Silent Cinema

ONCE UPON A TIME: A STUFFED BIRD

Of course, now and then – and here and there – it has been possible to see silent films somehow over the past thirty years. But only somehow. A poor state of affairs; as poor as the state of the films them­elves and the conditions under which they and a host of interested viewers were brought together. The German cultural and film critic Helmut Faerber summed things up as they appeared to him in the year 1983 in the following way: “A continuous, variable, lasting frame of reference comprising a large number of cinema films: That is what is missing from cinemas and film culture here more than anything else. It is relatively worthless if a single old film can be seen in a cinema now and then, in among the latest releases; as worthless as a stuffed bird in the window of a boutique.”

At that time, Faerber longed for a situation in which, as if glancing up at the sky while out walking, one could spot a chirpy flock of birds in the cinemas, and among them there would also be silent films. Lively diversity.

EDUCATIONAL DUTY OR AN ADVENTURE?

Silent films are moving images recorded before 1930. The recordings were made without the corresponding sound on a translucent, easily inflammable and flexible strip and projected onto a screen in a dark room using a projector at different speeds, ranging from 16 to 24 images per second. These moving images found a home in our cinemas and their destiny in the audience’s reception. Frequently, silent films are also referred to as ‘old films’. But isn’t the term ‘old film’ completely misleading? Who would call Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks or Franz Kafka’s America old books? Of course there are old books: printed works that are dog-eared, faded, and falling apart at the spine. When people refer to old books, they mean the material text carriers on which an author’s work was print­d. So naturally Goethe’s Werther exists in old books, but also in quite new ones. No age can be attributed to Werther per se, surely. And thus every new edition of this book is also – as a matter of course – a new offer, and opens the way to a new experience. It is, as it should be, simply a book.

Enno Patalas has always opposed this attitude. Patalas was a pioneer in the writing of German film history, director of the Munich Film Museum for almost 20 years, and is an internationally acknowledged expert in the reconstruction of silent films. “You never dive into the same film twice,” he says, varying a Chinese proverb, and colors his statement with a quotation from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead, it is not even past.” Even if they were recorded without sound, films are evidence of a former cultural technology, and a special re­erence to reality is inherent in them. They provide a link to reality that no other art form can achieve in this way – and silent films also convey this experi­nce to their audience, no matter what the content of each individual film may be.

Part of silent film’s current topicality, inevitably, lies in the fact that it has been released from its unique place in the noblest diaspora of film history. The fact that we have begun to re­atriate it among the flock of brightly-colored birds that constitutes cinema in its entirety.

CINÉ-CONCERTS

Unlike the situation ten or twenty years ago, today it is relatively easy to locate and attend a regular trickle of imaginative and yet seriously organized silent film screenings. Cinema Babylon in Berlin, for example, has been presenting regular silent film concerts since 2006. During these first two years, the cinema has realized a total of 100 events, either in the cinema itself or in special locations (open air, Berlin planetarium, or even a church). At the beginning of 2007, the cinema presented a report on the first year of the project, which was even considered bold by the initiators themselves. To their own delighted amazement, they were able to announce: “21 of the films (47 in all) shown last year (2006) belonged to the popular canon (for example Pandora’s Box (1929) directed by G.W. Pabst, with Louise Brooks in the lead­ng role, and 26 to the categories of rarely shown (for example Der Sonderling (1929) by and with Karl Valentin) and very rarely shown films (for example Die Blitz­entrale (1921) by Valy Arnheim). There were two Berlin premieres, a German premiere and a world premiere of restored films. All with outstanding projection, live music, introduction and a program leaflet.

Stephan von Bothmer performs ciné-concert during Lubitsch Festival

At the Babylon we had audiences of 4776, at the open-air events 1404, in the planetarium 313 and in the Apostelkirche 200. Two years ago, no one would have imagined such a thing possible.

