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3 - Expressive Visual Effects from Silent to Sound Film
- Edited by Daniel Wiegand, Universität Zürich
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- Aesthetics of Early Sound Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 17 February 2024
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- 04 September 2023, pp 49-66
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Abstract: It is often assumed that with the introduction of synchronized sound, ‘silent-style’ visual effects largely disappeared as an expressive device. However, sound films continued to render abstract ideas by means of multiple exposure and split screen mattes. The resulting composites, which I call montage shots, do not seek to represent physical realities within the diegesis. Instead, they are clearly recognizable as formal devices that encourage viewers to forge conceptual connections between simultaneously presented images. The case of montage shots attests to a far greater consistency between silent and sound aesthetics than is usually acknowledged. It reveals how early sound films cultivated and expanded silent cinema's modes of expressivity, but also relegated them to discrete non-mimetic episodes. Attention to alternative approaches to expressive visual effects also allows us to rethink the instance of the Hollywood montage sequence, which became a staple of American filmmaking for decades to come.
Keywords: visual style, composite shots, montage sequences, special effects, expressivity
Early sound films are often considered visually uninteresting, largely dialogue-driven and shaped by requirements of sound recording equipment. ‘Silent-style’ visual effects – specifically expressive ones resulting from multiple exposure or combination printing – are assumed to have largely disappeared with the coming of sound. In actual fact, early sound films feature a remarkable range of expressive visual effects, which build directly on silent-era practices. In this chapter, I will focus on composites that visibly juxtapose different image components in one shot, either layered on top of one another or presented side-by-side. Unlike sequential montage, which forges meaning from disparities between successive shots, what I call montage shots present diverse images simultaneously. Such composites are immediately recognizable as a purposeful arrangement and thus diminish the illusion of direct imprints of a physical reality. As I will show, montage shots persisted in sound cinema, where they facilitated enduring efforts to communicate ideas and emotions non-verbally. Highlighting the continuities between silent and early sound aesthetics, attention to montage shots allows us to revisit common assumptions about filmmaking in the early sound period.
Montage Shots in Silent Cinema
Already in the earliest days of cinema, filmmakers experimented with combining multiple scenes in one frame. Building on familiar iconography from religious art, lantern slides, illustrated journals, or advertising, early films juxtaposed different locations to represent projections of characters’ ‘inner eyes,’ that is, their mental images or accounts.
Conclusion: Techno-Romantic Cinema from the Silent to the Digital Era
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 273-278
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Techno-romantic thought, which construes machine technology as a means to reach beyond material reality, is still with us today. It is reflected in the vogue of speculative fiction in contemporary moving image media, which has been made possible by radical advances in digital visual effects. Computer-generated imagery has brought into reach the fully malleable photograph, a dream that epitomizes a major triumph of the human mind over outside reality and thus an essentially techno-romantic fantasy. The same ambition already animated German silent filmmakers, who saw special effects as a way to shape mechanically produced images. Their use of trick technology for conveying thoughts and emotions gives rise to a new research area: special/visual effects as artistic tools.
Keywords: CGI, digital cinema, visual effects, expressive special effects
Techno-romantic thought has been with us for at least two hundred fifty years. Every wave of technological innovation during the industrial, technological, and most recently the digital revolution has engendered new iterations of the same paradoxical response: Technological progress calls forth hubristic fantasies of unlimited, quasi-magical powers, while also triggering deep-seated anxieties about subjugation, dehumanization, and annihilation. This tension manifests, for instance, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), where the eponymous hero's command of fantastical technology allows him to overcome death and assume the godlike status of a “modern Prometheus.” At the same time, he renders his creature a victim to cruel oppression and thus turns it into a lethal danger. Techno-romantic perspectives help articulate and mitigate fears about modernity. Rendering it possible to savour the fascinating aspects of technology while grappling with its threats, techno-romantic thought is neither inherently technophile nor technophobic, but can be found in the context of technological utopias like Ian M. Banks's The Culture series (1987-2012) as well as dystopias like the Wachowskis’ The Matrix franchise (1999-).
The techno-romantic paradigm construes modern technology as a force that can reach beyond the limits of physical reality. This, on the one hand, magnifies technology's powers and thus its perils, but also envisions it as a means to safeguard the human soul against modern reification. Associated with emotional, imaginary, or spiritual qualities, technology then corroborates the primacy of human consciousness and facilitates retreats to an immaterial realm. As Mark Coeckelbergh has suggested, “As children of twentieth-century romantic counterculture, we seamlessly fuse technology and romanticism.
