collective identities. During a promotion of the film two members of La Scala, accompanied by a former accompanist of Enrico Caruso, presented Italian arias, songs, and duets. In a curious exercise of cross-cultural redress, UFA here mobilized the aura of high culture and spiritual refinement in order to bring Leander’s exoticism—her engagement with Caribbean popular culture—safely home to Germany. Italian opera staked out a space in which the audience could consume its star in various positions and against all signs of ideological inconsistency (fig. 10).
Most stars of Nazi cinema were designed to fetter the dreams of the spectator, to immobilize desires and identifications that threatened to escape political control.47 Shaped into a multivalent signifier, Leander at first seems to deviate from this norm in her performances. Her star persona invited the viewer’s imagination to wander off in various directions at once and, particularly in her early films, to transgress the realms of conformity.
On closer inspection, however, we see that Leander inhabited a discursive site at which ideological imperatives and cultural commodification struck a curious compromise. Fashioning her image into a repository of contradictory emotional investments, UFA inflated Leander’s meaning to such an extent that the star came to embody a wholesale market of spectatorial delight and consumption. Leander’s fans got whatever they wanted, which at first sight seemed a lot, yet in truth Leander only extended an invitation to cathartic assimilation. The pleasure of consuming the star Leander—to modify Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous dictum—promoted the resignation that it ought to help forget.48 For the German audience of 1937 Leander’s voice and image meant everything and nothing. As a screen site of highly contradictory investments, the star Leander became indeed “the falsest woman of the century.”49
Contemporary cultural studies is quick to assign subversive meanings to the popular appropriation of mass cultural symbols, to the ambivalent pleasures of consuming a star such as Leander. John Fiske does not hesitate to understand the mass cultural consumer as a “poacher, encroaching on the terrain of the cultural landowner (or textowner) and ‘stealing’ what he or she wants without being caught and subjected to the laws of the land (rule of the text).”50 Yet the Americanist inclinations of Nazi mass culture reveal some crucial blind spots built into such theories of cultural poaching. I would argue that German Hollywood clearly anticipated what contemporary audiences might have seen and today’s revisionists celebrate as enactments of resistance. A counterpart to a highly politicized public sphere, Nazi consumer culture reckoned with cultural poachers. Particularly in the case of Zarah Leander, it invited people to steal according to desire, to consume the
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Figure 10. Southern exposure: Zarah Leander in La Habanera. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
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illusion that within Nazi Germany certain spaces could remain free of politics. What the institutions and—as we will see in the remainder of this chapter—the texts of Nazi mass culture granted were predigested expressions but no rights: they enticed poachers to poach; they provided spaces of individualization and empowerment, only to strengthen—to extend Fiske’s metaphor—the laws that regulated the distribution of land outside of the distraction factory. The cultural poachers of the Nazi era transformed cultural poaching into a pleasurable experience of consumption itself, a commodity. Instead of consuming illegitimate meanings, they ended up being consumed by the very objects of their pleasure.
p o a c h i n g a s ta r
Stars stimulate modes of spectatorship that tend to undermine what for-malist film scholarship considers the primary engine of a film’s meaning, namely the mandates of narrative unity, closure, and motivation. To the extent to which publicity campaigns and tabloid journalism define a star’s persona as a public affair and social event, the star’s presence within a peculiar text blurs the boundaries between an “address relying on the identification with fictional characters and an activation of the viewer’s familiarity with the star on the basis of production and publicity intertexts.”51 The star’s performance interrupts narrative progress in favor of spectacular interludes solely there to exhibit the star’s features to the viewers’ consuming glance. Recycling constitutive elements of the early cinema of attractions, stars promote viewing pleasures that encourage the viewer to become not a hermeneutic reader but a textual poacher who isolates moments of spectacle when the image of the star can be consumed most intensely. The desire to possess displaces the urge to follow a narrative as the primary mode of reading a film.
In accord with international trends of the time German cinema of the 1930s redefined in no small way how stars appeared onscreen and appealed to their viewers’ emotions. One of the many stylistic effects of the coming of synchronized sound circa 1930 was a clear reduction in close-ups. As Hugo Zehder observed as early as 1929, “The close-up is being used ever more rarely, it is losing its expressive value because the sounds of voices and songs draw the audience’s attention to the hero and characterize the event exhaustingly.”52 Synchronized sound altered the methods by which narrative cinema aspired to the status of spectacle. It placed the star’s physical appearance at some greater distance, but at the same time it offered new technological opportunities to position her or him at very close range. What
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one might call the sonic close-up—shots that allowed the star’s voice as speech or singing to speak intimately to the viewer—became an important vehicle not simply to compensate for lost technologies of spectacularization but even to enhance the textual fabrication of star charisma. The making of stars in particular during the 1930s must be understood as a decisively audiovisual event.
