Artists in Exile by Joseph Horowitz

Author:Joseph Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061971303
Publisher: HarperCollins

ERICH POMMER, THE UFA producer of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was convinced the movie would fail because of its extreme style and story—the crooked Expressionist sets with their painted shadows, the pale makeup, the evil hypnotist and homicidal sleepwalker. Against their wishes, the writers—Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer—were instructed to frame their lurid story as a madman’s delusion. But Caligari closed after a two-day run at the Berlin Marmorhaus. Pommer undertook a six-month publicity campaign, after which the film triumphed in the same theater. America was even more resistant. New York audiences required an elaborate dramatized “Prologue” underlining the harmlessness of Caligari’s plot: the murdering somnambulist, harrowingly over-played by Conrad Veidt, was reassuringly described as “a man suddenly awakened from a bad dream and unable to remember any detail of its horror”; he had subsequently become “a prosperous jeweler in Holstenwal, happily married, with a couple of healthy, normal children.” Outside New York, Caligari failed.

In fact, what Siegfried Kracauer would term the “psychological dispositions” of the new German cinema were not readily exportable to the United States. For some Americans, the films were a revelation. Alien to most audiences, however, were the claustrophobic psychic landscapes so relished by the first important German filmmakers, and also the brutal fatalism of their tales, diminishing individual humans to ants in a tragic or de-ranged cosmos. The American Legion, guarding morals, and Actors Equity, guarding jobs, both called for a ban on foreign films. If the Germans acquired a Hollywood following, it was in great part because their technical prowess amazed: the stylized or supernatural pictorial effects, the virtuosity of camera and lighting, the visual imprint of an all-powerful directorial vision. The skewed perspectives, camera gyrations, extreme close-ups, and exaggerated shadows of many a German film influenced Hollywood practice, especially when dreams, inebriation, or derangement were at play; but these were incidental effects, not fundamental templates.

In the cultural exchange that brought German directors, designers, photographers, and costumers to Hollywood, New World ingredients ameliorated harsh Old World practices. And the first and most ubiquitous of the new ingredients—eventually to be darkened by film noir in the 1940s—was southern California itself, whose sunlight, ocean breezes, and wide horizons contradicted the gloomy interiors, twisting topographies, and airless courtyards and forests of many a German movie. German Expressionism was plainly a product of history and tradition: spent Romanticism and the Great War contributed to black ironies and a disillusioned worldliness. Hollywood, by comparison, was ahistorical, placeless, blithe. It offered eateries in the shape of a derby hat, a famous nightclub festooned with palms and coconuts, lavish private homes imitating or exceeding venerable manors and chateaux. Defusing the notion that Paramount might knowingly give offense, Adolph Zukor earnestly pronounced: “We do not make pictures with any idea of depicting real life.” A different kind of pronouncement was uttered by the British director Michael Powell:

California is a hell of a place to live. Miles from anywhere. In those days it was much further than it is now. We were Europeans.

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