The Haunted Screen Analysis
Our image of Weimar cinema is to a large extent the product of two accounts that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Siegfried Kracauer 's provocatively titled From Caligari to Hitler (1947) reads the films produced during the Weimar period as manifestations of a kind of collective unconscious, displaying a uniquely German preoccupation with authority and a desire for submission that foreshadows the willingness of Germans to submit to real-life dictator Adolf Hitler. Lotte H. Eisner 's The Haunted Screen (first published in France in 1952) offers a complementing notion of a German predilection for brooding introspection by anchoring the artistic imagination of Weimar era filmmakers to the tradition of German romanticism.
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With Weimar Cinema and After--which runs nearly 500 pages and features a sinister cover photo of a brooding Emil Jannings as Mephisto--Elsaesser seeks to set the record straight. His reassessment of Weimar cinema is thought provoking in a quite literal sense: the aim is to make the reader rethink familiar notions that have become so ingrained as to appear altogether self-evident. Much of the book thus amounts to a dismantling of stereotypes and clichéd views. Alongside stimulating, sometimes refreshingly provocative, readings of films by major directors, the book includes an extended discussion of the German "studio system," a model established above all by producer Erich Pommer at the UFA corporation, Germany 's largest and most important film company. A chapter is devoted to the impact of operetta on film as a modern form of mass entertainment. Another one re-examines the complicated nexus between Weimar cinema and Hollywood film noir. Throughout, Elsaesser draws on recent developments in film history that take into account institutional, economic, and technological considerations alongside artistic ones. Here, film is recognized as a cultural commodity produced in a quasi-industrial mode and subject to a logic of marketing and distribution that transcends national borders. It is a mode of expression contingent upon the availability of specific technologies. It is a product that addresses the tastes and viewing habits of audiences differentiated along social and gender lines. It is a mass medium that needs to define its status within a given culture vis-à-vis high art as well as competing forms of popular
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