1POPULAR CINEMA

iger. 18 Among the directors under contract at the new studio one finds
well-known personalities such as the Austrians Willi Forst and Gustav
Ucicky and the Hungarians Geza von Bolvary and Geza von Cziffra. All had
worked in Berlin at some point and become closely identified with things
Viennese. Now this “fifth column for the National Socialist cinema,” 19 to
quote Klaus Kreimeier, could be enlisted and relied upon to complete the
annexation of the filmic imagination.
Assessing the particular meaning of “Vienna” in the Wien-Film pr0ductions
requires a brief overview of what might be called typical images of
Vienna in Austrian and German films made before 1938. The Austrian productions
can be divided into four categories: historical films about the
Habsburg Empire and the rule of Franz Joseph; folk dramas and comedies
from the Biedermeier period; biopics about famous composers and musicians;
and sentimental love stories set in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Max
Ophüls’s Liebelei (1933) established the standard in the last category. The
new sound technology gave rise to a wave of big-budget films that featured
famous singers like Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth and covered the entire
range from formulaic operetta adaptations to ambitious biographies of
Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss I and II. While profiting from modernist
sensibilities in the choice of subject matter, the vast majority of Austrian
Vienna films from the early 1930s followed the formal conventions of
classical genre cinema.
More creative approaches could be found in the contributions by Forst,
from his first directorial effort, the Schubert biopic Leise flehen meine Lieder
(Quietly My Songs Are Weeping, 1933), to his repeated collaboration with
the screenwriter Walter Reisch on masterpieces like Maskerade (Masquerade,
1934) and Episode (1935). Only a few sound films took advantage of the
legacies of social realism from the silent period and incorporated them into
their portrayal of urban types and milieus; Werner Hochbaum’s remarkable
Vorstadtvarieté (Neighborhood Variety, 1935) is one such rare example.
A few directors also problematized the function of Vienna as a cultural
myth and, as in Erich Engel’s Hohe Schule (Haute École, 1934), offered revealing
insights into the opportunism behind the façade of cordiality and
equanimity.
In the German-made Vienna films from the early 1930s, the tendency
toward clichés was even more pronounced and rarely tempered by ironic
self-reflection. The critique of the big city that had produced the Weimar
classic Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) and its Austrian com-
The Annexation of an Imaginary City 155