The German press (Hamburger Morgenpost) certainly acclaimed the organizers of the silent film concerts as national players in the league of popular cultural events, and the Berlin BZ claimed that “silent film concerts are the latest trend”. German Films also presents ciné- concerts at many of its own Festivals of German Films around the world, with live musical accompaniment by the Aljoscha Zimmer­ann Trio.

Such enthusiasm can be topped only when the events take place in the open air. Of course open-air screenings have always been part of the cultural heritage in regions privileged with a warm climate, but meanwhile the combination of open air, silent film and concert has developed into a super trend for the metropolitan chill-out gener­tion from New York to Budapest: now ciné-concerts in parks, on river banks or other locations with special flair form a mainstay against constant over-stimulus from the world of 3-D visions and laser shows.

THE SOUNDS OF SILENTS

Music plays a key role in silent films’ new popularity among the general public. And it is no coincidence that the representatives of New Music have played and continue to play an extremely active role in this ‘gentle dusting-off’, for in the aesthetic concepts of silent film they discovered a principle that corresponds astonishingly to their own efforts at abstraction and attempts to overcome mimesis and naturalism. New compositions or adaptations of silent film music by renowned composers ranging from Mauricio Kagel (Un chien andalou) to Henning Lohner (Orlacs Haende), Andras Hamary (Foolish Wives) and Michael Nyman (Der Mann mit der Kamera) have contributed considerably to an awareness of the modernity and innovative force of cinema’s early years – and the re­evance of the past is emphasized particularly in a contemporary musical language. 
In this context, the DVD edition with which world sales agent Transit and the Murnau Foundation breathed new life into Murnau’s opus magnum The Last Laugh in 2004 is quite exemplary: with this lavish restoration made from various copies scattered all over the world – the original version being lost – the initiators have helped develop a differentiated aura to the film, a clarity and quiet in its images that could probably only be admired at its world premiere over 80 years ago.

There were no compromises regarding the sound, either. As this silent film is almost entirely without intertitles, the film music plays an even bigger part. Detlev Glanert composed an ad­i­ion to Guiseppe Becce’s vision – only passed on to us in a fragmentary form – that now constitutes an impressive symphonic commentary.

However, in the context of silent films and music, it is astonishing that the major classics are not necessarily the audience pleasers; it is the lesser known or rarely played works that have developed a certain reputation. And so the well-known German silent film pianist Stephan von Bothmer is delighted that audiences at his events have not succumb­d, obviously, to the idea that the best-known are auto­atically the best.

SILENT SELLS

Scene from “The Marriage Circle” (photo courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek)

To stay with The Last Laugh, the bonus documentation of this DVD provides expert insights for those who wish to inform them­elves about the ingenious animation technique, the miniatures with manipulated perspectives, the living camera, the digital restoration and the exciting search for the original cutting version. The factual, sober style of this presentation makes it stand out positively among the overdone clips accompanying large-scale American productions. An additional bonus is the opportunity to listen to Hugo Riesenfeld’s alternative film music, which accompanied The Last Laugh at its premiere in the Criterion Cinema in New York.

The initial prejudice against DVDs – the belief that they would help destroy the growing interest in public screenings of silent films – was overcome long ago. Obviously, it is truer to say that considerable overlaps exist between those who attend cinema screenings and those who buy the corresponding DVDs: they prefer to catch the films twice rather than not at all. As statistics prove, the DVD is never a replacement for the fans of silent film, but a welcome supplement. u8194

Occasionally, the television broadcaster ARTE is also active in the DVD publication of silent film productions. In 2001, it demonstrated its pioneering spirit by bringing out an ambitious box containing the films Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle, Augusto Genina’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and The Thief of Baghdad directed by Raoul Walsh. This was the first time that a DVD production in this field not only fulfilled, but also surpassed all expectancies with regard to image and sound quality, bonus material and booklet – as an overall publication, therefore. Since it started broadcasting in 1992, the German-French channel ARTE has sought to remind viewers regularly of the early years of film and to bring to light forgotten or lost treasures as well. A specific dramaturgy of events and marketing has been establish­d in this context: often the results of such expeditions into film and music history are presented in a first, lavish context that promises the development of great symbolic-cultural value, like the Berlinale or other film and music festivals, and later they experience their second premiere on ARTE, and a third via publication on DVD.

