Introduction 1

Home , Max Skladanowsky, Walter Hasenclever

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

GERMAN FILM THEORY 1907–1933

EDITED BY ANTON KAES, NICHOLAS BAER, AND MICHAEL COWAN

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Names: Kaes, Anton, editor. | Baer, Nicholas, 1985–editor. | Cowan, Michael J., 1971–editor. Title: The promise of cinema: German fi lm theory, 1907–1933 / edited by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, Michael Cowan. Other titles: Weimar and now ; 49. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016]. | “2016 | Series: Weimar and now: German cultural criticism ; 49 | Includes bibliographical reference. Identifi ers: lccn 2015049570| isbn 9780520219076 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520219083 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520962439 (ebook). Subjects: lcsh: Motion pictures—Germany—History—20th century. | Film criticism—Germany. | Motion pictures—History—20th century. | Film criticism. Classifi cation: lcc pn1993.5.g3 p765 2016 | ddc 791. 430943—dc23 lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049570

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper). Contents

Acknowledgments xiii User’s Guide xv

Introduction 1

SECTION ONE. TRANSFORMATIONS OF EXPERIENCE

1. A New Sensorium 1. Hanns Heinz Ewers, The Kientopp (1907) 13 2. Max Brod, Cinematographic Theater (1909) 15 3. Gustav Melcher, On Living Photography and the Film Drama (1909) 17 4. Kurt Weisse, A New Task for the Cinema (1909) 20 5. Anon., New Terrain for Cinematographic Theaters (1910) 22 6. Anon., The Career of the Cinematograph (1910) 22 7. Karl Hans Strobl, The Cinematograph (1911) 25 8. Ph. Sommer, On the Psychology of the Cinematograph (1911) 28 9. Hermann Kienzl, Theater and Cinematograph (1911) 30 10. Adolf Sellmann, The Secret of the Cinema (1912) 31 11. Arno Arndt, Sports on Film (1912) 33 12. Carl Forch, Thrills in Film Drama and Elsewhere (1912–13) 35 13. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Cinema (1912–13) 38 14. Walter Hasenclever, The Kintopp as Educator: An Apology (1913) 39 15. Walter Serner, Cinema and Visual Pleasure (1913) 41 16. Albert Hellwig, Illusions and Hallucinations during Cinematographic Projections (1914) 45

2. The World in Motion 17. H. Ste., The Cinematograph in the Service of Ethnology (1907) 48 18. O. Th. Stein, The Cinematograph as Modern Newspaper (1913–14) 49 19. Hermann Häfker, Cinema and Geography: Introduction (1914) 51 20. Yvan Goll, The Cinedram (1920) 52 21. Hans Schomburgk, Africa and Film (1922) 55 22. Franc Cornel, The Value of the Adventure Film (1923) 56 23. Béla Balázs, Reel Consciousness (1925) 58 24. Colin Ross, Exotic Journeys with a Camera (1928) 60 25. Anon., Lunar Flight in Film (1929) 62 26. Lotte H. Eisner, A New India Film: A Throw of Dice (1929) 62 27. Erich Burger, Pictures-Pictures (1929) 64 28. Alfred Polgar, The Panic of Reality (1930) 66 29. Béla Balázs, The Case of Dr. Fanck (1931) 68 30. Siegfried Kracauer, The Weekly Newsreel (1931) 70

3. The Time Machine 31. Ludwig Brauner, Cinematographic Archives (1908) 74 32. Berthold Viertel, In the Cinematographic Theater (1910) 77 33. Eduard Bäumer, Cinematograph and Epistemology (1911) 78 34. Franz Goerke, Proposal for the Establishment of an Archive for Cinema-Films (1912) 81 35. J. Landau, Mechanized Immortality (1912) 84 36. Heinrich Lautensack, Why?—This Is Why! (1913) 86 37. E. W., The Film Archive of the Great General Staff (1915) 88 38. Hans Lehmann, Slow Motion (1917) 89 39. Friedrich Sieburg, The Transcendence of the Film Image (1920) 92 40. August Wolf, Film as Historian (1921) 94 41. Fritz Lang, Will to Style in Film (1924) 95 42. Siegfried Kracauer, Mountains, Clouds, People (1925) 97 43. Joseph Roth, The Uncovered Grave (1925) 98 44. Fritz Schimmer, On the Question of a National Film Archive (1926) 99 45. Albrecht Viktor Blum, Documentary and Artistic Film (1929) 103 46. Béla Balázs, Where Is the German Sound Film Archive? (1931) 105

4. The Magic of the Body 47. Walter Turszinsky, Film Dramas and Film Mimes (1910) 108 48. Friedrich Freksa, Theater, Pantomime, and Cinema (1916) 111 49. Carl Hauptmann, Film and Theater (1919) 115 50. Oskar Diehl, Mimic Expression in Film (1922) 119 51. Béla Balázs, The Eroticism of Asta Nielsen (1923) 122 52. Friedrich Sieburg, The Magic of the Body (1923) 124 53. Max Osborn, The Nude Body on Film (1925) 126 54. Béla Balázs, The Educational Values of Film Art (1925) 130 55. Leni Riefenstahl, How I Came to Film . . . (1926) 134 56. H. Sp., The Charleston in One Thousand Steps (1927) 136 57. Leo Witlin, On the Psychomechanics of the Spectator (1927) 136 58. Lotte H. Eisner and Rudolf von Laban, Film and Dance Belong Together (1928) 139 59. Fritz Lang, The Art of Mimic Expression in Film (1929) 141 60. Emil Jannings, Miming and Speaking (1930) 142 61. Siegfried Kracauer, Greta Garbo: A Study (1933) 144

