German Expressionism in the Audiovisual Culture / Der deutsche Expressionismus in den Audiovisuellen Medien E-Book

• Herausgeber: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Popular Fiction Studies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 484

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts machte zeitgleich mit dem Expressionismus eine neue Kunstform ihre ersten Schritte, die Bild, Sprache und Musik in sich vereinte: der Kinofilm. In Deutschland hatte die expressionistische Ästhetik einen enormen Einfluss auf dieses neue Medium, der sich in Filmen wie Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Der Golem (1920), Nosferatu (1922) oder Metropolis (1927) zeigt und bis heute seine Spuren hinterlassen hat. Dieser Band analysiert, wie Themen, Motive, Mythen und Ästhetik des expressionistischen Kinos der 1920er Jahre in den audiovisuellen Medien bis ins 21. Jahrhundert fortwirken und welchen Einfluss sie auf Myth Criticism oder auf populäre Gattungen wie Fantasy, Horror oder Science Fiction nach wie vor ausüben.

Leseprobe

[1]German Expressionism in the Audiovisual Culture / Der deutsche Expressionismus in den Audiovisuellen Medien

[2]Popular Fiction Studies

edited by Eva Parra-Membrives (†) and Albrecht Classen

volume 7

Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina (Ed./Hrsg.)

[3]German Expressionism in the Audiovisual Culture

Myths, Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction

Der deutsche Expressionismus in den Audiovisuellen Medien

Mythen, Fantasy, Horror und Science-Fiction

[4]Bibliografische Information der Deutschen NationalbibliothekDie Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.

Die Publikation dieses Bandes erfolgte mit Unterstützung des Drittmittelprojekts „Estrategias de Innovación en Mitocrítica Cultural“ (AGLAYA, H2019/HUM-5714), gefördert durch die Comunidad de Madrid und den Europäischen Sozialfonds und dank der folgenden Institutionen: Universidad de Alcalá (UAH), Forschungsgruppe der UAH „Estudios de Recepción“ (RECEPTION, CHH2010/R24), Ministerio de Universidades (spanische Regierung) und Fonds Next Generation (Europäische Union).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24053/9783823395454

© 2022 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen

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ISSN 2197-6392ISBN 978-3-8233-8545-5 (Print)ISBN 978-3-8233-9545-4 (ePDF)ISBN 978-3-8233-0398-5 (ePub)

[5]Contents

Acknowledgements

Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina

Introduction

The Reception of German Cinematic Expressionism: A Multidisciplinary, International and Contemporary Phenomenon

1

Expressionism, Cinema, and Literature

Carmen Gómez García

The debate over cinema in expressionist literature

Julia Magdalena Piechocki-Serra

Utopie und Dystopie in

Die andere Seite

(1909) von Alfred Kubin und

Midsommar

(2019) von Ari Aster

Cristina Zimbroianu

Alfred Döblin’s

Berlin Alexanderplatz

in Francoist Spain

2

Expressionism, Cinema, and Music

Magda Polo Pujadas

Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene op. 34

by Arnold Schönberg

Programmatic music conceived as pure music?

Jesús Ferrer Cayón

The “expressionist impact” of

Die Teufel von Loudun

(Krzysztof Penderecki, 1969) in the

film-opera

for TV, by Joachim Hess and Rolf Liebermann

3

Expressionism in Audiovisual Media

María Carmen Gómez-Pérez

Homage to German Expressionist Cinema: von Sternberg’s Proposal

Celia Martínez García

The long shadow of German Expressionism in

Die Mörder sind unter uns

Manuel Maldonado-Alemán

Simulation, Überwachung und fremdbestimmte Identität

Die urbane Dystopie in

Dark City

Carlo Avventi

Moderne Abgründe

Die dämonische Leinwand des David Lynch

Luis N. Sanguinet

Von Caligari zu Mr. Robot

Das selbstreferenzierende und verdoppelnde Erbe des expressionistischen Kinos

4

Expressionist Myths in the Audiovisual Culture

4.1

The Myth of the Vampire. The legacy of Murnau’s

Nosferatu

Ingrid Cáceres-Würsig

Nosferatu

als ästhetisches und kosmogenetisches Muster für Vampir-Serien in Streaming-Diensten

Jorge Marugán Kraus

Vampires, Oral Fixations and their Connection with Sexuality in Two Films:

Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror

by Friedrich Wilhem Murnau (1922) and

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

by Francis Ford Coppola (1992)

Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo Pérez

The

femme fatale

in Victorianism and the

fin-de-siècle

Feminine vampiric duality

4.2

The Myth of the

Golem

and the Artificial Intelligence

Roland Innerhofer

Der künstliche Mensch im Expressionismus

Zur Faszination einer Filmfigur

María Jesús Fernández-Gil

Conflicting Narratives

The Otherness within Expressionist Approaches to the Golem vs Cynthia Ozick’s Affirmation of the Myth’s Jewishness

4.3

The Myth of

Faust

Emilio Sierra García

Faust in Murnau and Sokurov

From Cinema to the Sense of Myth

5

The Expressionist Aesthetic outside Europe

Montserrat Bascoy & Lorena Silos

Expressionistic Trends in

Persepolis

: The Role of Fantasy in Narratives of Memory

Satoru Yamada

The Failure of the Diffusion of German Expressionist Cinema in Japanese Cinema by

Benshi

through

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Contributors

Bibliography

[9]This volume is dedicated to our colleague and friend Eva Parra, director, and creator, together with Albert Classen, of the ‘Popular Fiction Studies’ series, without whom this book could not see the light of day. Eva was a fighter and a tireless worker, as well as a beautiful person who left us when we least expected it and whom we will always remember and carry in our hearts.

[11]Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Prof. José Manuel Losada (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), coordinator of the Research Project AGLAYA “Estrategias de Innovación en Mitocrítica Cultural” (H2019/HUM-5714). The current edition has been made possible thanks to the previous project, funded by the Community of Madrid and the European Social Fund (ESF), and as a result of the activities of the High-Performance Research Group from the University of Alcalá, RECEPTION “Reception Studies” (CCHH2010/R24) which I am honoured to lead.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the Scientific Committee that helped me with their recommendations regarding the selection and improvement of articles: Andreas Grünewald (Universität Bremen), Belén Santana (Universidad de Salamanca), Claudia Cabezón Doty (Universität Heidelberg), Georg Pichler (Universidad de Alcalá), Isabel García Adánez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Javier Albo (Georgia State University), Johnni Langer (Universidade Federal da Paraiba), José Enrique Monterde (Universidad de Barcelona), José Manuel Losada (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), and Susanne Cadera (Universidad Pontificia de Comillas).