Thanks to the moral and financial commitment of ARTE, it has been possible to rediscover films that were long thought lost – like Meyer from Berlin by Ernst Lubitsch or Burning Soil by F. W. Murnau – and to reconstruct works like The White Hell of Pitz Palu by Arnold Fanck or The General Line by S.M. Eisenstein in their original, i.e. sometimes also tinted color versions.

Of course in the vast majority of cases, these resto­ations also in­lude the development and production of accompanying music, because as already indicated – and this is one of the great revelations in connection with the renaissance of silent film – these films were seldom truly silent and sometimes, amazingly, they were even in color!

In this context, however Loy W. Arnold – managing director of Transit Film, which handles the international tilization rights to around 600 titles (not only from the era of silent film) – reminds us that all the people and institutions working with such commitment in this field are dependent on international exchange and above all on world-wide interest: “The necessary returns for our usually extremely costly enterprises can only be realized within an international frame- work. If we restricted ourselves to the German or even only to the European market, we would have to be content with DVD-sales of only three figures for many titles. However, if we also operate on the Japanese and American markets – where the interest in collectors’ products like ours is more widespread – the sales of our titles usually increase rapidly into the high thousands.”

METROPOLIS – AN EXCEPTIONAL CASE

One film that represents the German cinema of the twenties like no other experienced its premiere in Berlin on 10 January 1927: Metropolis, an Ufa production by Fritz Lang, was not only a film of monumental buildings and impressive camera tricks, but also a project of monumental cost and one that required an impressive length of time to produce. An amalgamation of science fiction and melodrama, the story may have sounded banal even to contemporaries: an omnipotent captain of industry forces his workers to work harder and harder while the sons and daughters of the upper class devote them­elves to the pursuit of pleasure. The setting is the gigantic city of Metropolis, which is threatened with destruction, however, be­ause an offended scientist intends to seduce the workers to insub­rdination with the aid of the artificially created, mechanical ‘Maria’. Counterpart to the ‘evil’ agitator is her double, the kind-hearted la­or­r Maria, who preaches love and reconciliation to the workers.

“The story we are told here is trivial, bombastic, pedantic and overwhelmingly romantic,” Luis Buñuel noted as early as 1927 after he had seen the film in a Paris cinema, but the Spanish director also recog­ized that Metropolis could only be approached through its story to a very minor extent: “However, if one does not concentrate on the anecdote, but on the vividly three-dimensional, photogenic back­round, Metropolis surpasses all expectations, astonishing us like the most wonderful picture book that has ever been created.”

And this ‘wonderful picture book’ has continued to fascinate audiences to the present day. Indeed, it seems to fascinate people now more than ever: Metropolis is one of the absolute bestsellers among classic (or historical) DVDs. In the program of Transit Film, there can be no doubt that it is an unbeatable sales stimulus. A brief Google search is all that is necessary in order to find detailed information about the film’s second, third (or already ninth?) life.

The divided opinions about this film since its premiere, which threaten­d to make it into the “greatest ever, unsurpassable commercial catastrophes of German film” (Film-Illustrierte), have actually prov­n to be its most valuable trump card. Today’s division of opinion no longer concerns the rating of its plot, but whether the film can be regarded as the non-plus-ultra of German silent film, dis­­issing all other candidates, or whether it may also open the door to other films from the same period – as an appetizer, a work that stimulat­s further interest. This open question is passionately voiced by fans, but reflected to the same extent in more differentiated expert views.

