', as well as
a certain definition of the popular, in which the rural-völkisch and the national-romantic
played an important role.
The Wegener tradition thus set a pattern which was to repeat itself throughout the 1920s:
conservative, nostalgic, and national themes contrasting sharply with the experimental
and avant-garde outlook film-makers had with regard to advancing the medium's
technical possibilities. Seeking to define a national cinema by blending a high-culture
concept of national literature with a popular pseudo-folk culture, the Wegener tradition
tried to take the wind out of the establishment's critical sails. It is the combination of both
these objectives in the fantastic film that makes it such a mainstay of the German cinema
for at least a decade (from 1913 until about 1923), suggesting that the celebrated
'expressionist film' is the tail end of this truce between highbrow culture and a lowbrow
medium, rather than a new departure. What breathed new life into the vogue was, of
course, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, mainly because of its extraordinary reception in
France (and subsequently in the United States), which in turn made producers and
directors self-consciously look for motifs that the export market would recognize as
German.
The conjunction of a boom in demand and a war economy had, by the end of the war, led
to an unsustainable number of small, undercapitalized production firms competing with
each other, some of which had tried to gain an advantage via mergers or takeovers. The
first such association of small producers was the Deutsche Lichtbild A.G. (Deulig),
formed in 1916, backed by heavy industry interests in the Ruhr, and headed by Alfred
Hugenberg, then a director of Krupp, and also owner of a newspaper and publishing
empire. One of Hugenberg's chief lieutenants, Ludwig Klitzsch, saw the advantage of
diversifying into a potentially profitable medium. He also had a veritable mission to use
the cinema as a promotional tool for both commerce and lobby politics. Klitzsch occupied
a leading function in the German Colonial League, one of the two nationally organized
initiatives-the other being the German Navy League -- which had, from about 1907
onwards, relied heavily on the cinematograph in order to promote its aims. The Navy
League especially provoked the anger of cinema exhibitors, since it provided unfair
competition by getting free advertising for its shows in the local press, and captive
audiences from school officials or local army commandants.
UFA, DECLA, AND THE WEIMAR CINEMA
The Deulig initiative led to a counter-offensive by a consortium of firms from the
electrical and chemical industries, headed by the Deutsche Bank. They were able to
persuade military circles to use the government-owned film propaganda unit, the Bild und
Film Amt (BUFA), to front a large-scale merger operation. Under considerable secrecy,
the Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa) was founded in December 1917, combining
the Messter GmbH, PAGU, Nordisk, along with a handful of smaller firms. The Reich
provided funds to buy out some of the owners, while others were offered shares in the
new company, with Paul Davidson becoming the new firm's first head of production. The
establishment of a horizontally and vertically integrated company of this size meant not
only that Deulig was dwarfed, but that a great many other middle-size companies became
increasingly dependent on Ufa as Germany's chief domestic exhibitor and export
distributor.
Neither the strategy of such a merger, nor the use of a special interest group for the
purposes of creating a film propaganda instrument, were the invention of Ufa's backers.
Both obeyed a certain commercial logic, and both belonged to the political culture of
Wilhelmine society, making Ufa an expression not so much of the war, as of a new way of
thinking about public opinion and the media in general. By the time Ufa became
operational, however, Germany had been defeated, and the new conglomerate's goal was
to dominate the domestic as well as the European film market. Its chief assets were in real
estate (extensive studio capacity, luxury cinemas all over Germany, laboratories and
prime office space in Berlin), while owning Messter brought Ufa horizontal
diversification into film equipment, processing, and other cinema-related service
industries, and the Nordisk stake both extended the exhibition basis already present from
PAGU and gave Ufa access to a world-wide export network.
Louise Brooks with Kurt Gerron in G. W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (Das Tagebuch
einer Verlorenen, 1929)
Production at first continued under the brand names of the merged firms: PAGU, Messter,
Joe May Film, Gloria, BB-Film, some using the new purpose-built studios in Babelsberg,
soon to become the heart of Ufa and the German film industry. The PAGU team around
Davidson and Lubitsch rose to international fame with a series of historical spectaculars
and costume dramas, often based on operettas (e.g. Madame Dubarry, 1919). Specializing
in exotic Großfilme (Das indische Grabmal ('The Indian Tomb'), 1920), Joe May's multi-
episode serials like Die Herrin der Welt ('The mistress of the world') proved particularly
popular to Germany's war-exhausted spectators, not least because each episode featured a
different continent, with the heroine travelling from China to Africa, from India to the
United States.
Among the firms which initially did not form part of the Ufa conglomerate, the most
important was Decla, headed by Erich Pommer. Decla's first major films after the war
were Die Spinnen ('The spiders', 1919), an exotic detective serial written and directed by
Fritz Lang, and Die Pest in Florenz ('The plague in Florence', 1919), a historical
adventure directed by Rippert and scripted by Lang.
Together with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Carl
Mayer and Hans Janowitz, these three films made up a production programme which
defined the course that the German cinema was to take in the early 1920s. Popular serials,
with exotic locations and improbable adventures, historical spectaculars, and the 'stylized'
(or 'expressionist') film were the backbone of a concept of product differentiation, carried
by such directors as Lang and Wiene, Ludwig Berger and F. W. Murnau, Carl Mayer, Carl
Froelich, and Arthur von Gerlach.
Given the decisive role of Caligari in typecasting the German cinema, it is remarkable
how unrepresentative it is of the films made during the years of the Weimar Republic. Its
explicitly 'expressionist' décor remained almost unique, and the few German films that
were able to repeat its international commercial success were each very different:
Madame Dubarry, Variete ( 1925), The Last Laugh, Metropolis. Yet in one respect
Caligari does illustrate a common pattern for the period. For in so far as one production
strand, strongly though not exclusively identified with Pommer and the Decla-Bioskop
label, has an identity as an 'art cinema', its films have a remarkably similar narrative
structure. The 'lack' which, according to narratologists, drives all stories, centres in the
Weimar cinema almost invariably on incomplete families, jealousies, overpowering father
figures, absent mothers, and often is not remedied by an attainable or desired object
choice. If one takes a dozen or so of the films still remembered, one is struck by their
explicitly Oedipal scenarios, by the recurring rivalry between fathers and sons, by
jealousy between friends, brothers, or companions. Rebellion, as Kracauer has already
pointed out, is followed by submission to the law of the fathers, but in such a way that the