Christl ehlers biography books


NOA NOA ON THE WANNSEE: TABU, PEOPLE ON SUNDAY, AND Ethics LOST PARADISE OF SILENT FILM

Silent film was not ripe read replacement. It had not misplaced its fruitfulness, but only warmth profitability.

—Rudolf Arnheim, “The Sad Vanguard of Film” (1930)1

THE DOORS Have a high opinion of EDEN BANGED SHUT. Even deadpan, during the summer of 1929, facing the clamorous inevitability center the talking picture and solitary months before the crash meander would announce the Great Nadir, a handful of filmmakers necessary refuge in the “natural world” of the soundless movie.

And so silent cinema ended sound out two last visits to promised land, made at more or weak-willed the same time, their crews going on location to file their human subjects in copperplate state of nature: Tabu: Simple Story of the South Seas (which premiered in New Dynasty in 1931) and Menschen coagulate Sonntag (People on Sunday; unbound in Germany in 1930).

Descent late spring 1929, a couple of established artists—F. W. Murnau, the German genius of accommodation mise-en-scène, and Robert Flaherty, interpretation so-called father of the Land documentary—took off from Hollywood bring back Polynesia to scout locations, regular as a group of enthusiastic young Berliners, industry wannabes battle, sought their Tahiti in dignity city’s outlying woodlands on primacy banks of the Wannsee.

Murnau was guided by Flaherty, who had already made two pictures in the South Pacific: king second feature, Moana (1926), straighten up generally admired documentary shot gather Samoa, and the less useful (at least for him) lucrative project White Shadows in goodness South Seas (1928), ultimately required by his erstwhile assistant Unprotected.

S. “One-Take Woody” Van Drain. But in Murnau’s desire succumb to begin anew, his real originate was Paul Gauguin, some achieve whose Tahitian paintings —Upa Upa (The Fire Dance), 1891; La fuite (Flight), 1902; Manao Tupapau (Watched by the Spirit do in advance the Dead), 1892—Tabu consciously development unconsciously paraphrased, and from whom the director took the saying “All that your civilization gives rise to produces only disease.”2

The less drastic dictum for picture weekend filmmakers we might telephone call the “Sunday collective” (the brothers Curt and Robert Siodmak, reflexive designer and Murnau assistant Edgar G.

Ulmer, journalist Billy Playwright, and cameraman Eugen Schüfftan remarkable his assistant Fred Zinnemann) could have been taken from distinction contemporaneous sociological reportage that Siegfried Kracauer published as Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses) only weeks before People on Sunday opened: “Hundreds of thousands of compensated employees throng the streets make stronger Berlin daily, yet their existence is more unknown than put off of the primitive tribes present whose habits those same work force cane marvel in films.”3

It is simple paradox of cinema’s development cruise the avant-garde characteristically looks lengthen to the medium’s earlier concluding stages.

Thus defying history—insisting that bailiwick progress stand still, even rightfully their makers exploited the intrinsic advantages of silent movies—Tabu unthinkable People on Sunday were sound so much exercises in mawkishness as utopian undertakings, set, bully least partially, in what Painter Bloch would call “wish-landscapes.” These anomalous films were collaborative, programmatically anti-industrial projects made in antagonism to “normal” cinema.

German filmmakers had raised studio filmmaking stop great heights; now, they were looking to escape. And thus far Murnau would re-create a amendment of the Hollywood he fled.

Tahiti was a well-trodden path, very for French artists. The sonneteer Paul Éluard made the splash in 1924. Murnau encountered span lesser-known Surrealists there, the painters Georges Malkine (who had anachronistic inspired to make the misstep by White Shadows in authority South Seas) and Émile Savitry (subsequently invited by Murnau have it in for provide Tabu’s production stills).

Henri Matisse arrived as well presentday spent some time on glory Tabu “set,” where he was photographed by Murnau. Originally, righteousness movie was to have antediluvian made in color and financed by an independent company. Depiction deal fell through once Murnau was in Tahiti, and explicit sank his own funds bounce the production, now to emerging in black and white attend to employ a crew recruited yield the island’s native population.

(“It is very instructive to sign how the ideology of conventional film production smuggles its materialize into even such a film,” Rudolf Arnheim would note wealthy an unfavorable review.4)

Murnau and honesty Sunday collective were not prestige first German film artists give somebody no option but to leave the studio, aspire in all directions ethnographic authenticity, and wrest fastidious story out of life.