Detlef Sierck, in his two Leander films of the 1930s, turned out to be an imaginative authority in this new art of audiovisual spectacularization. To New Shores was clearly meant from its very inception to endow the imported icon Leander with the visual and sonic spell of personality. It is one of the many ironies of Sierck’s career that he met this task by making a film that examined modern stardom itself. Intended as a piece of social criticism according to Sierck himself,53 To New Shores takes issue with the role of the star in postautonomous aesthetic culture. The film, in fact, tells a story about a peculiarly modern battle over the location of culture, about the division of modern culture into the commodified realms of popular entertainment, on the one hand, and the exclusive domains of aesthetic refinement and social representation, on the other. Torn between these two spheres, the Leander character experiences her popular consumption as a form of violence and self-alienation, and she learns to view the elite’s rhetoric of cultural refinement as hypocritical, as a strategy that links certain cultural practices to class positions in order to cement given structures of power. At the same time, however, the elaborately choreographed mise-en-scène of Sierck’s film caters to the new logic of the star system and the popular’s practices of audiovisual poaching. Set first in England during the heyday of colonial capitalism and then in Australia, the film uses shifting locations to deliver effectively the image and sound of UFA’s new star to the audience.
Whether we see Leander in the role of Gloria Vane in London or as a prisoner in the Parramatta jail, Franz Weihmayr’s cinematography conjures a panoply of attractive perspectives that suspend the viewer from the film’s overall narrative and supplies him or her with close-ups of Leander’s “be-guiling music” and looks.54
Both in England and in its colony Australia, the practices of cultural refinement occupy a space in which the social elite represents class position and negotiates the terms of social mobility. Although the film leaves no doubt about the corruption that prevails behind the façades of cultural distinction, it presents the cultural activities of the colonial upper class as part of a symbolic order that derives its strength from continual mechanisms of marking difference, of indicating inclusion or exclusion. At a party at the governor’s palace in honor of Queen Victoria, the elite come together to
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engage in a minutely staged ritual of social exchange while an anonymous crowd gathers outside passively watching the elaborate gala. Significantly, what provides diversion for the crowd offers the elite a platform to affirm and reconfigure the channels of power. The governor’s party and its sequence of formation dances serve as a spectacular backdrop to announce the marriage between the governor’s daughter and Gloria’s former lover, Albert Finsbury, and thus to reinscribe the lineage of colonial rulership. The traditional institutions of cultural refinement and high art operate here as stages on which power represents itself. Reserved for the colonial elite alone, the rituals of aesthetic cultivation transform the members of the crowd into cultural window-shoppers who consume their own exclusion from power as a spectacle of the first order.
Popular culture, on the other hand, is far from offering a space of democratic participation and empowerment either. In fact, it exhibits deforma-tions and duplicities similar to the ones that mark high culture. Popular diversion emerges as a realm of excess and exhibitionism, of aggressive sexuality and voyeuristic pleasure—a spectacular foreplay enticing desires but endlessly delaying their gratification. Although Gloria’s performance in the opening sequence challenges the moralism of the Victorian bourgeoisie, the viewer is soon to learn that her provocative stage persona is only a pretense, a second skin catering to her male consumers. Gloria’s successful “Yes, Sir!” that mocks the Victorian watchdogs brings into relief—as the film’s narrative is quick to reveal—anything but Gloria’s true backstage personality. Already during Gloria’s performance Sierck provides the viewer with a clear sense of the artificiality of the singer’s frivolous stage persona. The camera follows and reframes her movements onstage from ever-changing points of view and focal lengths. Frequent cuts and abrupt shifts draw the film viewer’s attention to the fact that what we see is not the recording of an artistic expression but a violent process of dismemberment—male desire mapped onto Gloria Vane’s body. Allowing us to see Gloria through the eyes of her delirious onlookers and listeners, Sierck’s editing denounces popular diversion as meaningless: Gloria’s spell of personality is fake, a reflex of projective activities, a male fantasy (fig. 11).
Sierck’s double critique of Victorian moralism and popular diversion as inauthentic becomes obvious in a later sequence when the former star of the Adelphi Theater, released from the Parramatta jail, performs in front of an Australian audience characterized by desires similar to those of the London public. In contrast to the London spectacle, however, Gloria now refuses to transform her body into a pleasurable commodity. Not surprisingly, her effort to use the stage as a screen of her true feelings meets with
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Figure 11. Spectacle as male fantasy: Zarah Leander in Detlef Sierck’s To New Shores (1937). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
the rude rejection of the audience, which is unwilling to endure Gloria’s melancholy slow fox-trot “Ich stehe im Regen . . .” (I stand in the rain . . .).
As if to endorse Gloria’s exercise in expressive authenticity, the cinematography and editing during this second performance avoids oscillating between various points of view from the audience. Instead, the camera immediately zooms in on Leander’s face and presents her throughout the performance in uninterrupted and motionless medium close-ups. These shots isolate her from the unruly diegetic audience and redeem the melodramatic power of her artistic virtuosity for modes of spectatorship that valorize contemplative identification over distracted appropriation. If the film’s camera work and editing in the earlier London sequence defined the popular dimension as one in which male audiences exploit women, during the second performance they try to reinstate for the film’s audience a legitimate notion of popular culture that incorporates principles, such as originality, authenticity, and attentiveness, typically associated with bourgeois high art. Melodrama and its emotional intensity, in this way, rearticulate auratic
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