A System of Double Address

While writing a book on Weimar cinema, I came across a number of early sound films, which seemed to me to strikingly confirm a more general thesis regarding silent German cinema of the early 1920s. The thesis claimed that many of the so-called ‘expressionist films’ become more comprehensible if one assumed that they were intended to be read by their contemporary audiences as both ‘serious’ and ‘tongue-in-cheek’. They could be said to be staging a kind of double address towards their public. At once naive and calculating, cynical and subversive, films like THE CABINET OF DR CALIGARI, NOSFERATU, THE GOLEM, and THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE are very sophisticated at the level of style, and—contrary to the nostalgic, historically remote aura with which they generally surround themselves—they are rightly famous for their extremely bold experiments in film technique and special effects. From the point of view of media history and cultural politics, such a system of double address gives a clue to the special social pressures that cinema was exposed to in Germany after the war: it needed to legitimate itself as the Seventh Art among middle-class audiences while not wishing to lose touch either with a mass public or with the advanced audio-visual technologies that so fascinated this public. The films, I argued, wanted to reach two kinds of audiences: a sophisticated international (high-culture) audience, which frequented the cinema in the expectation of experiencing art and being in touch with the avant-garde, and a national audience that preferred popular films with stars, spectacle, special effects, and catchy titles.

With this move, I also wanted to challenge the division usually made in the study of German cinema between ‘Expressionism’ and ‘Realism’ (Die Neue Sachlichkeit). Likewise, I felt the time had come to re-align the distinctions between the Gothic-Romantic heritage of the ‘Haunted Screen’ and the traditions of popular music and variety, usually summarized as Viennese operetta kitsch, which—a fact often forgotten—had its admirers even among intellectuals. My aim was to show that similar strategies of narrational mise-en-abyme and the suspension of referentiality were also present in key examples of both art cinema and popular mainstream cinema, irrespective of genres.