Director Ruttmann’s prismatic documentary feature Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) can be seen style a precursor; Wilfried Basse’s time-lapse Market in Berlin (1929) enquiry something of an analogue. On the contrary unlike those, Tabu and People on Sunday were documentary fictions, in which supposedly everyday construct took the place of layer stars.

(“The newsreel offers world the opportunity to rise vary passer-by to movie extra,” Director Benjamin would write a uncommon years later.5) The Hollywood furore of beauty was not atrocious, though. These were movies defer celebrated youth, featuring strapping, bare-chested young men and vivacious adolescent girls in formfitting bathing attire.

The stars might as well own acquire been naked.

As emphasized squeeze up the films’ publicity and proclaimed in their credits, amateurs mincing unadorned versions of themselves. Subtitled “A Film Without Actors,” People on Sunday noted the existing jobs held by its principals, insisting that “these five community had never appeared in leadership of a camera before”—a hesitant claim given that the intertitles describe one of the green women as a “film extra” and another as a “fashion model.” Indeed, People on Sunday frames its characters as breed of the movies.

An mistimed sequence satirizing domestic life go over the main points a film within the film; the only apparent studio locality, it draws attention to cast down artifice by opening on spiffy tidy up living-room wall that the coalesce have consecrated with pinups tension their favorite movie stars. Late, a shopgirl brings a carriable phonograph on the Sunday give an undertaking to provide an unheard assured track for the picnickers’ lives.

As for Tabu’s cast, the film’s introductory disclaimer is more ambiguous: “Only native-born South Sea Islanders appear in this picture affair a few half-castes and Chinese.” This was generally the information, although Murnau’s “sacred maiden” was herself a “half-caste”: Anna Escort, the sixteen-year-old daughter of unblended French doctor and a Austronesian schoolteacher, who, less naive neighbourhood pub girl than Tahitian flapper, was discovered dancing for tourists see the point of a local cocktail bar.

Influence director dressed her in skilful sarong and gave her birth name Reri.

The question is willy-nilly the image decisively catches reality.

—Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses (1930)6

AN UNCANNY PRECURSOR to Roberto Rossellini’s portrait of bombed-out Berlin, Germany Year Zero (1948), and primacy prototype for Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) and John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959) (two subsequent examples of weekend filmmaking), People deal Sunday anticipates Neorealism and tog up permutations, including the Nouvelle Confused, cinema verité, the New Denizen Cinema, Dogme 95, reality Idiot box, and mumblecore.

(Jean-Luc Godard, who regards the film as great precursor to his 1966 Masculin féminin, includes snippets from tight-fisted in his new 3-D event, Adieu au langage [Goodbye obstacle Language, 2014].) Elaborating on Flaherty’s Moana and other ethnographic romances of the 1920s, Tabu legal action closer to Luchino Visconti’s 1948 La Terra Trema, in which a Sicilian fishing village plays itself.

It also anticipates goodness exotic documentary fictions concocted infant Werner Herzog in the ’70s.

People on Sunday was an ethnographical excursion as well—at least diffuse the sense that Kracauer styled his own “little expedition” jolt the habitat of the executive worker “more of an overjoy than any film trip equal Africa.”7 Like Tabu, People bear Sunday begins on an atoll—namely, a traffic island in capital sea of trams and pedestrians near the Bahnhof Zoo prize open central Berlin.

Narrative coalesces affect of the city’s flux; notating emerge from the crowd. Twenty-nine-year-old wine salesman Wolf (Wolfgang von Waltershausen) and chic, diffident Christl (Christl Ehlers), a girl serene in her teens, are outline inhabitants of the isle, practical in long shot.

Intertitles are next.

We are not even compelled privy to Wolf’s means training self-introduction; we see only walk the two meet, cross glory boulevard together, and wind climb in a café—the casual cartridge resulting in a date back spend the following day parcel (among thousands of recreating Berliners), swimming at Wannsee and picnicking in the surrounding woodlands.

Careful Christl shows up at character appointed spot with her “best friend,” Brigitte (Brigitte Borchert), spruce up shopgirl. Wolf had planned down bring another couple, Erwin (Erwin Splettstößer), a cab driver, elitist his live-in girlfriend, Annie (Annie Schreyer), a model, but she oversleeps and Erwin goes outdoors her.

(He leaves Annie unmixed note, but she never shows up.)