Contents
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 5-6
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Bibliography
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 279-308
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Index
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 309-320
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Acknowledgements
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 7-8
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Frontmatter
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 1-4
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Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 9-32
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Abstract
German silent cinema is famous for its unconventional aesthetics and film-technological innovations. These characteristics were the result of efforts to reconcile the new medium's automatic reproductions of physical reality with idealist conceptions of art. Special effects played a crucial role in this endeavour. They afforded creative experiments with the cinematic apparatus and inspired filmmakers to convey ideas and emotions. Special effects embodied the “techno-romantic” project of construing technology as a means for transcending material reality. This common response to industrial modernity profoundly shaped German silent film culture. The techno-romantic paradigm formed the basis of one of the most creative periods in film history and proved instrumental in the evolution of cinematic expressivity and film art.
Keywords: special effects, techno-romantic thought, Expressionism, film art, expressivity
One of the most famous sequences in the history of cinema is the robot's anthropogenesis in Metropolis (Ufa, 1927, dir. Fritz Lang). The images of the metal cyborg seated like an ancient Egyptian deity on a throne enveloped in dramatic electric discharges and rings of light that glide up and down her body are as awe-inspiring as they are enigmatic and ominous. The scene has become an emblem for the unconventional aesthetics and seminal film-technological innovations of German silent cinema. It also points to a complex, even paradoxical attitude towards machine technology, one that is simultaneously characterized by fascination and apprehension. The filmmakers and intellectuals who principally shaped German silent film culture strove to reconcile their idealist conceptions of art and life with a rapidly mechanizing world. They eagerly embraced cinema as the art of the machine age. At the same time, however, they also insisted that it was imperative for the medium to meet key stipulations of idealist aesthetics. The leading German filmmakers were preoccupied with the creative potentials of film technology and special effects came to play a pivotal role in the endeavour to develop cinema's medium-specific expressivity. According to Sergei Eisenstein, German cinema evinced that the artistic value of special effects rivalled that of montage, which he considered the “nerve of cinema:” “‘The technical possibility,’ foolishly called a ‘trick,’ is undoubtedly just as important a factor in the construction of the new film art as the new principle of montage that emerged from it.”
2 - Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 67-112
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Two technicians had a particularly formative impact on the evolution of special effects in Germany. Film pioneer Guido Seeber favoured methods like multiple exposure composites, which allow the cinematographer to excel both technically and creatively. Aiming at forging convincing composite spaces on screen, Eugen Schufftan invented the only widely used commercial special-effects technique originating in Europe, the Schufftan process. In similar ways, Seeber's photographic and Schufftan's perceptual effects construe technology as cinema's core creative tool and the cinematic image as fundamentally malleable. Both shared technoromantic views, which is apparent from their devotion to the goal of film art and commitment to devising medium-specific means for transcending material reality and expressing emotions and ideas.
Keywords: Guido Seeber, Eugen Schufftan, film technicians, multiple exposure composites, Schufftan process
All major German cinematographers of the silent era were masters of trick technology. Internationally the best known was Karl Freund, but the artistry of Carl Hoffmann, whom Freund considered the greatest of all cinematographers, Fritz Arno Wagner, and Gunther Rittau equalled Freund’s. Even though German cameramen, particularly in the early 1920s, often complained about being undervalued, by international standards they were highly respected. Ubiquitous techno-romantic views elevated the cinematographer's prestige. They rendered conceivable the ostensibly oxymoronic notion of technician as artist. Because medium-specific creativity, i.e., the imaginative use of film technology to shape cinematic images, was deemed a prerequisite for film art, film technicians became regarded as co-creators of the filmic artwork early on in Germany. The ability to create striking trick effects was therefore not merely a hallmark of cinematographers’ professional merit, but fundamental to their status as artists.
Tricks, as Guido Seeber defined them in his 1927 book-length study on the subject, are “skilful cinematographic devices” [Kunstgriffe aufnahmetechnischer Art], specifically of the “photographic, optical, physical, and chemical” kind. Many of the devices that Seeber examines would still be considered special effects today. They include techniques that manipulate the photographic image itself, like mattes, miniatures, rear projection, and multiple exposure composites as well as methods that manipulate the illusion of movement like stop, reverse, slow, and fast motion. At the same time, however, several of the techniques covered in Seeber's book, such as extreme camera angles, capturing certain photographically challenging objects like the moon, or the use of particular film stock, were later no longer regarded as “tricks”.
