History of German Cinematograph

There is, nevertheless, one common thread or master-trope that seems to run through many of the essays brought together under the various headings. It has to do with an abiding interest in European cinematograph as it stands in dialogue with the idea of the nation in the political and historical realm, and on the other, with the function that I see the cinematograph serving in the spectators' identity-formation. This master trope is that of a historical imaginary, but which in the present essays is mostly elaborated around the idea of the mirror and the image, the self and the other. Like a fractal structure, its can and does reproduce and repeat itself at micro and macro-level, it can be analyzed in specific scenes, it shapes the way a national cinematograph tries to address its national and international audiences, and it may characterize, at the macro-level, the way that the European cinematograph has been, and perhaps continues to be "face to face with Hollywood." A few words about this historical imaginary: I am well aware of how contested a notion it is; how it places itself between movie theorists and movie historians, without necessarily convincing either. I have defined it elsewhere at some length, and given some of the heuristic as well as pragmatic motives why I employ it as a middle level concept, which allows me to hold in place what I see as related issues.4 These have to do with my view of the European cinematograph as a dispositif that constitutes, through an appeal to memory and identification, a special form of address, at once highly individual and comprehensive of fostering a sense of belonging. Spectators of European cinematograph have traditionally enjoyed the privilege of feeling "different", but in a historically determined set of relations based on highly unstable acts of self-definition and self-differentiation implied by the use of terms such as "auteur", "art", "national cinematograph", "culture" or "Europe". As discussed in more detail in a subsequent chapter (ImpersoNations: National Cinematograph, Historical Imaginaries), there seems to be some common ground between my "historical imaginary" and the justly famous concept introduced by Benedict Anderson, that of Imagined Communities. While I would not even presume to claim such a comparison, an obvious point of difference can be mentioned nonetheless. My idea of a cinematographtic historical imaginary (first set out in "Primary Identification and the Historical Subject" [1981] and then again, in "Movie History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinematograph" [1984]) was intended to rely on the distinct properties of the cinematographtic medium, such as composition and mise-en-scene, the architecture of the optical point of view, onscreen and off-screen space, depth of field, flatness and frontal shots as the key indices of a formal inscription that could be read historically. They formed the basis on which to elaborate the properties of a representational system that enabled an individual movie, a genre or a body of work to address the spectator as a national or art cinematograph subject. My topic being initially movies and moviemakers from Germany making up a national cinematograph (in the 1920s and again, in the 1970s), the representational system I identified seemed to me to function across relations of mirroring, mise-en-abyme and the figure of "the double as other",in which the self is invited to recognize itself. Some of the terms were owed to the then prevalent psychoanalytical movie theories (notably Fredric Jameson's reading of Lacan's concept of the imaginary) and to feminist theory, while the historical-political part came from Frankfurt School-inspired studies of social pathology and the analyses done by Alexander Mitscherlich on collective "personality types". To this already eclectic mix was added an ethnographic dimension. For instance, the mirroring function of such a "historical imaginary" had parallels with Michael Taussig's reading of Walter Benjamin (in Mimesis and Alterity); it was influenced by Marcel Mauss' theories about intersubjectivity as a process of asymmetrical power-relations, by Cornelius Castoriades,5 as well as by Jean Baudrillard's concept of uneven exchange. At the same time, it was never meant to be systematic, but to help answer a particular set of problems: those encountered when trying to explain the repetitions and parallels between two classically European instances of a national cinematograph, Weimar Germany and the New German Cinematograph, across the gap and rupture of fascism. In both cases, the significant other was Hollywood, with which this national cinematograph, in two quite different phases, had established mirror-relationships, in order to work through the displaced presence of an uncannily familiar other: the popular cinematograph of the Nazi period, framed by two catastrophic histories of self-inflicted national defeat, of humiliation and shame, that of WWI and then WW II. Revisiting Siegfried Kracauer's study of post-WWI movies as a national cinematograph (a term he never uses) had thus to do with a parallel interest in the New German Cinematograph, in order to derive from it the idea of a historical imaginary, i.e., a concept that was both cinematographtically specific and historically grounded. This eventually resulted in two publications on German cinematograph, and a monograph on R.W. Fassbinder - all exploring these shifting relations of identification and self-differentiation.