Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective (review)

Reviewed by: Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective Steffen Hantke Halle, Randall and Margaret McCarthy , eds. 2003. Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. $49.95 hc. $29.95 sc. xxvi + 442 pages. German popular cinema is a wide field, covering a history that not only predates the Weimar Republic and extends beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also encompasses a variety of genres and styles, complex exchanges between highbrow and lowbrow, and idiosyncratic negotiations between authorial intention and ideology. How to bring order to such richness? The pun on the word leitmotif in Randall Halle's and Margaret McCarthy's Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective announces the two editors' intent: the "light motives" of the title point to an interest in the popular, in light entertainment, on the part of German directors and their films throughout the 20th century. With this structuring device, which does not flatten out the topic's heterogeneity but helps to articulate it, the anthology opens with three essays that address the cinema of the Weimar Republic. This selection is especially fortuitous because each essay sheds light on a unique historical moment of a period often homogenized in cultural histories that focus primarily on the prevalence of Expressionism. Aside from this conscientious concession to the period's internal complexity, the anthology starts with a programmatic essay by Christian Rogowski. It takes on the reading of Weimar cinema that casts the longest shadow over the critical debate, Siegfried Kracauer's 1947 "demonology" of Weimar film From Caligari to Hitler. Rogowski's attention to popular films, all of them released during the same period in which Kracauer combed a cinema of high artistic aspirations for clues to fascist susceptibility in the German national character, unearths a far less demonic, politically dubious image. As an alternative or even corrective to Kracauer, it represents a striking example of the critical agenda Halle and McCarthy announce in their Introduction: to "offer serious, critical attention to popular films that to this point have remained mostly beyond the pale of critical attention" (xii) and thus to open new pathways in the discussion on German cinema, pathways unavailable to criticism that limits itself to the canonical films and directors from Weimar to the postwar Autorenkino. [End Page 232] Following this programmatic opening, the subsequent eighteen selections cover, respectively, the years of the Third Reich, those of the Wirtschaftswunder, the 1960s which marked the separation of an aesthetically and politically more radical cinematic tradition from that of pure entertainment but also brought about the rise of television as cinema's rival medium, the 1980s with their cautious negotiations between German and Hollywood film, and what critics call the "postwall" years of the newly "reunited Germany" and its integration into a newly organized Europe. One essay along the way branches off into the East German DEFA (Deutsche Filmakademie) production, while all other essays on postwar German film deal with West Germany's film industry and its products. Hester Baer's essay on Herbert Vesely's The Bread of Those Early Years and the two essays about Joseph Vilsmeier by Robert Reimer and by Lutz Koepnick explicitly make the connection between popular cinema and the German Autorenfilm, which for most US audiences probably constitutes the sole point of contact with German postwar cinema. Whereas this chronological outline may sound somewhat rigid, the anthology does in fact offer a good deal of heterogeneity. Gerd Gemünden's essay on Peter Lorre, for example, charts the uneven course of an exemplary film career that covers the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the first years of the postwar period, reading the transformations and consistencies in Lorre's star persona in the context of a series of cultural displacements in each of the three periods. Side by side with Gemünden's essay, the editors have placed Antje Ascheid's discussion of Kristina Söderbaum, an actress whose professional identity, unlike Lorre's, is virtually identical with Nazi Germany, and who, very much like Lorre, tried to continue her career without much success in the postwar years. An essay by Alison Guenther-Pal rounds out the topic by...