3 - The Uncanny Mirror: Der Student von Prag (1913)
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 113-144
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The first German film to excite art critics was simultaneously a milestone in the history of special effects. Der Student von Prag was co-created by some of Germany's most ardent early cinephiles with the goal to demonstrate the feasibility of film art. Proceeding from techno-romantic assumptions, they construed artistic filmmaking as the articulation of ideas and feelings through the imaginative application of the medium's technological assets, specifically location shots and trick effects. Consequently, Der Student von Prag depicts the intrusion of an uncanny doppelganger into a real-life setting, the mystical city of Prague. As a vehicle for abstract notions, the horrific double thus bore witness to cinema's ability to convey figurative meaning and participate in the life of the mind.
Keywords: doppelganger, double, film art, split-screen composites, location Cinematography
The first German film to excite art critics across the board was simultaneously a milestone in the history of special effects. Der Student von Prag (Deutsche Bioscop, 1913) was co-created by some of Germany's most ardent early cinephiles, actor Paul Wegener, author Hanns Heinz Ewers, director Stellan Rye, and cinematographer Guido Seeber. Their goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of film art, and special effects played a central role in this endeavour. Der Student von Prag emerged from an art film movement that dominated German production between the fall of 1912 and the summer of 1914. Encouraged by new commercial opportunities arising in the wake of the feature-length film, ambitious producers engaged in the creation of “artistic” premium films. Specifically, they aspired to mitigating concerns about cinema's negative social and aesthetic implications and improving the medium's reputation with elite opinion leaders.
As I have shown in Chapter 1, aesthetic theory considered medium specificity as a prerequisite for art. Cinema's first critics identified two types of subject matter as cinema's proper areas of competence: nature cinematography and fantastic or mental imagery, realized by means of special effects. In line with this and proceeding from fundamentally techno-romantic premises, the creators of Der Student von Prag sought to devise an art film by capturing the intangible through cinema's unique technological assets. Their tale about a man haunted by his mirror image featured scenic shots of romantic Prague and the eerie figure of the doppelganger, created by means of split screen composites.
1 - Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 33-66
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As a form of popular mass entertainment and an apparatus for the automatic reproduction of material reality, cinema's artistic aspirations seemed futile. Some early commentators nonetheless asserted that the new medium could be a legitimate object of aesthetic scrutiny. In an attempt to fathom cinema's immaterial values, early film theorists including Herbert Tannenbaum and Georg Lukacs explored cinema's kinship with folk art, mental processes and the fantastic. They argued that film technology, specifically special effects, could articulate ideas in a sensual form and thus provide a pathway to a spiritual dimension. As this chapter shows, their techno-romantic lines of argument conceptualized the medium within established aesthetics and set the stage for the recognition of cinema as the first technological art.
Keywords: film theory, technology, film art, fantastic, trick effects
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.
5 - The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 185-226
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Metropolis displays a deeply conflicting attitude toward industrial modernity. Conceived and marketed as a marvel of film technology, the film pursued the techno-romantic project of transcending material reality through technological means. What is more, the goal was to capture the unfathomability of technology itself. Metropolis simultaneously portrays technology as an agent of tyranny and dehumanization and flaunts it as spectacle. Special effects facilitate encounters with overpowering technological environments and omnipotent machines, which give rise to sentiments that are best described in terms of a “technological sublime.” The sublime characterizes experiences that go beyond the earthly and finite, to attain a spiritual dimension. In attributing transcendent qualities to mechanical objects, the technological sublime embodies the technoromantic paradigm.
Keywords: sublime, robot, science fiction, Schüfftan process, multiple exposure composites
Metropolis (Ufa, 1927, dir. Fritz Lang) exhibits an ambivalent, even paradoxical stance towards industrial modernity, which over the past century has profoundly resonated with audiences. The film's look has shaped science fiction films, music videos, video games, comics, and graphic novels. Its influence can be seen in the work of filmmakers and pop culture luminaries from Tim Burton and Ridley Scott to George Lucas and Denis Villeneuve, from Osamu Tezuka and Freddie Mercury to Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. Indeed, Metropolis has fashioned the way we imagine the future.
Set in a repressive urban dystopia that collapses following a humancaused disaster, Metropolis articulates fundamental fears about industrial modernity. The film paints a picture of the future in which nurturing natural environments have disappeared and technology permeates all aspects of life. As people have become enslaved by god-like machines, the fusion of human and apparatus seems inevitable. Despite these horrific premonitions, however, Metropolis is far from taking a purely technophobic stance as it flaunts technology's splendour, magnetism, and visionary power. By confronting the audience with monstrous machines and hostile high-tech environments of hypnotic grandeur, Metropolis simultaneously characterizes the future as astonishing and dreadful. This apparent contradiction can be best understood in terms of a “technological sublime.” The concept builds on theories by eighteenth-century philosophers like Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller, who conceived of objects that exceed our sensory capacities and result in conflicting emotions of pleasure and pain as “sublime.”