Martin Koerber, film curator at the Deutsche Kinemathek, who dis­overed (in 1997) the original negative of the export version of Metropolis in the Federal Film Archives that was used as the basis for the film’s most lavish and enduring reconstruction, naturally shares the enthusiasm of all aficionados. In connection with this film in particular, however, he also unorthodoxly questions the reliability and bind­ng nature of the accepted canon: “It only began to develop its current significance decades later. Of course that is also an argument against the customary practice of archiving. Naturally and inevitably, in archives there is also the issue of what is ‘worth archiving’. Films that are not considered worth archiving should be destroyed, or so the working instructions state, and there was actually a good chance that Metropolis would have fallen through the net as not worthy of archiving. So that means one has to reconsider repeatedly and very carefully what should be done with a film that is categorized as lamentably poor, and without doubt, Metropolis is lamentably poor in many respects. But the film’s absolute quality, if there is such a thing at all, is not the aspect that interests us; we are interested in something different. Part of this, surely, is the fact that it functions like a message from the era in which it was made, perhaps one of the most informative messages in existence. Indeed, this quality as a messenger was also one of the reasons why it has been adopted – as the only film – into the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage.”

Metropolis is also discussed over and over again in the relevant cyber-communities, as if it was a current blockbuster, and as an unprejudiced visitor to the corresponding forums or sites, one is rapidly compelled to admit surprise at the large number of people all over the world who feel called upon to act as testers of the film’s various editions. On www.areadvd.de, for example, after the DVD publication by Transit Film based on the work of Martin Koerber and Enno Patalas: “The gigantic pictorial worlds of the city are still visually impressive today and ought to astound even those skeptics who normally have no interest in silent films. On this DVD, the film can be found in its restored version for the first time. This is also the longest version that has been published from 1927 to the present day.” And finally, also on www.areadvd.de, the technical verdict of skeptical fan Karsten Serck, ex-pressed in a language that may justifiably be call­d ‘specialist’: “The master is only ‘window-boxed’ very slightly, which means it has been given a black frame around the image that alters it a little in places, but this is hardly likely to be noticeable due to the overscan. For this black and white film, the video-bit rate of 5.5 Mbps is adequate to avoid the creation of new digital defects in the image through com­ression, which would spoil the meticulous efforts of restoration. This makes it possible to receive a near un­dulterated impression of the quality of the restoration from this DVD as well. Despite compression, the graininess of the image is pre­erved. The image is very quiet, with hardly any irregular motion. In this respect, Metropolis is even better than some contemporary films that have not been scanned with sufficient care. Thanks to digital technology, the clearly legible intertitles are almost motionless, like a still. The dropouts and scratches, which were con­iderable in some places, have been 99% eliminat­d, and hardly any inter­erence is now noticeable. Above all, it is astonish­ng how much detail the master still en­bles us to make out. In some places, certainly, you can see that the film material used did not have the same quality through­ut, but overall the quality is very good for this age, and there are even some sequenc­s with a sharp­ess of detail that almost meets the standard of more recent productions.”

Thus, although Metropolis may appear to be the synonym for the topicality of German silent film, one should recall that its success story only really began after a delay of three decades.

NOSFERATU: CONSTANTLY REVISITED, RELENTLESSY REMADE

Not long ago, Indy Mogul (www.indymogul.com), a video podcast for young independent filmmakers, asked its subscribers which horror film they thought was the most important of all time: in first place, the up-and-coming independent filmmakers did not name John Carpenter’s Halloween or a current Stephen King adaptation, but Murnau’s Nosferatu, a silent film made in 1921. The old Nosferatu still resembles a message from the Olympus of inter­ational cinema. This first filming of the Gothic novel by Bram Stoker has been followed by innumerable versions; not least, Werner Herzog erected a personal memorial to the film with his remake Nosferatu the Vampyre in 1978.