5. Spectatorship and Sites of Exhibition 62. Fred Hood, Illusion in the Cinematographic Theater (1907) 147 63. Alfred Döblin, Theater of the Little People (1909) 149 64. Arthur Mellini, The Education of Moviegoers into a Theater Public (1910) 151 65. Anon., The Movie Girl (1911) 153 66. Anon., Various Thoughts on the Movie Theater Interior (1912) 154 67. Victor Noack, The Cinema (1913) 155 68. Emilie Altenloh, On the Sociology of Cinema (1914) 156 69. Resi Langer, From Berlin North and Thereabouts / In the Movie Houses of Berlin West (1919) 161 70. Milena Jesenská, Cinema (1920) 164 71. Kurt Tucholsky, Erotic Films (1920) 166 72. Herbert Tannenbaum, Film Advertising and the Advertising Film (1920) 168 73. August Wolf, The Spectator in Cinema (1921) 169 74. Kurt Pinthus, Ufa Palace (1925) 170 75. Karl Demeter, The Sociological Foundations of the Cinema Industry (1926) 172 76. Rudolf Harms, The Movie Theater as Gathering Place (1926) 174 77. Siegfried Kracauer, The Cinema on Münzstraße (1932) 175

6. An Art for the Times 78. Egon Friedell, Prologue before the Film (1912–13) 178 79. Anon., The Autorenﬁ lm and Its Assessment (1913) 182 80. Ulrich Rauscher, The Cinema Ballad (1913) 184 81. Kurt Pinthus, Quo Vadis, Cinema? (1913) 186 82. Anon., The Student of Prague (1913) 188 83. Hermann Häfker, The Call for Art (1913) 190 84. Herbert Tannenbaum, Problems of the Film Drama (1913–14) 192 85. Will Scheller, The New Illusion (1913–14) 196 86. Kurt Pinthus, The Photoplay (1914) 199 87. Malwine Rennert, The Onlookers of Life in the Cinema (1914–15) 203 88. Paul Wegener, On the Artistic Possibilities of the Motion Picture (1917) 206 89. Ernst Lubitsch, We Lack Film Poetry (1920) 208 90. Fritz Lang, Kitsch—Sensation—Culture and Film (1924) 210

SECTION TWO. FILM CULTURE AND POLITICS

7. Moral Panic and Reform 91. Georg Kleibömer, Cinematograph and Schoolchildren (1909) 215 92. Franz Pfemfert, Cinema as Educator (1909) 219 93. Albert Hellwig, Trash Films (1911) 222 94. Robert Gaupp, The Dangers of the Cinema (1911–12) 223 95. Konrad Lange, The Cinematograph from an Ethical and Aesthetic Viewpoint (1912) 226 96. Ike Spier, The Sexual Danger in the Cinema (1912) 227 97. P. Max Grempe, Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid (1912) 230 98. Roland, Against a Cinema That Makes Women Stupid: A Response (1912) 232 99. Naldo Felke, Cinema’s Damaging Effects on Health (1913) 234 100. Karl Brunner, Today’s Cinematograph: A Public Menace (1913) 235 101. Richard Guttmann, Cinematic Mankind (1916) 238 102. Walther Friedmann, Homosexuality and Jewishness (1919) 240 103. Wilhelm Stapel, Homo Cinematicus (1919) 242 104. Kurt Tucholsky, Cinema Censorship (1920) 243 105. Albert Hellwig, The Motion Picture and the State (1924) 246 106. Aurel Wolfram, Cinema (1931) 247 107. Fritz Olimsky, Film Bolshevism (1932) 249

8. Image Wars 108. Paul Klebinder, The German Kaiser in Film (1912) 254 109. Hermann Duenschmann, Cinematograph and Crowd Psychology (1912) 256 110. Der Kinematograph, War and Cinema (1914) 258 111. Anon., The Cinematograph as Shooting Gallery (1914) 259 112. Hermann Häfker, Cinema and the Educated Class: A Foreword (1914) 260 113. Hermann Häfker, The Tasks of Cinematography in This War (1914) 262 114. Edgar Költsch, The Beneﬁ ts of War for the Cinema (1914) 266 115. Karl Kraus, Made in Germany (1916) 267 116. Anon., State and Cinema (1916) 269 117. Johannes Gaulke, Art and Cinema in War (1916) 271 118. Gustav Stresemann, Film Propaganda for German Affairs Abroad (1917) 273 119. Erich Ludendorff, The Ludendorff Letter (1917) 275 120. Joseph Max Jacobi, The Triumph of Film (1917) 277 121. Rudolf Genenncher, Film as a Means of Agitation (1919) 279 122. Kurt Tucholsky, War Films (1927) 281 123. Film-Kurier, Film in the New Germany (1928) 282 124. Siegfried Kracauer, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) 284 125. Kurt Tucholsky, Against the Ban on the Remarque Film (1931) 286

9. The Specter of Hollywood 126. Claire Goll, American Cinema (1920) 288 127. Erich Pommer, The Signiﬁ cance of Conglomerates in the Film Industry (1920) 290 128. Valentin, The Signiﬁ cance of Film for International Understanding (1921) 292 129. Joe May, The Style of the Export Film (1922) 294 130. Hans Siemsen, German Cinema (1922) 295 131. Georg Jacoby, Film-America and Us (1922) 297 132. Ernst Lubitsch, Film Internationality (1924) 298 133. Georg Otto Stindt, Is Film National or International? (1924) 300 134. Axel Eggebrecht, The Twilight of Film? (1926) 301 135. Anon., The Restructuring of Ufa (1927) 304 136. Carl Laemmle, Film Germany and Film America (1928) 305 137. Billie Wilder, The First One Back from Hollywood (1929) 306 138. Alexander Jason, Film Statistics (1930) 308 139. A. K., Done with Hollywood (1931) 309 140. Anon., Film-Europe, a Fact! (1931) 311 141. Anon., Internationality through the Version System (1931) 312 142. Erich Pommer, The International Talking Film (1932) 314

10. Cinephilia and the Cult of Stars 143. Henny Porten, The Diva (1919) 317 144. Kurt Pinthus, Henny Porten for President (1921) 319 145. Robert Musil, Impressions of a Naïf (1923) 323 146. Béla Balázs, Only Stars! (1926) 325 147. Vicki Baum, The Automobile in Film (1926) 327 148. Anon., Vienna Is Filming! (1926) 328 149. Willy Haas, Why We Love Film (1926) 330 150. Hugo, Film Education (1928) 333 151. K. W., What Is Film Illusion? (1928) 335 152. Hans Feld, Anita Berber: The Representative of a Generation (1928) 337 153. Marlene Dietrich, To an Unknown Woman (1930) 338 154. Max Brod and Rudolf Thomas, Love on Film (1930) 340 155. Siegfried Kracauer, All about Film Stars (1931) 344 156. Siegfried Kracauer, Destitution and Distraction (1931) 347 157. Anon., In the Empire of Film (1931) 349

