Watkins on Elsaesser

The "German cinema of the 1920s" (Elsaesser 18) picked up a few epithets along its way past the second world war. Thomas Elsaesser's "Expressionist Film or Weimar Cinema?" looks at two of these, as well as at two of the writers responsible for their popularization.

Siegfried Kracauer, with From Caligari to Hitler (1947), and Lotte Eisner, with The Haunted Screen (1969, originally published in French in 1952), take retrospective, exilic looks at a portion of Germany's cinematic output during the twenties. What they are looking for, and what they believe they have found, is evidence of trauma in Germany's commercial (Kracauer would say) and artistic (Eisner would say) output. These films both reflect the post-World-War-I political situation and presage the political situation which was to follow but shortly afterward.

What Kracauer sees in Expressionist Film--his titular choice the films of his study--is a spreading societal evil. In Caligari, Nosferatu, Rotwang and many other villains of the German screen are to be found "the prototypes of those madmen, charlatans and tyrants who took Germany, Europe and finally most of the rest of the world, into another disastrous war" (21). He treats Expressionist Film as a narrative whole, tracing the Nazi seed from its germination in the womb of Caligari to its eventual dissemination throughout the whole of the German nation (if this truly is the case, it causes one to wonder if the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda films was not due in some small part to an audience primed for the content by Expressionist cinema).

Is it wrong to saddle German cinema, specifically, with such a burden, since there were other media and other forms of artistic expression which, conceivably, could have shared some of the blame? Perhaps, though Kracauer does not view Expressionist Film alongside that which is exemplary of "high art," but alongside that which is able to seize society on a phenomenal level. This seizure is beyond high art, because for him there is no high artist, no auteur-as-agent.

Eisner's take on what she terms "Weimar Cinema" stands in contrast to this way of thinking. It is precisely this notion of auteurism, in fact, which leads her to the broader definition of "Weimar Cinema." The German cinema of the 1920s is, for her, a continuation of an artistic movement reaching back a full century: that of German Romanticism. Her conception of Weimar Cinema is a conception of a cinema which shares with German Romanticism a sense of the sublime in nature and a penchant for the grotesque. The German cinema of the 1920s is to her "the culmination of a long development of the 'demonic', exacerbated by the lost war, and testifying to a national character inclined at times of crisis or disgrace to turn irrational, choleric and manic-depressive" (24).

Weimar Cinema is as much an aesthetic development for Eisner as Expressionist Film is an economic development for Kracauer--which should not be taken to mean that Kracauer is unconcerned with aesthetics or that Eisner remains ignorant of the impact of the economic situation on auteurism. Both approaches are problematic. The films Kracauer discusses, for example, only make up a small percentage of those released in Germany during the twenties, and of those he elects to discuss, only a handful could be considered to have been among the most popular of their time. Eisner's claims of a new romanticism, furthermore, are challenged by her own insistence on "influence" as an explanatory concept.

It is important to remember that the respective labels Kracauer and Eisner impose on their select examples of 1920s German cinema "name two imaginary identities" (Elsaesser's label). They agree neither on which specific films should be their focal points nor on what it is the films common to both their discussions have to say to them. Whatever seems to Kracauer and Eisner to be apparent in the films is not something which seemed readily apparent to audiences and critics of the twenties, of course, and what they see when they look back is partly symptomatic of a desire to get answers where answers are not so easily gotten (the high stylization and abstraction of the films in question makes it difficult to say what should be looked upon as kitsch and what should be looked upon as the realest representation of a nightmare as could possibly have been committed to film).

Kracauer's and Eisner's labels, regardless of which of the two is the more appropriate, are inextricably bound to the modern conception of what was the "German cinema of the 1920s." That conception is understandably incomplete, since early film stock was not built to last forever, or even beyond the films' first runs. They have helped to create an idea of 1920s German film which is in the very process of outlasting those films. A question this may lead one to ask oneself is what use their labels have beyond the act of labeling. Does a better understanding of what kinds of films immediately predated a horrific historic event help to prevent similarly horrific events from occurring in the future?