Cinematography in the Weimar Republic by St. Pierre Paul Matthew;

Author:St. Pierre, Paul Matthew; [Pierre, Paul Matthew St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Fritz Arno Wagner, G. W. Pabst, and the Weimar Zeitgeist

In the eight films he shot, 1921–1933, with F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Arthur Robison, notably Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and Lang’s M (1931), collaborative works of exceptional cinematic artistry, Fritz Arno Wagner proved himself a versatile and eclectic cinematographer, capable of adapting to the directors’ demands for special effects achieved both through photographic techniques and generated before the camera; passing shots in which the camera is stationary and subjects and objects move or in which the camera moves and subjects and objects are stationary; acute angle and heterodox shots; and a facility in the visual syntaxes of Expressionism and Realism. In the six films he made, 1927–1931, with director G. W. Pabst, Wagner established a fuller collaborative filmmaking partnership, in part because he demanded less photographic tricks and severities than a percipient eye, less the silhouettes and mirror shots of Expressionism than the images and montages of social realism.

On Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney [The Love of Jeanne Ney] (1927), Wagner was assisted by cinematographer Robert Lach, who had previous experience with Pabst, shooting his first three films with him: Die freudlose Gasse (1925), Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926), and Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe (1926). Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney concerns post–World War One unrest and the Russian civil war (1917–1923) that broke out after the Russian Revolution, precisely as the dispute spilled over into Crimea. The film opens with a close-up profile shot of a pair of men’s shoes, propped against the wall. It engages with its curiosity but also provokes speculation beyond the borders of the frame, such as about the sitting position of the person wearing the shoes. Still in close-up, Wagner pans down the pant legs, across a newspaper, and along a cluttered desktop, when a hand enters the field of view to feel for a partly smoked cigarette butt and then returns to feel for a match. Here Wagner pans right to reveal in high-angle close-up a reclining man, Khalibiev (Fritz Rasp), now struggling to get the smoke alight through a cigarette holder. With this character established, Wagner cuts to the scene of a boisterous pub packed with drunken soldiers, paramilitary types, and civilians. He captures the raw emotion of the space in a montage of close-ups and mid shots, pans and tilts, all for presence, as he swings the camera in and out of the dense crowd in all directions through the tight space, seemingly recording indiscriminately whatever the lens crosses, but as if it is whatever crosses the lens. As in medical semiotics “the symptom is felt, the sign observed by some other person,” so throughout Jeanne Ney the symptoms are the feelings evident in the performances, the signs how Wagner imprints them on film, whether those of the lead actors or those of supporting or bit players. A server carries a tray into a second-floor room, where, spectators learn, Khalibiev is, to deliver him some

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