In selecting Arndt as a spokesman of westward expansion, The Emperor of California employs an ideological trope characteristic of right-wing anti-Americanism ever since the Weimar period: the image of the German as the good American immigrant resisting Jewish American greed, functional abstraction, cultural hybridization, and racial miscegenation. Unlike other immigrants, the German in America, according to this trope, preserves a typically German sense of belonging, a sense—as Adolf Halfeld wrote in 1928 — of “his morals, his homeland, and his blood.”40 German immigrants remind multicultural America that ethnic differences matter. As they sustain organic relations to geography and ethnicity, German Americans—according to this view—infuse the accidental nation America with existential vigor and meaning. Trenker’s Arndt projects this anti-American trope on the most American of all film genres, the western. Arndt’s cinema of attraction inspires Sutter to become the model Germanic settler who defends
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Figure 17. Colonial optics: Luis Trenker as cowboy Johann Sutter in The Emperor of California (1936). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
agrarian virtues and ethnic identity against the evil forces of capitalist abstraction, racial mixing, and—by implication—Jewish migrancy.41
Like Arndt, Sutter himself on several occasions operates as a cinematic audiovision machine in whose perception aesthetic pleasure, spatial appropriation, and the execution of power over fellow immigrants become one and the same. Consider the California sequence showing Sutter at the height of his success as he rides through his estates. A low-angle close-up frames the hero’s face, proudly gazing left and right, and the deliberate overexposure of the image endows his features with an almost divine aura (fig. 17). This close-up intercuts several times with what the spectator must assume is Sutter’s point of view, although Trenker’s montage editing disappoints our desire for spatial continuity among the scenes that we will see through Sutter’s imperial eyes. The first intercut maps a grand orchard with trees neatly arranged in geometrical lines and shapes: rough nature turned into an ordered garden. The second displays a gigantic wheat field exposed to the gentle rhythms of the winds, a scene that literally displays the writing of nature on the surface of the visible. The third consists of four different
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shots of farmworkers who swing their scythes in harmonious rhythms.
Presented to Sutter’s and our own gaze as a unified configuration of bodies and synchronized movements, these harvesters appear forged into a mass ornament. In a manner strikingly consonant with Nazi ideologies of labor, individual work is rendered not as exertion but as a form of music, a ritual of communal communication that allegedly transcends the confinements of modern subjectivity and routine. The fourth intercut pictures a large group of sheep transformed into one body by a black sheep dog that approaches from the left and stimulates the herd to a single movement to the right.
This last shot, drawing from the formal tradition of Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, presents a visual metaphor for what we have seen before: the charismatic creation of integrated communities in which the unified shape counts more than the individual body.
Becce’s sound track throughout this sequence underscores this project.
During the first close-up Becce once again bathes the audience in what has been clearly established as the score’s leitmotif for Sutter’s colonial aspirations: ascending brass fanfares that extend sublime impressions of power.
Subsequently, Becce’s richly textured score emulates a highly melodic peasants’ song and in so doing traverses, in a sense, the boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic spaces. The bucolic humming we hear weaves working bodies and natural settings into one powerful experience. Social integration, we are meant to understand, results from the melodic alignment of individuals and natural environment. It requires the presence of a commanding subject, a compelling choreography of sights and sounds powerful enough to establish a nexus between aesthetic experience and social discipline.
