Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm
- 1 Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory
- 2 Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan
- 3 The Uncanny Mirror: Der Student von Prag (1913)
- 4 Visualizing the Occult: Nosferatu (1922)
- 5 The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)
- 6 “German Technique” and Hollywood
- Conclusion: Techno-Romantic Cinema from the Silent to the Digital Era
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm
- 1 Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory
- 2 Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan
- 3 The Uncanny Mirror: Der Student von Prag (1913)
- 4 Visualizing the Occult: Nosferatu (1922)
- 5 The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)
- 6 “German Technique” and Hollywood
- Conclusion: Techno-Romantic Cinema from the Silent to the Digital Era
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
As a form of popular mass entertainment and an apparatus for the automatic reproduction of material reality, cinema's artistic aspirations seemed futile. Some early commentators nonetheless asserted that the new medium could be a legitimate object of aesthetic scrutiny. In an attempt to fathom cinema's immaterial values, early film theorists including Herbert Tannenbaum and Georg Lukacs explored cinema's kinship with folk art, mental processes and the fantastic. They argued that film technology, specifically special effects, could articulate ideas in a sensual form and thus provide a pathway to a spiritual dimension. As this chapter shows, their techno-romantic lines of argument conceptualized the medium within established aesthetics and set the stage for the recognition of cinema as the first technological art.
Keywords: film theory, technology, film art, fantastic, trick effects
Cinema's emergence as a prominent mass culture phenomenon in the early 1900s triggered intense public discussions all over Europe. Gauging the new medium's social and aesthetic implications, commentators voiced grave concerns. Cinema was perceived as a threat to the health, tastes, and morals of mass audiences as well as a danger to established cultural institutions like the theatre. Even more importantly, cinema's technological character raised fundamental questions about the nature of art in the machine age. This chapter explores why film posed such a major aesthetic problem and how the new medium was eventually integrated with existing conceptions of art. As I argue, special effects played a key role in this endeavour.
In Germany, the first comprehensive discussion about film sprung up around 1907, at a time when cinema established itself as a public institution, permanent movie theatres became increasingly prevalent, and the first specialized film trade journals emerged. Simultaneously, the aesthetic discourse was dominated by idealist convictions that posited machine technology as diametrically opposed to art. Art generated beauty and truth through the sensuous expression of the ideal, while technology was associated with exteriority and soulless objectivity. As a mechanism that merely reproduced the appearance of the material world, film was portrayed as one-dimensional, mundane, and inherently incapable of transcending phenomena. Devoid of spiritual properties, the medium necessarily remained aesthetically inconsequential. For cinema-friendly critics, the task was therefore to ascertain film's ontology and invalidate these allegations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Special Effects and German Silent FilmTechno-Romantic Cinema, pp. 33 - 66Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021