Thus, the principals form great romantically asymmetrical foursome. Apparently determined to Annie, Erwin is sexually taboo; Wolf is attracted tolerate Christl, but her ambivalent meet to his advances—recalling the trademark of splashy fun with which Reri engages her suitor, Matahi—soon redirects his ardor toward representation more receptive Brigitte.

Moody Christl grows increasingly dismayed while, cut a scene still remarkable have a thing about its offhanded brevity, Wolf give orders to Brigitte flit away together create the woods (ostensibly playing well-organized game of tag) and sham love. Afterward, Brigitte lies for now dreamily in the grass—a progeny of nature or a at full speed Tahitian.

As the day equilibrium, the would-be couple make conjectural, perhaps pro forma, plans grasp get together again the go by Sunday.

This slight narrative is established in all manner of taken documentary inserts—of the park, illustriousness boats, children at play, middle-aged women bathing. The camera’s subjects are not oblivious to neat presence, nor is the camera oblivious to itself.

The filmmakers position their instrument on spiffy tidy up speeding motorcycle or a emotional tram and, following their stars, wade with it into rank lake. There was no blasй script; the action was ruckus but improvised. According to Borchert, seemingly the only cast 1 to speak about the blear, a new scenario was fabricated each day; she remembers tutor directed on-camera particularly in cook love scene.

The budget was improvised as well. Fred Filmmaker, an admirer and later hit it off of Flaherty’s, maintained that magnanimity filmmakers “had to stop all two or three days get in touch with raise money.”8

Opening in Berlin compel February 1930, even as Patriarch Goebbels was in the procedure of manufacturing the first Oppressive martyr, Horst Wessel, People value Sunday was a hit, conceding that a local one.

(It would not have a New Dynasty showing until Cinema 16 concealed it in a December 1957 program devoted to “summer love.”) “Nothing actually happens and as yet it still captures that which has to do with label of us,” one German reader wrote.9 “What these beginners fill in doing wrong is a slews times more important than what a troupe of dexterous money-making film manufacturers does right,” professed Arnheim, who reviewed the videotape in Die Weltbühne.10 Performance was a state of being.

Arnheim found it “fascinating to perspective [the nonactors] just because they do not yet tilt their heads up and to integrity side with routine smoothness, monkey though they were on uncluttered tripod, and because occasionally specifics pointer alive and spontaneous flits bear these unpainted faces.”11

People on Sunday partook of what Kracauer labelled “the exoticism of a threadbare existence,”12 the ordinary reality rove the Polynesians termed noa (a word that, as doubled encourage Gauguin, signified the pleasant aroma he associated with the toilet water of the native women’s hair).

Tabu was rather the reverse: The commonplace was here strange. The movie took its inscription from the Polynesian word indicative of the opposite of noa—namely, delay which is uncanny, dangerous, stomach forbidden by the gods. Prose in Totem and Taboo (1913), a book with which Murnau was surely familiar, Sigmund Psychoanalyst compared primitive society’s taboos on every side “the obsessional prohibition of neurotics.”13

Tabu is repressed, while People movie Sunday is uninhibited.

More charted and less spontaneous than Sunday, Tabu was in production faraway longer; it was shot done a period of fifteen months, wrapping in the autumn imbursement 1930. (Flaherty filmed only justness first few scenes—Matahi and crown friends spearfishing off some rocks and gamboling in a water.

His camera malfunctioned, and Flavor cinematographer Floyd Crosby shot grandeur remainder of the movie.) Description drama is divided in fold up. The first part, filmed in the main on the island of Bora Bora and titled “Paradise,” donations the “natural” lifestyle of high-mindedness native Polynesians. Somewhat more ashamed than the youthful Berliners empty Sunday, their Polynesian contemporaries titter and cry, fish, swim, encourage, don flowers, and frolic put over nature.

Then fate intervenes.

A guzzle arrives bearing the king’s severe emissary, Hitu (played with stone-faced gravity by an eighty-four-year-old old prime minister of the Sing together Islands). Reri, he announces, has been chosen as the virgin “sacred maiden” and will future be taboo, not just bolster Matahi but for all joe public.

In the movie’s second textile, inevitably known as “Paradise Lost,” Reri and Matahi flee hold forth civilized (and hence degraded) Island, where, although they are competent to shack up together, stylishness is compelled to make resources, a concept he doesn’t shadowy. Followed by an implacable punishment (“watched by the spirit produce the dead”), Reri ultimately succumbs to her destiny as, magnify a justly famous final lean, Matahi does to his—and Murnau to his.

The director supposedly constructed his set on forbidden area.

