Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

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xxii Steffen Hantke Americanism of Cold War politics behind the Iron Curtain—but no horror films. Not a single one. Why not? Can horror film not be made to serve the interests of a totalitarian regime? Why do the monstrous abjections of horror cinema not lend themselves to the vilification of enemies of the ruling elite? Why does horror cinema appear to be useless to the requirements of political propaganda? These are questions for another time and place, yet questions that may be crucial for a critical assessment of the politics of horror film. 9. Exceptions to these accounts that place so much emphasis on German expressionist filmmaking tend to be thematic histories: Reynold Humphries’ The American Horror Film: An Introduction, and Darryl Jones’ Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. Both mention German expressionist films as examples of genre archetypes, themes, and stylistic idiosyncrasies, but are not interested in determining to what degree the style of prewar German filmmakers has had a lasting effect on the genre of horror film. See Darryl Jones, Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold, 2002) and Reynold Humphries, The American Horror Film: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002). 10. Klaus Kreimeier, in his history of the German Ufa, keeps using the expression “the ‘gothicizing’ films of the Weimar Republic” (109) instead of using genre terminology. 11. Gruenberger goes on to classify Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker as political satire. 12. In Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror, James Twitchell underwrites this notion of German horror classics as “art films” by contrasting directors like Murnau with those working in popular culture. An “important” film like Murnau’s Nosferatu is not interested in “advancing the myth [of the vampire]” but instead “promulgate[s] one particularly self-conscious version” of this myth (Twitchell 141). 13. “…horror production by the German film industry [after the disruption of cinematic traditions during the Third Reich] did not return in any significant form until the late 1960s” (Halle, “Unification Horror” 284). 14. Kreimeier sees the Ufa style more as a set of production practices than a concrete and discernible set of visual conventions: “a strong capital base, squandered carelessly, a talent for large-scale organization and a tendency to go astray in microscopic detail; devotion to artistic excellence and to its perversion, which was empty perfectionism; a delight in the imaginative use of technology and in its reverse, which was mere technical slickness; a quest for philosophical power, but pursued in an intellectual vacuum; a ‘will to form’ that produced an amorphous ruin; craftsmanship, imagination, and diligence, and the waste of all those virtues through intellectual arrogance and the lack of a governing concept” (152). Kreimeier continues: “This interplay between perfectionism and inarticulateness, like that between mysticism and intellectual vapidity in the plot of Metropolis, was part of the ‘Ufa aesthetic …’” (155). 15. “. . . dies war ein Programm gegen die ‘Wirklichkeit’ und eine Absage an jeglichen Realismus. Seine Gestalt gewann dieses Konzept jedoch in höchstens zehn bis fünfzehn Werken, die als ‘klassische’ deutsche Stummfilme, heute zum ‘unvergänglichen Erbe’ der Kinematographie zu zählen sind” (Kreimeier 125–6). 16. For a more detailed discussion of film careers across the historical turning-point of the Zero Hour, see Sabine Hake, “The Legacies of the Past in the Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction,” in Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: Texas University Press, 2001), 210–31.
xxiii Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film 17. If there was a rupture in continuity between Weimar and Bonn, it could perhaps be attributed to the films indebted to the fantastic, which constituted a significant part of prewar German cinema. “In contrast to its Weimar counterpart,” Rentschler writes, “Nazi cinema denigrated the film of the fantastic as well as filmic realism. The former remained too open to irrational forces; the rightful place of the fantastic was to be an everyday of bright uniforms, hypnotic rituals, and dazzling spectacles” (216). 18. For this approach, I am strongly indebted to Thomas Elsaesser’s discussion of the relationship between Weimar film and American film noir, which, as Elsaesser points out, “does not ultimately make sense as history if considered in terms of demonstrable cause and effect, agency and consequence” (420). Instead, Elsaesser suggests that historians read Weimar film through the lens of film noir, an ideological operation that serves “the function of simultaneously ‘covering up’ and ‘preserving’ the inconsistencies, multiple realities and incompatible entities named by German expressionist style, political exile and the Hollywood film industry, constructing an effect of self-evidence by giving them a single name and a cause-and-effect ‘history’” (440, n6). To the degree that American film noir appears as a kind of “afterlife” of German expressionist film during the Weimar years, postwar German horror film could be considered a similar form of afterlife. 19. The haggling over the proper genre label makes Siodmak’s case exemplary of the larger problem I have been discussing in the introduction. One critic, for example, refers to The Spiral Staircase as “a thriller-cum-horror set in 1906 New England and inside an effectively used Victorian-Gothic mansion” (Greco 74). Discussing the production history of The Spiral Staircase, Greco also points out that the film was considered a vehicle for Hitchcock and his idiosyncratic evocation of mood (74), and that producer David O’ Selznick had considered Fritz Lang as his first choice of director (75). Another critic, Lutz Koepnick, cites Hollywood agent Paul Kohner calling Siodmak’s style “vividly realistic” (169), but refers to The Spiral Staircase as meeting “the aesthetics of horror” (184) and being one of the “Hollywood gothics” (185). With reference to Lang and Hitchcock, Koepnick points out that The Spiral Staircase is essentially a whodunit (185), but that it also, very much like a neo-horror film, targets the sphere of the domestic, “contrary to [the] Victorian ideology” one might expect from its turn-of-the century New England setting, “as a space not of security and refuge but of terror and anxiety” (185). To qualify it further as a horror film, Koepnick also points out a scene in which a subjective shot literalizes the murderer’s disgust at his victim’s muteness by erasing the mouth from her face (he describes this as “surrealist iconography” 188), as well as the underlying process of forcing an audience to submit to, and perhaps ultimately enjoy, the killer’s sadistic gaze (188). Sabine Hake has similar problems placing Siodmak’s postwar film Nachts Wenn der Teufel Kam in a generic context. She classifies it as a “noirish thriller” (96), but suggests, albeit obliquely, a relationship to horror film by placing it next to Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene (by virtue of both directors being returned exiles) and then suggesting that both films use “the familiar Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde motif to evoke the disturbing image of a nation ravaged by guilt” (Hake 96).
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