E A Dupont And His Contribution To British Film

The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

To continue doing business in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany's persecution of Jews. Ben Urwand reveals this bargain for the first time—a "collaboration" (Zusammenarbeit) that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood icons such as Louis B. Mayer. At the center of Urwand's story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies and recognized their power to shape public opinion. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions. Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios—many of which were headed by Jews—began dealing with his representatives directly. Urwand shows that the arrangement remained in place through the 1930s, as Hollywood studios met regularly with the German consul in Los Angeles and changed or canceled movies according to his wishes. Paramount and Fox invested profits made from the German market in German newsreels, while MGM financed the production of German armaments. Painstakingly marshaling previously unexamined archival evidence, The Collaboration raises the curtain on a hidden episode in Hollywood—and American—history.

In film history, director-cinematographer collaborations were on a labor spectrum, with the model of the contracted camera operator in the silent era and that of the cinematographer in the sound era. But in Weimar era German filmmaking, 1919-33, a short period of intense artistic activity and political and economic instability, these models existed side by side due to the emergence of camera operators as independent visual artists and collaborators with directors. Berlin in the 1920s was the chief site of the interdisciplinary avant-garde of the Modernist movement in the visual, literary, architectural, design, typographical, sartorial, and performance arts in Europe. The Weimar Revolution that arose in the aftermath of the November 1918 Armistice and that established the Weimar Republic informed and agitated all of the art movements, such as Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Minimalism, Objectivism, Verism, and Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Among the avant-garde forms of these new stylistically and culturally negotiated arts, the cinema was foremost and since its inception had been a radical experimental practice in new visual technologies that proved instrumental in changing how human beings perceived movement, structure, perspective, light exposure, temporal duration, continuity, spatial orientation, human postural, facial, vocal, and gestural displays, and their own spectatorship, as well as conventions of storytelling like narrative, setting, theme, character, and structure. Whereas most of the arts mobilized into schools, movements, institutions, and other structures, cinema, a collaborative art, tended to organize around its ensembles of practitioners. Historically, the silent film era, 1895-1927, is associated with auteurs, the precursors of François Truffaut and other filmmakers in the 1960s: actuality filmmakers and pioneers like R. W. Paul and Fred and Joe Evans in England, Auguste and Luis Lumière and Georges Méliès in France, and Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton in America, who, by managing all the compositional, executional, and editorial facets of film production—scripting, directing, acting, photographing, set, costume, and lighting design, editing, and marketing—imposed their personal vision or authorship on the film. The dichotomy of the auteur and the production ensemble established a production hierarchy in most filmmaking. In formative German silent film, however, this hierarchy was less rank or class driven, because collaborative partnerships took precedence over single authorship. Whereas in silent film production in most countries the terms filmmaker and director were synonymous, in German silent film the plural term filmemacherin connoted both directors and cinematographers, along with the rest of the filmmaking crew. Thus, German silent filmmakers’ principle contribution to the new medium and art of film was less the representational iconographies of Expressionist, New Objective, and Naturalist styles than the executional practice of co-authorship and co-production, in distinctive cinematographer-director partnerships such as those of cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl and director Ernst Lubitsch; Fritz Arno Wagner with F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst; Rudolf Maté with Carl Theodor Dreyer; Guido Seeber with Lang and Pabst; and Carl Hoffmann with Lang and Murnau.

This book investigates a Jewish orientation to film culture in interwar Britain. It explores how pleasure, politics and communal solidarity intermingled in the cinemas of Jewish neighbourhoods, and how film was seen as a vessel through which Jewish communal concerns might be carried to a wider public. Addressing an array of related topics, this volume examines the lived expressive cultures of cinemas in Jewish areas and the ethnically specific films consumed within these sites; the reception of film stars as representations of a Jewish social body; and how an antisemitic canard that understood the cinema as a Jewish monopoly complicated its use as a base for anti-fascist activity. In shedding light on an unexplored aspect of British film reception and exhibition, Toffell provides a unique insight into the making of the modern city by migrant communities. The title will be of use to anyone interested in Britain’s interwar leisure landscape, the Jewish presence in modernity, and a cinema studies sensitised to the everyday experience of audiences.

London as Screen Gateway explores how London features within screen narratives and as a location of screen industry activity. Reflecting the diversity of roles the city plays both on screen and within the screen industries, the volume explores the intersection between London as a material place and its position within a cultural imaginary. Conceptualising London as an archival city, as a collection of specific places and spaces, and as a part of national and international cultural and economic flows, contributors from film studies, television studies and media studies approach London through the lenses of textual analysis, historical work, industry studies and user experience. Chapters explore how London has appeared on screen across film and television, how screen content frames notions of place and belonging within the diasporic communities across the city, how the city has become a hub for the UK and global screen industries and how it intersects with national and local media policy. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, television studies, media industry studies, games studies, cultural and media studies.

Social dance was ubiquitous in interwar Britain. The social mingling and expression made possible through non-theatrical participatory dancing in couples and groups inspired heated commentary, both vociferous and subtle. By drawing attention to the ways social dance accrued meaning in interwar Britain, Rishona Zimring redefines and brings needed attention to a phenomenon that has been overshadowed by other developments in the history of dance. Social dance, Zimring argues, haunted the interwar imagination, as illustrated in trends such as folk revivalism and the rise of therapeutic dance education. She brings to light the powerful figurative importance of popular music and dance both in the aftermath of war, and during Britain’s entrance into cosmopolitan modernity and the modernization of gender relations. Analyzing paintings, films, memoirs, a ballet production, and archival documents, in addition to writings by Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Vivienne Eliot, and T.S. Eliot, to name just a few, Zimring provides crucial insights into the experience, observation, and representation of social dance during a time of cultural transition and recuperation. Social dance was pivotal in the construction of modern British society as well as the aesthetics of some of the period’s most prominent intellectuals.

Carl Theodor Dreyer was a visionary director whose films were based less on his screenplays than on his preconceptions, his complete formal, aesthetic cinematic projections of the films he deputized actors, cinematographers, and crew to produce. Cinematography of Carl Theodor Dreyer examines the life and work of a brilliant director and visionary.