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tion companies, and internal and external pressures resulted in the sudden rise of new producer-directors, a greater demand for product differentiation, and significant modifications to the studios’ hierarchy of A and B productions. The extraordinary boom of the Hollywood film industry during World War II surely delayed a full-blown manifestation of what started to upset the classical studio system around 1940. But seen in retrospect, it is evident that a general sense of pending realignments struck Hollywood as early as 1939 and, hence, that ominous signs of decline and reorientation, of confusion and dislocation, loomed over studio filmmaking long before the Supreme Court separated production from exhibition sectors in 1948
and thereby triggered the protracted death of the studio system in the course of the 1950s.
Industry conditions in the immediate prewar era opened an exceptional window of opportunity for film directors eager to infuse studio filmmaking with new creative impulses. “Significantly enough, many of these filmmakers came from outside the studio system, bringing a strong sense of personal style and individual creative authority to their work in Hollywood. Indeed, the early 1940s saw the sudden explosive emergence of a new generation of Hollywood directors who would have tremendous impact on American film history.”41 It was the time of Hitchcock and Welles, of Ford and Hawks, and of Sturges and Huston, who all understood how to translate their creative ambitions into commercially viable products. But it was also the time of German-speaking exile directors such as Bernhardt, Lang, Preminger, Siodmak, Sirk, Wilder, and Zinnemann, who either were finally contracted by the studios for their technical expertise and versatility or whose American work suddenly experienced both critical and commercial successes. As we will see in further detail in the following chapters, the positions of these émigré directors differed greatly. What they all shared, however, was an often passionate dedication to things American, a desire for cultural adaptation and transformation that had clearly preceded their exile from Hitler Germany.
The irony of the remarkable rise of German exile directors during the 1940s, then, was that it took place against the backdrop of fundamental industry changes challenging the classical Hollywood studio system. Unlike pre-Nazi émigrés such as Ernst Lubitsch or William Dieterle, late-arrival exile directors confronted a film industry eager to modernize its formal syntax and cultural reach. What is even more ironic, however, is that in spite of their outspoken desire for cultural transformation and self-redress, exile directors were often expected to do precisely what they had left behind. Like exile actors and émigré composers, German directors, too, were
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hired by Hollywood studios to replay the past and thus to perform “Teutonic clichés as a mimicry of survival.”42 But if the Hollywood employment of most émigré actors rested, as we have seen, on their ability to act out a limited number of decisively unmodern German stereotypes, the Hollywood fortunes of exile directors were tied to their former association with the eminently modern and economically adept German film industry.
Notwithstanding what the Nazis were doing to German cinema at the time, in the eyes of Hollywood executives UFA continued to represent a laboratory of highly professional filmmaking, fusing cineastic proficiency with commercial viability. With UFA’s trademark on their sails German émigré directors promised to help navigate studio filmmaking through whatever storm was approaching.
Contrary to common wisdom, German exile directors became influential forces in 1940s Hollywood not because their personal ambitions subverted dominant studio styles but because industry conditions rendered the 1940s a unique period of opportunity for outside talents anxious to merge their professional competence with the variable demands of the day. Whether they had surfaced as successful filmmakers already during the Weimar era (Bernhardt, Lang, Ophuls, Siodmak) or under Goebbels (Sirk), émigrés seemed to offer viable resources to warrant the future marketability of motion pictures. Professional success for exile directors resulted, therefore, from delicate negotiations between past and present, old and new. It crystallized within a force field defined by the studios’ expectations for continuity and the exiles’ personal quests for innovation, by the shifting ideological parameters of post-Depression America and the exiles’ own imported and often hopelessly romantic Americanism. Performative repetition rather than radical metamorphosis often became the exile directors’ password to initial recognition, even if it meant to masquerade as what one had never been before and, in the process, to manufacture copies without originals.
p r o s t h e t i c i d e nt i t i e s
It is in this respect that the work of German exile directors during the last one and a half decades of the classical studio system provides a highly instructive test case for critical debates about the category of authorship and narrative control in Hollywood, about the interplay between innovation and standardization, art cinema and mass culture. George Wilson has advised us to be cautious when entertaining the view of cinema as authored, for there is “no grounds for recognizing in narrative film, a being, person-
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like or not, who fictionally offers our view of narrative events to us, although we are often tempted to do so.”43 David Bordwell, on the other hand, has acknowledged the critical role of directors in the 1940s as catalysts of product differentiation and stylistic change,44 but similar to Wilson, Bordwell sees little evidence for an understanding of studio directors as sole creators of individual films weaving various narrative perspectives or aesthetic expressions into one unified fabric. European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s may have seen the rise of a form of authorship that can be defined—
retrospectively—as a set of formal, narrative, and thematic strategies that gradually emerged as a virtual trademark in the course of an entire filmmaking career.45 But throughout the entire studio era, filmmakers rarely enjoyed the kind of autonomy and control that would allow later critics to reconstruct their works as strictly authored, as articulating a single author’s style, agenda, or experience.
It is the premise of the following chapters that some of the most intriguing films by German exile directors after 1939 embrace this lack of authorship and expressive authenticity as a custodian of authorial control itself.
Exile cinema at its best revels in masterful tales of impaired authenticity and mistaken identity, of mimicry, make-believe and masquerade, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Robert Siodmak’s Cobra Woman (1943) representing perhaps the two most politically charged examples (fig. 20). In many instances exile directors aspired to forms of authorship in Hollywood by holding up a mirror to the workings of the studio system, by grafting their personal experience of forced displacement—the exile’s lack of authorship over his own narrative of life— onto the work of representation. What Said calls the exile’s median state of half-involvements and half-detachments, his or her performative and multiply imbricated identity, thus advanced to an often ironic allegory for the operations of studio filmmaking—and vice versa. Recurrently contracted by the studios to mimic their past and provide some kind of European flair, émigré directors exploited their peculiar state of in-betweenness, not only to complicate the relation of individual films to their genre but also to reflect, refract, and reconstruct the image of German cultural identity— of German music, literature, and cinema history—within the American imaginary of the time. Exile filmmaking as discussed in the following brought into view that any cinematic negotiation of past and present, home and homelessness, is deeply affected by cinema’s
“prosthetic memory,”46 that is, the power of mass cultural technologies to enable individuals to experience different temporalities and memories as if they were their own.
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Figure 20. Allegory of fascism: Robert Siodmak’s Cobra Woman (1943).
Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
The Wagnerian elements of Nazi Americanism, as we saw in the first part of this study, served as instruments of fantasy production fusing disparate experiences with the cause of the Nazi movement. They functioned as a vehicle of affective Anchluß, bonding mass cultural utopias to essentializing views of history as nature and of cultural identity as uncontested.
Although clearly involved in projects of ideological and temporal alignment themselves, the films discussed in the following chapters, by contrast, examine the constructedness of cultural identities and explore the extent to which—after Hitler—representations of inauthenticity subterraneously
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salvage any reasonable sense of expressive authenticity and collective identity. Because they often worked in genres that involved multiple layers of representation (costume films, literary adaptations, musical films), exile film directors had ample opportunity to probe the processes of cinematic representation. As we will see, in many instances they not only reconfigured dominant relations between image and sound, as well as complicated the audience’s modes of sense perception, but in doing so they also challenged—
intentionally or not—the coordination of human sensuality in Nazi cinema. Exile filmmakers at their best made visible and audible the very process by means of which cultural identities may be put on or removed.
