Alfred Abel as Joh Fredersen and Brigitte Helm as Robot Maria (Maschinenmensch)
Note from the Editors
In this issue, we present a new dossier on Metropolis as part of our ongoing “Featured
Classics” series. A brief description of this experiment in film archaeology can be found
here. We also include a new dossier in our “Extended Canon” series on Anders als die
Andern (Different from the Others), curated by Ervin Malakaj and Shoshana Schwebel.
We’re planning to expand our Film Dossiers section and invite your suggestions for
additional titles. If you would like to curate a dossier on a Weimar film based on archival
material, please click here.
In addition to the announcement of current publications, this issue also features an essay
by Brenda Benthien on Lichtspiel, Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel about G.W. Pabst. As always, we welcome your feedback, suggestions, and contributions to the site. Please send your comments
to weimarcinema@gmail.com. If you're interested, feel free to sign up for our mailing list here.
Let us know if you plan to attend the Silent Film Festival in Pordenone, Italy, October 7-14, for a possible get-together.
The 2024 Pordenone Silent Film Festival
(October 7 to 14) will feature the following restorations and rediscoveries from the Weimar Republic:
Vanina (Arthur von Gerlach, 1922); Raskolnikow (Robert Wiene, 1923) Dagfin (Dagfin lo sciatore) (Joe May, 1926);
and Saxophon-Susi (Miss Saxophone) (Karel Lamač, 1928. In addition, two films with Anna May Wong will be shown:
Song (aka Schmutziges Geld ) (Richard Eichberg, 1928) and Großstadtschmetterling (Richard Eichberg, 1929).
On September 25, 5 pm (GMT),
the Weimar Film Network hosts an online discussion about plans to represent Weimar cinema’s first “nasty women”
across various curatorial and archival initiatives. Participants are Kate Saccone (University of Amsterdam),
project manager of the Women Film Pioneers Project as well as Maggie Hennefeld (University of Minnesota)
and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam), curators of the DVD/Blu-ray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women.
Register here!
Silent Film in Berlin: Ufa-Filmnächte
Ufa-Filmnächte: Kinomagie auf der Museumsinsel (August 21-23, 2024). The program can be found here.
— Stummfilmfestival im Babylon (September 5-15). This film series focuses on German and international
films released in 1924. The program features some of the best-known silent film musicians; it takes place
at the Babylon, an iconic movie theater from the late 1920s; and the entire festival is free. For the
full program, click here.
— The Zeughauskino is showing several restorations of Weimar films with live-music
from late November to mid-December. Click here for the program. Oliver Hanley presents his restoration of
Was ist los mit Nanette (1929) on December 12. Click here for details.
Babylon Berlin, the internationally
successful German television series from 2020 to 2022, returns to the U.S. for a fourth season after airing
in Germany two years ago. All 12 episodes of Season 4 will premiere in the U.S. in June and July 2024 on
the streaming channel MHz Choice (for $7.99 per month). Seasons 1 through 3,
which were previously available on Netflix, have also been moved to MHz Choice. Season 4 begins on New
Year's Eve 1930, one year after Season 3 ended with the stock market crash of 1929. A fifth season,
set in February 1933, will begin filming in the fall of 2024 for release in 2025.
MEGALOPOLIS, Francis Ford Coppola's
long-awaited film, premiered at Cannes in May 2024. Coppola wrote, directed
and financed the film himself in order to maintain complete control over it. Not only in its title, but
also in its futuristic urban setting, historical scope (from ancient Rome to the present), and philosophical
ambitions about the future of humanity, Megalopolis is reminiscent of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It also echoes
a lesser-known 1936 science fiction film, Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells, who published a scathing review
of Metropolis in 1927. Coppola's Megalopolis is distributed by Lionsgate Films and will be released in U.S.
theaters (including IMAX screens) on September 27, 2024.
The Deutsche Kinemathek, home to an
extensive research collection on filmmakers of the Weimar Republic, is moving from the Sony Building on
Potsdamer Platz to a new temporary home in the historic E-Werk in Berlin-Mitte, near Checkpoint Charlie.
The move is scheduled for January 2025. The E-Werk, a former electrical substation, will be converted to
house the film museum, library and archives. There are plans for a future film house in the center of Berlin.