11. The Mobilization of the Masses 158. Béla Balázs, The Revolutionary Film (1922) 351 159. Siegfried Kracauer, The Klieg Lights Stay On (1926) 353 160. Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Potemkin and Tendentious Art (1927) 355 161. Walter Benjamin, Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz (1927) 356 162. Lotte H. Eisner, The New Youth and Film (1928) 359 163. Franz Höllering, Film und Volk: Foreword (1928) 361 164. Béla Balázs, Film Works for Us! (1928) 362 165. Heinrich Mann, Film and the People (1928) 364 166. Ernst Toller, Who Will Create the German Revolutionary Film? (1928) 365 167. Karl Ritter, Mass-Man in the Cinema (1929) 366 168. Willi Münzenberg, Film and Propaganda (1929) 367 169. A. A., World Film Report (1930) 368 170. Lupu Pick, Individual and Montage (1930) 370 171. Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Lawsuit (1931) 372 172. Herbert Jhering, The Banned Kuhle Wampe (1932) 374 173. Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Film and Conviction (1933) 375

12. Chiffres of Modernity 174. Georg Lukács, Thoughts toward an Aesthetic of the Cinema (1911) 377 175. Alfred A. Baeumler, The Effects of the Film Theater (1912) 381 176. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Substitute for Dreams (1921) 384 177. Kurt Pinthus, The Ethical Potential of Film (1923) 386 178. Siegfried Kracauer, A Film (1924) 389 179. Siegfried Kracauer, Film Image and Prophetic Speech (1925) 391 180. Adolf Behne, The Public’s Attitude toward Modern German Literature (1926) 392 181. Fritz Giese, Revue and Film (1928) 395 182. Walter Benjamin, Chaplin in Retrospect (1929) 398 183. Siegfried Kracauer, Chaplin in Old Films (1930) 400 184. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin (1930) 401 185. Walter Benjamin, Mickey Mouse (1931) 403 186. Ernst Kállai, Painting and Film (1931) 404 187. René Fülöp-Miller, Fantasy by the Meter (1931) 407 188. Ernst Jünger, The Worker (1932) 408

SECTION THREE. CONFIGURATIONS OF A MEDIUM

13. The Expressionist Turn 189. Bernhard Diebold, Expressionism and Cinema (1916) 415 190. Gertrud David, The Expressionist Film (1919) 420 191. J. B., Expressionism in Film (1920) 422 192. Ernst Angel, An “Expressionist” Film (1920) 424 193. Carlo Mierendorff, If I Only Had the Cinema! (1920) 426 194. Robert Müller, The Future of Film (1921) 433 195. Robert Wiene, Expressionism in Film (1922) 436 196. Walter Reimann, An Afterword to Caligari (1925) 438 197. Rudolf Kurtz, Limits of the Expressionist Film (1926) 440 198. Hanns Sachs, The Interpretation of Dreams in Film (1926) 443 199. Robert Breuer, The Film of Factuality (1927) 444 200. Henrik Galeen, Fantastic Film (1929) 447

14. Avant-Garde and Industry 201. Walter Ruttmann, Painting with Time (ca. 1919) 450 202. Bernhard Diebold, A New Art: Film’s Music for the Eyes (1921) 452 203. Hans Richter, Basic Principles of the Art of Movement (1921) 454 204. Adolf Behne, Film as a Work of Art (1921) 457 205. Rudolf Arnheim, The Absolute Film (1925) 459 206. László Moholy-Nagy, ﬁ lm at the bauhaus: a rejoinder (1926) 461 207. Walter Ruttmann, How I Made My Berlin Film (1927) 463 208. Walter Ruttmann, The “Absolute” Fashion (1928) 464 209. Siegfried Kracauer, Abstract Film (1928) 465 210. László Moholy-Nagy, The Artist Belongs to the Industry! (1928) 467 211. Lotte Reiniger, Living Shadows (1929) 470 212. Hans Richter, New Means of Filmmaking (1929) 472 213. Walter Ruttmann, The Isolated Artist (1929) 474 214. Hans Richter, Avant-Garde in the Realm of the Possible (1929) 475 215. Anon., “Candid” Cinematography (1929) 476 216. Lotte H. Eisner, Avant-Garde for the Masses (1929) 478 217. Alex Strasser, The End of the Avant-Garde? (1930) 478

15. The Aesthetics of Silent Film 218. Ernst Bloch, Melody in the Cinema, or Immanent and Transcendental Music (1914) 482 219. Oskar Kalbus, The Muteness of the Film Image (1920) 485 220. Albin Grau, Lighting Design in Film (1922) 487 221. Hans Pander, Intertitles (1923) 489 222. Béla Balázs, The Close-Up (1924) 492 223. Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, My Ideal Screenplay (1924) 498 224. Paul Leni, Architecture in Film (1924) 499 225. Julie Elias, Film and Fashion (1924) 501 226. Guido Seeber, The Delirious Camera (1925) 503 227. Béla Balázs, Productive and Reproductive Film Art (1926) 505 228. Fritz Lang, Looking toward the Future (1926) 508 229. Karl Freund, Behind My Camera (1927) 509 230. Lotar Holland, Subjective Movement (1927) 512 231. Giuseppe Becce, Film and Music (1928) 515 232. Béla Balázs, Farewell to Silent Film (1930) 517

16. Film as Knowledge and Persuasion 233. Hans Hennes, Cinematography in the Service of Neurology and Psychiatry (1910) 520 234. Osvaldo Polimanti, The Cinematograph in Biological and Medical Science (1911) 523 235. Leonhard Birnbaum, The Cultural Mission of the Cinematograph (1912) 526 236. Anon., Cinema in the Light of Medicine (1913) 529 237. Julius Pinschewer, Film Advertising (1913) 530 238. Bruno Taut, Artistic Film Program (1920) 532 239. Wilhelm von Ledebur, Cinematography in the Service of the Police (1921) 534 240. Arthur Lassally, Film Advertising and Advertising Films (1921) 537 241. Edgar Beyfuss, School and Film (1924) 539 242. Ulrich Kayser, Industrial Films (1924) 540 243. Eugen R. Schlesinger, Kulturﬁ lm and Cinema (1924) 541 244. Dietrich W. Dreyer, The Trick Film (1927) 544 245. Hans Cürlis, Film Is Promotion (1929) 545 246. Karl Nikolaus, Advertising Film and Its Psychological Effects (1932) 546

