Cinema's emergence as a prominent mass culture phenomenon in the early 1900s triggered intense public discussions all over Europe. Gauging the new medium's social and aesthetic implications, commentators voiced grave concerns. Cinema was perceived as a threat to the health, tastes, and morals of mass audiences as well as a danger to established cultural institutions like the theatre. Even more importantly, cinema's technological character raised fundamental questions about the nature of art in the machine age. This chapter explores why film posed such a major aesthetic problem and how the new medium was eventually integrated with existing conceptions of art. As I argue, special effects played a key role in this endeavour.

In Germany, the first comprehensive discussion about film sprung up around 1907, at a time when cinema established itself as a public institution, permanent movie theatres became increasingly prevalent, and the first specialized film trade journals emerged. Simultaneously, the aesthetic discourse was dominated by idealist convictions that posited machine technology as diametrically opposed to art. Art generated beauty and truth through the sensuous expression of the ideal, while technology was associated with exteriority and soulless objectivity. As a mechanism that merely reproduced the appearance of the material world, film was portrayed as one-dimensional, mundane, and inherently incapable of transcending phenomena. Devoid of spiritual properties, the medium necessarily remained aesthetically inconsequential. For cinema-friendly critics, the task was therefore to ascertain film's ontology and invalidate these allegations.