Archival Spaces

337: Bratři/Brothers (2023)

Archival Spaces 337

Bratři / Brothers (2023, Tomáš Mašín)

Uploaded 15 December 2023

Ambassador Jaroslav Olša and the Czech Consulate in Los Angeles recently invited guests to a special screening of the Czech entry to the Academy Awards, Bratři / Brothers (2023, Tomáš Mašín), at the Crescent Theater in Beverly Hills with the director in attendance. The film opened in Prague in October. Like several recent films coming out of the Czech Republic, including In the Shadow (2012), Milada (2017), and The Golden Sting (2018), Brothers addresses the dark days in the 1950s of Czechoslovakia’s Stalinist dictatorship under Klement Gottwald, when the Státní bezpečnost, the secret police, ruthlessly suppressed all opposition. The film was of interest to me, not only because my father, Jarome V. Horak, was sentenced to 20 years hard labor in absentia, for his role in the „abduction“ of Dr. Petr Zenkl (https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/ archival-spaces/2018/08/31/abduction-petr-zenkl), but also because my aunt and a cousin were imprisoned for years by the Communists. My aunt‘s husband, Gen. Josef Kohoutek, was executed on 19 August 1942 at Plötzensee (Berlin) by the Nazis (https://wordpress.com/post/archivalspaces.com/1945), in direct reprisal for Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination, just as Josef Mašín, leader of the Three Kings anti-Nazi resistance group was executed on 30 June 1942 in Pankrác Prison (Prague) weeks after Heydrich’s death.

Mašín’s film begins with the execution of Josef Mašín after intense interrogation, then relates the story of his two sons, Ctirad (called Radek) and Josef Mašín, who in 1953 became resistance fighters against the Communist dictatorship; they were perceived as blood-thirsty terrorists by others. Their legacy is even today, seventy years later, hotly contested in the Czech Republic, which is why the director, “a distant relative” spent ten years trying to get the film made

The brothers, who were still students, aged 21 and 23, initially planned to form a resistance cell, after reading that they could join the American army to overthrow the Communist government. With school friends they make plans to escape to West Berlin, first agreeing to steal weapons from a local police station. But being amateurs, their plans go completely wrong, and in September 1951 they kill a local policeman without getting any weapons. In a second raid on another village police station, they do get a cache of weapons, but they kill a second policeman in cold blood after being handcuffed and drugged. Later, in robbing a payroll car to finance their escape, they murder a civilian. Their plan to flee the country is upended when the secret police capture one of the conspirators, and the older brother is sentenced to two years hard labor in a uranium mine (possibly the same mine in which my cousin, Pepic was incarcerated), the police not connecting the police station raids to the group. Meanwhile, their mother, who has stomach cancer is forced out of her home and eventually imprisoned.

*Brothers* (2023) with Oskar Hes (center)

After Radek’s release, thanks to an amnesty following Stalin’s death in 1953, the group fled across the border into East Germany, where they were involved in a shoot-out at a train station, killing several Volkspolizisten. Despite a massive manhunt involving thousands of East German police and the Soviet Red Army, the two brothers and a friend eventually make it to West Berlin, while the remainder of the group is sent back to Czechoslovakia, where they are executed, while almost everyone who knew the group is mercilessly harassed, the mother dying in prison without treatment.

The film makes clear that the brothers have taken the words of their father to heart to fight tyranny because to live without freedom is to not live at all. But beyond that, the audience learns little about their inner motivation, only seeing their actions. The film does a good job of visualizing the absolute oppressiveness of the Stalinist era and the ruthlessness of the secret police. In a time when few Czechs attempted any kind of resistance, the Mašín group is portrayed as heroes. The latter half of the film actually morphs into a thriller, as the group escape after being surrounded by hundreds of German police. But there is also a moral ambiguity here, in particular when Josef Mašín slits the throat of an unarmed, handcuffed country policeman. The killing is not actually shown, just as their killing of the innocent civilian during a car-jacking remains off camera, so the director is staking the deck to an extent.

*Brothers* (2023) with Hes, Nedbal and Vaclav Neuzil

Until I started doing some research, I was unaware of the degree to which the Mašín Brothers are still controversial in the Czech Republic. After their successful escape, the Communists branded them as terrorists and murderers, and for many in the country that label has stuck. Even after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when many victims of the Communist regime were rehabilitated, President Václav Havel and other government officials kept their distance, because 55% of the Czech public (according to a survey in 2003) still considered them murderers. Their criminal case was in fact not removed from the books until 2001.

It is unclear from Czech film reviews, whether this film will in fact change anyone’s mind about the brother’s legacy since opinions are still divided on their actions. However, Tomáš Mašín has made a gripping film that does illuminate the terrible crimes committed by the Gottwald regime, and the, at times, wrong-headed attempts to fight that tyranny.

336: Danger… Music!

Archival Spaces 336

Danger Music… Between Film Comedy and Musical

Uploaded 8 December 2023

**Szöke “Cuddles” Sakall** **in *The Floating Virgin* (1931)**

Over Thanksgiving weekend the Hamburg Cinegraph group invited scholars to the 36^th International Film Historical Congress, “Danger Music… Between Film Comedy and Music,” which accompanied the “20^th International Festival of German Film Patrimony,” held in Hamburg’s storied Metropolis cinema between 17 – 26 November. The main focus of the festival, as well as the conference, was the late Weimar period after the introduction of sound, in particular film operettas and musical comedies, although with side glances at individual films from the silent era, the Third Reich, postwar Germany and Hollywood (made by German émigrés). As a conference participant, I was only able to see the film program in the last four days, but still made numerous discoveries, given that many films from this period have only been recently discovered and preserved.