Finally, I would like to thank Andrea Alfonso González (“Beca de Introducción a la Investigación” of the Universidad de Alcalá) and, especially, Patricia Rojo Lemos (“Beca Margarita Salas” of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid), whose collaboration was made possible thanks to funding from the Ministerio de Universidades (Spanish government) and the Next Generation programme (European Union).

Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina

[13]Introduction

The Reception of German Cinematic Expressionism: A Multidisciplinary, International and Contemporary Phenomenon

Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina

Expressionism is a cultural movement that emerged in Germany in the early 20th century and initially manifested itself in painting. In contrast to previous currents, such as Realism (which tried to reflect reality in an objective and imitative way) or Impressionism (which tried to suggest reality), artists such as E.L. Kirchner and Franz Marc proposed a new aesthetic aimed at reflecting the feeling that reality evokes in the painter. With forceful strokes, loud colours and violent forms, expressionist artists reflected anger, bitterness or pleasure from a subjective perspective, managing to express feelings that strongly impact the viewer.

Expressionist aesthetics soon manifested themselves in media other than painting, appearing in literature (in works by Strindberg, Werfel, Benn, Heym, Döblin and Kafka) and in music (in pieces by Schönberg, Berg and Webern). Simultaneously to the birth of Expressionism, a new art form that fused images, words, and music was also beginning to emerge. It was an art form which burst onto the scene with such an overwhelming force within the German-speaking realm that its power remains undimmed even to this day. That art form was cinema. Between 1920 and 1927, under the influence of Expressionism, German cinema produced classic films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), Der Golem (Paul Wegener, 1920), Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926) and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), whose aesthetic legacy endures. Indeed, a century after these productions, there is no escaping the extent to which the expressionist aesthetics of these films has permeated the visual arts of the 21st century.

These were the first “silent” films, i.e., with sound (live music) but without words (dialogue). Curiously, these silent films without dialogue, despite new [14]technologies that easily integrate all the arts into a single artistic product (or perhaps because of this), have today become what is known as cult films, as they are immensely popular, especially among young people, despite the passage of time. Today’s audiovisual media (films, TV series and video games) ooze expressionist motifs: images of vampires identical to Murnau’s Nosferatu in horror films, recreations of the expressionist Faust, depictions of Wegener’s Golem, replicas of the robot Maria from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, fantasy films recreating the motifs of expressionist films, or science fiction films imbued with the languian metropolis. There is a massive current use of expressionist myths, as well as their use in popular genres such as Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction.

To understand how the expressionist aesthetic, born at the beginning of the 20th century, has permeated the visual arts of the 21st century in such an overwhelming way, we will now try to answer the following questions: In which artistic expressions, apart from cinema, can we find traces of this movement? What aspects are noteworthy in this reception? At what historical moment do we observe this influence? And, finally, in which countries do these traces appear?

In response to the first question, we will see below how the German Expressionist movement left its mark not only in the visual arts but also in literature, music, graphic novels and, above all, in the audiovisual media, specifically in cinema and television series.

As for the second question, this volume analyses the reception of German Expressionism from its appearance at the beginning of the 20th century to the present day in the 21st century. The volume demonstrates that this movement exerts a real fascination on contemporary art that began at the end of the Expressionist movement around 1928 and has continued to grow to the present day.

As far as the remarkable aspects of the expressionist reception are concerned, the extensive use of myths in film, which was already characteristic of German expressionist films, is striking. From the earliest film productions to today, myths are included in numerous audiovisual expressions. Three myths, in particular, stand out and will be studied in this volume: Firstly, the myth of the vampire, which already appears in Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, the first horror film in history, and which has since been found in countless movies and television series today. Secondly, we observe the predominance of the myth of artificial intelligence, the Maschinenmensch or the fear of the creation conscious life already present in German expressionist films such as Der Golem (Paul Wegener 1920) or Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1927) and whose traces can be seen, since then, in a host of audiovisual artistic expressions. Thirdly, the traces of the [15]expressionist Faustian myth can be observed since the release of Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926) based on the work of Goethe, a clear audiovisual reference for numerous current works of art. To understand these three specific myths (the myth of the vampire, the myth of artificial intelligence and the myth of Faust) and following the study of mythocriticism initiated by José Manuel Losada, this volume analyses the myth from a multidisciplinary point of view. The volume studies the reception of these myths in fields as wide-ranging as literature, graphic novels, cinema and television, theatre, painting and music and also offers interpretative approaches to these myths from disciplines as diverse as literature, audiovisual media, psychoanalysis, politics and sociology. As we will see throughout the volume, the authors also examine the differences and similarities between myths and the popular genres of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction.

Finally, regarding the geographical location where we can detect the traces of German Expressionism, we will see below how the imprint of this movement extends beyond the most obvious territories. Firstly, Europe stands out, but the Expressionist imprint can be detected not only in German-speaking countries (such as Austria or Germany) but also in countries such as France and Poland. German Expressionism is also clearly reflected in Russia, North America and Australia. Finally, the volume takes a novel approach to analysing the traces of German Expressionism in non-Western countries such as Syria and Japan.

The volume is divided into five chapters: the traces of Expressionism in literature; the reception of this movement in music; the imprint of Expressionism in the audiovisual media; Expressionist myths; and the reception of Expressionism outside Europe.

The first section of the book, entitled Expressionism, Cinema and Literature, analyses a key aspect in understanding the phenomenon of the reception of Expressionism in the audiovisual media: the emergence of a new art form–cinema–and the problematic relationship between this first silent cinema and literature. European literary art, whose beginnings can be traced back to the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the 5th century AD, has a long tradition. However, the cinema, as mentioned above, was born 15 centuries later, at the beginning of the 20th century, initially related to the entertainment industry but soon showing a unique and overwhelming artistic personality, capable of bringing together the artistic aesthetics of the time in a very complex and subtle way.

Carmen Gómez García introduces us to this artistic tension with an article entitled “The Debate on Cinema in Expressionist Literature”. Gómez García explains how the cinema or “literature without words” had to compete with drama. Although fascinated by the new medium, authors were torn between a [16]certain aversion to what they described as trivial and an optical seduction that was impossible to escape. However, as early as 1910, psychiatrist and writer Alfred Döblin recommended novelists adopt a “cinematic style”, a style that determined expressionistic prose to an extent they were referred to as “films of words”. Gómez García examines how the ambivalent fascination with the cinema, once the logical reservations of the cultural elite had been overcome, would determine the literary work of the period as well -literature of expressionism, which borrows greatly from silent films. Freed from its beginnings as a form of documenting reality, as simply a rapid succession of images or a type of shadow play, its illusory character would eventually prevail. The integration of this new medium into the broader cultural context went through its phases of denial, integration and adaptation, leading to a rich debate about literature and set against the backdrop of the new culture of the masses, proved to be an unstoppable process. Gómez’s article reflects how today, a century later, we can see that this fascination has retained all its power.