17. Sound Waves 247. Anon., How Singing Pictures (Sound Pictures) Are Made (1908) 549 248. Herbert Jhering, The Acoustic Film (1922) 551 249. Heinrich Strobel, Film and Music (1928) 552 250. Walter Ruttmann, Principles of the Sound Film (1928) 555 251. Siegfried Kracauer, Sound-Image Film (1928) 556 252. Béla Balázs, A Conviction (1929) 559 253. Ernst Hugo Correll, The Nature and Value of Sound Film (1929) 562 254. Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Reality of Sound Film (1929) 563 255. Carl Hoffmann, Problems of the Camera (1929) 565 256. Walter Gronostay, Possibilities for the Use of Music in Sound Film (1929) 566 257. Erwin Piscator, Sound Film Friend and Foe (1929–30) 567 258. Rudolf Arnheim, A Commentary on the Crisis Facing Montage (1930) 569 259. Edmund Meisel, Experiences in Composing Music for Sound Films (1930) 572 260. Alfred Döblin, Only the Transformed Author Can Transform Film (1930) 574 261. Film-Kurier, Fritz Lang: Problems in Sound Film Design (1931) 575

18. Technology and the Future of the Past 262. Max Mack, The Conquest of the Third Dimension (1914) 578 263. Max Skladanowsky, The Prehistory of the Bioskop (1916) 579 264. Heinz Michaelis, Art and Technology in Film (1923) 581 265. Béla Balázs, The Color Film (1923) 583 266. S. E. Bastian, The Teleﬁ lm (1925) 584 267. Herbert Jhering, Film and Radio (1925) 585 268. Kurt Weill, Possibilities for Absolute Radio Art (1925) 586 269. Eugen Schüfftan, My Process (1926) 589 270. Arthur Korn, Why We Still Do Not Have Television (1929) 590 271. László Moholy-Nagy, The Elements Once Again (1929) 592 272. Erich Grave, The Third Dimension (1929) 593 273. Ernst Steffen, Telecinema in the Home (1929) 595 274. Frank Warschauer, A Glance into the Future (1930) 598 275. H. Baer, The Color Film (1930) 600 276. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio-Film (1932) 602 277. Bernhard Diebold, The Future of Mickey Mouse (1932) 603 278. Siegfried Kracauer, On the Border of Yesterday (1932) 607

Bibliography 613 Credits 639 Index 641 INTRODUCTION

Even if the clattering of the ﬁ lm projectors disappears, there will be something—I ﬁ rmly believe—“that functions like cinema.” Alexander Kluge, Cinema Stories (2007)

the rise of digital media has provoked no shortage of debates about what cinema has been and will become. To some observers, fi lm seems to be a thing of the past, an artifact of twentieth-century visual culture, a relic of the Fordist era with its industrial rhythms and distinct division of labor and leisure. Others point to cinema’s unanticipated after- lives in fi lm festivals and retrospectives, compilation fi lms and museum installations, online archives and virtual cinephilic communities. From the latter perspective, cinema is not so much disappearing as morphing into exciting new forms and hybrids, whose uncharted trajectories bear an uncanny resemblance to the cinema’s beginnings more than a hundred years ago. Looking back on the fi rst decades of the twentieth century, we fi nd a rich culture of theoretical speculation, as critics imagined the possible futures of what was then a “new medium.” In this book, we hope to give readers a sense of these diverse futures of the past by reanimating the promises once associated with cinema— both those that were realized and those, in Siegfried Kracauer’s words, that “history did not see fi t to explore.”1 The Promise of Cinema thus reconceives fi lm theory as a fi eld of possibilities, expecta- tions, and propositions. Whereas scholars have conventionally viewed the corpus of “classical fi lm theory” as concerned with defi ning the medium’s specifi c, essential prop- erties, this book highlights the multiple potentialities that cinema represented for fi lm theorists, whose writings, as Rudolf Arnheim suggested, referred “not so much to what is as to what can be or ought to be.”2 Theorization of fi lm, we contend, often occurred in the subjunctive rather than the indicative mood—one oriented toward an unknown, empirically unverifi able future that might diverge from all prior historical experience. In this regard, fi lm theory exemplifi es what Reinhart Koselleck has characterized as the modern period’s expanding chasm between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.”3 Reconstructing a wide-ranging set of debates from 1907 to 1933, this sourcebook offers a glimpse into cinema’s historical horizons, which were inseparable from the broader horizons of modernity as such.

1. Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995), 6. 2. Rudolf Arnheim, “Preface to the 1957 Edition,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), n.p. Emphases added. 3. Reinhart Koselleck, “ ‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255–75.

1 2 Introduction

The German-speaking world was one of the leading sites for theorizing the promise of cinema in the early twentieth century, as names such as Arnheim, Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Lotte Eisner, Kracauer, and Hans Richter attest. Despite trans- lations of seminal works by these fi gures, however, we still have no collection of early German fi lm theory to complement existing sourcebooks in English devoted to the Chi- nese, Czech, French, and Russian contexts.4 Assembling 278 texts, nearly all of which appear in English for the fi rst time, this volume not only features lesser-known essays by the aforementioned fi gures but also situates their works within a much wider nexus of writings on fi lm from the period—writings by a broad range of authors, including actors and fi lmmakers, journalists and philosophers, activists and government offi cials, doctors and educators, and many other voices that have come down to us only as “anonymous.”