The extent to which Murnau’s masterpiece still stimulates the imagination of filmmakers today is indicated by the film Shadow of the Vampire made by the American director Elias Merhige in 2000. This feature film recounts the filming of Murnau’s Nosferatu and attempts to suggest that the actor of the title role, Max Schreck, was a real vampire. And this was no minor project; after all, the main roles in the film were played by John Malkovich as F. W. Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck. Horror specialist Tobe Hooper also paid trib­­e to Murnau with Salem’s Lot in 1979: here, a blue-print of the original Nosferatu haunts a small American town, only to infect its population with vampirism.

And its horrific fascination continues to exercise an impact through citation as well, for instance in Wes Craven’s Scream 2. But these direct references are only an indication of the enduring, fundamental influence of Nosferatu on the genres of horror and fantasy film. On the occasion of the Murnau retrospective at the Berlinale in 2003, the German filmmaker and film critic Joerg Buttgereit posed the question: “Only a Movie?” and answered it himself by making the point that Nosferatu is so important to us, “because it identifies Germany as a birthplace of the horror film genre, much maligned since then.” Indeed, Tod Browning’s wonderful Dracula starring Bela Lugosi from 1931, for example, would be inconceivable without the silent work from 1921: scenarios, camera angles and above all the atmospheric lighting design are based on the model from Germany. Nosferatu thus had an influence on the design and genesis of an entire genre, since Browning’s Dracula and its success led to the development of an explicit visual style for horror films in the Hollywood studio Universal, and this has continued to shape the genre to the present day.

It is conceivable that a tradition of horror film could have developed in Germany as well, but the phenomenon that began with Nosferatu, The Student of Prague and also The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with its powerful images of individual fear, did not suit the concept of National Socialist film after 1933. There, the emphasis was on distraction from everyday life. Buttgereit: “If the clean screens of the ‘Third Reich’ had not got in the way, we might have had a horror culture as deep-rooted as that of American cinema today. Murnau’s Nosferatu is evidence, so to speak, of a con­eivable German horror film culture that never really spread.”

GERMAN SILENT CINEMA – 100% EXPRESSIONIST?

But the roots of horror film are not all that can be found in the German cinema of the twenties. Ufa and the independent film companies earned their money at cinema box offices with a wide range of genre films. In the words of Martin Koerber, film curator at the Deutsche Kinemathek: “Everyone who produced images at that time was a professional who referred to older pictorial traditions, e.g. those in painting. Of course, the cinema of the twenties is not Expressionist through and through, there were also quite cheerful commercial films, brightly-lit throughout, and there were films that were dark because they told crime stories … Basically, it was – and of course it still is – a matter of getting through to good material – with the emphasis required in each case.”

Scene from “Digging for Belladonna” (photo courtesy of X Verleih)

Despite the widespread commercial success of these genre productions, nevertheless it is primarily the image of an Expressionist cinema of hard shadows, two-dimensional sets and white made-up faces that shapes our impression of cinema in the Weimar Republic. Have we succumbed to a curious form of legend-creating? Martin Koerber agrees: “To a great extent, the notion that silent film is always hard and only black and white is due to a misconception and poor original material. The authors that wrote about it in the past drew their know­edge from very poor quality copies. Incredible theories emerged as a result of such sources, which should rather be called poor photo­opies of photocopies of the sources. These theories concerning light and shade and Expressionism in German film have often survived to the present day. When one views good copies, none of this can be found, not even in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; there are no hard shadows there either, although it is true that the shadows were painted directly onto the wall. But it is filmed in a marvelously soft style otherwise.”