The second article of this chapter, “Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz in Francoist Spain”, written by Cristina Zimbroianu, focuses precisely on the author mentioned above, Alfred Döblin, and analyses his most famous novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, a work that has been, from the beginning, closely related to cinema. Döblin’s novel, inspired by Walter Ruttman’s film Berlin: A symphony of a big city, issued in 1927, reached 45 editions within a few years and was translated into several languages. Afterwards, the novel was adapted to cinema in 1930 by director Piel Jutzi in his film Hampa (released the following year in Spain). Much better known was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fifteen-and-a-half-hour television series made in 1980, later released in cinemas with shorter editing. The relevance of this novel in today’s audiovisual media is also evident in the latest film by German-Afghan director Burhan Qurbani in 2020, a free and modern interpretation of the novel. Zimbroianu studies also in her article how this novel was welcomed outside of Germany, precisely in Spain, where Piel Jutzi’s 1930 cinematographic version of the novel was released. The paper examines the reception of Berlin Alexanderplatz in Franco’s Spain, when all writing had to be approved by the censors, as well as the film adaptation of the novel in 1931, 1980, and 2020.

Julia Magdalena Piechocki-Serra focuses in the last article from this chapter, “Utopie und Dystopie in Die andere Seite (1909) von Alfred Kubin und Midsommar (2019) von Ari Aster”, on the symbolic conformation of a utopia in novelistic and cinematographic fiction. The paper begins with the work of Alfred Kubin, a very good friend of Franz Kakfa’s that, like Döblin, also lived for a time in Berlin. Additionally, he strongly influenced Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film work (especially in Nosferatu), which will be discussed later [17]in this volume. Piechocki-Sierra focuses on the utopian/dystopian imagination that the Austrian novelist Alfred Kubin displays in Die Andere Seite (1909) and the similarities and differences that this novel allows us to establish when comparing it with the recent film Midsommar (2019) helmed by American director Ari Aster. The author pays special attention to how the novel and the film imagine a utopian/dystopian space in which their respective narratives are located and from which they emanate. Despite the 110-year gap between Kubin’s work and Ari Aster’s film, fascinating similarities can be observed in both Kubin’s and Aster’s concept of the city, another relevant topic that will be discussed (by other authors like Manuel Maldonado) in this volume. As Piechocki claims, in both cases, the desire for a better, more modern world leads to an uncompromising tension and indecision between utopia and dystopia that cannot be differentiated in either Kubin’s novel or Ari Aster’s film.

The second section of this volume, Expressionism, Cinema and Music, approaches the phenomenon of expressionist music, so important in film productions. Despite being called “silent cinema”, the art of filmmaking was never silent: from its origins, it has been inextricably linked to sound, specifically music. From the earliest productions, films were accompanied either by piano or live orchestra. For this reason, any analysis of film must inevitably include musical analysis.

First, Magda Polo Pujadas explains one of the most emblematic works of the most famous expressionist composer in German-speaking countries: the Austrian citizen Arnold Schönberg. The twenties of the last century were decisive years for incorporating sound and music in the cinema. Consumers around the world were looking forward to the possibilities that this artistic language offered, and musicians were also interested to see how music acquired roles that led it to experiment between the emphasis of reality and the manifestation of emotions. Arnold Schönberg was no stranger to all this and composed Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene op. 34 (1929–1930), an experimental work that confirms the evident influence of German expressionist cinema. Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene op. 34 was a challenge to demonstrate that music contemplates by itself all the expressive possibilities and that it can awaken in us the same sensations that cinematographic images can create. Moreover, Schönberg intended to demonstrate the pre-eminence of music over other artistic languages – among them the cinematographic language – by containing in itself and in the compositional rules that governed it the possibility of expressing the inner world of the individual, of his pain, of his fear and his anguish. In this chapter, Polo analyses the score from a musicological point of view. She describes the score and the way Schönberg conveys the expressionist anguish and believes that it is pure music [18](autonomous or abstract) that has emotional content that appears and refers to the same music. Indeed, it is music that follows the parameters of music resulting from the acceptance of artistic expressionism and, especially, the cinematographic one. The programmatic aspect, then, becomes pure.

For his part, Jesús Ferrer Cayón focuses his research on the opera Die Teufel von Loudun, impregnated with expressionist aesthetics, by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, that was filmed as a television movie one month after its premiere in June 1969 at the Hamburg State Opera, thanks to the vision of Rolf Liebermann and the talent of Joachim Hess, an expert director in television adaptations who German expressionist filmmakers heavily influenced. Ferrer entitles his paper “The expressionist impact of Die Teufel von Loudun (Krzysztof Penderecki, 1969) in the film-opera for TV, by Joachim Hess and Rolf Liebermann”. As the author puts it, Penderecki conceived atmospheric expressionism to give a dramatic effect to this allegory of violence and of neurotic societies and promoters of political and religious fanaticism. To achieve this impact in music, he played with the effect produced by the contrasts between different types of instrumental writing and antagonistic vocal styles. Thus, from the tragic event that took place in France in 1634 (the death at the stake of Urbain Grandier, a parish priest with whom the mother superior of the Ursuline convent in Loudun was in love), Penderecki freed himself of the oppression exerted on Poland by the Soviet communist regime and the Catholic Church, by reflecting the different mental states that the unstable psyche of the characters experience when operating in different oppressive social environments. Going deeper in this same line, Hess, through an imaginative use of the visual effects, managed to capture more dramatically the tension, terror and truculence contained in this singular opera.

The volume’s third section is the most extensive, as it deals with the central and most relevant aspect of the volume: the reception of German Expressionism in the Audiovisual Media. Thus, this part comprises four chapters focusing on feature films and one chapter on television art. As mentioned above, the beginning of cinematic Expressionism is usually dated to the inaugural film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920). Usually, it ends with the spectacular Metropolis (Lang, 1927), which shows clear traces of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. However, as we will observe throughout this section, expressionist traces can be seen in the audiovisual media from 1929 to the present day.

Carmen Gómez Pérez starts this part of the book with his chapter entitled “Homage to German Expressionist Cinema: von Sternberg’s Proposal” and analyses the legacy of Expressionism in the first sound movie in German cinematography, Der blaue Engel released in 1929 after the UFA Studios’ proposal to The American film director Josef von Sternberg. To succeed in his creative [19]vision for this film, Von Sternberg had to overcome the challenges inherent in the switching of modes in communication. He made a film that would later be considered pioneering in many aspects, both technical and artistic, by scholars from different disciplines. In this chapter, Gómez-Pérez highlights Von Sternberg’s ability to adapt to the new mode of communication in the transition from silent movies to talkies, basing his proposal on the inheritance of Expressionism handed down from the golden age of Weimar cinema.