Bauhaus and its relationship to National Sozialism
will be comprehensively examined in three exhibitions at three locations in Weimar: "The Bauhaus as a Site of
Political Contest, 1919-1933," at the Museum Neues Weimar; "Expelled - Confiscated - Assimilated, 1930/37,"
at the Bauhaus Museum; and "Life in the Dictatorship, 1933-1945," at the Schiller Museum. All are organized
by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and curated by Anke Blümm, Elizbeth Otto, and Patrick Rössler. The exhibitions
run from May 9 to September 15. For more information, please visit the exhibition website.
On the place of film in the Bauhaus movement, see Laura Frahm's recent book "Design in Motion: Film Experiments
at the Bauhaus" (2022).
A new score for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was performed live at a screening at
the Alte Oper in Frankfurt on February 17, 2024. The composer, former
"Kraftwerk" musician Karl Bartos, worked for four years on this new electronic
soundtrack, which is also available on CD. The film with the new
score can be found here. For details about the music and a reading of Caligari as a "key work
for transhumanism," see Andrian Kreye’s enthusiastic review of the premiere
(“Was für ein Triumph”). Bartos explains his “narrative music and sound design”
project in this 12-minute video (in English).
The 27th San Francisco Silent Film Festival moves for the first time from the
Castro Theater to San Francisco’s historic Palace of Fine Art, April 10-14, 2024.
Among others, the Festival will feature restorations of Die Strasse (Karl Grune, 1923) and G .W. Pabst’s forgotten 1928 film Abwege (The Devious Path). For more information,
click here.
The Stummfilmfestival Karlsruhe,
directed and founded by Josef Jünger, will
celebrate its 22th year of annual silent film festivals in 2024. There is also a new
website with a list of previous festival programs and
videos introducing rare silent films.
In a long review essay titled “Fragile, Resilient Weimar”
in the NY Review of Books
(February 8, 2024), Christopher R. Browning reflects on the precarious politics of
the republic between Hitler’s two attempts—in 1923 and 1933—to overthrow
democracy. Browning’s essay provides an important framework for examining
Weimar films, which are inherently part of that history.
A new restoration of Die Straße,
Karl Grune's influential 1923 film will be screened at the
Pordenone Silent Film Festival in October 2023. This restoration by Stefan Drössler
(Filmmuseum München) has been eagerly awaited. We are pleased to publish an extended version
of Drössler's introductory essay for the Pordenone catalogue. A DVD edition of the restored
version is planned for a later date. The essay can be found here.
Upcoming workshop: "Provincializing Weimar Culture: Global and Local Perspectives on
Interwar Germany" is the title of a workshop to be held in Utrecht (NL) on April 25-26, 2024.
The workshop will be organized by Nicholas Baer, Jochen Hung and Britta Schilling, with a
keynote by Uta Poiger on "Weimar and Now: Culture, Race, Politics". For more information, please click here.
100! Jahre Stummfilm
is the title of a three-month film festival (until September 10). It takes place at Berlin's famous
Babylon, which dates back to 1929 and still uses its original cinema organ. Curated by
Friedemann Beyer, the series includes many rarely seen German films such as Fräulein Raffke
(Richard Eichberg, 1923), Das alte Gesetz (E.A. Dupont, 1923), Buddenbrooks (Gerhard
Lamprecht, 1923), Erdgeist (Leopold Jessner, 1923), Der Schatz (G.W. Pabst, 1923), and
Schlagende Wetter (Karl Grune, 1923), among others. For the full program, click here.
Film History as Media Archaeology. When Thomas Elsaesser died unexpectedly in Beijing on
December 4, 2019, he had just given a lecture on film history as media archaeology at Peking
University and participated in a roundtable discussion with Siegfried Zielinski. His sudden
death came as a shock to scholars of film theory and history everywhere. Thomas was a pioneer
in Weimar film studies, most notably with his magisterial Weimar Cinema and After:
Germany's Historical Imaginary (BFI, 2000). As a small, belated tribute to his prodigious life's
work, we are pleased to link to the full transcript of his final lecture and the ensuing discussion
with Zielinski and the audience about the current state of cinema and media archaeology. The
conversation was first published in Interface Critique 3 (2021) under the title "Conversations on
Cinema and Media Archaeology - in memoriam Thomas Elsaesser (1943-2019)". We add the
conference program here and a short video clip of the Q&A here. Many thanks to Prof. Zielinski
for bringing this unique documentation to our attention.
