It fragments the assembled group of priests and reintegrates them as audiovisual consumers into an imaginary community. Poaching the popular, Quarterman’s cinema of attractions refracts traditional modes of integration and reconstructs the esoteric sphere of cultural refinement from the vantage point of public, commodified space. Thus, the spectacle onscreen and on the stairs, to use Guy Debord’s phrase, “reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. ”16
Propelled by instrumental reason, the priests—like the masses outside—sacrifice the bliss of salvation on the altar of commodified perception.
Their very desire to behold redemption in the form of an image causes them to lose their vision. What they consider a miracle is a hoax: synthetic aura effected by modern technologies. Sirk’s mise-en-scène and editing captures this loss of authentic vision as a loss of reciprocity. The film stages perception as disjointed; it relies on mismatched eyeline shots and diverging per-
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spectives. The characters’ gazes frequently wander offscreen as they fail to find a corresponding eye within the frame. Many shots picture awkward three-character constellations. Dispersed onto conflicting visual planes, the human triangles of these shots fail to establish any kind of meaningful, fulfilling exchange. Unlike To New Shores, which either reveled in well-orchestrated two-shots or froze the image of Zarah Leander into spectacular vignettes, the perceptual field of The First Legion thus remains incoherent and uncontained, as if to bespeak the logic of separation that resides under the popular’s veneer of wholeness and salvation.
It is only in the film’s final shots—picturing the real miracle in which Dr. Morrell’s patient Terry Gilmartin learns how to use her legs again—
that Sirk seems to renounce the film’s underlying logic of skewered triangulation. The second miracle’s place is neither the privatized public space of the street in front of the compound nor the publicized private sphere of the seminary’s meeting room. Rather, it occurs in the enclosed space of the compound’s chapel normally barred to any outside visitors. Sirk stages this second miracle as a drama of visuality resulting in the reassertion of authentic, noninstrumental perception. Once Terry has entered the chapel, Sirk intercuts between shots showing Terry looking intently at the altar, the altar itself, and Arnoux and Morrell silently looking at Terry looking, rising out of her wheelchair, and finally falling toward the altar.17 Yet even though Sirk in this final sequence seems to revel in the restoration of true vision and corporeal unity, the film withholds any images that would rejoice in the foundation of a new, unified community. Rather than situating Terry, Arnoux, and Morrell in a congruous triangular constellation, the final montage splinters the group into separated individuals shown in isolating close-ups. Terry’s miracle may thus overcome inauthentic images and reified perceptions. It may restore to vision the power of introspection and mimetic experience, the ability to yield to and become other. But in its failure to restore an operative community, this miracle also reminds the viewer of the very condition of separation that makes it possible in the first place. Contrary to the earlier mass spectacle, the representation of Terry’s miracle elides any attempt to gloss over the divisions of modern culture.
Instead of hypostatizing a world of unlimited universality, the second miracle presents the secluded realm of esoteric experience and refinement—
the antipopular—as the only source of authentic salvation.
Commenting on one of his later Universal productions, Sirk remarked to Jon Halliday: “There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”18 Unlike the final images of To New Shores, which collapsed
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competing cultural practices into the vision of a unified, homogeneous culture, The First Legion insists on fundamental boundaries between high art and trash, aesthetic cultivation and mass culture. The film’s final montage sequence valorizes authentic self-expression over mass-cultural kitsch. Curiously annulling melodrama’s own origins in the popular, The First Legion in the end maps melodrama’s aesthetics of polarization onto the topographies of modern culture itself, and it is this gesture of “craziness” that keeps the film from slipping into the domain of trash and kitsch. Unlike the ending of To New Shores, The First Legion disappoints any populist claim for social reconciliation and cultural synthesis. High and low remain locked in a melodramatic conflict between good and evil, light and dark.
This cultural Manicheanism of The First Legion shows Douglas Sirk in critical opposition to industrial culture and its strategies of collapsing diverse registers of expression into seamless unity. The film struggles with modern consumer culture over the right to inherit premodern meanings, values, and utopias, but in stark contrast to Sirk’s earlier UFA films The First Legion elides any notion of cultural production that would try to appease the entire spectrum of society with standardized consumer goods.
We should not think, however, that Sirk’s rejection of popular culture in The First Legion allies him neatly with Horkheimer and Adorno and their assault on industrial culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Surely, similar to Sirk, Horkheimer and Adorno considered aesthetic autonomy as an enigmatic space of meaning and resistance to the homogenizing logic of cultural commodification. Unlike Sirk, however, Horkheimer and Adorno encouraged us to think of modern culture not in Manichean but in dialectical terms.
