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Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 137; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2022.0046

1080-6598

Anne Eakin Moss,

Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies

Reviewed by: Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew Anne Eakin Moss (bio) Katharina Loew. Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema. Amsterdam UP 2021. 320 pages. The pioneering efforts of German filmmakers to make visible the invisible phenomena of the psyche and mind are the focus of Katharina Loew’s new book, Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema. Drawing on path-breaking research into the early history of special effect practices in Germany in the 1910s and twenties, she argues that advancements in the technological capabilities of cinema paradoxically served to articulate the highly ambivalent attitudes toward technology prevalent in popular culture of the time. What she calls “techno-romantic” cinema encompasses the depiction of phenomena that exceed both the indexical possibilities of film and conventional assumptions about the optical mediation of the world, such as the uncanny, the occult, and the sublime. In charting the efforts of filmmakers to depict spiritual and mental experience on screen, she shows how the techno-romantic paradigm drove innovation in the medium and, in turn, how these explorations of cinematic possibility offered audiences and critics new ways of thinking about the relationship between art and the world. The book should be read not only by film specialists, but also by those for whom assumptions about early cinema’s ‘essence’ shape conclusions about the intellectual and cultural history of the era, both in Germany and beyond. The book’s six chapters each stand on their own such that they could be excerpted for teaching purposes, though together they build a case for the [End Page 605] international and enduring influence of German cinematographic innovation from the silent era to the present. Chapter 1, “Imagining Technological Art: Early German Film Theory,” reframes German film theory around a focus on its treatment of special effects. Loew shows in this chapter how early German film theory reconciled artistic ideals with cinema’s technological basis. Film trick capabilities, by allowing filmmakers to manipulate the photographic image and thereby evoke ideal realms, elevated cinema to art. Drawing on early film critics including Gustav Melcher, Will Scheller, Herbert Tannenbaum, and Georg Lukács, Loew shows how advancements in film technology helped to expand theorists’ understanding of the liberating possibilities of aesthetic experience. In turn, the Schillerian Romantic valorization of semblance or Schein as a means of imaginative liberation endowed filmmakers’ play with the surface of the filmstrip and trickery of the eye with philosophical weight. Exemplary practitioners of that play are the main protagonists of Chapter 2, “Modern Magicians: Guido Seeber and Eugen Schüfftan.” In this chapter, Loew’s original research and technical know-how particularly shine. Focusing in on two of the most influential masters of early special effects techniques, she traces their professional biographies and shows how their skills and aspirations for cinema opened new expressive horizons for the medium. Seeber, who innovated compositing effects executed on the film strip, and Schüfftan, who combined images in the studio through the use of mirrors, collaborated with directors to expand the imaginative possibilities of German cinema, and transmitted their skills through their writing and entrepreneurship. Seeber achieved complex compositing effects via multiple exposures with carefully placed mattes in order to give life to the controlling gaze of the Grand Lama in Lebende Buddhas (1923/1925) and to produce the doppelganger in Der Student von Prag (1913). As the technical director of Deutsche Bioscop and a prolific author of technical handbooks for the trade, Seeber exercised an influence on the look and the technological aspirations of cinema in these formative years that cannot be underestimated, and that extended internationally including into the Soviet Union. Eugen Schüfftan was the creator of the patented Schüfftan process, which used a mirror with a transparent section to capture live action at the correct scale together with a projected image. It was most famously put to work for the effects in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), but, as Loew charts, the elegance of this special effect kept it in use for several decades despite other technological advancements. Schüfftan’s entrepreneurship helped both to spread the use of the technique, and...