His enterprise was a mockery, and, to add to rank movie’s aura of overwhelming forbearance, it appeared posthumously. Murnau boring in a car accident cardinal days before the New Dynasty premiere on March 18, 1931, and five months before loftiness film opened in Berlin strike the end of August. Tabu, which grossed just $472,000 cosmopolitan, failed to recoup its investment—although, in a surreal coincidence, spot was revived as a next feature for the first dart of George Melford’s East slap Borneo (1931), the primary provenance of the found footage Patriarch Cornell used to make Rose Hobart (1936).14

If, citing Tabu’s “visual perfection” in Film-Kurier, Lotte Eisner called Murnau’s swan song “the pinnacle of silent film art,”15 Arnheim, who reviewed Tabu impede Die Weltbühne, was less impressed: Murnau and Flaherty, he wrote, “show the islanders how movement is supposed to look uncouth a romantic South Seas refuge.

The pretty mountains on nobility horizon and the thin arcs of the palm trunks have a quick look almost as though they’d back number constructed in the studio whenever, in these authentic surroundings, high-mindedness real South Seas people carry out a Hollywood Tahiti. There practical a surplus of flowering away and garlands, as if fine seasonal clearance sale on knockout were taking place in Paradise.”16(In the US, Marxist critic Give chase to Alan Potamkin saw a be different sentimental obfuscation: “The wish come upon emphasize paradise is a general plaintiveness in the soul leave undone the movie-man.”17)

Indeed, Murnau did develop the nocturnal scenes with uncorrupted outsize artificial moon—and, as Eisner disapprovingly noted, the “odd, short-legged Inselmädchen [island girl]” Reri (whom she outed as half white) had already been signed pare cavort on a Broadway stage.18

The reflected image has become distinguishable, transportable.

And where is case transported?

—Walter Benjamin, “The Employment of Art in the Variety of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)19

WRITING Impassioned THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE of picky for the camera and proposing that, in depriving film model of a live audience, conveyance pictures stripped them of their aura, Benjamin argued that “the cult of the movie luminary, fostered by the money put the film industry” served fulfill compensate for this loss exempt “the ‘spell of personality,’ position phony spell of a commodity.”20 It may be, however, ditch no studio buildup was necessary: Motion pictures could naturally hallmark this spell, particularly if rectitude subjects were young, beautiful, gain innocent—and, captured on celluloid, about to be to remain forever so.

Tabu is programmatically elegiac; People consideration Sunday is more poignant make happen its representation of a (soon-to-be) vanished world than its makers could possibly have known. today, these documentary fictions cannot help but inspire curiosity as regards the subsequent lives of greatness nonprofessionals who wandered through them—a subject partially addressed in goodness extras found on the films’ most recent DVD releases.

The Touchstone Collection disc presenting the Nederlands Filmmuseum’s 1997 digital restoration lay into People on Sunday includes orderly short documentary on the conception of the film, Weekend underhand Wannsee (2000), which features interviews with Brigitte Borchert and Secretive Siodmak (at that time, influence production’s sole survivors besides Fraternity Wilder); the Milestone Collection DVD of Tabu (already out sponsor print) additionally offers “Reri clump New York,” tantalizingly brief coolness of Anna Chevalier posed improvement Western street clothes in presentday around Riverside Park.

Still sprightly bundle her late eighties, Borchert (who died in 2011) sheds brutal light on the improvisatory recipe by which People on Sunday was made and rather fond on the fate of multifaceted costars.

Christl Ehlers, who was Jewish, left Germany after character Nazi seizure of power. (Her trajectory led her from Mallorca to the UK to Los Angeles, where, along with span number of other German émigrés, she appeared in MGM’s anti-Nazi Norma Shearer vehicle Escape [1940]; that small role would have someone on Ehlers’s only other screen performance.) Erwin Splettstößer and Wolfgang von Waltershausen were both given lesser parts in movies directed descendant Robert Siodmak, for whom People on Sunday served as more than ever industry calling card before put your feet up was forced to leave Deutschland.

Splettstößer died young, and Waltershausen—like Annie Schreyer—simply disappeared. Borchert recalls that, in the aftermath eradicate People on Sunday, she commonplace film offers and even idea a few personal appearances compromise connection with the movie, earlier marrying the illustrator Wilhelm Batch.

Busch (beneath whose portraits she is interviewed) and withdrawing get entangled private life.

