As Martin Jay has reminded us recently, the question of whether a text articulates true negativity and avant-gardism cannot be reduced to theory because “history has a way of subverting the logic we impute to it.”34
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It is in this sense that the use of sound in Rancho Notorious also urges us to reconsider the one-sided valorization of dialectical audiovision in the modernist work of Adorno, Brecht, Eisenstein, Eisler, and others. Dissonances between images and sounds may indeed, as I argued in chapter 6, complicate the viewer’s relation to a particular film by multiplying possible meanings and channels of perception. But they do not necessarily do so. As an aesthetic formula dialectical sound has attained much of its currency because its advocates demonized as merely conventional any practice other than counterpoint. Neither Eisenstein nor Adorno, although authorities in dialectical reason, fully escaped the inclination to essentialize what in truth is an ideological product of historical processes. For even if classical codes sought to paper over their heterogeneous relationship, sound and image are in some fundamental ways always at odds with each other simply because both rely on different logics of expression, recording, and representation. There are, in other words, many more than merely two ways (dissonant vs. affirmative) to add sound and music to a given cinematic image.
“Of this vast array of choices,” as Michel Chion has warned scholars against overzealous political posturing, “some are wholly conventional. Others, without formally contradicting or ‘negating’ the image, carry the perception of the image to another level.”35 As long as we conceive of audiovisual dissonance as merely the inverse of convention, we remain caught in a binary logic that denies the many shades of gray characteristic for commercial filmmaking—a logic that blinds us to some of the basic principles according to which popular cinemas work.
h o m e s w e e t h o m e ?
For many German intellectuals and artists born during the 1940s and early 1950s, American mass culture offered welcome means by which to challenge the hegemonic valorization of high art over mass culture in postwar West Germany. Writers and filmmakers such as Herbert Achternbusch, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Peter Handke, Werner Herzog, Monika Treut, and Wim Wenders, in their often ambivalent appropriation of American popular culture, shared—as Gerd Gemünden has shown—“an anti-intellectual and antitheoretical sensibility that favor[ed] experience over meaning and sensuality over sense.”36 Haunted by the memory of war and Nazi geno-cide, German adult film audiences during the 1950s (that is, the parents of Achternbusch et al.) may have shown a similar hunger for sensual immediacy and nonconceptual delight, but they did not aspire, in spite of the spi-
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raling “coca-colonization” of postwar West-Germany,37 to find their primary sources of cultural renewal in Hollywood import products. Nor did their pleasures entail an antimetaphysical assault on sense and meaning in Gemünden’s understanding. West German cinema of the 1950s, in fact, operated as a meaning machine. German homeland films, which by the early 1950s had pushed Hollywood releases almost completely from the annual top-ten list of box office hits,38 endorsed traditional lifestyles and unquestioned normative arrangements. Domestic melodramas presented the patriarchal bourgeois household as a blueprint for the reconstruction of German national identity after Hitler and for preparing West German society for its new role in cold-war Europe.
It therefore should come as no surprise that émigré adult westerns such as Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious found little resonance among West German audiences during the 1950s. American and homemade western films, as I argued in chapter 4, had been enormously popular in Germany during the entire interwar period. The genre’s stress on physical immediacy and phallic reassertion had offered a projection screen for various ideological projects and utopian longings, but with their self-reflexive exploration of unfulfilled desire, repressed violence, and decadent morality, the Hollywood adult westerns of the 1950s raised considerably less enthusiasm in the moviegoing public of the Adenauer period than had their prewar predecessors. Lang’s Rancho Notorious, in fact, was not released until 1960, a time at which dramatic changes in the international film market were underway, changes that would lead to the disintegration of former distribution circuits and the factual decline of West Germany’s popular cinema of the 1950s.
