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FILM NOIR AND THE EXILE
OF GERMAN FILMMAKERS IN HOLLYWOOD Â Â Washington University, Spring
2001 German 494, Film and Media
Studies 490, Comp Lit 4949, English 4501, Literature and History 4941  Lutz Koepnick   Hitler refugees such as Fritz
Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, and Billy Wilder played a
significant role in the emergence of film noir during the 1940s.
Common wisdom has often explained this prominence of German exile directors
in film noir by seeing film noir as a direct expression of
exile and despair. Separated from a home that had gone crazy, exile
directors—according to this argument—revitalized Weimar expressionism in
Hollywood so as to articulate personal gloom and warrant forms of authorship
amid a studio system dedicated to standardized genre products and escapist
star vehicles. This seminar interrogates the German roots of film noir
in order to complicate this reasoning. It explores the stylized shapes
and traumatic narratives of film noir in order to examine dominant
notions of film history and authorship, of cultural transfer, national
cinema, exile and displacement, and the popular. Readings and discussions in
English. Undergraduates with permission of instructor. Â |
    HANDOUTS  LECTURE SERIES Caught by
Politics: German Exiles and American Culture during the 1930s and 1940s Â
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The following books are required
and can be purchased at the Bookstore:  ·      Â
Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar
Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge,
2000. ·      Â
Hill, John W., and Pamela
Church Gibson. The Oxford guide to film studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998. ·       Kaes, Anton. M. London: BFI, 2000. ·      Â
Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. Eds. Film Noir Reader.
6th ed. New York : Limelight Editions, 2000. Â Additional readings are
marked with an “*” and will be available in reader
to be purchased from the German Department. |
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Online Submission.
Participants will be asked to provide one online position paper on selected readings.
These 500 word submissions shall be send online to the entire class
twenty-four hours before the class session for which the readings are
assigned. ·      Â
Seminar Paper.
Participants will be asked to compose in the courÂse of the semÂester either:
two essays (5-8 pages), topics will be suggested or may be proposed; or one
critical research paper (15-20 pages). Those students preferring to write a
research paper will be asked to submit a one-page abstract and to have their
topics approved by April 5.  Essay(s): 40% Position Paper: 20% Participation: 40%  Ridgley 328 M 2:30 – 3:30 & W 2:30 – 3:30  314.935.4350 |
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Required screenings take
place on Wednesdays in Brown 100, at 4 pm. Â 1/17: Robert Siodmak, People
on a Sunday (1929) 1/24: Fritz Lang, M
(1931) 1/31: Karl Freund, Mad
Love (1935) 2/7: Fritz Lang, Fury
(1936) 2/13: Fritz Lang, You and
Me (1938) [special in-class screening] 2/14: Ernst Lubitsch, To
Be Or Not To Be (1942) 2/15: Fritz Lang, Hangmen
also Die (1943) [special in-class screening] 2/21: Robert Siodmak, Phantom
Lady (1944) [Steinberg Hall, 8 pm] 2/22: Hans Richter, Dreams that Money Can Buy
(1944-47) [Steinberg Hall, 5 pm] 2/28: Billy Wilder, Double
Indemnity (1944) [Steinberg Hall, 8 pm] 3/7: Otto Preminger, Laura
(1944) 3/21: Fritz Lang, Scarlet
Street (1945) [Steinberg Hall, 8 pm] 3/28: Edgar Ulmer, Detour
(1945) 4/4: Robert Siodmak, The
Spiral Staircase (1946) 4/5: Josef von Sternberg, The
Shanghai Gesture (1941) [special in-class screening] 4/11: Robert Siodmak, The
Killers (1946) 4/18: Billy Wilder, Sunset
Boulevard (1950) |
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 (S: Screening / F: Film / T:
Text)  WEEK ONE  January 16 Introduction  January 17 S:      Robert Siodmak, People on a Sunday (1929)  January 18 F:      People on a Sunday T:      Stephen Crofts, “Concepts of National Cinema” (in
Hill/Gibson)  WEEK TWO  January 23 F:      People on a Sunday T:      Thomas Elsaesser, “Erich Pommer, ‘Die UFA’, and Germany’s
bid for a studio system”  January 24 S:      Fritz Lang, M (1931)  January 25 F:      M T:      Anton Kaes, M (7-38)  WEEK THREE  January 30 F:      M T:      Anton Kaes, M (38-80)  January 31 S:      Karl Freund, Mad Love (1935)  February 1 F:      Mad Love T:      John Belton, “American cinema and film history” (in
Hill/Gibson)          Douglas Gomery, “Hollywood as industry” (in Hill/Gibson)          E. Ann Kaplan, “Classical Hollywood film and melodrama”
(in Hill/Gibson)  WEEK FOUR  February 6 F:      Mad Love T:      Thomas Elsaesser, “To be or not to be: extra-territorial in
Vienna-Berlin-Hollywood”          *Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “What is a Minor