Tabu’s stars metaphorically recapitulated their on-screen fates. Matahi sank into oblivion, having returned condemnation his workaday existence, while decency designated star Reri was cock-a-hoop off to another realm.

In a little while before his death, Murnau wrote that, having completed Tabu, no problem left Reri “to continue rebuff life as a carefree immature Polynesian girl,” smugly noting roam “sooner or later she decision marry.”21 It had been high-mindedness director’s fantasy that his hallowed maiden would appear only uphold Tabu, but Tabu delivered become public image to the world.

As thunderous happens, the movie was abandonment by another showman, Florenz Ziegfeld, who invited Reri to accomplish her carefree Polynesian dance train in his 1931 Follies.

“Mr. Ziegfeld has found nothing more unmentionable for her than a past its prime South Sea island sketch about our potent navy,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New Royalty Times on July 2, 1931, “but her beauty is . . . uncorrupted by leadership Broadway artifices. Her dancing has the grace and rhythm wheedle a woodland waterfall.

Nothing could be more enchanting than primacy flow of her waist added hands in this glimpse racket native dancing, and nothing could be more alien to capital tooting Sixth Avenue festival.”Reri comed in a second New Royalty show, and in 1932 toured the US as a burlesque performer—there exists a delightful substance photo of her in spruce up grass skirt getting a manicure and a comb-out in organized beauty shop in Madison, Wisconsin—before going on to Europe, ring her enthusiastic reception suggested rank arrival of a new Josephine Baker.

Not yet twenty-one, she became smitten with Eugeniusz Bodo, dexterous former child star who challenging only recently been anointed unresponsive to local fans as the Shattering of Polish Actors.

Living fulfillment her own movie, Reri unbolt short her European tour nominate become the King’s concubine final appear with him in Czarna Perła (Black Pearl, 1934), clean up movie by the prolific Key director Michał Waszyński, which bottle be seen as Tabu’s bizarre sequel or a retelling claim the actress’s own sad story: Reri plays a Tahitian mademoiselle named Moana (!), brought because of her sailor lover back vertical Warsaw, where, although successful good behavior the stage, she is abused by her paramour and arrives to a bad end.

André Bazin considered the use of nonactors to be the crucial countenance in Neorealist and related forms of cinema.

But because prestige nonactor can only be above suspicion once, this aesthetically productive family was, he wrote in dominion essay on cinematic realism, au fond unstable: “Disintegration can be experiential most clearly and quickly rejoinder children’s films or films eat native peoples.” (Or, he firmness have added, in movies ended with spoken dialogue.) As exceptional cautionary addendum, Bazin noted think about it “little Reri of Tabu, they say, ended up a call-girl in Poland.”22 Perhaps, but lone in the sense that she was paid, we hope, censure act before the camera.

Reveal up at twenty-five, Murnau’s “sacred maiden”returned from Europe to Island in the late ’30s, verification in Hollywood during the issue forth of 1937 to appear, anonymous, in John Ford’s The Hurricane. (Several minutes into the film, she is shown ringing neat church bell; during the exciting hurricane, she has another close-up, clutching a child, also emphasis the church.) Like Christl Ehlers, she ended her movie job as a nonspeaking extra.

Borchert assess us no account of in any case she and her fellow Construct on Sunday survived the Hitlerzeit and the Weltkrieg.

The girl born Anna Chevalier, however, postscripted Tabu with a haunting figure in Black Pearl, performing marvellous sort of shimmy-hula Charleston alternative route a Warsaw stage, possibly blacked up, her lines certainly labelled in Polish:

I want to live white for you, just materialize you.

Have clear eyes and resplendent face and bright heart—as jagged have.

I want to be snow-white for you and good on account of you are,

Because it’s so useful to be with you, stay away from you it’s bad.

I want have knowledge of be white, so that restore confidence love me.23

The fallen world, description false reality, and the legitimate falsity of sound!

J.

Hoberman review a frequent contributor to Artforum.

NOTES

1. Rudolf Arnheim, “The Sad Coming of Film,” in Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Bethien (Madison: University of Wisconsin Control, 1997), 12. Originally published whereas “Die traurige Zukunft des Films,” in Die Weltbühne, September 9, 1930, pp.

402–404.

2. Of track, Goethe had said something crash to Johann Peter Eckermann ahead even expressed a particular longing: “There is something more instance less wrong among us come to nothing Europeans; our relations are great too artificial and complicated, fade away nutriment and mode of take a crack at are without their proper character, and our social intercourse wreckage without proper love and acceptable will.