Lang’s third western was distributed in Germany as Die Gejagten (The chased), a title that shifted the viewer’s attention away from Vern’s and Altar’s predicaments and marketed the film as a conventional pursuit-of-justice tale. Eager to please domestic tastes and pieties, the German distributor also decided to rename the Dietrich character Cora-Kean. In a cultural atmosphere in which Christian church authorities continued to patrol popular entertainment closely, Dietrich’s original “Altar Keane” must have rung all too blasphemous.39 In spite of such firewalls and revisions, however, the reviewer of the Berlin Abendzeitung, for instance, still expressed outrage about Lang’s exclusive focus on the “life of some outlaws on a ranch hermetically sealed off from the bourgeois world.”40 Lang’s film, the reviewer implied, lacks any normative center and heroizes antibourgeois attitudes. Rather than uplifting the viewer with a narrative about the moral self-constitution of bourgeois society, Lang uses the western genre simply
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as a star vehicle for Dietrich and her “already rancid myth,”41 thus offend-ing in particular those German viewers who considered Dietrich’s service for the U.S. Army during World War II an act of high treason.
In her study of postwar German film culture Heide Fehrenbach summarizes the often-ambivalent view of Hollywood feature films throughout the 1950s: “Critics feared that American cinema would facilitate social disintegration by seducing the German public (and particularly German women) with its slick production style, consumer values, and Hollywood brand of hedonism. Persuaded that film influenced social behavior, they suspected Hollywood of encouraging individual fulfillment and pleasure seeking over social responsibility to family and nation.”42 Although Rancho Notorious neither provided spectacular production values nor appealed to hedonistic modes of spectatorial identification, Fehrenbach’s description explains both why Rancho Notorious received mostly negative responses on its German release and why Lang—similar to Robert Siodmak—was destined to disappoint critics and audiences alike when he returned to West Germany in the late 1950s to direct his last three feature films, Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The tiger of Bengal, 1959), Das indische Grabmal (The Indian tomb, 1959), and Die tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The thousand eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 1960). Lang’s cinema, Weimar and Hollywood, had always been driven by antibourgeois impulses. It had alternated between an aris-tocratic and a populist, a Nietzschean and a Rousseauean rejection of modern civil society and bourgeois morality. With its carefully crafted tales of perversion and excess, its self-reflexive concern with the dynamic of the cinematic medium, and its calculated exploitation of the viewers’ desire for spectacle and voyeuristic identification, Lang’s allegorical cinema was simply not fit for a German film public simultaneously unwilling to work through an unacceptable past and to face an increasingly international and decentered present.43
Fehrenbach’s account of film spectatorship and criticism during the 1950s also helps explain why Sirk’s The First Legion, by contrast, was able to draw ample praise on its original release on June 29, 1955, in West Germany.
Many in Adenauer’s Germany perceived American society as ungodly or sacrilegious, an iconoclastic harbinger of atheism, sectarianism, or misdirected faith. As L. L. Matthias put it in an influential 1953 treatise, “Christianity has lost the cross in America not only in a metaphorical but also in a literal sense.”44 Americans, he continued, consume rather than believe.
Their Protestant work ethic blinds them to the affective symbolism and integrative power of organized religion, Catholicism in particular. Sirk’s The First Legion was welcomed as a counterpoint to this absence of spirituality.
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The film, according to critic Martin Ruppert, accomplished nothing less than “to heal a world infected with the virus of progress, and afflicted with delusions, hectic dreams and visions.” 45 Critics such as Ruppert applauded The First Legion as a sophisticated art house feature, an “interesting dialogue film”46 in which the community-building power of spiritual values prevailed over the materialist egotism of the time.
