Many initial reviewers applauded The Tunnel as a great success, not least of all because the film’s futuristic narrative was able to reawaken childhood fantasies and early reading adventures. As one critic commented,
“Bernhard Kellermann’s novel The Tunnel was a remarkable sensation when it appeared for the first time. This reviewer still recalls very clearly how at that time, shortly before the war, as a sixth-grader he devoured the novel with a pounding heart and hot cheeks.”10 According to this and many other reviewers, The Tunnel invited the viewer to envision the future with a certain kind of nostalgia. A product rooted in fantasies from the past, the film projected memory as coming attraction; its appeal relied on how it brought present audiences back to the future. It is in this curious fusion of conflicting temporalities, desires, and memories that the following pages locate the political project of Bernhardt’s The Tunnel. The film’s fascination with America and modern technology, I argue, produced meanings intended to capture the past for the present and shape a new view of the world. Unlike the original novel, the film presented America as essentially memory, and it is as memory that America here became part of the effort to mobilize generic conventions for a political cause. Casting sound and image into seemingly natural unity, The Tunnel redefined German film as a showcase of renewal and mobilization, and it thereby realized Goebbels’s simultaneous call for a self-consciously German and internationally viable cinema.
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Figure 5. Networking the national community: Ad for Curtis Bernhardt’s The Tunnel ( Film-Kurier, 1933) .
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i n s e a r c h o f s o u n d
André Bazin once suggested a number of editing strategies that could bring greater realism to the imaginary world of science fiction features.11 According to Bazin science fiction should progress from alternating long shots to climactic images that show the strange and the normal together in the same frame. Drawing from Bazin, Vivian Sobchack has concluded that spectatorial pleasure in conventional science fiction films results primarily from successful visual collisions, that is, the compelling coexistence of the real and the imaginary in one image. Science fiction films, she contends, arouse delight through unique strategies of authentication that allow the spectator to simultaneously avow and disavow the work of special effects:
“The satisfaction comes from seeing the visual integration of actual and impossible in the same frame, from the filmmaker’s ability to make us suspend our disbelief at the very moment we are also wondering, ‘How did they do it?’”12
It is not difficult to see that the setting of The Tunnel—an enclosed underground tube—mostly prohibits the strategies of persuasion suggested by Bazin and Sobchack. A straight and dark underground passage hardly allows for the extreme long shots that establish spatial depth and set up the visual integration of the unknown (the gigantic tunnel) with the familiar (the masses of working bodies). It therefore is no surprise that the camera— once in the tunnel—remains extremely passive. Although praised by various reviewers as magical,13 Karl Hoffmann’s underground cinematography is dominated by stifling frontal shots and awkward angular viewpoints. It omits lateral tracking shots or daring crane vistas, and it thus recalls the kind of cinematography that typified sound cinema prior to the development of mobile recording devices around 1931. In accord with the majority of later Nazi features, the film valorizes display over movement, well-defined sets over shifting perspectives and alternating focal lengths.
Although offering a narrative of spatial conquest and technological triumph, The Tunnel transforms action into stasis and in so doing frustrates the viewer’s desire for a climactic union of the actual and the possible. So restrictive is this underground that the meeting of the strange and the familiar, in a sense, has always already happened. What we see is always the same dark hole, a hole that hardly suffices to make the spectator believe in the magic of future engineering.
That The Tunnel nevertheless succeeds in creating the illusion of coherent and expansive space results from strategies of persuasion that transcend Bazin’s and Sobchack’s image-centered suggestions. On the one hand, it is
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the differentiated use of diegetic sound that shapes the viewer’s sense for the plasticity of the underground locale.14 Off- and onscreen noises from sirens, trains, drills, and other construction gadgets deepen diegetic space, define auditory points of view, and emplace the spectator in the diegesis itself. Many of the film’s sound effects lead the viewer’s imagination beyond what is merely visible. They open up the frame’s defining power, add different compositional planes, evoke the illusion of documentary footage, and thus add realism to the image. Walter Gronostay’s galvanizing music track contributes actively to this construction of spatial depth and diegetic texture. Modeled on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1929 Love Parade, Gronostay’s workers’ march infuses the film with rhythm and direction. It creates illusions of resolve and mobility that counteract the camera’s lack of motion.
What compensates for the overall lack of visual credibility is, on the other hand, an interesting framing device, which transports the viewer from the New York prologue to advanced stages of the digging activities.