••• The project of expanding “fi lm theory” beyond established fi gures was both motivated and facilitated by the shifts in our media environment, where digital collections and online resources are affording us unprecedented access to a searchable, ever-growing archive of materials beyond traditional canons. But this decision to broaden the material base also underlies an implicit argument about how we should understand and approach fi lm theory itself. Amidst recent debates across the humanities on the origins, history, and fate of theory,5 D.N. Rodowick has historicized the concept of fi lm theory, arguing that the term’s common usage has tended to “superimpose retroactively a picture of theory on a complex range of conceptual activities that may not have characterized them- selves as such.”6 For Rodowick, what is called “classical fi lm theory”—unlike the semiotic and psychoanalytical theories of later decades—can best be understood as an open set of interrogations, which sought to comprehend a medium that was itself unsettling established aesthetic categories. While sharing Rodowick’s interest in reconceiving the history of fi lm theory, we nonetheless diverge from his analysis in two notable ways. Whereas Rodowick seeks to replace the paradigm of “classical fi lm theory” with what he calls an “aesthetic discourse”—one that extends from early studies by Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg to the postwar writings of André Bazin and Kracauer—the present volume understands fi lm theory as an entire network of discourses that approached fi lm not only as a form of art and entertainment but also as a medium of culture, science, education, training, politics, philosophy, and governmentality. Furthermore, in contrast to Rodow- ick, who restricts his discussion mainly to well-known fi gures, we suggest that the contributions of so-called classical fi lm theorists can best be read as part of a large and con- tentious culture of writing about fi lm during the medium’s fi rst decades. Early writings on fi lm were grappling with an acute medial transformation, one that was fundamentally challenging prior frameworks of experience and knowledge. Appear- ing long before fi lm study and theory were institutionalized—that is, when commentators necessarily came from a wide range of educational and professional backgrounds—

4. See George S. Semsel, Xia Hong, and Hou Jianping, eds., Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era (New York: Praeger, 1990); Jaroslav Andeˇl and Petr Szczepanik, eds., Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908–1939 (Prague: National Film Archive, 2008); Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939 (London/New York: Routledge, 1988). 5. See, for example, Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003); and Ian Hunter, “The History of Theory,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2006): 78–112. 6. D.N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 71. Introduction 3 these writings were characterized less by systematic and exhaustive investigation than by speculative, heterogeneous, and open-ended exploration.7 Although known primarily for their book-length studies, Arnheim, Balázs, Eisner, and Kracauer all began as fi lm critics in the 1920s, publishing hundreds of texts in newspapers and journals—texts that were passionately “in the moment,” responding to new fi lms, emerging stars, technological and aesthetic developments, inaugural events, special screenings, censorship cases, economic crises, and political exigencies. Contributing to far-reaching and ever-shifting debates, these texts were adaptive and provisional in their approaches and styles of prose, lacking any fi xed or dominant epistemological framework and engaging in a dynamic interplay with a medium that was itself in statu nascendi.

••• Reﬂ ecting this open-ended mode of early writing about cinema, Béla Balázs advanced the following understanding of “theory” in the preface to Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films (Visible Man or the Culture of Film, 1924):

Theory opens up the broad vistas of freedom for every art. It is the road map for those who roam among the arts, showing them pathways and opportunities, so that what appeared to be iron necessity stands unmasked as one random route among a hundred others. It is theory that gives us the courage to undertake Columbus-like voyages of exploration and turns every step into a freely chosen act.8

Setting aside the imperialist resonances of the phrase “Columbus-like voyages”—and the entanglement of cinema and colonial ideology is more than evident in Balázs’s contention that cinema will produce a “uniform type of the white race” throughout the world9— Balázs makes a remarkable argument here: far from uncovering inherent laws, “theory” is what ﬁ rst enables exploration, indicating the arbitrariness of current practices and revealing alternative possibilities. Theory is thus a “road map” not in the sense of a math- ematical representation of organized space but rather in the sense of a creation of con- cepts that both liberates art and inspires its movement into unknown territories. This temporal structure—theory before rather than after the perfection of its object, theory as a facilitator of exploration rather than as a form of retrospective mastery—is something that Balázs shares with thinkers such as Kracauer, whose essay “Photography” (1927) would likewise attribute to consciousness the task of establishing “the provisional status of all given conﬁ gurations.”10 But this interrogative gestus is also evident in the writings of countless other contemporaries across a wide variety of realms, whose theorization of cinema is similarly driven by what Robert Musil, in The Man without Qualities, famously called “a sense of possibility” (Möglichkeitssinn)—that is, a concern less with cinema in its current, often-compromised forms than with what it might become.

7. On this point, see also Francesco Casetti, “Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Changes in Objects,” CiNéMAS 17, nos. 2–3 (Spring 2007): 33–45; and “Roundtable on the Return to Classical Film Theory,” October 148 (Spring 2014): 5–26. 8. Béla Balázs, Visible Man, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 3. 9. Ibid., 14. In Theory of the Film (1948), Balázs would revise this passage, instead invoking “an international human type”; Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), 45. See also Erica Carter, “Introduction,” in Balázs, Early Film Theory, xxxviii. 10. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 62. Emphasis in the original. 4 Introduction

This is not to argue that we should make no distinction between dedicated fi lm critics and writers from other professional spheres whose interest in cinema was motivated by other questions. For one thing, readers will quickly notice in the following pages how many of those other voices, particularly as they intersected with the so-called Kinoreform movement (see chapter 7), greeted fi lm with ambivalence or even downright hostility, regarding the new medium as a symptom of the broader ills and pathologies of modern society. It bears emphasizing, however, that even as such commentators disparaged fi lm’s actual, commercially driven uses, most of them maintained a tacit investment in the medium’s prospects, whether in the realms of art, politics, science, or education. And it is the wager of this book that every one of these overlooked texts contains insights that might be called “theoretical.” While this concept of theory is rarely addressed as explic- itly as it is by Balázs, it is always present in a dormant sense—for example, in Berthold Viertel’s 1910 account (no. 32) of the German and Austrian emperors watching them- selves on fi lm, where cinema’s ability to challenge political sovereignty (“Is one allowed to copy majesty so wantonly? Is it not too much for one moment to have two, no, four kings?”) is no less palpable than it will be a quarter century later in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936). Early commentators adopted a variety of positions vis-à-vis cinema’s present and future, its actual and potential uses, its dangers and utopian promise. But nearly all of them shared a fundamental sense that fi lm was effecting and registering a revolution in virtually every area of life: the experience of space, time, and the body; the articulation of class, gender, and race; sexuality and social mores; the partition of private and public spheres; politics and forms of mobilization; the defi nition and functions of art; the ways that knowledge could be generated, applied, and disseminated; and the construction of “reality” itself. The debates here address cinema’s role as both catalyst and seismograph of a host of massive and abrupt transformations that characterize German modernity: industrialization and urbanism; the emergence of a mass culture of consumption and distraction; the increasing precariousness of the cultural and intellectual elite; the multiple traumas of war, defeat, and the loss of colonies; failed revolution and new state- formation; and, fi nally, economic and political crisis. More than any other cultural form, cinema appeared as inextricably linked to processes of modernization, and the texts collected here view fi lm as an indicator of the course that modernity was taking—and even as a signal of the paths that could yet be taken.