Christopher Frayling has emphasized the antimodern impetus of scenes such as this in Trenker’s film.42 Trenker, for Frayling, embraces the western genre in order to escape modern urban life. His western conveys mystic desires for redemption; it wanders into the past with the intention of displacing the technological outlook of the present with images of reciprocal harmony between humanity and the elemental. Although Frayling’s analysis is insightful, it seems necessary to elaborate on the distinctively modern moment that drives Trenker’s search for agrarian salvation. In the above-mentioned sequence Trenker not only marks the hero’s gaze as a distinctively cinematic one, but he also indicates that his idyllic images of harvest-ing are technological constructions, conjured by modern recording devices and the skill of editing. In a manner that recapitulates the Weimar mountain film genre,43 and in surprising agreement with the antimimetic elements of modernist painting, landscapes in Trenker’s films of the 1930s
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often achieve almost abstract qualities. Assuming the gaze of the film’s hero, the camera in the harvest sequence venerates natural topographies as screens featuring abstract bodies, outlines, shapes, and movements. Modern machines here create the natural sublime; they are to become nature again. Like Arnold Fanck, Trenker seems to claim that “nature remains mute and unexpressive unless captured by the camera.”44 Like Fanck, Trenker elevates mediated effects to natural presences. As the film’s director and cinematographer in disguise, Sutter advocates an authoritarian concept of nature that calls for individual and collective subjection to alleged laws of natural circularity. Although the film’s choreography of sights and sounds replaces the timetables of history with the “rhythmic principle” of nature,45
it also actively converts natural forms and human formations into ornamental configurations. Yet in containing the imagined elemental as ornament, Trenker masks the instrumental reason that fuels Sutter’s very project of California colonization. As it maps agrarian space through Sutter’s commanding gaze, Trenker’s cinema renders political authority solely a function of aesthetic beauty. Like fascism in Benjamin’s famous reading, Trenker’s antimodern modernism replaces politics with aesthetics. Trenker’s uncompromising desire for form, his pathos of creation and control, becomes in the final analysis an attack on the viewer’s senses, an assault on the human body as an unpredictable site of pleasure and corporeal experience. In likeness to the fascist spectacle Trenker’s agrarian total work of art wants to rouse powerful emotions, yet at the same time it strives “to neutralize the senses, to knock them out.”46
Trenker’s The Emperor of California is shot through with longing for premodern wonders, as Frayling rightly observes, but it also endorses a modernist project in a twofold manner. On the one hand, Trenker wants to restore contemplative experiences through a deliberate use of modern machines. Twentieth-century technologies of representation here endow colonial countrysides with a renewed sense of metaphysical depth and a mystical unity between humanity and nature. On the other hand, and in a manner similar to that of Rudolf Borchardt’s modernist sketch of the Italian landscape in “Villa” (1908),47 Trenker relocates aesthetic experiences from the secluded sphere of bourgeois art to the ranges of farm life as seen through the ordering perception of patriarchal autocrats. Sutter’s audiovision explodes the limits of bourgeois art, but it simultaneously recontains what has been unleashed by the hero’s imperial perception in the first place.
In achieving this Trenker proposes nothing less than a modernist attack on autonomous art, redefining art—like Borchardt—as “a practical expression of power, stripped of any commitments to emancipation.” 48 Trenker’s cinema summons the elemental in such a way that his film pictures the
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West as a site that renders power and art, form and domination, mutually exchangeable. Trenker embraces advanced tools of representation as vehicles that overthrow liberal rationalism: to the extent that the cinematic apparatus—in likeness to the settler or cowboy—transforms nature into an ordered garden, it installs a public space in which personal charisma undoes the legacies of bourgeois culture.
Like Hitler in his 1943 order to read May novels, then, Trenker’s western invites the viewer to understand modern constellations as effects of mythic structures. Trenker’s The Emperor of California turns an idealized image of the cowboy as colonial explorer into an authoritative metaphor for modern life and the cinematic process. Emulating the Hollywood western genre, Trenker suggests that the cinematic apparatus itself, in spite or even because of its modernity, operates according to the same logic that once appeared in the perceptual regime of the Far West, in the westerner’s imperial perception of pristine landscapes and virtuous farmworkers. Trenker’s film does not therefore simply seize the western as a source of escapist fantasies. Quite the contrary, the rugged world of the West here defines the generic structures and possibilities of film itself. What triumphs at the end of the film is not so much Sutter’s political intervention as the logic of the camera, the film’s evocation of elemental forces and their recontainment in a highly controlled mise-en-scène. So triumphant is the victory of Trenker’s sights and sounds that they can even outlive the destruction of Sutter’s New Helvetia. The final shot of Sutter as a trekking cowboy, literally projected on a screen of clouds,49 articulates this powerful persistence of cinematic recording. Trenker’s last shot encodes cinema as an instrument preserving the imperial spirit of western heroes. Cinema recuperates the power of colonial appropriation and stimulates contemporary spectators to channel their energies into new geopolitical projects, whether at the western frontier or the eastern front. Mobilizing images from the West, Trenker’s ethereal cinema of clouds thus becomes a cinema of emotional mobilization.
It should therefore come as no surprise that one of the most emblematic New Helvetia scenes is directly modeled on a sequence of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nuremberg film released only a few months before The Emperor of California went into production. In this sequence Sutter walks along a line of workers eagerly shoveling an irrigation canal. While he offers each worker a cigar, he asks the men to identify their geographic origins, prompting them to name a host of locations spread all over central Europe. Although executed with less cinematic artistry than its textual predecessor, this scene relocates the labor force sequence of Triumph of the Will from the Nuremberg rally grounds to the shores of the Sacramento River.
Similar to Riefenstahl’s elaborately choreographed parade, in which the
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