They investigated why we always tend to assign transcendental meanings to music; they examined the impact of modern technologies on the human body and voice; they mingled “German” expressionist iconographies with domestic American literary traditions and visual styles, and in this way they helped draw attention to the prosthetic process of representation, projection, and remembrance that is at the center of all cinematic experience.
Given both Wilson’s and Bordwell’s legitimate reservations about seeing classical Hollywood cinema as authored, we need to be careful not to heroize the studio work of émigrés such as Bernhardt, Siodmak, or Sirk as expressions of genuine auteurism, even if their work rendered the representation of the inauthentic a placeholder for authentic expressiveness. As I will emphasize in the following interpretations, some of the most fascinating aspects of exile directorship in fact did not emerge out of a quasi-romantic defiance of mass cultural technologies but through their deliberate endorsement and gradual modification, not in spite of studio control but as a result of complex negotiations with the various forces that defined studio filmmaking. Likewise, rather than celebrating the textual meanings provided by exile filmmakers as subversive per se, we should inquire into how formal experiments interacted with industry demands for product diversification and how the sights and sounds of émigré films resonated with general transformations of the American imaginary. Only by positioning the work of exile filmmakers in their ideological and industrial context can we fully appreciate how some of their work aspired to de- and reconstruct larger structures of perception and identity and how for the exile director studio filmmaking could allegorize the traumatic experience of cultural displacement. Only if we, in other words, map the work of émigré directors against the interplay of sociocultural, industrial, technological, and ideological forces that define the history of film can we fully understand how their films opened up imaginary spaces in which different cultures and histories penetrated each other through the medium of mutual citation, interpretation, or imitation. Read
05-C2205-P2 8/17/02 3:45 PM Page 162
162
/
Berlin in Hollywood, 1939 –1955
forward, backward, and sideways at once, exile filmmaking after 1939 is thus reconstructed in the following case studies as an alternative to the way the mass cultural fusion of sights and sounds in Nazi cinema was meant to define the nation as a “repository of a unitary, immutable, and essentialized identity.”47 Seizing new possibilities that opened up in Hollywood after 1939, the best products of émigré studio filmmaking during the 1940s and early 1950s not only questioned naturalizing concepts of cultural singularity and absolute alterity, but they also proposed a kind of civic nationalism, a pluralistic framework in which oppositional identities and splintered narratives could cohabit the imagined community of the nation.
r e f l e c t i o n s f r o m a d a m a g e d l i f e In one of his most gloomy reflections on modern life Adorno wrote in 1944
that the combined realities of German fascism, Soviet-style socialism, and American consumerism have obliterated any possibility for properly dwelling in the twentieth century. The exile’s life expresses metonymically what the dialectic of enlightenment has done to all of us. In a world in which disaster radiates triumphant, contemporary houses and apartments offer only a false sense of home. “The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one. . . . It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” Yet even those who try to live according to this morality must guard themselves against the temptation to feel at home in their state of spiritual and/or physical displacement. For a loveless disregard for things cannot but lead to destruction, and “the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing a bad conscience to keep what they have. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”48
The following three chapters examine the extent to which selected products of émigré studio filmmaking during the 1940s and early 1950s reflected Adorno’s paradox of exile. How did Hitler refugees in Hollywood use mass cultural technologies to offer reflections from damaged lives?
How did they align their initial views of America with the significant transformations of American society during and after World War II? What strategies did they employ to elude the coupling of sights and sounds in Nazi cinema and thereby to redefine the possibilities of film as a public horizon of experience? At first sight, much of what will be said in the following might bear no direct relation to questions of German identity or film history. Data drawn from German history or culture appear as mere specters in the films discussed, as broken mirror images, as fleeting flashes of the imaginary. Yet it is precisely the gesture by which these films turn away
05-C2205-P2 8/17/02 3:45 PM Page 163
Wagner at Warner’s
/
163
from Nazi cinema and its essentializing definitions of individual and national identity and it is the methods by which these films experiment with different ways of merging images, sounds, and cultural codes into mass cultural products that mandate we see these Hollywood productions as an important chapter of German film history after all. If a wrong life cannot be lived rightly, if a proper sense of home after Hitler is no longer available, then cultural histories, too, transcend the physical boundaries of single nations and enter a state of fluid multiplicity and simultaneity. That émigré studio filmmaking turned “Germany” into a specter bears testimony to the fact that after Hitler nothing concerning the relation between modern mass culture and national identity goes without saying anymore. Their spectral audiovisions questioned conventional notions of the home and homeland and in so doing elaborated an emancipatory sense of Germanness that drastically broke with the essentializing concepts of the past yet has remained mostly unrecognized to the present.
06-C2205 8/17/02 3:38 PM Page 164
6 Berlin Noir
Robert Siodmak’s Hollywood
The American cinema of the 1940s “was an industry at war, fighting monumental battles at home and overseas, both on-screen and off.”1 From 1942
to 1945 Hollywood filmmaking found itself in a state of war production.