6 - “German Technique” and Hollywood
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 227-272
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In the mid-1920s, the innovative imagery and emotional force of German films startled American critics and filmmakers. Well-known directors like F. W. Murnau and Paul Leni were invited to Hollywood, and their American films showcased a range of unconventional camera effects, in particular moving camera feats and extreme camera angles. What galvanized American commentators about these methods was the realization that cinematic devices could be used to visualize affective content. German filmmakers proffered a novel model of cinematic immersion, which augmented the audience's absorption in the story world with figurative levels of meaning. Prompted by objectives originating in techno-romantic thought, Hollywood began to pay increased attention to the expressive potential of technical tools, with lasting effects on American filmmaking.
Keywords: F. W. Murnau, camera angles, moving camera, immersion, camera cranes
In the mid-1920s, German films caused an upheaval in Hollywood. Critics and members of the film industry were astonished by the camera feats on display in films like Der letzte Mann (Ufa, 1924, dir. F. W. Murnau), Varieté (Ufa, 1925, dir. E. A. Dupont), and Metropolis (Ufa, 1927, dir. Fritz Lang). Possibly for the first time since the introduction of feature-length films, it became painfully obvious that, despite all its commercial successes, Hollywood was lagging behind technically and aesthetically. The New York Herald Tribune for instance proclaimed: “It is curious to note how completely Germanic this new art of the cinema seems to be. As an industry, of course, the American photoplay is supreme by at least a thousand miles, yet when it comes to the aesthetics of the screen field, even the local film makers look to Germany for inspiration and idea.” In addition to aesthetic deficits, early warning signs also indicated that American market shares in Europe were slipping. As part of a multi-faceted approach to meet these challenges, studios started importing directors from Europe with expectation that they would create prestigious films with the international appeal and familiarize Hollywood with their methods.
Conventional wisdom has it that many of the impulses Hollywood received from Germany were technical in nature. Indeed, Hollywood paid close attention to German technological innovations, as producer G. A. Mincenty observed: “What interests almost every American about German films is whether he can see something technically new.” Scholars have often pointed to special effects, camera movement, or high-contrast lighting as examples of Germany's influence on Hollywood.
4 - Visualizing the Occult: Nosferatu (1922)
- Katharina Loew
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- Special Effects and German Silent Film
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021, pp 145-184
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Public enthusiasm for occult themes was rife in the decades around 1900 and many German filmmakers and intellectuals were occupied with esoteric concepts. Constitutive of occultist thought is a belief in secret realities beyond our perceptual abilities. The vampire tale Nosferatu does not advocate for specific doctrines, but many of the film's idiosyncratic aspects, particularly the appearance, behaviour, and powers of the vampire, become intelligible in novel ways when examined from an occultist perspective. The film externalizes the vampire's nature through cinematic devices and most notably special effects. The materialization of the intangible by means of technology constitutes an essentially techno-romantic project. In Nosferatu, it served to consolidate objectives of occultists and cinephiles for the purpose of film art.
Keywords: occultism, vampires, the invisible, camera effects, stop-motion
The period between the 1870s and the 1930s saw a surge of occultist ideas and practices across the Western world. Although the history of occultism goes back to antiquity, a sharp upturn in public interest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century suggests that the occult revival constitutes a characteristically modern phenomenon. For philosopher Richard von Coudenhove-Karlegi, enthusiasm for the occult was indicative of “modern romanticism,” which also underlay other zeitgeist sentiments like nostalgia, exoticism, and faith in the future. All expressed longing for other, remote, and mysterious worlds and sprang from anguish in the face of modernity's concrete, cold, and pragmatic materialism, a feature that machine technology epitomized. The techno-romantic paradigm constitutes a response to the same affliction, yet paradoxically seeks to attain the intangible, specifically through technology. What concerns me here are the intersections between techno-romantic and occultist lines of thought. Although both construe the spiritual as the essential feature of human existence, occultism's quest for invisible realities and eternal truths through the pursuit of ancient hermetic wisdom did not specifically pertain to machine technology, and techno-romantic perspectives neither constituted a systematic doctrine nor were they expressly concerned with mysterious forces. Nonetheless, in cinema, occultist and techno-romantic approaches proved highly compatible.
In the decades around 1900, fascination with the occult permeated all layers of European society. Many artists, including filmmakers, engaged with occultist thought and practices.
Special Effects and German Silent Film
- Techno-Romantic Cinema
- Katharina Loew
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- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 13 April 2021
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- 22 March 2021
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In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a 'techno-romantic' paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.