BRINGING UP TO DATE & CONTEXTUALIZING

Scene from “Nuts & Bolts” (photo courtesy of Andreas Krein)

It seems that people are surprised and above all captivated by the innovativeness, even brilliance, of the artistic and sociological ap­roaches in silent film, as long as the topic is successfully brought up to date or suitably contextualized. Initially, for instance, the theme of the Berlinale retrospective in 2006, “City Girls – Images of Women in Silent Film”, was not regarded as especially original, but it proved to be one of the hits of that year’s Berlinale. In this context, Rainer Rother, the artistic director of the Deutsche Kinemathek, which is responsible for the annual retrospective of film history at the festival, explained: “We know that images of women changed radically from the 1910s to the 1920s, but there was also some continuity. Our selec­ion of films attempted to bring both across to the audience. Our retrospective centered on the phenomenon of the 'new woman', whose image reflects the social changes of that era. The new female figures’ playful and challenging qualities, their mobility, their audacious expressions; these all interested us. It is a great pleasure to see how their undisturbed sparkle and great enthusiasm helped to upturn traditional models.”

Besides the annual retrospectives at the Berlinale, there are also a number of international silent film festivals. The spectrum ranges from the USA (San Francisco Silent Film Festival) and Great Britain (British Silent Cinema in Nottingham), to the Netherlands (Filmmuseum Biennale in Amsterdam), Australia (Silent Film Festival in Hobart/Tasmania) and Japan (Kyoto Film Festival). In 1997, the German film composer Guenther A. Buchwald was even honored in Japan with an opportunity to compose new music for the silent film What Made Her Do It? (1929) by the director Shigeyoshi Suzuki, which was then premiered as a ciné-concert at the gala open­ng of the 10th International Tokyo Film Festival.

Over the past 15 years, silent film festivals have developed from secrecy-clad meetings between representatives of a curious sect into cultish audience-pullers in the relevant regions or countries. As it was a pioneer in this field, one special example is “Le giornate del cinema muto” in the Northern Italian town of Pordenone, where top-quality master classes for film musicians are also organized. This part of the festival has developed into a cross-over event with international impact; a firm date in their annual diary for most German silent film musicians from Aljoscha Zimmermann and Juergen Kurz to Peter Gottwald and Guenter A. Buchwald.

In addition, top-quality colloquia take place in Pordenone, conceived as enthusiastic dialogues between veterans and 12 young fellowship-holders each year – intensive work to support the up-and-coming generation. As Luca Giuliani, who is responsible for the workshops, emphasizes: “The object of these dialogues is not only to elicit information and instruction, but to establish personal, social connection between collegians and Pordenone habitues, so that the former will have no inhibitions about approaching the latter, in the course of the week, for supplementary discussion.”

OF SKYSCRAPERS, BELLADONNAS & INVENTORS

In the past decade, contemporary filmmakers in Germany have made several interesting attempts to investigate the early days of their medium. These projects’ diversity of ambition and style enables us to conclude that the era of silent film – a period of around 35 years, after all – is no longer seen as a monolithic block, but that a fine awareness of the wealth of facets in this epoch has developed. Preferences and dislikes are played out with cheerful presumption, for example in Andreas Krein’s prize-winning short film homage Nuts & Bolts from 2003. Krein’s film, produced during his studies at the Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg, represents a remarkably easy game with action and image patterns from the glorious era of slapstick comedies: On the construction site of a steel-framed skyscraper in the New York of the late twenties, lunchtime is announced by a siren. The workers’ break takes place on a steel girder at a dizzying height. However, the uncertain peace among the men is disturbed when an apprentice steals his master’s sandwiches. His own lunchbox is empty because he has turned it into a home for his pet frog. But the robbery is discovered, and to crown it all, the frog also escapes from its prison; a breath-taking chase between master, apprentice and frog ensues in the lofty heights – including some daring manoeuvres, acrobatic cliff-hangers and a surprising meal. The background to the action, i.e. the city extending to the horizon, was developed entirely by computer. An urban environment of 30,000 houses was ‘constructed’ on the computer using the director’s own pre-vis designs and a library of window and wall textures. Apart from the actors, in reality there was no more than a six-meter long dummy steel-girder made of wood in front of the camera. Ten days of shooting in the Bluescreen Studio were followed by more than a year of digital post-production. In the meantime, Nuts & Bolts has enjoyed an impressive international career, receiving a Special Mention in the international short film competition at the Venice International Film Festival and the Short Tiger Award at the Munich Film Festival. In addition, it was honored with a gala screening in the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Scene from “The Eyes of the Mummy Mâ” (photo courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek)