After showing the bankers’ decision to pursue the enterprise, the film immediately directs us into a cinema to witness a newsreel broadcasting the progress of the American crew. Filmed from a frontal perspective, with the movie screen’s edges still visible, the film-within-the-film condenses a whole series of newscast sequences into one continuous event. It informs about the recruitment process, the first installation of train tracks on Long Island, the impressive movements of soil, and finally—after a smooth ride through space and time—it sets the stage for the film’s first tunnel episode, in the third year of digging. In order to prove the spatial progress, this montage of newscasts repeatedly displays maps; graphic lines indicate the route and current position of the American crew, and intercuts and super-impositions picture the flat surface of the ocean in extreme long shots.
Bernhardt arrests us in this cinema-of-attraction for the remainder of the film: without rupture the newsreel frame suddenly dissolves; the inner screen becomes the main screen; the newscast transforms into narrative action, and internal and external audience become one and the same.
Instead of making us wonder about the question “How did they do it?”
the newsreel sequence appeals to the look of documentary footage in order to naturalize the space of the unfamiliar and to help us suspend our disbelief. By staging a newsreel report and drawing the viewer into a play with different forms of cinematic representation, the film creates its own myth.
Additionally, as it dissolves the framing device and collapses documentary and narrative, The Tunnel models the cinematic apparatus itself as the ultimate enactment of futuristic special effects. The blurring of newscast and fiction designates film as the ideal vessel of science fiction themes, insofar
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as cinematic representation relies on a whole inventory of special effects itself: the tricks of shooting, cutting, and splicing that belong to the practice of filming, not to what is being filmed.15
Introducing the fantastic underground as a realm of believable special effects, the newsreel sequence involves the spectator in a multiple process of persuasion. It seems to establish—as Steve Neale has argued in a different context—the film’s very “regime of credence—the rules, the norms and the laws by which its events and agents can be understood and ad-judged.”16 Yet much more is at stake in this sequence than simply the need to generate realism. Although enormous loudspeakers can be seen on both sides of the screen, the cinema in this newsreel sequence predates the arrival of synchronized sound. The musical sounds and voices that bathe the auditorium in grandiose effects clearly emanate from a separate sound source, whereas the actual film-within-the-film remains technically silent.
Past technologies thus guide the film’s viewer into the future. Remarkably enough, at several points this four-minute sequence intercuts to shots that depict a proletarian, all-male audience, pictured from the point of view of the screen itself. When the engineer Mac Allan (Paul Hartmann), in the newsreel, waves directly at the camera, a reaction shot captures the amused response of his spectators. Far from being distressed about Mac Allan’s muted voice, the audience in this moment assumes the role of ventriloquist. We see and hear how the viewers add their own interpretations to Mac Allan’s lip movements and thus, in their imagination, transform the film they witness onscreen into a talkie.
In stylistic terms this brief scene recalls the use of speech in René Clair’s first sound films of the early 1930s, Sous les toits de Paris (1930) and Le Million (1931) in particular. Clair, in these films, frequently relied on imaginative plot situations that involved an absence of speech, and this motivated lack of dialogue allowed him to maintain many values of silent cinema while endorsing asynchronous sound as a viable method of expression in the age of the talkie.17 Bernhardt’s cinema sequence, likewise, integrates aspects of silent film aesthetics into the era of sound film. It recuperates the old with the help of the new to bridge historical ruptures and uphold memory. What is equally important, however, is the fact that in picturing Mac Allan’s direct address to the diegetic audience, the film imagines a viewing public very well aware of the act of looking, an audience emancipated from the codes of dominant narrative cinema, silent and sound. In the film’s newsreel sequence cinematic sights and sounds seem to interrupt the voyeuristic pleasures of “invisible” spectatorship, pleasures that derive from forms of representation that bond the viewer to a fictional world and
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its dramatic drive. Although the newsreel sequence celebrates sound film as a teleological culmination of silent cinema and its viewer’s innermost desire for speech, it also endorses forms of spectatorship that appear fundamentally decentered and distracted, not arrested by silent passivity or disembodied identification.
It is in this sense that The Tunnel, at first sight, seems to situate cinema as what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge understand as an alternative public sphere, a place that allows for the articulation of group-specific needs, anxieties, fantasies, and memories within industrial or commercial contexts. Opposed to the speech-centered and exclusive model of bourgeois publicity, the emergence of alternative and proletarian public spheres in modern culture entailed “principles of inclusion and multiplicity, an emphasis on concrete interests and self-organization and, most crucially, an insistence on the concreteness of human experience across dominant divisions of public and private, including the experience of fragmentation and specific blockages.”18 Similarly, the newsreel sequence of The Tunnel seems to valorize spectatorship as a medium of articulation and exchange that indeed fosters the identity of the proletarian collective. Preceding a kind of cinema that absorbs diverse empirical viewing acts into textually centered positions of subjectivity, Bernhardt’s silent-cinema-within-sound-cinema seems to define cinema as a trading place of concrete experience and fantasy across existing private and public demarcations.
