by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a peculiar presentation on
Turner Classic Movies, an elaborate 2014 documentary on the films of Weimar-era
Germany called From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the
Masses. I had assumed this would be a relatively
normal TCM documentary — narrated in English and with a few film clips
interspersed with a lot of talking heads — instead it was made by Rüdiger
Suchsland (which sounds more like the name of a place than a person — I
couldn’t help but think, “Suchsland, Suchsland, über alles”) and the narration
was in German (they didn’t do what PBS usually does when they show foreign documentaries and have an English
voice-over replace the original). What’s more, the visual content consisted
almost exclusively of film clips, not only from the Weimar-era dramatic films
but from actual newsreels and amateur footage from the same time, and some of
the parallels between what documentarians of the time were recording in the
streets of Berlin and Germany’s other major cities and what fiction filmmakers
were reproducing in the great German studios (between the two World Wars the
German studios were the best-equipped and most technologically advanced in the
world outside of Hollywood) were among the most interesting parts of the film.
The title came from a controversial 1947 book by Siegfried Kracauer, From
Caligari to Hitler, which made the case
that the filmmakers of the Weimar era had consciously or unconsciously
reproduced the conflicts within Germany, psychological and social as well as
political, that ultimately brought the Nazis to power in 1933.
I hadn’t known
much about Kracauer personally but I wasn’t surprised when this film noted that
he was a member of the so-called “Frankfurt School,” a group of Marxist
scholars including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who
essentially attempted to update Marxism to include a critique of mass culture
and an analysis of how the capitalist ruling class used it to inculcate its
values among the masses. I’ve never actually read Kracauer’s book, though I’ve
seen a lot of the major movies of the Weimar era and some of their directors —
notably Fritz Lang, who if I were forced to pick just one would be my all-time
favorite filmmaker, both for the obsessiveness with which he told his story and
the sheer range of his approach (though if I had to pick one movie as the
greatest film of all time it would probably be Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey — I remember my
disappointment when the results of the last Sight and Sound poll of the 10 greatest movies of all time came out
and Hitchcock’s Vertigo had
surpassed Citizen Kane at the top
of the list; I remember thinking that if any movie deserved to chart above Kane it was 2001, and though I love Vertigo
I’d rate at least three other Hitchcock films — Shadow of a Doubt,
Notorious and Strangers on a
Train — ahead of it), as well as the number
of genres in which Lang pioneered
(he was making “Hitchcock movies” before Hitchcock was and James Bond movies
well before Ian Fleming created the character — and, praise by, Suchsland
devoted quite a bit of time to Lang’s 1928 film Spies, which pioneered both the Hitchcock and Bond films; no fewer than three
1930’s British Hitchcock films, The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage, rip off key sequences or plot points from Spies, and when I saw the complete Spies from Kino Lorber the film came off as less
Hitchcockian and more Bondish than it had in a 90-minute cut version I’d first
seen in the 1970’s). Anyway, Kracauer’s analysis was ridiculed by many of the
surviving filmmakers who had actually worked in Weimar Germany; in his
post-film commentary TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said that Lang had claimed he made
his two-part film Die Nibelungen
in 1923-24 to exalt the German people instead of criticize them, and in his
1965 autobiography Josef von Sternberg said that Kracauer’s claim that the
students who harass their professor in The Blue Angel were the prototypes of the Hitler youth. Sternberg,
a native Austrian who made all but two of his films in the U.S., said that when
he went to Germany to film The Blue Angel in 1930 he’d never heard of the Nazis, and while he was there he ran
into two of their rallies but otherwise had no contact with them. As I
mentioned, virtually this entire film was in German with English subtitles —
though ironically Fritz Lang was represented by a late-1960’s documentary
interview he had filmed in English, and one of the modern-day talking heads,
U.S. professor Eric Weitz, was also shown speaking English. (Presumably he was either subtitled or voice-overed in the original
German release of this documentary.)
If there’s a point to be made for this
documentary, it’s that the cinema of Weimar Germany encompassed far more than
the dark, brooding, atmospheric films most movie buffs think of — Wiene’s The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The
Student of Prague; Lang’s The
Spiders, Destiny (whose German title, Der
Müde Tod, literally translates as Weary
Death), Dr. Mabuse, Die
Nibelungen, Metropolis, M and The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Pabst’s The
Joyless Street, Pandora’s Box, Diary
of a Lost Girl and The Threepenny
Opera, Sternberg’s The Blue Angel — when they think “Weimar German cinema.” It also
encompassed light-hearted musicals with titles like Drei von der
Tankstelle (literally “Three from the Gas
Station”) and The Congress Dances
(a musical about the Congress of Vienna, of all things), many of them starring
Willy Fritsch and Lillian Harvey, who became a superstar team in early German
sound films anticipating Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the U.S. (though
ironically before sound came in Fritsch had been the juvenile male leads in
Lang’s Spies and Woman
in the Moon). There was also a strain of
socially conscious films that came about during what Suchsland called the “New
Sobriety,” the period between the currency reform of 1924 that ended the
hyperinflation and the worldwide depression of 1929, in which (at least
according to him) German cinema moved away from the Expressionism of the Caligari period and became more realistic. One of the
paradigmatic examples was a rarely seen film from 1929 called People
on Sunday, made on a shoestring budget and
self-financed by its illustrious participants, including Robert and Curt
Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Eugen Schuftan and Billy Wilder. (In his 1969
interview in The Celluloid Muse Wilder
— one of the few Celluloid Muse
subjects who was still making movies when he was interviewed for it — recalled,
“We borrowed the money from the uncle of Robert Siodmak, the director. And
Robert was the director for a very simple reason: when kids play football on a
meadow the one who owns the football is the captain, and Robert owned the
camera.”) It anticipated the French New Wave films of three decades later and
was a simple story of two young (straight) couples out and about on a Sunday,
and as Suchsland pointed out it began with a deliberate rejection of movie-star
culture: two of the protagonists are shown messing up publicity photos of Willy
Fritsch and Lillian Harvey.
Suchsland also mentioned that the German Social
Democratic Party had its own filmmaking operation, devoted to making movies
about working-class people in dire straits due to the financial situation —
including one in which an old man commits suicide and the director cuts to a
group of 1-percenters who see the story in the newspaper and wonder why today’s
workers are so weak-willed that they give up so easily. At least one of the
frustrations of a documentary like From Caligari to Hitler is it whets your appetite for long-unavailable or
hard-to-find movies — you’ll see clips from an unfamiliar but
fascinating-looking film and think, “Gee, I’d love to see that!” In this case, the movie I’d most like to see after watching this one is Nerves, made the same year (1919) as Caligari and apparently even more extreme — and effective —
in its stylization. From Caligari to Hitler suffers from the pretentiousness of its theorizing —
Siegfried Kracauer was one of the founders of modern-day “critical theory” and
you can definitely see its roots here (after From Caligari to Hitler Kracauer wrote another book, Theory of
Film, which Pauline Kael ridiculed in her
review, saying that Kracauer couldn’t just enjoy watching Fred Astaire dance
like the rest of us; he had to construct a theory under which Astaire’s work
could be validated in serious intellectual terms) — and certainly a version
with an English-language narration would have been more satisfying to a U.S.
audience, but it’s still an interesting look at one of the most important eras
in any country’s cinematic
history even though, if Douglas Sirk’s 1937 film La Habañera is to be believed, the common assumption that the
Nazi years were an artistic wasteland and German films didn’t start getting
good again until the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, when a new generation of
directors like Schlondorff (interviewed here), Herzog, Wenders and Fassbinder
emerged and put German cinema back on the international map, is simply not
true.