After this first homage to Expressionism in cinema, the second chapter of this section, “The long shadow of German Expressionism in Die Mörder sind unter uns”, by Celia Martínez García, examines the traces of this movement in Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 film. This production, the first one after the Second World War (1945) in Germany, and the paradigm of the so-called rubble films (Trümmerfilme) sets the beginning of a new film era born amid another postwar, another defeat and in an unprecedented context of emotional ruins. The film references Fritz Lang’s M, the recurring use of shadows, and Italian Neorealism, which, by definition, can involve a contradiction concerning the Expressionist concept.

In the third chapter, Manuel Maldonado focuses on the analysis of the concept of the city, so characteristic of expressionist films such as Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1927), which influences the picture of the city in this science fiction film and examines the representation of urban dystopia in Australian film director Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998). Under the title of “Simulation, Überwachung und fremdbestimmte Identität. Die urbane Dystopie in Dark City”, Maldonado starts his articles from the background of Georg Simmel’s reflections on the devaluation of the personal idiosyncrasy of the individual in modern metropolises, which constitutes the metropolitan form of alienation. By staging a dystopian future world and its adverse effects on the individual, the film warns of social aberrations and their impending consequences. The mixing of simulation and reality or the externally controlled construction of identity raises questions about the blurred demarcation line between virtual and non-virtual worlds and the dissolution of the self in contemporary society. Dark City exemplifies how the simulation of society and the unreal perception of reality lead to the alienation and denaturalisation of the individual. As a result of the absolute hypertrophy of an environment dominated by machines and technological surveillance, the real disappears into the simulation, behind which the relations of domination, social reality and the dissolution of the self-remain hidden. In its cinematic representation of the omnipotence of the city and the machine, Maldonado demonstrates how Dark City refers to films of German Expressionism, especially Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, which provides models for the design and architecture of the dark city.

[20]Carlo Avventi continues the analysis of expressionist traces in cinema, studying the work of American director David Lynch, in his chapter “Moderne Abgründe. Die dämonische Leinwand des David Lynch.” As explained by Avventi, from his first feature-length film Eraserhead (1977) to his more recent productions (Twin Peaks. Season 3 (2017)), the influence of the visual arts in David Lynch’s filmography is unmistakable. Alongside Edward Hopper, Henri Rousseau and Francis Bacon, German Expressionism also proves to be a model and source of inspiration for the US-American director. The author refers to how the caricature-like, grimacing portrayal of many of his figures, the distortion of spaces, the breaking up of linear narrative structures, the autonomy of shadows, the heightened colour palette and the alienation of the sound backdrop bear witness to this. Lynch’s films tear down the boundaries of the visible in order to reveal the background or abyss of reality. Yet this expressionist gesture not only serves Lynch to deconstruct conventional modes of representation in the sign of a crisis-like experience of reality but also increasingly reveals itself as media iconoclasm throughout his artistic career. Lynch thus emerges as a modern expressionist.

In the following chapter, Luis N. Sanguinet analyses the cinematographic legacy of the film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) in current films and series. As the author states, in the many fantasy and horror films of the Expressionist time, camera tricks and special effects that were still in the experimental stage were used to depict miraculous events. In Caligari, the distortion of reality created a visual form for the protagonist’s delusions. The film reflected the distrust of authority and psychiatric methods of the time, which gained prominence in the Weimar Republic due to the psychological aftermath of the First World War. Caligari used cinematographic techniques to depict states of mind at a social moment when the concept of identity was in deep crisis. Nowadays, but already in the last decades, self-questioning and narrative instability have gained importance as elements of the plot core in popular films and series. Meta-discursive frames and the decline of identity are current themes that serve to structure mental situations narratively and cinematographically in the so-called psychological thrillers. Sanguinet’s essay examines one such series, Mr. Robot (Sam Esmail, 2014–2019), and considers its parallels and convergences with Caligari, delving into the protagonist’s mental state. Mr. Robot updates cinematographic devices that are over a hundred years old and whose origins lie in Caligari.

The fourth block, devoted to the study of myths, entitled Expressionist Myths in the Audiovisual Culture, begins with an analysis of the legacy of the first horror movie in the history of film: Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu, which focuses on the myth of the vampire.

[21]Jorge Marugán Kraus begins this section with an essay that examines the psychological transcendence of the vampire myth comparing Murnau’s Nosferatu of 1922 and Coppola’s version of 1992 and is entitled “The Vampire, the Oral Fixation and its Connection with the Sexual through Two Cinematographic Works: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror by Friedrich Wilhem Murnau (1922) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola (1992)”. According to psychoanalyst Marugán Kraus, expert in Jacques Lacan, the myth of the vampire gives expression to two fundamental drives: the oral drive on which Murnau’s version focuses and the sexual drive that manifests itself in Coppola’s version. While in the oral drive the baby’s anguish manifests itself in the possibility of the food provider remaining empty, Murnau’s vampire reverses the roles and it is the subject himself who surrenders his vital essence, avoiding this anguish at the cost of himself. As Marugan Kraus explains, it is a monstrous vampire because it retains and imprisons the subject in the primitive time of the oral. Coppola, on the contrary, humanises the vampire who manifests himself as a seductive and desiring gentleman; he thus transcends the monstrosity and the oral fixation of Nosferatu, renouncing, like a romantic hero, his object of desire for love.

For his part, Francisco Javier Sánchez Verdejo, also examines the myth of the vampire in Coppola’s film but focuses on the representation of the visual archetype of the vampire in “The femme fatale in Victorianism and the fin-de-siècle: feminine vampiric duality”. As the author states, if an idea has terrified humankind, it is that of a being that has crossed the threshold of life but is able to return “from the other side” to suck the energy of those who stayed behind. Even worse than the fact that the vampire is dead is his responsibility for taking life to satisfy his insatiable thirst and fulfil his diabolical curse. Sánchez Verdejo examines also in his paper how, if there has been something that has been able to intimidate the patriarchal society it is the idea that death has been traditionally typified as a female being.