••• The temporal parameters of modernity are often contested, and the dates of the present volume deserve more precise explanation. While the “birth” of German cinema has traditionally been dated according to the fi rst public screening of Bioskop fi lms by the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin’s Wintergarten on November 1, 1895, most scholars today agree that such dates are at best heuristic placeholders and at worst misrepresentations of a medium that emerged from myriad technological, performative, and intellectual contexts. Such contexts were hardly rendered obsolete overnight, and some fi lm historians have gone so far as to argue that the very term cinema is a misnomer for what, until shortly before 1910, was understood as the latest variation of long-familiar cultural forms and practices.11 Thus, the awareness that cinema was becom-

11. André Gaudreault, “The Culture Broth and the Froth of Cultures of So-Called Early Cinema,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Malden: Wiley- Blackwell, 2012), 15–31. Introduction 5 ing a major and enduring force in public life—and consequently that something like a theory of this new medium was necessary—arose gradually and unevenly across different contexts. For the purposes of this volume, 1907 offers a convenient starting date because it is the year when the fi rst fi lm journals were founded in both Germany and Austria. Among these journals, the earliest and most notable was Der Kinematograph (1907–35), published by Eduard Lintz in Düsseldorf. In its inaugural issue, on January 6, 1907, the editorial and publishing staff identifi ed the publication as an “organ that reports on the latest achievements, shares information with a circle of interested parties on new technological developments, and also publishes important news from the realm of praxis.”12 The com- mercial success of Der Kinematograph quickly led to the founding of additional journals devoted to fi lm, among them the Erste Internationale Film-Zeitung (Berlin, 1907–20), Kinematographische Rundschau (Vienna, 1907–21), and Lichtbild-Bühne (Berlin, 1908– 39). As such publications suggest, it was evident by this point that fi lm mattered, and understanding what cinema could become was now fi rmly on the agenda of public discourse.13 In contrast, the ending date of our volume was dictated by wider political developments. The National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933 forced countless Jewish and left- ist fi lm theorists to fl ee Germany, among them Arnheim, Benjamin, Brecht, Eisner, Kracauer, and Richter. (Balázs remained in the Soviet Union, where he had gone in 1931.) While these exiled fi gures would continue to write about fi lm in new national and linguistic contexts, the German-speaking world, as Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hage- ner note, “lost its pre-eminent position” in the international debate about fi lm.14 Follow- ing the Nazi regime’s systematic appropriation of cinema for diversion, propaganda, and warmongering, the medium’s promise also appeared to have been irrevocably betrayed. At the height of its power in the 1940s, cinema had failed to engage with the Holocaust, as Jean-Luc Godard argues in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, stifl ing rather than enabling forms of resistance to the atrocities occurring across Europe. Not until a few decades later could one again invoke “German fi lm theory,” now in relation to fi gures such as Alexan- der Kluge and Hans Magnus Enzensberger and journals including Filmkritik (1957–84) and Frauen und Film (1974–).

••• In order to offer a “road map”—to borrow Balázs’s term—through the period thus delim- ited, this book is divided into three sections of six chapters each. Arranged according to a loose and overlapping chronological progression, the sections all examine questions con- cerning cinema’s promise and possibilities. Section 1 brings together writings that sought to comprehend cinema’s imbrications with transformations of experience. Though dispa- rate in their speciﬁ c concerns, these texts all reacted to the sense that cinema was uniquely poised to register and assimilate myriad aspects of modern life. Chapter 1 examines cinema’s power to address the senses: to dazzle spectators with magical displays, jolt them with nervous thrills, or confound them with optical illusions. Recalling the

12. Redaktion und Verlag, “Geleit-Worte,” Der Kinematograph no. 1 (January 6, 1907). 13. See Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film, 1909–1929 (Munich: DTV, 1978); Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Helmut H. Diederichs, Frühgeschichte deutscher Filmtheorie: Ihre Entstehung und Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Habilitation, University of Frankfurt, 1996). 14. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2. 6 Introduction nineteenth-century visual culture studied by Jonathan Crary,15 all of these texts assume a thoroughly embodied spectator, one both fallible and eminently excitable. More often than not, “sense perception” meant vision, of course, and a number of texts included here attempt to work through the modes of “visual pleasure” (Serner, no. 15) offered by the new medium. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the ways in which fi lm was linked to shifting conceptions of space and time. Contemporary observers were fascinated by cinema’s ability to trans- port spectators to foreign and even extraterrestrial spaces, but they also pinned divergent hopes on the medium’s status as what Alexander Kluge would later call a “time machine”16—one able to record segments of time, fragment them through montage, and stretch or contract them through the techniques of slow motion and time lapse. These refl ections on space and time are followed in chapter 4 by a set of texts examining what Friedrich Sieburg called “the magic of the body” (no. 52), that is, the heightened visibility and affective power of bodies shown on the silent screen. Chapter 5 presents a range of texts on fi lm spectatorship and sites of exhibition, from early, working-class Kientopps (Döblin, no. 63) to erotic cinemas (Tucholsky, no. 71) to the gentrifi ed picture palaces of the 1920s (Pinthus, no. 74). Chapter 6 concludes the section with a number of texts that consider cinema with respect to existing aesthetic norms, either by transforming the cinema into a form of art (e.g., the debates around the Autorenfi lm) or by adapting the very defi nition of art to a modern age defi ned by speed, concision, and fragmentation (Frie- dell, no. 78). Section 2 turns to questions of fi lm culture and politics. Beginning with the Kinore- form movement, in which psychologists, educators, and moral leaders fi rst sought to reg- ulate fi lm’s infl uence, especially over women and youth (chapter 7), the section goes on to examine cinema’s status vis-à-vis state power (chapter 8), from the “The German Kai- ser in Film” (no. 108) through the propaganda battles of World War I to the censorship cases of the late Weimar Republic. Chapter 9 focuses on the precarious position of the German fi lm industry in the face of Hollywood’s ever-increasing hegemony, and chapter 10 considers audience investment in the institution of cinema and its star system, highlighting the entertainment industry’s massive infl uence in Weimar democracy. Chapter 11 follows these discussions with writings on the roles cinema could play in mass mobilization, whether by socialist revolutionaries or by members of the emerging Nazi Party. Lastly, chapter 12 steps back to examine seminal refl ections on fi lm as a medium of philosophical thought, one that could facilitate broader insights into the modern condition. Section 3 brings together essays that strove to comprehend various confi gurations of the medium, especially with regard to its evolving technological and aesthetic potentials. In chapter 13, we encounter discussions of expressionism, dream states, and the fantastic, all of which probe the possibilities of fi lm as a modernist, anti-mimetic medium. Chapter 14 examines the discourse around the radical uses of cinema by the avant- garde as it made “absolute fi lms” and entered into a fraught relationship with the fi lm industry. In chapter 15, we examine aspects of silent fi lm aesthetics, including set design, lighting, and camera technique. Chapter 16’s selections approach the cinema as an instrument of knowledge and persuasion in science, culture, and

15. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 16. Alexander Kluge, “Zu einer Stein-Konstruktion,” in Foto-Assemblagen, ed. Udo Klückmann, Klaus Heinrich, et al. (Berlin: Medusa, 1979), 29. Introduction 7 commerce. We turn in chapter 17 to the major technological shift of the late 1920s: the advent of sound. Finally, chapter 18 assembles reﬂ ections on ﬁ lm technologies, their histories, and their possible futures. Resonating with recent studies in media archaeology, this chapter features early explorations of television, 3-D, color, and expanded cinema.

••• Providing a heuristic analytical grid, these sections and chapters represent an initial attempt to map a vast area of writing, much of which is still unexplored.17 While they could, of course, be read in any sequence, our division seeks to convey broad, if uneven, discursive shifts. The earliest writings on cinema were overwhelmingly concerned with fi lm’s role as a gauge of changing modes of experience. Writers from the Wilhelmine period sought to grasp the newness of cinema as a representational form, its ability to render modernity legible, and the challenge that its rapid and disjunctive aesthetics posed to the traditional arts. During the Great War, politics became an explicit and dominant concern, and commentators began to think intensely about cinema’s relation to the masses, its potential as a tool of mobilization and political propaganda, and its role in forging national communities and collective identities. Finally, the 1920s, a decade in which fi lm attained greater cultural legitimacy, saw efforts to defi ne fi lm’s specifi c qualities and to forge a language and repertoire of aesthetic means (e.g., camera movement, montage) that would lend cinema a unique identity among the arts. At the same time, this decade of fi lm history—one also marked by greater institutionalization and profes- sionalization—witnessed the emergence of new forums for specialized thinking about fi lm technologies, avant-garde experimentation, and cinema’s uses in science, industry, and advertising. This temporal division should not suggest that there was no media theorizing or political thinking before the First World War nor that the imbrications of cinema and modern experience became any less important in later years (a proposition refuted by Ben- jamin’s work alone). Rather, we are acknowledging that specifi c sets of concerns moved to the fore at particular historical junctures. The three sections of this book trace large- scale shifts in fi lm discourse, but they also include numerous texts that look backward and forward in order to call attention to the impossibility of confi ning any single mode of interrogation to rigid temporal parameters. Organized around historical debates or theoretical issues, the chapters in this volume present a full trajectory of responses to particular issues. Following Kracauer, one might refer to the series of texts in the various chapters as “sequences,” that is, “successive ‘solutions’ of problems originating with some need and touching off the whole series.”18 By arranging the texts into these discrete temporal “sequences” (rather than according to an overall chronology), we hope not only to render the volume’s materials conceptually coherent and manageable for readers but also to acknowledge each historical moment’s heterogeneity and Ungleichzeitigkeit

17. The archive for German writings on fi lm in the period covered by this book is immense; in a 1930 brochure on German trade publications, Erwin Ackerknecht listed 160 fi lm periodicals, about half of which are now available on microfi lm. These titles include infl uential trade papers that appeared daily in the late 1920s, such as Der Kinematograph (1907–35) and the Film-Kurier (1919–45), as well as fan magazines that often stopped after just a few issues. In addition to these fi lm-related publications, most newspapers (there were sixty daily papers in Berlin alone) and lifestyle magazines featured fi lm reviews and articles about cinema. The present book can only offer a glimpse into the overwhelming mass of archival sources; most still await discovery. 18. Kracauer, History, 144. See also George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). 8 Introduction

(nonsimultaneity)—a concept theorized in the interwar years by German thinkers such as Wilhelm Pinder, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Bloch.19 Within the volume’s eighteen chapters, all texts are introduced with editors’ comments, which highlight their contributions to the theorization of cinema’s promise and possibilities in the early twentieth century. Resisting any unifying generalizations, these comments signal some of the events, debates, and other immediate circumstances to which the authors were responding. Our interest in recovering the historical dimensions of the texts is matched, however, by a commitment to conveying their relevance today. Following Walter Benjamin’s argument in The Arcades Project that “the true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space),”20 we forego any attempt at self-transposition into the past and instead ana- lyze early-twentieth-century documents in dialogue with contemporary issues. Our hope is that the texts throughout this sourcebook will continue to gain new, unanticipated meanings, illuminating our ever-shifting media environment and its attendant theoretical concerns.21

