A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany

A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany

Frances Guerin

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0816642869

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany's advance to technological modernity, light - particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light - became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life.In Frances Guerin's compelling history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light - electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights - and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin's interpretations center on use of light in films such as Schatten (1923), Variete (1925), Metropolis (1926), and Der Golem (1920). In these films we see how light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the narrative, and the central thematic concern. This history relieves German films of the responsibility to explain the political and ideological instability of the period, an instability said to be the uncertain foundation of Nazism. In unlocking this dubious link, A Culture of Light redefines the field of German film scholarship.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

residences defined by “the impression of an endless flow of space.”114 Here, in this dissolution of boundaries through an interaction of glass and light, this architecture forged new conceptions of the relations between inside and outside, public and private. In the case of the residential buildings, inside and outside became integrated: the walled- in outdoor patio and the large, symmetrical, sparse dining or indoor living room were often separated by floor- to- ceiling glass panes. Thus, walls of

the most remarkable feature of Und das Licht Erlosch is the adroit use of the lighthouse, the light of which is referenced in the film’s title. The chain of events that leads to Gerd’s near death, Werle’s downfall, and the young lovers’ eventual union is structured around the beaming light of the lighthouse. Moreover, the mise- en- scène in these scenes underlines the centrality of the lighthouse to the narrative structure; for the lighthouse and its regular, pulsating warnings in light either sit

36 However, what remains striking about the fi lm’s representation of the spectacle of steel production, and its simultaneous images of modernity and progress for a Germany at war, is the articulation of these attributes through a manipulation of light and lighting. For Das Stahlwerk der Poldihütte the enthrallment of the processes of steel production is both depicted and aroused in the audience through an equation between steel fabrication, the construction of the cinematic mise- en- scène, and

brought to life within the international arena of technological modernity. In particular, experiments with technological light in the films and other arts of France, Italy, Britain, and the United States are the silent context in the background of the fi lm analysis in chapters 2 through 6. Films, photography, architecture, theater, and everyday life on the streets of these other modern nations often used light and lighting to represent and engage with technological modernity. Any number of

Although both types of shadow are executed through an equally creative manipulation of the fi lm’s light sources, their relationship to the bodies of the casters is quite different. The shadows of the husband and wife animated in the window that compel the camera to move inside the mansion are not, strictly speaking, shadows. Unlike the shapes we see in the window, shadows cannot exist on their own: they are always dependent on, although not necessarily attached to, the solidity of the object that

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