Finally, Ingrid Cáceres-Würsig ends this section with an essay entitled “Nosferatu als ästhetisches und kosmogenetisches Muster für Vampir-Serien in Streaming-Diensten”, which examines the influence of Murnau’s Nosferatu in present-day television series. As the author states, due to its novelty and originality, the expressionist-style image of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) has become a collective imagotype, nurturing the popular imaginary of cinema. The proliferation of digital content platforms such as Netflix, HBO and Prime Video has transferred an important part of the audio-visual narrative to this new environment, where the vampire genre, in all its variants such as fantasy, horror or tragicomedy, plays a central role. Cáceres-Würsig analyses how Murnau’s aesthetic-narrative model is still present in television series. On the one hand, [22]Cáceres-Würsig’s article suggests that the visual stereotype of the character of Nosferatu continues to inspire the demonic vampires that fill the screens and, on the other hand, that the narrative refers to the archaic vision of cosmic regeneration present in many mythologies.

In the following, the myth of the Golem and the artificial intelligence is examined through two different lenss.

First, Roland Innerhofer, in his essay “Der künstliche Mensch im Expressionismus. Zur Faszination einer Filmfigur” examines how the cinematic figurations of the artificial human in Paul Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) have a lasting appeal to this day. The artificial human as an alien, threatening and seductive life form awakens felings and emotions, fantasies and imaginative potentials that are mobilised more directly and effectively in the medium of the expressionist silent film than in the novel genre, whose media and aesthetic prerequisites cannot erase distancing and reflexive effects.

For her part, María Jesús Fernández Gil, in her article “Conflicting Narratives. The Otherness within Expressionist Approaches to the Golem vs Cynthia Ozick’s Affirmation of the Myth’s Jewishness” studies the use of the golem myth in Cynthia Ozick’s work. As is known, Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem (1915) and Paul Wegener’s film (1920) garnered so much critical and audience attention for their treatment of the golem that they soon became a paradigm for future versions of the legendary Jewish clay man. Fernández Gil states that Cynthia Ozick can be counted among the group of writers that have participated in the recent cultural resurgence of this figure and it is possible to argue that the golemic creature fashioned by this Jewish-American writer offers a counternarrative to works where the golem’s clearly demarcated cultural and ethnic origins were subverted. As Fernández Gil refers, Ozick goal is to restore the myth’s Jewishness. The conclusion of the author’s research is that the original myth is selectively transformed in all cases to make it fit a specific historical and sociocultural framework.

To conclude the section dedicated to Expressionist myths, Emilio Sierra examines the Faust myth in F.W. Murnau, with his film Faust (1926) and Sokurov’s Faust (2011), in his chapter “Faust in Murnau and Sokurov. From cinema to the sense of myth.” Sierra exposes the parallels and the differences between the myth of Faust in the German and Russian expressionist cinema. If Murnau’s Faust has its roots in the personal version of the director, very marked by Goethe’s version, highlighting disconcerting and innovative elements in silent cinema, it is, as the author states, light and chiaroscuro that leads us to meditate on the meaning and preponderance of “love and beauty before knowledge and immortality”. In the case of Sokurov, the reflection is marked [23]by his characteristic photography that focuses on the Faustian myth around the role of power as apogee and absence. Emilio Siera reflects on how the myth of Faust in these films will lead the spectator to think about beauty, death, the value of the present, power and love as questions that clarify not only the artistic realization of the myth but also the meaning of existence itself.

The book ends with a section devoted to the reception of German cinematic Expressionism outside Western borders, dealing with two examples focused on Syria and Japan.

The first paper of this section, by Lorena Silos and Montserrat Bascoy, is an essay entitled “Expressionistic Trends in Persepolis: The Role of Fantasy in Narratives of Memory” which analyses the role of fantasy in the graphic novel Persepolis (2000) that was brought to life in Vincent Paronnaud’s acclaimed animated adaptation of the same name in 2007. Both novel and film narrate Satrapi’s childhood in Iran during the Islamic revolution as well as her experiences as a teenager and an adult woman in Europe, all the while exploring the struggles of a female individual to find her place in a hostile environment. The authors claim that, in order to convey the anxiety triggered by totalitarianism and displacement, but, at the same time, to grant her narrative a patina of unreality or fantasy to alleviate the harshness of her memories, Satrapi resorts to the aesthetic tools of Expressionist cinema. Thus, their paper examines the influence of Expressionism on Persepolis and shows how expressionist techniques remain appropriate tools for capturing the fear and alienation suffered by an individual.

Finally, Yamada Satoru offers an innovative insight into the reception of German Expressionism in Japan. As the author states, Robert Wiene’s Caligari, released in 1921, had a great impact on Japanese society. The metaphors contained in this film stimulated the minds of great cinematic personalities such as Tanizaki Junichirō (1886–1965), Kinugasa Tēnosuke (1896–1982) and Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) to face the challenge of shooting an expressionist film. In this article, Satoru focus on benshi, the peculiar Japanese system of explaining the film with words to the audience.

The volume thus traces the reception of German Expressionism from its beginnings in the early 20th century to the present day in the 21st century and demonstrates how pictorial expressionism immediately caught up with the then nascent film industry and art. The tensions and relationships of film with other, much more established arts, such as literature and music, are shown. The prevalence of the cinematic element and its relevance today is also demonstrated. It shows how the influence of German Expressionism is not only widespread and observable in literature and music, but also how these two arts feed off each other. In addition, three myths are analysed which prove to be [24]characteristic in the study of the reception of German Expressionism in cinema: the myth of the vampire, the myth of the artificial man/woman and the myth of Faust. In addition, the book attempts to shed light on the differences between the concept of myth and the genres of fantasy, horror and science fiction, concerning the reception of German cinematic Expressionism in the world, from its appearance in 1920 to the present day. Finally, it is shown how German expressionist work has an impact on European or Western art, and even on Persian or Asian culture, as in the case of Japan.

[25]1Expressionism, Cinema, and Literature

[27]The debate over cinema in expressionist literature

Carmen Gómez García

Es gibt kein anderes Mittel, als das Kino.

Was ist daneben das Buch?

Was ist daneben das Theater?

[…]

Sie [Die Welt] stünde still, nähme man das Kino heraus. […]

Wer das Kino hat, wird die Welt aushebeln.1

The origins

In 1920, when Carlo Mierendorff wrote these lines in his essay Hätte ich das Kino!, barely 25 years had passed since, according to the most accepted conventions, the history of cinema had begun (on 28 December, 1895).2 Quite contrary to the fervour they express, the integration of the silent film into the first wave of expressionism would be marked by a debate that fluctuated between the rejection of its trivial content and a fascination with its visual appeal.

