Cg 2011 by JESSICA ELIZABETH KAMM. All Rights Reserved
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c 2011 by JESSICA ELIZABETH KAMM. All rights reserved. GERMAN FILM, WORLD TRAVEL: BERLIN, HOLLYWOOD, BOMBAY BY JESSICA ELIZABETH KAMM DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Harry Liebersohn, Chair Professor Peter Fritzsche Professor Mark Micale Professor David O'Brien Abstract This dissertation considers the work of German filmmakers who traveled to the United States and India between 1919 and 1936. This subject covers a wide range of documentary and feature films made throughout the interwar period, which are significant for two main reasons. First, through these films, Germans at home could experience the world from which they had been secluded as a result of the war. At a time when travel opportunities were limited and Germany’s international prestige was severely damaged, these films provided a conduit through which Germans could participate in international exchanges. Second, German filmmakers who traveled were able to create a network of industrial connections around the world that aided in further productions, allowing them to become an integral part an increasingly transnational industry. These international networks were imbued—sometimes explicitly—with an informal diplomatic authority; well respected German films and filmmakers contributed to restoring Germany’s international reputation, even as films allowed Germans to see and interpret a rapidly changing world. Using German archival sources, a wide range of German, American and Indian periodicals, German travelogues, and testimonies given to the Indian Cinematograph Committee, this study addresses the ways in which Germans attempted to extend their imaginative reach beyond the confines of Germany during the interwar period. It also examines the relationships formed between German and foreign filmmakers and the collaborative works that resulted from their cooperation. Beginning immediately after World War I and ending just after the Nazi takeover in Germany, this work attempts to understand German fascination with travel films, the relationship between German film and society, and Germany’s place in the international film industry. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE……………………………………………………...…………………………………iv INTRODUCTION: TRAVEL FILM AND CINEMATIC TRAVEL…………………………….1 NEW WORLD ORDER: INDIAN ADVENTURES AND CIVILIZING ENCOUNTERS………………………………………………………………………………….30 TOWARD GERMAN-INDIAN CINEMATIC COLLABORATION………………………......92 COLLABORATION, COMPETITION AND FILM COLONIES: GERMANY AND THE UNITED STATES…………………..………………………………………………………….154 USING HOLLYWOOD: DEFINING GERMAN FILM IN A WORLD INDUSTRY…………………………………………………………………………………….224 CONCLUSION: NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CINEMA ………………………...283 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………...…302 iii Preface Rabindranath Tagore and I could have been neighbors. Not real neighbors, as the widely noted Bengali writer best known for his 1913 Nobel Prize in literature has been dead since 1941. Still, as reluctant as I am to cast myself opposite him in The Lake House, I discovered that Tagore and I, had we respectively given in to the throes of the B-grade Hollywood romance, could have exchanged letters via the same mailbox. I do not take it personally that Tagore chose to correspond with Ezra Pound instead of me during the months he spent at 508 High Street in Urbana, two blocks from my grad school apartment. Nor do I have any lingering epistolary fantasies regarding anything I myself might want to write to him. Yet I did find it rather disorienting that after nine months rummaging around Berlin’s ample libraries and archives, searching for information on Tagore’s visits to Germany and his role as an icon of the cosmopolitan cultural milieu of the 1920s, that a simple electronic search of the University of Illinois’s archives brought forth a picture of Tagore and his American friends having a reunion a stone’s throw from the café in which I was working.1 I was able look Tagore in the eye while standing in the same spot he had stood nearly a hundred years earlier. Anyone can make it to Germany, but to travel to Urbana Illinois requires a true cosmopolitan. Tagore and his travels are not the exclusive focus of my research, but he does represent much of what I find compelling about the 1920s: the enthusiasm with which cosmopolitan artists traveled, their familiarity with a wide range of cultural and intellectual media, and their 1 University of Illinois Archives “Tagore Circle reunion; group photograph,” December 1916, box 187, folder VIS-Rabindranath Tagore, negative number: 2268, record series 39/2/22. Tagore first came to Urbana in 1912 shortly before winning the Nobel Prize in literature and returned for a reunion in 1916. iv popularity across state borders, not just, as in the case of Tagore, in India but throughout the world. German fascination with Tagore is also representative of the interwar period, as German cultural critics and travelers alike sought new understandings for Germany’s place in the world and new relationships on which to base these perceptions. Tagore’s reputation in Germany and his travels there piqued my interest in other relationships between German and Indian intellectuals, while the numerous references to the poet in German film publications—and in some cases even films themselves—led me to wonder how the cosmopolitanism of the 1920s affected German culture on a popular level. German film of the 1920s remains some of the best loved and most highly regarded work in film history—and for good reason, as German filmmakers consistently worked hard to expand beyond accepted artistic and technical conventions as film developed as a genre. More important, however, German filmmakers of the interwar period were transnational figures, whose work and reputations to a remarkable degree crossed geographic boundaries, while German filmmakers themselves traveled widely in the 1920s and 1930s. It is for this reason too that their work remains internationally popular, even today; the early German works of Ernst Lubitsch, for example, have surely been digitalized and distributed on DVD in this country in such great volume because he spent a large part of his career working in the United States. Transnational careers have led to lingering transnational recognition. Interwar German film also continues to inspire cinema at an international level: it is possible to see visual and thematic echoes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in the work of a wide range of filmmakers including George Lucas’s robot character C3PO, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), and Rintaro’s animé film Metropolis (2001)—among other Japanese animé features to reference Lang’s work. Another example is Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) whose vampire v villains are clearly descended from F. W. Murnau’s Nosfuratu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). These contemporary references to the work of German filmmakers of the 1920s are not simply a result of the powerful artistic vision of these Weimar filmmakers, but also the ease with which they traveled and the broad base of international support they created during their own lifetimes. My interest in the cultural scene of the 1920s began with my undergraduate thesis, a project considering the political work of German visual and literary artists in the interwar period. The shift to film came later, but I have found the art history of interwar Berlin fascinating for over a decade. I would like to thank David Barclay and John Wickstrom for their guidance in this initial project and throughout my entire time at Kalamazoo College. They were truly the best mentors one could have hoped to find: teaching me how to write, where to question conventional wisdom, and when to keep my mouth shut (a lesson hard learned). At the University of Illinois I am indebted to “The Adviser,” as he became known to my friends and family, Harry Liebersohn, who has been incredibly supportive over this long process. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee: Peter Fritzsche, Mark Micale and David O’Brien. Their feedback has been extremely helpful in determining what transnationalism means in the context of my project and in narrowing the scope of my work. I am also grateful to Craig Koslofsky and Mara Wade for their help in refining my proposal and aiding me in preparing for my research trip. My research would not have been possible without the generous support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) or the help of the archivists at the Federal Archive in Berlin, the German Federal Film Archive and especially the Berlin Film Museum. (The librarian who yelled at me for failing to show my ID as I left the StaBi also deserves special mention, although I am still trying to determine the lesson I was to vi learn from that encounter.) I also appreciate the good friends who read drafts, kept me focused through “work dates” and bribes with cherry Danish, and shared draughts when the drafts became overwhelming: Anita Bravo, Amanda Brian, Erica Fraser, Greg Goodale, Elana Jakel, Danielle Kinsey, Kathy Kloepper, Greg Kveberg, and Doria Lynch. I would like to thank my family, which has informed me that my degree has taken far too long, and it is now time for me to complete it. It’s hard to argue with their particular brand of logic. It’s also impossible to imagine where I would be without their continuous love