Another debut: In 2005, the internationally celebrated German film actress Franka Potente (Run Lola Run, Blow, The Bourne Identity) return­d to Germany for her debut as a director on a film that was largely silent, and black and white: Digging for Belladonna. f0

Her work was premiered in the Perspectives German Cinema section at the Berlinale in 2006 and tells a rather bizarre story of the love between the daughter of a reputable but impoverished family at the end of the First World War and a punk from the 21st century. In a very intelligent way, Franka Potente’s film pinpoints something that is experienced by every filmgoer after seeing a film that is 70 or 80 years old: the images, the stories come alive, they become present – and as long as the magic of the film continues, there is no difference between here and now, between the past and today.
The director, who also wrote the screenplay, took a long look at film history before making her film. She reminds us that Ernst Lubitsch had already conjured the curse of the mummy in The Eyes of the Mummy Mâ as early as 1918, and that even erotic cinema enjoys a tradition dating back to the beginnings of cinematography.

Digging for Belladonna is a declaration of love to the cinema. Frame fade-outs end the scenes, fixed camera positions capture the restless action, and the protagonist’s mouth is a red heart-shape in her white powdered face – the ideal of beauty represented by film divas a hundred years ago. In addition, there is a substantial pinch of Lubitsch: doors behind which the unmentionable takes place, curtains that reveal more than they conceal, husbands caught out, and angry elderly ladies in full-length nightdresses. Above all, this is a comedy that allows itself to have fun with old films without making fun of them.

Wim Wenders had already set about investigating the genesis and origins of his profession in 1995, as part of activities to mark the hundredth birthday of film. His documentary film A Trick of the Light reconstructs the history and impact of the first public film projection in the world, which took place in Berlin in 1895. Together with some students from the Munich University of Television & Film, Wenders investigated the story of film pioneers Max and Emil Skladanowsky and translated it into a cinematic narrative. To do so, he selected the perspective of a young girl, whose curiosity brings the narrative forward. At the same time, this girl is the alter ego of an elderly contemporary witness, the daughter of the main protagonist Max Skladanowsky. The camera therefore always watches the work of the three brothers from the level of the table top. Wenders and his students even reproduced the emotions and problem-solving of the Berlin showmen Skladanowsky down to details such as the shoelace eyelets used to reinforce the perforation holes of the first film strip. The film’s special attraction lies in Wenders’ use of a camera from the early twenties to shoot the acted sequences. Today’s viewer can thus judge the quality attainable with those relatively simple recording de­ices, even down to the niceties of contrast.

WORSHIPPING THE ASHES OR CARRYING THE FLAME?

In the context of the Murnau retrospective at the Berlinale in 2003, Wim Wenders wrote of Murnau’s film Phantom (1923): “Murnau was light years ahead of his time. Film language would take a long time to reach the point where he wanted it. And even he himself had not arrived at the place he wanted to be. Murnau died too soon, cer­ainly. But was he also born too soon? The way he wanted to tell us things with Phantom – it simply wasn’t possible at that time! And some­imes what he did manage to convey is incredible. Take the whole passage entitled ‘Der taumelnde Tag’, for instance. It ought to be played as a loop in all shopping centers when they are open on Sundays, as an apotheosis of the spending spree. The way Lorenz spends his money in that sequence is unbeatable, even today.”

Film history, that much is certain, is not a matter of worshipping the ashes, but of carrying on the flame – something that is very much alive!

About the authors:

Ralph Eue is editor of the magazine Recherche Film und Fernsehen and professor of Time-Based Media in Berlin.

Michael Esser is editor of the magazine Recherche Film und Fernsehen and a therapist in Berlin.