Prodded by political elites and studio executives alike, wartime features explored unprecedented relationships between cinema and social conditions, mass diversion and propaganda. But the studios’ most challenging wars during this decade were waged on the domestic front: over antitrust violations with the Justice Department in Washington, over communist infiltration with Congress and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), over employment issues with labor unions, over matters of artistic control with new independent producers and freelance talents, and over film distribution with unruly theater owners. Haunted by this ongoing state of emergency, the American cinema of the 1940s witnessed both a tremendous boom and, after 1946, a disastrous slump of revenues and studio confidence.
The decade of the 1940s thus became an era of crises in the word’s most literal sense: a time of instability and reorientation, a time in which political, economic, and cultural antagonisms upset what formerly had been taken for granted.
Crises are the signature of the modern. Rather than simply replacing something old with something new, the moment of crisis redefines the very parameters according to which we remember the past and envision the future. To speak of the American cinema of the 1940s as one of ongoing crises, therefore, means to draw attention to the ways in which studio filmmaking during this decade underwent a dramatic process of renewal and self-redress. It means to emphasize how economic, political, and aesthetic pressures urged classical cinema to probe its own limits, reinterpret 164
06-C2205 8/17/02 3:38 PM Page 165
Berlin Noir
/
165
former practices, and face an arbitrary tomorrow. Periods of crisis break up dominant perceptions of time, and in the American cinema of the 1940s this splitting of temporal experience produced competing models of how to organize time within the limits of a consistent tale. The war film genre and the anti-Nazi film genre, as Dana Polan has argued, still triumphed in the attempt to align the power of narrative with the need to shape community and produce political commitments. War features exploited cinema’s “en-veloping ability to take any element, even one that would seem oppositional or resistant, and represent it in forms of an overall masterplot, to transcribe it in a discourse of affirmation.”2 But in many other spheres of 1940s American filmmaking, we observe a questioning of coherent narrative patterns, a sudden emphasis on the arbitrariness of temporality and experience. We encounter repetition, stasis, and ambiguity. Men’s and women’s time in so many films of the 1940s entered into an unparalleled state of nonsynchronicity. In contradistinction to the escapist fare of the 1930s, there seemed “to be no single space in which all desires can come together in permanent and euphoric triumph.”3 In face of the continuing battles on-and offscreen many Hollywood films of the 1940s abandoned the teleological masterplot. They gave voice to a plurality of narratives and perspectives that no longer allowed one to think of history as a linear dynamic of development.
Film noir is widely—and rightly—recognized as one of the most fascinating responses to the many wars Hollywood waged in the 1940s. The film noir cycle was born out of the spirit of industrial crisis as much as out of social and political anxiety. It marked an important step in the matura-tion and diversification of American mass culture during and after World War II. With its stylized images of violence, paranoia, male hysteria, and legal corruption, with its narratives of social contingency and existential ambiguity, film noir simultaneously encoded and counteracted the experience of a world out of joint, including the world of classical studio filmmaking. Film noir can be understood in this respect as a heterotopia in Michel Foucault’s sense: a site that differs from most other spaces but that allows us better to understand how society organizes human relations across space and time.4 Heterotopias “are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”5 Film noir often juxtaposed temporal and spatial experiences that were in themselves incom-
06-C2205 8/17/02 3:38 PM Page 166
166
/
Berlin in Hollywood, 1939 –1955
patible. In its most striking manifestations, film noir provided other spaces that complicated the ways in which American cinema and society emplaced the body in everyday space and time.
Common wisdom explains the prominent role of German exile directors in film noir by seeing film noir as a direct expression of exile and despair.
Film noir , according to this argument, owed its existence in large part to the ways in which émigré directors such as Fritz Lang, Anatole Litvak, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, and Billy Wilder stamped their personal past onto American entertainment. In the eyes of some critics film noir served Teutonic directors in exile as a platform to express nothing other than the torments of the German soul.6 Other critics, arguing in more historical terms, suggest that German film noir directors all “shared a world view that was shaped by their bitter personal experience of living and then escaping from a nation that had lost its mind.”7 Separated from their home, these directors—we are told—revitalized the formal language of German expressionist cinema in order to challenge German fascism.
They espoused the heritage of Weimar film— chiaroscuro lighting, canted angles, narratives of male anxiety—to convey personal gloom but also to explore forms of authorship in a film industry dedicated to standardized genre products. Film noir , in this understanding, was European art cinema in disguise, a calculated assault on classical cinema that grafted the exiles’
experience of displacement and artistic blockage directly onto the syntax of Hollywood filmmaking.
The present chapter nudges debates about the German impact on film noir in a different direction by discussing how film noir itself undoes ge-nealogical accounts that map the history of film in terms of linear determination and direct cultural transfer. Film noir , I argue, was not a product of German authorship in exile or a belated offspring of Weimar cinema.