While that projection by the Lumiere brothers is generally considered to be the first in history, earlier, on 1 November 1895, the brothers Max and Emil Skladonowsky, the inventors of the bioscope, had exhibited their own moving images for the first time (and to a paying public) at Berlin’s Wintergarten Theatre. Eight films (at the time referred to “living photographs”), each only a few seconds in duration, showed a series of acrobatic feats, circus stunts, displays of boxing and other technical wonders.3

[28]It is true, however, that the early cinema cannot be disassociated, on the one hand, from other turn-of-the-century institutions of entertainment: cabaret, vaudeville, musicals, magic shows, circuses… those expressions of Schaulust and Unterhaltungslust that the public demanded and which were being shaped by the times. As Mierendorff would formulate it in the text already cited: “In einer Zeit, die alle in Beziehung setzt mit allen, konnte das starre Bild nicht mehr genügen”4. On the other hand, cinematography was a product of 19th-century industrialization, combining, accumulating and perfecting techniques that were already known and practiced in fairs, variety theatres and travelling cinemas, at the same time that it embodied the premises of 20th-century aesthetics. On this point, one might include Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Ernst Mach’s loss of rationality in human thought, or Georg Simmel’s “intensification of the nervous life”5, concepts in which, as in the cinema, there is a splitting apart of unitary images into diverse perspectives of varying duration and focus. To direct one’s attention rapidly for very brief instants to ever-different locations is to discover the principles of the cinematographic being, a term used by the “cine-sceptic” Henri Bergson in L’évolution créatrice (1907). This influence of the cinema on the viewer’s psyche was duly noted in what the journalist Hermann Keizl would refer to as “Großstadt-Psychologie”.6

The cinema, then, answered to the new emotional needs of a primarily urban public, the same that attended cabaret performances and on which the cinema depended economically. For this, in 1913 two extremely important Lichtspiel-Paläste were inaugurated: Berlin’s Marmorhaus and, in Leipzig, Europe’s first open-air cinema, with capacity for 1,000 spectators.7 Cinema spread in direct competition with conventional theatre, in 1909 sparking the inevitable debate over its value, and stimulating a fruitful aesthetic and sociological reflection on literature as well.

[29]The debate

The opinions of the expressionists themselves ranged from antipathy toward the new medium to the greatest of enthusiasm. Indeed, the first cinematic programs repeated and expanded upon the themes of established popular entertainment. Logically, gehobene Literatur was excluded from this:

Und wie sich die Welle der Schundliteratur über die Massen ergoß, so entstanden von hunderten kleiner Filmfirmen gedreht die Unsummen von Schundfilmen: in 250 derartiger Streifen stellte man 1910 97 Morde, 45 Selbstmorde, 51 Ehebrüche, 19 Verführungsszenen, 22 Entführungen, 35 Betrunkene und 25 Dirnen fest.8

It is thus to Schundliteratur (pulp literature) that we owe the “autonomous” beginnings of cinematic narrative. Nevertheless, as the cinema industry also hoped to win over the bourgeoisie–who had shown themselves to be adamantly in opposition–, more appropriate venues were sought (hence the so-called Lichtspiel-Paläste), as well as more sophisticated subject matter.

The reaction of the intellectuals was immediate: the harsher critics (such as Franz Pfemfert or Alfred Lichtenstein)9 railed against the damage that cinematic adaptations would do to the literary and theatrical industry, extending to the work of actors and the development of audiences. Other authors, meanwhile, such as Ferdinand Hardekopf and Walter Hasenclever,10 praised the visual power, immediacy and concentration of cinematic storytelling. Indeed, a good number of expressionists were fascinated by this new world of fleeting, strident and penetrating impressions, of images never seen before, of stories told with such ingenuity that they seemed to function as “extracts” of the powerful emotions generated by industrial mass-production.

Thus, these living or animated photographs stimulated a new perception and, from this, a new aesthetic. Jakob van Hoddis would employ the Reihungsstil to convey this rapid succession of images in verse, as can be observed in his poem Schluß: Kinematograph from the cycle Varieté (1911):

[30]Der Saal wird dunkel. Und wir sehn die Schellen

Der Ganga, Palmen, Tempel auch des Brahma,

Ein lautlos tobendes Familiendrama

Mit Lebemännern dann und Maskenbällen.

Man zückt Revolver, Eifersucht wird rege,

Herr Piefke duelliert sich ohne Kopf.

Dann zeigt man uns mit Kiepe und mit Kropf

Die Älplerin auf mächtig steilem Wege.

Mit Lebemännern dann und Maskenbällen.

Man zückt Revolver, Eifersucht wird rege,

Herr Piefke duelliert sich ohne Kopf.

Dann zeigt man uns mit Kiepe und mit Kropf

Die Älplerin auf mächtig steilem Wege.

Es zieht ihr Pfad sich bald durch Lärchenwälder,

Bald krümmt er sich und dräuend steigt die schiefe

Felswand empor. Die Aussicht in der Tiefe

Beleben Kühe und Kartoffelfelder.

Und in den dunklen Raum – mir ins Gesicht! -

Flirrt das hinein, entsetzlich! nach der Reihe!

Die Bogenlampe zischt zum Schluss nach Licht -

Wir schieben geil und gähnend uns ins Freie.11

Essential to this, in any case, was the fact that the viewer, as Walter Benjamin observed years later,12 would wonder whether there were something “optically unconscious” hidden in the images he has seen, and which therefore transcended his understanding of the cinematic form. This question would be addressed by Alfred Döblin, psychiatrist and dedicated cinema-goer, in his Berliner Programm (1913), in which he also proposed the Produktivkraft of the word, in a Kinostil or Döblinism, that is to say: a paratactic style built upon suggestive terms, neologisms, sparse vocabulary, and the use of rapid shifts that suggest to the reader the speed, complexity and disconcerting novelty of modern life. Little value is given to the action itself, and psychological characterization is rejected, as well as all description, explanation and com[31]mentary.13 In 1910, Döblin had recommended to dramatists: “Lernen Sie die Kürze und Gedrängtheit vom Kinema” and advocated the Kinostil: “höchste Gedrängtheit und Präzision”, as well as Plastik und Lebendigkeit in prose.14 Precepts like these, combined with montage and the use of terse telegrammatic language, can be observed paradigmatically in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and in his novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lung. Chinesischer Roman (1915), a clear example of the Döblinist style. The narrator of that work lives in a big city, which he observes through an open window. This allows him to explore the ambivalent relationships of gestural-visual language, employing a collage technique and the Reihungsstil:

Daß ich nicht vergesse–.

Ein sanfter Pfiff von der Straße herauf. Metallisches Anlaufen, Schnurren, Knistern. Ein Schlag gegen meinen knöchernen Federhalter.

Daß ich nicht vergesse–.

Was denn?

Ich will das Fenster schließen.

