Cultural Hieroglyphs

“Spatial images are the dreams of society.

Wherever the hieroglyphics of these

images can be deciphered, one finds the basis of

social reality.”—Kracauer

Screenings, etc.

Today 2: Dracula (en Español)

Today 4: VampyrFriday: Rules of the Game

Today’s Agenda

Montage, sound, and the social: Deserter

The Blue AngelThe German industrial contextThe cultural hieroglyph: ExpressionismSound and staging

Deserter

Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Aleksandrov:Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-à-vis the visual

fragment of montage will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage….

The new technical discovery is not a passing moment in the history of cinema but an organic escape for cinema’s cultural avant-garde from a whole series of blind alleys which have appeared inescapable.

Heinrich Mann:Addressing a newly founded popular league for the

encouragement of artistic film-making (Volksverband für Filmkunst) after the showing of Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg in 1928, he called for German films that would emulate the Russians’ ability to dramatise the work, social conditions, and mental set of large popular audiences; films that would not be potboilers to make profit for the industry’s moneymen, deliberate falsifications of what actually went on in the modern world, or escapist flights into remote ethereal regions…. ‘We do have such directors. They are eager to base their work, poetically, on the real nature of our time, to depict real figures in its atmosphere. Let them be allowed to go ahead. The Russian example shows how authentic unfalsified effects can be achieved.’ (Prawer 11; italics added)

German context

IndustryStyle/NarrativeStarDirectorOthers?

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German industrial contextTech/Corp/State Nexis:

Tobis-Klangfilmoligopoly, vertical integration UFA: Babelsburg

Individual productions have status within the corporation, and can aspire to represent the entire industry. “It was not Germany’s first sound film—but it was the most prestigious so far. The commissioning studio (UFA, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) had grown out of an organization founded during World War I by the German government and army to counter enemy propaganda, and had recently come under the control of a staunchly right-wing press baron [Hugenberg] and a group of industrialists and bankers whose chief business manager, Ludwig Klitzsch, was given the task of finding a project that would unite cultural prestige with the kind of popularity that promised commercial success. This was to inaugurate UFA’s newly built sound stages: a cruciform arrangement of four studios with built-in sound equipment grouped around a central administrative area. Intricate negotiations had been necessary to obtain workable patents…

IndustryState/StudioProducerStarDi

rectorStoryKlitsch lured back Erich Pommer, a successful producer who had found new fields for his energies and enterprise in the USA, to head a production company within the UFA organisation and find a vehicle for the first sound film that would star Emil Jannings, also recently returned from Hollywood where he had been crowned with the first Academy Award ever conferred on an actor….One of the films for which he had received this award had been directed by the Austrian-born Josef von Sternberg…The subject Jannings suggested, the life and death of Rasputin, did not interest Sternberg; Jannings therefore fell back on another, long-cherished project: to play the central part in an adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat. (Prawer 10)

Social RepresentationMontage discourse: intentional representation of social conflicts

Hollywood discourse: censored, filtered representation of social conflicts

Kracauer’s account: An analysis of the simple surface manifestations of an epoch can contribute more to determining its place in the historical process than judgments of the epoch about itself….The very unconscious nature of the surface manifestations allows for direct access to the underlying meaning of existing conditions. [At the same time] the interpretation of such manifestations is tied to an understanding of these conditions. (67/SB 111)

German Expressionism?

German Expressionism

German Expressionism

Production Design: UFALAND

Production Design: Cluttered Set

Realism, “The New Objectivity,” and the

return of expressionismMann: ‘We do have such directors. They are eager to base their work,

poetically, on the real nature of our time, to depict real figures in its atmosphere. Let them be allowed to go ahead. The Russian example shows how authentic unfalsified effects can be achieved.’ (Prawer 11; italics added)

Prawer’s human capital account of UFALAND: Most experienced of all was the set designer and sculptor Otto Hunte: he had worked with [Fritz] Lang and Joe May since [1919], and had continued with both of them, working with May on The Indian Tomb and with Lang on the Mabuse films, Die Niebelungen, Metropolis, [Spies] and [The Woman in the Moon]…Sternberg was particularly grateful to him for the set of the dark street that leads from the day-time world of the professor’s flat and school to the night-time world of the stage.He became so fond of this set that he would not allow it to be struck… (20)Sternberg understood Jannings…and has left a most amusing portrait of his gluttony, childish tantrums, and egocentricity without minimising his abilities as an actor who took a masochistic delight in miming suffering and humiliation. This found a ready response, not only in Germans humiliated by the Versailles Treaty… (25)The remoteness of the Blue Angel world from that of the real German of 1925-9 is strengthened by the absence of motor cars, gramophones, radios and even…the cinema. (32)

Realism, “The New Objectivity,” and the

return of expressionismKracauer’s cultural hieroglyphic account: Despite all

efforts to maintain neutrality for the sake of the status quo, the façade of New Objectivity began to crumble after 1930. This is corroborated by the disappearance of those street and youth films which during the stabilized period had served the paralyzed authoritarian dispositions as a dreamlike outlet. Such screen dreams were no longer needed, for now that the paralysis had subsided, all kinds of leanings, authoritarian and otherwise, were at liberty to manifest themselves. As in the postwar period, the German screen became a battleground of conflicting inner tendencies. (215/SB 129)

The narrow interiors of The Blue Angel are endowed with a power of expression rarely even aspired to during the stabilized period [1925-1929]. There is a promiscuous mingling of architectural fragments, characters and nondescript objects…. As in Carl Mayer’s postwar films, the persistent interference of mute objects reveals the whole milieu as a scene of loosened instincts. Perfect conductors, these objects transmit Janning’s delayed passion as well as the waves of sexual excitement emanating from Lola Lola. (217)

Sound and Staging: Rath Meets Lola

DVD Chs. 5-6

Industrial Hieroglyph?

The Administrative Core

Kracauer: The Blue Angel can be considered a variation on Karl Grune’s The Street. Like the philistine from the plush parlor, Jannings’ professor is representative of the middle class; like the philistine, he rebels against the conventions by exchanging school for The Blue Angel, the counterpart of the street; and exactly like the philistine, this would-be rebel again submits—not, it is true, to the old middle-class standards, but to powers far worse than those from which he escaped. It is significant that he increasingly appears to be the victim of the manager rather than Lola Lola’s personal slave. Love has gone, indiscriminate surrender remains….This archetypal character, instead of becoming adult, engages in a process of retrogression effected with ostentatious sel-pity. (218/ SB 131)