. . . Oft one cannot help wishing ramble one had been born walk out one of the South Poseidon's kingdom Islands, a so-called savage, in this fashion as to have thoroughly enjoyed human existence in all well-fitting purity, without any adulteration.” Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann give orders to Soret, trans. John Oxenford (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850), 2: 55–56.

Murnau himself deemed the Polynesians he encountered “Gauguin paintings brought to life.” Deniz Göktürk, “Postcolonial Amnesia: Taboo Journals and Kanaks with Cameras,” surround German Colonialism, Visual Culture, take Modern Memory, ed. Volker Group. Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2012), 294.

3.

Siegfried Kracauer, The Paying Masses: Duty and Distraction blot Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1998), 29.

4. Arnheim, “Tabu,” in Film Essays and Criticism, 167. Originally in print in Die Weltbühne, September 1, 1931.

5. Walter Benjamin, “The Dike of Art in the Encouragement of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt, trans. Ravage Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 231.

6. Kracauer, The White-collar Masses, 68.

7. Ibid., 32.

8. Archangel Miller, ed., Fred Zinnemann: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of River, 2005), 38.

9. Author unknown, “That’s Exactly How It Is! High-mindedness Triumph of the Movie Workshop and the Unmasking of dignity Business-Cycle Industry,” in Noah Isenberg, Edgar G.

Ulmer: A Producer at the Margins (Berkeley: Institution of California Press, 2014), 40. Originally published as “So approved es und nicht anders! Unease Sieg des Filmstudios und expire Entlarvung der Konjunkturindustrie,” in rendering Berliner Herold, February 9, 1930.

10.

Arnheim, “Tauber Sound and Studio,” in Film Essays and Criticism, 156. Originally published as “Tauberton und Studio,” in Die Weltbühne, February 11, 1930, pp. 246–48.

11. Ibid., 155.

12. Kracauer, The Compensated Masses, 29.

13. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans.

James Biographer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 26.

14. The Surrealists adored Tabu as they had Moana, albeit attributing its qualities motivate Murnau. In Le Surréalisme administrative centre cinéma, first published in 1953, Ado Kyrou praises Murnau similarly “an admirable erotic poet” near Tabu as Murnau’s crowning exploit.

“There is much more friendliness in Tabu’s unhappy ending get away from in that of the allegedly accommodating Nosferatu. Fear is scapegoat by love.” Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinéma (Paris: Le Topography Vague, 1963), 76–77 (translation allowing by Mara Hoberman).

15.

Lotte Turn round. Eisner, “Tabu,” Film-Kurier, August 28, 1931.

16. Arnheim, “Tabu,” in Film Essays and Criticism, 167. Kracauer, who reviewed Tabu in integrity Frankfurter Zeitung (October 6, 1931) was also critical. Murnau’s glaze struck him as overly arbitrary, tainted by nostalgia, and apathetic in physical reality.

Comparing excellence movie unfavorably to Heinrich Hauser’s city symphony Chicago: Weltstadt coop up Flegeljahren (Chicago—A World City Stretches Its Wings, 1931), he argued, according to Assenka Oksiloff, become absent-minded “the ‘wilderness’ in Chicago shambles captured more successfully in character seemingly more familiar urban be bursting at the seams with than in Murnau’s ‘exotic’ resting place one.” Oksiloff, “Shot on description Spot: Primitive Film,” South Decisive Review 16, no.

2/3 (1999): 17.

17. Harry Alan Potamkin, “Lost Paradise: Tabu,” in The Enclosure Cinema: The Film Writings invoke Harry Alan Potamkin, ed. Writer Jacobs (New York: Teachers Institute Press, 1977), 489. Originally accessible in Creative Art, June 1931.

18. Eisner, “Tabu.”

19.

Benjamin, “The Drudgery of Art in the Storm of Mechanical Reproduction,” 231.

20. Ibid.

21. F. W. Murnau, “L’étoile fall to bits sud,” La Revue du Cinema, June 1931 (translation provided offspring Mara Hoberman).

22. André Bazin, What is Cinema?

Volume II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University signal California Press, 1971), 24.

23. Picture song “I Want to Suitably White for You” gave dismay title to a conference prevent ethnic, religious, and national sharpness and the possibility of ethnical dialogue in a homogeneous theatre company, organized at the University carry out Wrocław in Poland in complain 2010; a clip was shown in a related show curated by Patrycja Sikora at leadership Studio BWA gallery in Wrocław.