Die Straßen haben sonderbare Stimmen in den letzten Jahren bekommen. Ein Rost ist unter die Steine gespannt; an jeder Stange baumeln meterdicke Glasscherben, grollende Eisenplatten, echokäuende Mannesmannröhren. Ein Bummern, Durcheinanderpoltern aus Holz, Mammutschlünden, gepreßter Luft, Geröll. Ein elektrisches Flöten schienenentlang. Motokeuchende Wagen segeln auf die Seite gelegt über das Asphalt; meine Türen schüttern. […]

Ich tadle das verwirrende Vibrieren nicht. Nur finde ich mich nicht zurecht.15

Without question, the representatives of the literary avant-garde understood that, thanks to these new forms of optical narration, more could be transmitted than before. Characters could be described by their gestures, by mimickry; that is, not from within, but from without. The intention here was to emphasize the rigidness of the marionette, characteristic of modern types, and its “Gefühlsmechanik”, in the words of Alfred Polgar;16 one sought the fecundation of all the senses through the organ of sight, in an individual who was continually excited [32]and incited by external stimuli. As Emilie Altenloh would write in Theater und Kino,17 one characteristic of cinematography was the rapid development of the action, which corresponded to the needs of the big-city dweller, an individual habituated to the urban landscape rushing past him and to a generalized sensation of isolated moments, of a world condensed, seen in extracts. It was a world he was technically familiar with, which demanded his interaction and which had its repercussions on his physical and mental capacity for leisure. This was what had been denominated “trivialer Erholungstrieb”.18

It was, in any case, an ambiguous fascination. In 1910, Georg Lukács spoke of a soul-less medium, of a beauty that could not be subsumed into older categories, but which distanced itself from the metaphysical sphere of true art.19 The expressionist writers, influenced by values and concepts such as the soul or fate, made similar pronouncements. They saw the cinema as a medium of dynamic, superficial perception, a space of pleasurable regression in which the reigning artistic premises remained suspended. In their own endeavours, it would inspire a return to the Ur-Emotionen, to the realm of primordial, puerile sensations, to a narrative archaism based on the perceptive, the visual.20 The new medium became an exotic zone, one contrary to their own intellectual desires, but which nevertheless exuded an ingenuous, naïve attraction.

This ambivalent reaction of fascination and scepticism was in any case inevitable, due to the threat of change that the cinema posed to established culture, a change that would require the corresponding phases of integration and adaptation. This meant assuring a social hegemony, given that, at the dawn of the 20th century, art was still situated in a sphere that was only accessible through culture and training, still understood as a space of higher spirituality, a distillation of all that was noble, valuable, unique and ideal. Modernity, die Moderne, had disrupted this relationship definitively, and the consequences of capitalist industrialization, especially in cultural pursuits, which relied on the modern techniques of reproduction (Benjamin), were in effect a threat to the dominant cultural elite. Of this, cinema was the most visible exponent.

[33]As Schweinitz would affirm,21 the reasons that most intellectuals had for rejecting the cinema can be distilled into three:

The cinema industry prioritized the value of a work of art as merchandise; that is, its material interest took precedence over its presumed ideal, mythified character.

Cinema was aimed at the masses, at the very lowest layers of society; it articulated and gave voice to their aesthetic preferences in a way that denied the concept of culture and training, and thereby emphasized a plebeian, anti-authoritarian perspective. Art, then, was transformed into a populist institution.

This new, dynamic, visual medium demanded a new type of aesthetic perception. In consonance with the period, the visualization of communication assumed an unprecedented value, as something whose impact was sensorial rather than intellectual, with no time required for reflection. The cinema implied the simplification of artistic endeavour.

What was the path of acceptance like?

The change that would define the expansion of Kintöppe arrived in 1913. First, the most renowned actor of the time, Albert Bassermann, a self-declared enemy of the cameras (up to then he had refused even to be photographed), appeared for the first time in a motion picture, Paul Lindau’s Der Andere.22 Second, another star of the stage, Paul Wegener, not only acted in but co-directed Germany’s first hugely successful film, The Student of Prague (with a screenplay by Hanns Heinz Ewers). Third, the great dramatist Max Reinhardt used his own actors to make his first film, Venetianische Nacht.23 After the examples of Bassermann, Wegener and Reinhardt, the most important artists of the day felt pressured to attend the cinema themselves and to participate in adaptations of works by established authors–names such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Sudermann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler–who wilfully “consented” to the industrialization of their creations, giving further fuel to the debate.24

To this must be added the decision of the Verband deutscher Bühnenschriftsteller (1912) to cooperate with the emerging industry, which was becoming [34]more and more powerful.25 For the literary elite, this offered a new -and lucrative- possibility for re-valuing their texts; for the cinema industry, it was a way of appropriating the established forms of cultural discourse, with the aim of winning acceptance from a public oriented toward a traditional idea of culture as belonging only to them, as well as from the wider circles of workers. Thus, for the screening of modern productions that would be highbrow as well as lowbrow, Kinopaläste began appearing everywhere, designed by respected architects and artists. The new cinematic adaptations, which for the most part were highly pretentious works featuring theatrical stars, would constitute a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon.26 Finally, with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the development of the sound film, writers would lay aside all reservations about collaborating in the cinematic versions of their works and even participated in set design, as in the case of Georg Kaiser or Hugo von Hofmannstahl.27

What repercussions did the cinema have on literature?

There were basically three ways that literature related to the new medium:

Differentiation. Literature and cinema were viewed as two different media that needed to pursue their respective developments in parallel.28

Integration. Literature made use of the cinematic form as a mode of conventional narrative or theatrical language to adapt an originally literary work. On this point it will be useful to mention the Kinobuch published by Kurt Pinthus in 1913, of which I will have more to say later on.

Appropriation. The written work would draw upon the new forms of perception and reproduction characteristic of the cinema, as in the poetic cycle Varieté (already cited) by Jakob van Hoddis, or the anthology Der Selige Kintopp (1913/1914).

Das Kinobuch (1913)

This small volume was published by the prestigious Kurt Wolff Verlag, in the same year that the debate over the cinema began. With the exception of Heinrich [35]Lautensack’s essay Zwischen Himmel und Erde,29 Das Kinobuch had arisen from the desire to stimulate a generation of young authors and to react assertively to the attacks of the critics.30 The texts themselves, somewhat overly narrative, focused on psychological details; they decried the type of cinema writing that resembled a literary draft and did not take into account the peculiarities of the genre; at the same time, they playfully speculated about its forms, transformed and parodied its clichés, poked fun at the naivete mentioned earlier and the Schaulust of the public.