Literature”  February 7 S:      Fritz Lang, Fury (1936)  February 8 F:      Fury T:      Stephen Crofts, “Authorship and Hollywood” (in Hill/Gibson)          WEEK FIVE  February 13 No class S:      Fritz Lang, You and Me (1938) T:      *Tom Gunning, “You and Me”  February 14 S:      Ernst Lubitsch, To Be Or Not To Be (1942)  February 15 No class S:      Fritz Lang, Hangmen also Die (1943) T:      *Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the
1940s (sel) *David
Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style”  WEEK SIX  February 20 T:      *Max Horkheimer / Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry”          *Nico Israel, “Adorno, Los Angeles, and the Dislocation
of Culture”  February 21 S:      Robert Siodmak, Phantom Lady (1944)  February 22 F:      Phantom Lady T:      Thomas Elsaesser, “Caligari’s legacy? Film noir as film
history’s German imaginary”          *Catherine Portuges, “Accenting L.A.”  WEEK SEVEN  February 27 F:      Phantom Lady T:      *James Naremore, “Old is New: Styles of Noir” Tony
Williams, “Phantom Lady, Cornell Woolrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic” (in
Silver/Ursini)  February 28 S:      Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity (1944)  March 1 F:      Double Indemnity T:      *Steve Neal, “Questions of Genre”          Tom Ryall, “Genre and Hollywood” (in Hill/Gibson)  WEEK EIGHT  March 6 F:      Double Indemnity T:      *James Naremore, “Modernism and Blood Melodrama” (sel)          Borde and Chaumeton, “Towards a Definition of Film
Noir” (in Silver/Ursini)  March 7 S:      Otto Preminger, Laura (1944)  March 8 F:      Laura T:      *Joan Copjec, “The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space
in Film Noir”  WEEK NINE  March 20 T:      *Doreen Massey, “Double Articulation: A Place in the World”          *Edward Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and
Marginals”  March 21 S:      Fritz Lang, Scarlet Street (1945)  March 22 F:      Scarlet Street T:      *Deborah Thomas, “Psychoanalysis and Film Noir”  WEEK TEN  March 27 F:      Scarlet Street T:      *Deborah Thomas, “How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male”  March 28 S:      Edgar Ulmer, Detour (1945)  March 29 F:      Detour T:      Raymond Durgnat, “Paint it Black” (in Silver/Ursini)          Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir” (in
Silver/Ursini)          Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, “Some Visual Motifs of Film
Noir” (in Silver/Ursini)  WEEK ELEVEN  April 3 F:      Detour T:      *Elizabeth Cowie, “Film Noir and Women”  April 4 S:      Robert Siodmak, The Spiral Staircase (1946)  April 5 No class S:      Josef von Sternberg, The Shanghai Gesture (1941)  WEEK TWELVE  April 10 F:      The Spiral Staircase T:      *Kaja Silverman, “Body Talk”  April 11 S:      Robert Siodmak, The Killers (1946)  April 12 F:      The Killers T:      Robert Porfirio, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film
Noir” (in Silver/Ursini) *Jonathan
Buchsbaum, “Tame Wolves and Phoney Claims: Paranoia and Film Noir”  WEEK THIRTEEN  April 17 F:      The Killers T:      *Marc Vernet, “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom”  April 18 S:      Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (1950)  April 19 F:      Sunset Boulevard T:      Paul Kerr, “Out of What Past?” (in Silver/Ursini)  WEEK FOURTEEN  April 24 F:      Sunset Boulevard T:      *Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses”  |
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 Internet Movie Database
 Film and Media Studies Site,
Olin Library, Washington University http://library.wustl.edu/subjects/film/ Â German Cinema Site, UC
Berkeley http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/germanfilmresources.html  Selected Bibliography of
Readings on German Film (UC Berkeley Library) http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Germanfilmbib.html  The German-Hollywood
Connection http://www.german-way.com/cinema/index.html  Film Museum Berlin /
Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek http://www.filmmuseum-berlin.de/ Â CineGraph (Hamburgisches
Centrum für Filmforschung e.V.) http://www.cinegraph.de/en/index.html  Stichworte zur Geschichte
des deutschen Films (Goethe Institute) http://www.goethe.de/z/wwfilm/stichw/degesch.htm  German Film Links http://castle.uvic.ca/german/439/glinks.html  German Film Links (via
About.com) http://worldfilm.about.com/movies/worldfilm/msub-ger.htm?once=true&] Â German Film and Related
Topics (Bibliography) (University of Houston) http://www.uh.edu/academics/de/frieden/germanfilmread.html  Expressionist Film in the
Weimar Republic http://users.deltanet.com/users/lukelin/gerfilm.html  German Expressionist Cinema
1919 - 1933 (by Fabian Ziesing) http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/user/73853/gerexp.html    |
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