Ein Sommernachstraum (A Midsummer Night's Dream), Hans Neumann's forgotten 1925
masterpiece, premiered in a newly restored print at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in July
2023. Chris Horak, who had initiated the restoration at UCLA, wrote a lengthy blog entry about
the film here Archival Spaces 327.
Weimar Cinema in 90 seconds?Here is the short trailer for "Beyond Your Wildest Dreams:
Weimar Cinema 1919-1933,” a BFI Southbank series of nine landmark films from the period.
The brilliantly edited clip is intended to "celebrate the sheer diversity of styles and genres from
the groundbreaking creative era of Weimar cinema.”
The Weimar Years is the title of a BBC 3 podcast consisting of five 18-minute episodes. Each
episode focuses on a specific theme: history (episode 1), art (2), sexuality (3), cinema (4), and
Weimar music and song (5). More details here.
The Haunted Screen:
Film History is World History is a podcast about the history of Weimar
cinema in 6 episodes of about 90 minutes each. More details here.
Mission 1929 - Das Online Game
appeared in January 2023 as part of the outreach program of The House of the Weimar Republic, which
opened in Weimar at the republic’s centennial in 2019 and is dedicated to all things Weimar. The
interactive online game (in German) wants to teach young Germans how precious democracy is and how quickly
it can vanish. The online game is accompanied by an interactive Online-Lernmodule (learning platform)
featuring several short films about Revolution und Aufbruch; Krisen der Anfangsjahre; Die goldenen Zwanziger;
Die Zerstörung. The game is also promoted by a YouTube trailer. See also Browsergame Mission 1929.
All Quiet on the Western Front
wins four Oscars – for best camera, film music, and production
design, as well as the Oscar for best International Feature Film in 2023. See the acceptance
speech here.
The BBC interview with the lead actor is here. Deutsche Welle produced a short
feature about the politics of this film, and several hundred users responded. All Quiet on the
Western Front was produced by Netflix and directed by the German director Edward Berger. It
currently streams on Netflix in German with English subtitles. The film is an adaptation of the
influential American film with the same title from 1930. Both are based on internationally
famous antiwar novel Im Westen nichts Neues by Erich Maria Remarque published in 1929.
Read about the highly contested German reception of this American film in the polarized
climate of Germany in December 1930 in this dossier. The reaction to this antiwar
film in 1930 was even more heated than the debate about Potemkin in 1926. See the dossier on
Potemkin’s German reception here.
German cinema and the effects of inflation in 1923
is the topic of a new film series, Die Freudlose Gasse: Die Auswirkungen von 1923 im Kino der Weimarer Republik,
presented by the Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt (DFF) in May 2023. See details (in German) here. The film
series accompanies a new exhibition with the title “ ``Weimar, weiblich: Frauen und
Geschlechtervielfalt im Kino der Moderne, 1918-1933” at the same venue from March 29 to
November 12, 2023. More details (in German) here.
Babylon Berlin Season 4,
co-produced between paid television network Sky and German public broadcasting company
ARD, was shown on Sky in late 2022; it’s expected to start in Germany on ARD not until Fall of 2023 and on
Netflix some time in 2024. Read the latest on this delay here.
ON SET. Filmstadt Berlin is a new app from the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek that
allows you to explore film locations and sets of Weimar films with the help of Augmented
Reality (AR). Check here.
See also the smartphone version in Google Play Store.
Memories of Desire, a 2019 autobiographical film by Victoria Schultz is an example of the
international afterlife of German Expressionism. This rarely-seen film was the subject of a
recent blog post by the Finnish film critic, Antti Alanen.
Commenting on the black and white, sharp-contrast film, he writes: “The mode has affinities with the
Kammerspiel films of the Weimar Republic such as Schatten and the whole théâtre intime cycle written by
Carl Mayer. These are films of interiority, starkly abstracted with stylized characters, spaces often
overwhelmed by large shadows.” See also Schultz’s website.
Phantome der Nacht.
100 Jahre Nosferatu is the title of a new exhibition by the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin
(Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg) between December 16, 2022 and April 23, 2023. For more details,
check here.