••• With its dual temporal focus on the historicity and actuality of early-twentieth-century texts, the present volume seeks to contribute to understandings of German fi lm theory in three major ways. First, it allows us to see the broader context in which cinema could appear to well-known theorists as a key cultural form of modernity. Alongside Ben- jamin’s and Kracauer’s analyses of cinema’s “shocks” and “distractions,” we encounter a vast array of writings on cinema and modernity from other commentators, such as government advisors, sociologists, or advertising theorists. In these writings, words like tempo, nervousness, thrill, astonishment, and novelty abound as efforts to understand the transformations of everyday life that modernity had wrought. If many of these texts strike us today as reactionary, others stand out for their euphoric tone. But the important point—and the one that becomes visible with suffi cient historical distance and a large enough archival base—is that all the authors were observing the same phenomena. From Alfred Döblin’s description of working-class audiences “spellbound” by the cinema’s “white eye” in 1909 (no. 63) to Wilhelm Stapel’s anxious observations on the revolutionary “homo cinematicus” in 1919 (no. 103) to Ernst Jünger’s reactionary-modernist refl ections on the new audience of mass types in 1932 (no. 188), the authors of nearly all the texts collected here understood fi lm as a medium of modernity, one deeply implicated in the emergence and workings of twentieth-century mass culture. Second, this expanded range of articles allows readers to better comprehend the cultural and linguistic specifi city of writings by Balázs and other well-known theorists who were well acquainted with wider debates on cinema in Germany and Austria. Such debates have transnational ramifi cations, and one can draw links, for example, between the emergence of cinema reform movements in Germany and America; the rise of the avant-garde in Germany, France, and Holland; or the forging of a left-wing fi lm culture

19. See Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1926); Erwin Panofsky, “Refl ections on Historical Time,” trans. Johanna Bauman, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 4 (2004): 691–701; and Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 20. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 206. 21. On the goal of conveying both the historicity and actuality of fi lm theory, see also Johannes von Moltke, “Out of the Past: Classical Film Theory,” Screen 55, no. 3 (Autumn 2014): 398–403. Introduction 9 in Germany and the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, many of the epistemological framings of German-language debates were also informed by specifi c intellectual traditions such as Kultur (culture) and Bildung (education), both of which had been valorized and discussed extensively since the German Enlightenment. When Balázs titled his study Visible Man or the Culture of Film, for example, he understood the term Kultur according to a Germanic tradition linking Kultur to the idea of Bildung as the holistic cultivation of an ensemble of human faculties; it was precisely this organic notion of Kultur that the technological medium of fi lm had seemed to threaten. Similarly, the Schillerian concept of aesthetic education arguably informed debates among German educators and psychologists about the effects of cinema on child development (see chapter 7); the efforts of the Kulturfi lm, a German variant of documentary based on ideals of experiential education (chapter 16); and Balázs’s 1925 speech to an annual conference of educators on the Bil- dungswerte (educational values) of fi lm art (chapter 4, no. 54). The terms Kultur and Bil- dung provide just two examples of the many latent “protocols” of early German fi lm theory, which become visible only when theoretical writings are reinserted into their cultural-linguistic context. Third, the scope of this volume allows readers to see more clearly the ways in which early fi lm theory was always already a form of media theory—one whose open, interrogative quality anticipates our efforts to assimilate “new media” today. Many of the key top- ics of contemporary media studies—animation, immersion and distraction, participation and interactivity, remediation and convergence, institutional and nontheatrical uses of cinema, amateur fi lmmaking and fan practices, democracy and mass media—were already part of early fi lm-theoretical discussion and can be fruitfully teased out of the texts in this volume. Such thoughts and questions were not entirely new even in the 1910s and ‘20s; most of them can be traced back to the visual and media culture of the nineteenth century and even before.22 But our present environment of proliferating screens and media platforms allows these aspects of early fi lm culture to come to the fore in new ways, revealing the latent futures harbored within archives. The present volume thus embraces an understanding of the contemporary moment that Thomas Elsaesser describes as an ever-shifting “enunciative position” from which the past is constantly reorganized in constellation with present concerns.23 Eschewing any approach that assumes we know what the cinema is, has been, and will become, this volume features historical writings that explore cinema’s manifold horizons—writings that suggest actual futures, as well as the many roads not taken.

••• Although the three categories outlined above—fi lm and modernity, fi lm and cultural context, and fi lm and media theory—loosely correspond to our section divisions, each one also cuts across the book as a whole. This means, of course, that the form of the present collection is provisional, its categorizations necessarily tentative. Much as Aby Warburg per- petually reorganized his Mnemosyne Atlas in the 1920s, we have gathered, arranged, and

22. Siegfried Zielinski has been particularly insistent on this point. See his Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7–8. See also Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 44–45; and Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 13. 23. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” CiNéMAS 14, nos. 2–3 (2004): 75–117; here 78. 10 Introduction repeatedly repositioned the texts before settling on a working assemblage. In this regard, we have adopted the role of curators who place artifacts into creative constellations; while we suggest pathways through the book’s immense archive of materials, we also encourage readers to establish their own links cutting across the various sections and chapters. To offer one example: though many of the texts reproduced here embrace notions of artistic and medial “specifi city” as part of an effort to legitimate cinema, one could also construct an entirely different genealogy of conceptualizing cinema in terms of interme- diality. Such a trajectory would include all of the early efforts—palpable throughout chapter 1—to position cinema with respect to existing forms of visual culture, such as variety shows, naturalist theater, sports, the circus, amusement parks, and phantasmago- ric illusions. But it would also include the myriad refl ections of the avant-garde on cinema as a form of “painting with time” (Walter Ruttmann, no. 201) or “music for the eyes” (Bernhard Diebold, no. 202); experiments with fi lm and modern dance (Rudolf von Laban, no. 58); writings on mixed media (Kurt Weisse, no. 4; Heinrich Strobel, no. 249); and efforts to position cinema with respect to emerging media such as radio (Herbert Jhering, no. 267; Kurt Weill, no. 268) and television (which Rudolf Arnheim discussed under the name “Radio-Film” in 1932; no. 276).24 An anthology informed by a narrower defi nition of fi lm theory might limit itself to discussions of medium specifi city and “fi lm as art,” or to canonical theorists and texts. But in our era of expanded audiovisual media and their concomitant genealogies, we are aware that such a shared consensus can no longer—if it ever could—be taken for granted. Cinema is and was many things. It was defi ned and redefi ned by countless voices, projects, and relation- alities. For any sourcebook seeking to understand what German fi lm theory might mean for us today—what sorts of promises it still holds, “even if the clattering of the fi lm projectors disappears”—it is imperative to take seriously the anonymous murmuring that subtended “classical fi lm theory,” lending it the expansive relevance and vitality that it always possessed.

24. On the intermedial concerns of classical ﬁ lm theorists, see Doron Galili, “Intermedial Thought in Classical Film Theory: Balázs, Arnheim, and Benjamin on Film and Radio,” Germanic Review 88, no. 4 (2013): 391–99.