The success of The First Legion in Adenauer Germany is notable for at least three reasons. It tells us, in a symptomatic way, more about the often-contradictory predilections and phobias of West German film spectatorship during the 1950s than about the film itself. First, to create popular interest for Sirk’s neo-Wagnerian tale of healing and redemption, the German distributor (Donau-Verleih) decided to release the film under the mismatched title Die Beichte eines Arztes (The confession of a doctor). The doctor genre was one of the most viable formulas of the 1950s aside from the homeland film genre. It inundated the viewer with repressive fantasies of social harmony and reconciliation, suggesting that any given pathology could be resolved within patriarchal domestic settings.47 In placing Sirk’s The First Legion in the genre of popular medical melodramas such as Rolf Hansen’s Sauerbruch: Das war mein Leben (Sauerbruch: That was my life, 1954), Donau-Verleih wanted to amplify Sirk’s emphasis on salvation so as to align the film with the escapist tendencies of 1950s German cinema. Second, most critics, defying these populist marketing strategies, downplayed the film’s cinematic aspects in order to commend its theatrical, and hence highbrow, sources. The critics’ hero of the moment was neither Sirk nor Dr. Morell but Emmet Lavery, the film’s screenwriter and the author of the original 1934 theater play of the same title. Staged in Germany in the immediate postwar period, Lavery’s theological dramas The First Legion and Monsignore’ s Hour, it was recalled, had helped “to eradicate the last sulfu-ric smoke of the anti-Christ’s luciferous demonism, and to hold aloft again new banners in a new time in God’s wind.”48 Thanks to Lavery’s spiritual genius, Sirk’s film thus served a double task in the eyes of the critics: it substantiated the reconstructive efforts of postwar German culture, and it warned domestic audiences not to seek salvation in an unmitigated embrace of American popular culture and Americanism. Third, and finally, neither the critics nor the distributor made any mention whatsoever of Sirk’s professional past at UFA during the Nazi period and of his exile status in Hollywood after 1939. Once celebrated as a maestro of the melodrama, Detlef Sierck/Douglas Sirk for German critics around 1955 was simply
“the director Sirk,” for Sirk’s name and identity, not his work, challenged the silent consensus of postwar German film culture in a double way. Any
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allusion to the director’s past would have either broken the taboo on exile so characteristic for West German society until the 1960s or evoked in an all-too-explicit way the extent to which postwar German film relied on the directors, stars, and technicians of the Nazi period. A minefield of uncontrollable meanings and memories, “Sirk” was therefore veiled by German critics in a protective cloak of anonymity and statelessness.
The later revaluation of Douglas Sirk by filmmakers and psychoanalytic scholars during the 1970s is by now well documented. For Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sirk’s Universal melodramas of the 1950s provided a paradigmatic example of how to appropriate “the classical system to the point of rethinking not only what it meant to address audiences in what remained of the public space that was cinema, but what it meant to organize the field of vision that is the cinematic apparatus.”49 In films such as Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear eats the soul, 1974) Fassbinder espoused the legacy of Sirk’s American melodramas to unmask the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality and stress the artifice of cinematic representation. Douglas Sirk, by now retired in Lugano (Switzerland) and teaching occasional courses at the Munich Film School, thus became one of the elected fathers of the New German Cinema, even if it meant once again to render Detlef Sierck silent. Sirk’s academic critics of the 1970s, on the other hand, celebrated films such as Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life as exercises in subversion that articulated artistic authorship within the heart of standardized mass culture. Strangely enough, though, this scholarship, although proposing extremely sophisticated strategies of formal exegesis, often relied on highly conventional notions of cultural and national identity.
Rather than understanding Sirk’s work as a site of cultural syncretism, it valorized Sirk as a European art director who succeeded in smuggling aesthetic refinement into the camp of the enemy, as a secret agent who crossed borders yet did not unfix given identities. No longer rendering the continuities and ruptures between Sirk’s German and his American work taboo, more recent scholarship has rightly questioned this image of Sirk as an un-dercover artist simply dismantling American culture and identity. In linking Sirk’s extravagant mise-en-scène to the demands of 1950s consumer society, scholars such as Barbara Klinger read Sirk’s style not in terms of subversion but of unbridled commodification: “[T]he production of films with lush visuals was strongly influenced by publicity considerations in the 1950s which sought to exploit the contemporary decor and fashions showcased in certain films as a means of advancing Hollywood’s relation to consumer society. The rich mise-en-scène of family melodramas . . . did not result simply from directorial decision, but from socially influenced industry
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