Babylon Berlin Season 4
premiered in Germany on Sky Atlantic on October 14, 2022. No date has been
set for the subtitled version on Netflix. While Seasons 1-3 have focused on events in 1929, Season
4 concentrates on 1930/1931. For more details about Season 4, check here(Guardian), here(trailer),
here(short episode list), and here(Reddit discussion thread).
Weimar, weiblich: Frauen und
Geschlechtervielfalt im Kino der Moderne, 1918-1933 is the title of a new exhibition at the
Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt. It is planned for the end of March 2023. More details (in German)
here.
Women in German Dissertation
Prize 2022: Mary E. Hennessy, Handmaidens of Modernity: Gender, Labor and Media in Weimar
Germany. 2021. U of Michigan, PhD dissertation. See Feminist German Studies
(Volume 38, Number 2) Fall/Winter 2022, 132.
1923 --
This fateful year is the subject of no fewer than seven books published in 2022
(a year ahead of its centennial). For the political, social, and cultural context of
films produced at the time, see the following titles: Volker Ulrich: Deutschland 1923.
Das Jahr am Abgrund. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2022; Jutta Hoffritz: Totentanz. 1923 und
seine Folgen. Hambug: HarperCollins Verlag, 1922; Peter Süß: 1923. Endstation. Alles
einsteigen! Berlin: Berenberg Verlag, 1922; Peter Longerich: Außer Kontrolle.
Deutschland 1923. Wien/Graz: Molden Verlag, 2022; Peter Reichel: Rettung der Republik?
Deutschland im Krisenjahr 1923; Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1922: Christian Bommarius,
Im Rausch des Aufruhrs. Deutschland 1923. Munich: DTV, 2020; Nikolai Hannig and
Detleve Manes, eds. Krise! Wie 1923 die Welt erschütterte. Berlin: Wbg Academic, 2022.
See also a review of the first five titles by Alexander Gallus, Das Weimarer Doppelgesicht,
in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (November 28, 2022).
Nicolas Cage paid homage
to The Cabinet of Caligari, in his 2022 Film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
The homage was depicted in a scene, which did not make the final cut
(it was too artsy for the studio), but can be viewed here. The
black-and-white scene imitated the silent film's setting and lighting.
According to IndieWire (June 2022), Cage said: “I always designed my performances
with the cinematic dream of getting back to silent film performance in general,
and German Expressionism in particular.”
All Quiet on the Western Front, a filmic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s blockbuster anti-war novel “Im Westen nichts Neues” (1929)
by the German director Edward Berger, premieres in a subtitled version on Netflix on October 27, 2022.
This film is also Germany’s entry for the 2023 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. See reviews of the German
film in USA Today,
NPR, and New York Times.
The Dossier on the German reception of the 1930 American adaptation is available here.
A new restoration by the Deutsche Kinemathek of Razzia in St. Pauli (Werner
Hochbaum 1932) premiered this fall at the 2022 Budapest Classics Film Marathon.
The Haunted Screen is the title of a six-part narrative podcast about Weimar cinema (available
through Apple or Google Podcasts and Spotify). The six episodes are written and presented by
Travis Mushett, professor of film & media at Fordham University. They run between 60 and 90
minutes each and concentrate on the classic films and directors. They are remarkably well
researched and easy to listen to. A brief article about the podcast can be found here. (Thanks
to Rick Rentschler for the tip.)
The Pordenone Silent Film Festival is the world’s leading international silent-film
festival. Each October, many hundreds of archivists and scholars from around the world
meet to see the most recent restorations of silent films. The festival has screened more than
than 300 films from the Weimar Republic since it began in 1982. For a complete database
of Weimar films shown between 1982 and 2018, click here.
Fritz Lang made a brief audio recording (“Leitworte”) about the universal language of
cinema to mark the premiere of Metropolis in January 1927. The recording, transcript, and
translation are here
Filmportal.de offers a succinct introduction to Weimar film in English (with valuable links
to historical documents in
translation). Check here
Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, vol. 2, the authoritative 673-
page history of documentary cinema in the Weimar Republic, is now available online.
Edited by Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann and Jean-Paul Goergen, it was published by
Reclam in 2005. Vol. 1 (Kaiserreich) and vol. 3 (Drittes Reich) are also online. Vol. 4 (nach
1945) is in production.
Zensurkarten -- An extensive collection of German film censorship
records is now digitized and available online. (Thanks to Oliver Hanley for sharing this information here).