The contributors shared an attitude of detachment toward what was narrated, an ironic tone and an imaginative point of view. They were playing a kind of literary game with the cinematic form, not for creating cinema but based on the cinema that was popular at the time, which Kurt Pinthus analyzed in his prologue to the collection: in effect, the viewer wanted to see anything that would elevate him to the realm of the ideal, the fantastic, exaggerated and extraordinary, extending even to the grotesque and the kitsch; he wanted to be shaken to the very depths of his being.31 With this in mind, the texts in Das Kinobuch were aimed at “elevating” life, no longer opposing cinema (which they did not consider artistic), but seeking to create a better, more wonderful form of cinema, one that appealed to the senses and “awakened hearts”.32

The book, whose texts display a language and a freedom unheard of up to that time, went largely unnoticed; indeed, most of its readers and critics saw it as a joke. Even so, Pinthus would manage to define the three characteristics of cinema that fell within the essence of expressionist creation, both in film and in literature:

A limitlessness of context and setting;

Movement; the rapidness of gesture and rhythm;

Artifice; the tension created by the astonishing and unexpected.

All of this was entangled with the human being and his fate, as we know was the focus of all expressionist creation. Thus, claimed Pinthus, the works he was introducing were “Kino der Seele”,33 and so he was indifferent to whether they would ever actually be translated to the big screen.

[36]Der selige Kintopp (1913/1914)

In late 1913/early 1914, the Munich publisher Heinrich F.S. Bachmair would bring out a small book dedicated to the cinema, containing six poems by Johannes R. Becher, Emmy Hennings, Karl Otten and Sebastian Scharnagl (the pseudonym used by the publisher for his own literary works). Only 100 copies were printed, hand-numbered and intended to be gifts for the publisher’s friends.34

It is striking that most of these poems were not “Kino-Gedichte” strictly speaking; in fact, only the first of Otten’s two poems (Asta Nielsen) dealt with the cinema, along with Scharnagl/Bachmair’s own contribution:

Sebastian Scharnagl, Der Selige Kintopp

Wir starren unentwegt hin auf die Leinwand,

wo blasse Schatten ineinander schweben

erheben gar nicht den geringsten Einwand

betreffs des Schundprogramms, das sie hier geben.

Und unsere Lippen zucken jäh im Krampfe,

wenn sich Rivalen mit Pistolen schießen.

Doch endet tödlich dieser Liebeskampfe,

dann müssen unsre heißen Tränen fließen.

So lindern tröstlich wir die Feuerwunden,

die uns ein hartes Leben lächelnd schlug:

Was wir empfinden, das wird dort empfunden.

Wir grüßen Dich, Du heiliger Betrug

Der Leinwand mit den magren Schattenhunden,

die uns ein guter Gott ins Dasein trug.35

It should be noted, however, that the reader here encounters the same ambiguous perspective, against the common backdrop of the cinema as a refuge of pleasurable psychic regression.36 The “I” of the author becomes diffused in the “we” of the masses who flock to the cinema and undauntedly fix their gaze to the screen. The poem is linked with the idea then in vogue that the cinema possessed hypnotic powers, that it connected with obsessive moments that reduced one’s personality to “a sort of collective soul of the masses”.37 Indeed, the concealment of a higher state of socialization built on reason and culture was felt to carry with it a reduction to a lower, unsocialized layer that [37]was primitive in its instincts due to the contagious emotional effect it had on the mass audience.

Bachmair, for his part, would take special note of these indissoluble moments of regression and obsession; indeed, the regressive nature of the cinematic experience was thought to require a suspension of cultural norms to make way for the obsessive pleasures produced by archetypal images and emotions. Be that as it may, the Schaulust expressed by this impulse, this obsession, was being rekindled by the new medium. In 1913, the dadaist Walter Serner spoke frankly on this shameful and terrible question, which brought to mind a Troy in flames. “A morbid fascination with death and with pleasure,” said Serner, “is what brings people en masse to the cinema”.38

To delve deeper into some specific aspects of the era, in Der selige Kintopp the image of Asta Nielssen, the Danish actress and great diva of the expressionist decade, particularly in Germany, is particularly memorable:

Karl Otten, Asta Nielsen

Deine Hände sind ein Monogramm

in ein Schicksal eingedeutet

das am Boden kriecht und frißt, sich häutet

heimtückisch giftig wie ein Telegramm.

In ein Schicksal eingedeutet

wirst du wild von Leid verzehrt –

Ach dein Antlitz ist ein Flammenschwert

deiner Haare Glocke Unglück läutet.

Wild wirst du von Leid verzehrt

und du rückst die Glieder unbeholfen

Mädchen der Fabrik das eines Mannes Wege quert

und in Liebe sich aufbläht wie ein Schiff auf Felsengolfen.

Mädchen der Fabrik das eines Mannes Wege quert

und sich gierend auflöst in der Augen Strahl

das hypnotisch eingewiegt astral

seines Leibes schmales Brot verzehrt.

Gierend lösest du dich in der Augen Strahl

[38]weich gespreitet wie ein lichter Schein

kläglich schwindend fort wie einer Narbe Mal

du enttanzest den Statisten in ein Schicksal ein – -

Weich gespreitet wie ein lichter Schein

alle Menschen haben sich an dir geweidet

alle haben überall dich ausgekleidet

und versinken starr, so dein Lächeln scheidet

und du kamst und warst wie immer: rein!39

Otten stresses her state of being “rein” while repeating that this represents the relationship of the expressionists to the cinema. On the one hand, as cultural figures they felt threatened by Sinnlichkeit, by the atmosphere of game-playing and anti-patriarchal conflict they found in film, by the spell cast over the female audience by the screen, by her “weibliche Schaulust”;40 at the same time, they were captivated by the provocative, confident, self-aware aura of femininity transmitted by Asta Nielsen, the first media star to become an icon of the avant-garde, and who came to their own attention through the press. Even Pfemfert, who was so adamantly opposed to the cinema, would devote an entire page to her in Die Aktion.

Another ostensible particularity of Otten’s poem with regard to the cinema concerns its sense of widened perspective (in this case, of Nielsen’s hands): “Deine Hände sind ein Monogramm in ein Schicksal eingedeutet”. At the same time, the actress is presented as a kind of luminous, unreal and volatile being, recalling the illusory nature of Nielsen’s chimerical characters. With this we come to a second recurring aspect of these texts, and this is the relationship of cinema and its images to shadow, which arises inevitably from the two-dimensionality of the filmed image, the result of its homogeneous black-white-grey tonalities, and carries it into the realm of the extraordinary, the fictitious, the merely apparent, which, once it has been seen, is only barely comprehensible. What is real vanishes, but the shadow is eternal because it lacks reality.41 In a similar vein, Victor Klemperer would argue in 1912 that the cinema offered a life which was free, “otherworldly”42, or rather, “an earthly life exempt from gravity”, one of “joyful purity”, inasmuch as the idea was liberated from the heaviness of things (ibidem). This led to the same intellectual posture [39]