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Hitler's Machtergreifung, or seizure of power, on January 30, 1933, marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich, and German film scholarship has generally accepted this date as the break between Weimar and Nazi-era film as well. This collection of essays interrogates the continuities and discontinuities in German cinema before and after January 1933 and theirrelationship to the various crises of the years 1928 to 1936 in seven areas: politics, the economy, concepts of race and ethnicity, the making of cinema stars, genre cinema, film technologies and aesthetics, and German-international film relations. Focusing both on canonical and lesser-known works, the essays analyze a representative sample of films and genres from the period. This book will be ofinterest to scholars and students of Weimar and Third Reich cinema and of the sociopolitical, economic, racial, artistic, and technological spheres in both late Weimar and the early Third Reich, as well as to film scholars in general.
Contributors: Paul Flaig, Margrit Frölich, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Bastian Heinsohn, Brook Henkel, Kevin B. Johnson, Owen Lyons, Richard W. McCormick, Kalani Michell, Mihaela Petrescu, Christian Rogowski, Valerie Weinstein, Wilfried Wilms.
Barbara Hales is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. MihaelaPetrescu is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Valerie Weinstein is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
WHEN IN JUNE 1928 the Ufa star Brigitte Helm arrived in Paris, a crowd gathered at the train station to welcome the actress who had come to sudden fame through her debut in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). Eighteen months after the German premiere of Metropolis in January 1927, and after no less than six more film roles, Helm had come to Paris to work with the film director Marcel L’Herbier, one of the central figures in French cinema at the time. She had been contracted, alongside Alfred Abel, the accomplished Ufa actor best known for his portrayal of the imperious ruler of Metropolis, Joh Fredersen, to play a leading role in L’Herbier's screen adaptation of Emile Zola's novel L’Argent (Money).
As astounding as it may seem at first glance to find two prolific German actors in this French motion picture, their participation illustrates the collaboration between Ufa, the German film industry's leading player, and the French film industry, which evolved in the second half of the 1920s. Collaborations such as the distribution of L’Argent in Germany by Ufa sowed the seeds for subsequent business ventures between the two European film industries, which turned out to be beneficial to Ufa before and after 1933. How did this engagement of Helm and Abel come about? What does it reveal about the specific nature of the German and French business interests at the time? What does it tell us about economic trends and technological challenges that affected Ufa and the French film industry, respectively, during this transitional period from 1928 onward? Considering these questions will give us insights into some of the continuities of Ufa's corporate politics between the Weimar years and the Nazi era and the film's connection to two of the pivotal crises of the transitional years—the economic crisis and the introduction of sound film.
Doing Business: Marcel L’Herbier, Ufa, and “Film Europe”
Marcel L’Herbier will prove with L’Argent that the French school has its proper qualities and that our country is entitled to a place of honor in the international film market.