They understood autonomous art and twentieth-century mass culture as opposite sides of the same coin, as cultural responses to the same process of social transformation. Neither modernism nor mass culture could do without the other. Commodified diversion was therefore not the radical other (as Sirk wants to have it) but the shadow of serious aesthetic practice. Seen in light of Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument, Sirk’s Manichean critique of modern culture in fact must be understood as being effected by the very kind of modernization and secularization that The First Legion intends to defy. Sirk’s melodramatic segregation of high and low relies on reified forms of reason—a transposition of mediated relationships into categories of absolute difference and alterity—that in themselves are the outcome of a truncated process of Enlightenment.
Not Horkheimer and Adorno, for that reason, but Richard Wagner must be seen as the intellectual godfather of Sirk’s melodramatic critique of modern culture in The First Legion. Read as an allegorical commentary, Sirk’s
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1951 film submits reforms to the troubled American film industry that recall Wagner’s attempts to remake nineteenth-century culture with the help of the extraterrestrial Bayreuth festival. In his 1880 essay “Religion and Art” Wagner had suggested that modern culture should draw on the legacy of religion and myth not only to protect the aesthetic from commodification but also to reclaim semantic resources embedded in religious belief systems: “One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognizing the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us to believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal representation.”19 Inaugurated in 1882, the Bayreuth festival put this program into practice. Wagner designed Bayreuth as an autonomous framework in which Wagnerian music drama could revitalize the community-building symbols of the past and thus emancipate cultural expressions from the constraints of a competitive market society. Taking position in the wake of this project, Sirk in his 1951 film wants cinema to transfer older symbols to the present in order to employ them in current showdowns between authentic culture and popular diversion. Hollywood, for Sirk, should become a latter-day Bayreuth: The First Legion aspires to remove commercial imperatives from the production and distribution of film so as to redesign cinema as a sanctuary of communicative exchange, authentic expressiveness, and spiritual redemption. Sirk’s use of diegetic and nondiegetic music underscores this Wagnerian figuration of Hollywood as an esoteric civil religion, and, as I will detail now, the film places pianos and organs at the threshold between the authentic and the popular.
b ay r e u t h i n h o l l y wo o d
Grand pianos occupy prominent positions in many émigré films shot around 1950, even though this presence may at first seem counterintuitive. Founded by German immigrants in 1850, Steinway and Sons reported extraordinary losses in sales and profits in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Piano ship-ments, for instance, dropped from 163,807 in 1948 to 133,401 in 1949; in 1952 and 1953 the company’s profits plummeted to the lowest figures since the Depression era.20 In contrast to the years 1946 –1948, when sales dramatically outpaced production, shifting American leisure activities, domestic arrangements, and investment preferences resulted in a fundamental restructuring of the piano industry during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Although clearly delivering quite different products, postwar American piano makers thus shared many of their woes with Hollywood filmmakers.
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Arthur Loesser summarized the situation in 1955: “In the family, the piano competes manfully with the washing machine and the station wagon for the installment dollar, and rather more weakly with gardening, photography, and canasta for hobby time. As a source of passive musical enjoyment, it has been all but snuffed out by the phonograph, the radio, and the television set.”21
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century immigrant piano makers and pianists from Germany had often been mocked as missionaries colonizing American life with the bliss (and tribulation) of serious German music.22 The most remarkable appearances of pianos in émigré films around 1950 give little reason to believe that German directors in Hollywood were eager to continue the cultural imperialism of nineteenth-century piano practitioners. In many cases, in fact, these appearances manifest the extent to which the piano was a child of nineteenth-century bourgeois society—
its aesthetic preferences, its organization of domestic space, its definition of gender roles, and its vocabulary of social status and cultural distinction.
Hollywood’s grand pianos circa 1950 articulate precarious states of nonsynchronicity. They signify voices of the past that fail to find a place in the present. Rather than inundate contemporary culture with the charm of highbrow refinement, grand pianos express critical disjunctions between then and now, high and low, “Europe” and “America.” They bring discord and downfall instead of harmony and elevation. In many instances grand pianos not only help resound foreboding ruptures in modern American society but catalyze climactic fury and conflict. Death and destruction are near whenever grand pianos take center stage in émigré films of the immediate postwar period.
Father Fulton’s piano in The First Legion adds in interesting ways to the figuration of keyboard instruments in postwar émigré films such as Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed (1947), Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), William Dieterle’s September Affair (1950), and Irving Rapper’s Deception (1946, a film not by an exile but about exile). Reminiscent of Bernhardt’s Possessed, in which Schumann’s piano concerto helps pit Joan Crawford’s romantic sentimental-ism against Van Heflin’s disenchanted engineerdom, Fulton’s piano at first seems to convey residues of expressive authenticity to a world governed by instrumental reason and impoverished affect. Likewise, on one’s first viewing, one is tempted to compare Fulton’s Grieg performance with the tran-som scene in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Analogous to Ophuls, Sirk seems to resort to diegetic piano music to set a vanished world of awe and
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