MIES VAN DER ROHE AND THE MOVING IMAGE Lutz Robbers A ...

middle class’s moral values, desires and habits of perception. The individual’s striving for a
higher spirituality, inner edification and contemplative pleasures suddenly was confronted with
cinema that was immediate, corporeal and popular. 114
By speaking out in favor of a reformed cinema as a “means for the education of the masses
115
that combines instruction with entertainment,” the social-liberal elites hoped to gain control
over the aesthetic and narrative codes of representation of the new medium. 116 For this
progressively-minded group the “cinematograph represents a cultural progress” as the theologian
Adolf Sellmann declared in 1912, a possible weapon in the battle against the wide-spread feeling
of cultural degeneration and rampant materialism. 117 Hermann Häfker, one of the first voices that
most emphatically advocated a cinema that would function in the service of ‘higher’ values
without sacrificing its popular appeal, imagined already in 1908 a cinematographic
Gesamtkunstwerk as an interplay of different art forms, reconciling words and images. 118
114
On the sociological and cultural-historical implication of the irruption of cinema see Arnold
Hauser, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur, vol. 2 (München: C.H. Beck'sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1953), 481-515. Regarding the cultural critical discourses of the time see
Schweinitz, ed., Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909-1914. Kaes,
ed., Kino-Debatte
115
Alfred Heinze, "Kunst und Kino," Der Kinematograph, no. 30 (1907). Cited in Diederichs,
Frühgeschichte deutscher Filmtheorie, 20.
116
Horrified by film’s openly manifested commodity character and its ecstatic visuality, the
conservative part of the cultural elite attempted to defy the threat by clinging on to an outdated
conception of culture.
117
Adolf Sellmann, "Kinoreform," Bild und Film 1, no. 2 (1912), 50.
118 In a 1908 two-part essay about the “cultural meaning of the cinematograph” Häfker draws
comparisons between different media: writing and print, photography and phonography. The
novelty of cinema Häfker detects in the medium’s ability to record and reproduce events without
human intervention. He also imagined the total experience of cinema: “It is the question whether
if and to what extend one can produce an total artistic effect through the inclusion of other art
forms to cinematography, that is automatic and free music, the spoken word, sounds (thunder
etc.), atmospheric interior spaces, a calculated program sequence etc.” Hermann Häfker, "Die
Kulturbedeutung der Kinematographie und der verwandten Techniken. Können kinographische
92