Techno-Romanticism and Early German Film

Techno-Romanticism and Early German Film Ervin Malakaj (bio) SPECIAL EFFECTS AND GERMAN SILENT FILM: TECHNO-ROMANTIC CINEMA BY KATHARINA LOEW Amsterdam University Press, 2021 Uneasiness about cinema's dependence on the technologies that make it possible infamously finds expression across the early writings about film. In the Germanophone context, the tradition persists well into the 1920s, where pundits were still questioning if filmmakers had harnessed cinema's tenacious technology to suit their artistic vision. In 1923 the film critic Heinz Michaelis, for instance, deems "the apparatus" the "enemy" of true artistic expression (581–82). For him, unlike other art forms, cinema did not emerge out of the artist's need for a specialized technology to express certain aesthetic forms. Cinematic technology indeed serves no master but itself, dictating and thereby overdetermining artistic expression. Michaelis goes so far to note that cinema's "apparatus is the tyrant that conquers mind and soul in order to overwhelmingly reveal its own power and glory" (582; emphasis in original). The cinematic product is thus tainted by its technology-induced soullessness, which cannot facilitate true artistic creativity and serve as a foundation for transformative imagination among its audiences. In Michaelis's assessment, the spectacle of automaticity at the core of cinema's "reproduction of life" through recording ultimately compromise cinema's status as art form. However, the persistent suspicion about cinema's relationship to technology did not suppress technological innovation in the first decades of German film history. On the contrary, advancements in recording and projection technology—along with innovation in set End Page 179 design, camerawork, performance style, and directorial practice—helped establish the German film industry as an international leader. And contrary to the warnings of pundits like Michaelis, the technological refinement of German cinema in the silent era did not come at the expense of aesthetic quality. As Katharina Loew's book admirably outlines, some German cinema pioneers actively countered the persistent apparatus concerns by their contemporaries by embracing the medium's technological foundation. In fact, it is precisely at a site at which cinema's technology arguably made itself most legible to audiences—namely, in the special effect—that early film practitioners and theorists made the case for the artistic-imaginative qualities of a technology-driven artistic medium. Their work aligned with what Loew calls the techno-romantic paradigm, which "refers to the inclination to construe technology as a means to evoke the imagination, emotion, and more generally the intangible or spiritual" (14). Film practitioners in the first decades of German film history were able to deploy special effects in the service of facilitating precisely those transcendent, soulful, and imaginative experiences that some critics claimed would not be possible. Special effects, according to Loew's study, are powerful techno-romantic cinematic procedures important for the understanding of the early development of German cinema. By variously interacting with the apparatus, probing its limits, experimenting with recording, editing, and film-manipulation techniques in order to stage a dramatic effect on screen, special effects practitioners infused the moving image with spirit. This transcendental force of the special effect stems in part from challenging reality, stretching its limits, manipulating images, and presenting their reality-transcending results to audiences. Technology, far from being lifeless machination detached from or even incapable of creativity, indeed became a "creative agent" in special effect praxis and discourse during Germany's silent era (44). Loew turns to the writing of the prominent early German director and performer Paul Wegener to flesh out this point. In an article published in 1916, Wegener likened the camera to a poet. This gesture foregrounded his conviction about the apparatus's "creativity and expressivity," which for Loew marks a "radical shift in perspective" in the public writing about cinema's capacities (45). A prominent film director and performer goes public with a statement that the creative process in his End Page 180 own cinematic practice depended in large part on a collaborator, namely the apparatus. Critics like Gustav Melcher, Will Scheller, Herbert Tannenbaum, and Georg Lukács—all discussed in great detail in Special Effects and German Silent Film—variously shared Wegener's conviction of the camera's transcendental capacities. Theirs is, however, not an...