The Congress opened on 11-22 with a screening of Die grosse Sehnsucht/The Great Passion (1930, István Székely), a comedy about an ambitious extra, played by Camila Horn of Murnau’s Faust fame, who claws her way to film stardom but must in the process sacrifice her boyfriend. Like all early sound films, it includes several musical numbers, including “The Girl has Sex Appeal.”Not only does the film visualize the technical details of the new process of making films – shot at the UFA studios -, but also includes cameos by more than a dozen German film stars, including Lil Dagover, Anny Ondra, Olga Tschechowa, Charlotte Susa, Gustav Diesel, Karl Huszar-Puffy (Charles Puffy), Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Fritz Rasp, Luis Trenker, and Conrad Veidt. I was particularly happy to see Francis Lederer, who left Germany for Hollywood before ever making a sound film; surprisingly, he spoke accent-free German, though born in Prague.

**Käthe von Nagy** **and Willi Fritsch** **In *Ihre Hoheit befiehlt* (1931)**

Bypassing well-known film operettas, like Wilhelm Thiele’s The Three From the Gas Station (1930) and Erik Charell’s The Congress Dances (1931), the festival screened Hanns Schwarz’s Ihre Hoheit befiehlt/Her Grace Commands (1931), based on a script co-written by Billy Wilder. A tongue-in-cheek homage to Lubitsch’s mythical central European Kingdoms, the film involves the romance of a young lieutenant (Willy Fritsch) and a princess (Käthe von Nagy), who meet incognito at a costume ball. The film is staged as a war of the sexes, which can only be resolved when the couple flees the demands of royal court etiquette, thus re-establishing the equality of their first encounter.

Billy Wilder’s last German film script, Ein blonder Traum/Happily Ever After (1932, Paul Martin) forsakes the aristocracy for the nether world of Germany’s working class during the Depression: A young homeless woman dreams of Hollywood film stardom (Lilian Harvey), but is loved by two window washers (Willy Fritsch and Willy Forst) who battle for her affection. Unlike Bertolt Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe(1932), which likewise plays in a homeless encampment, this UFA film calls not for revolution, but for the girl to give up her dreams, marry, and become a contended housewife. The film’s sexual politics presages the coming Third Reich, not a surprise, given UFA was controlled by Alfred Hugenberg and Hugenberg would enter Hitler’s first cabinet. Meanwhile, as if film mirrored life, Harvey would leave for Hollywood and a contract at Fox after completion of the film, but after four films she was back in (Hitler’s) Berlin, while Wilder would arrive in Hollywood 18 months later, a penniless refugee from Hitler.

Wilhelm Thiele’s Madame hat Ausgang/Amorous Adventure (1931) begins, like Her Grace Commands, with a costume ball, where a couple of working class singles meet, only she is an upper-class married woman (Liliane Haid) incognito and out for revenge against her philandering husband, while he’s a petit bourgeois bookbinder (Hans Brausewetter). Somewhat incredibly, she falls hard for the thoroughly conventional lover, so he is the one to send her back to her husband, understanding that he would never be able to give her a life of luxury. Both Blonde Dream and this film were composed by Werner Richard Heymann, who as an exile would join Lubitsch’s team in the late 1930s.

One film that had the audience in stitches, more comedy than musical, was Die schwebende Jungfrau/The Floating Virgin (1931, Carl Boese), starring Szöke “Cuddles” Szakall, and several other prominent comedians. The Hungarian actor became famous for playing a stranded exile in Casablanca, fracturing English, “What watch?” Ironically he was himself an exile, speaking perfect German as did many in Hungary’s Jewish community. Here, Szakall plays an uncle who creates chaos wherever he goes in a virtually incomprehensible plot involving a switched suitcase between Berlin and Hamburg. No matter, Szakall who got his nickname from Jack Warner, was the whole show. Not surprising then that “Cuddles” was always memorable, even if only in one scene

Andalusisische Nächte/Nights in Andalusia (1938) featured the Spanish film diva, Imperio Argentina, one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite actresses – he personally paid for her to come to Berlin to work at UFA – in an unauthorized version of Carmen sans Bizet’s music, where Carmen sings folk songs. Unlike the original, it is not Carmen who dies, but rather her soldier-lover, who sacrifices himself for the troops he previously betrayed, in keeping with the Nazi ethics of death for the Führer. Carmen also has a second lover, which shifts the central drama away from feminine desire to the male drama of competition for the female and duty to comrades. Imperio who was a mega star in Latin America, was certainly charismatic, unlike her dull co-star, but she she lacks agency in the narrative.

Ein Lied geht um die Welt/My Song Goes ‘Round the World (1933, Richard Oswald) starred the diminutive tenor, Joseph Schmidt, who became an international radio and recording star, but whose height (well under 5 feet) precluded a career on the opera stage. Semi-autobiographical, the film tells the story of a Venetian singer who despite his amazing classically-trained voice succeeds in radio, but loses the girl because of his size. To add insult to injury, it is his partner on stage and best friend who gets the girl. The Jewish-born Schmidt fled Germany on May 9, 1933, a day after the film’s premiere, attended by Goebbels, and three days after the mass book-burning of Jewish authors. After making several more films in Austria and the United Kingdom, he died in a Swiss internment camp in 1942.

***Ich glaub’ nie mehr wieder an einer Frau*** **(1930)**

Finally, extremely popular operatic tenor, Richard Tauber, was another victim of Nazi anti-Semitism, even though it is not even certain that his illegitimate father was Jewish. The first of several musical films produced by Tauber’s own film company, Ich glaub’ nie mehr wieder an einer Frau/Never Trust a Woman (1930, Max Reichmann) was one of the few musical melodramas in the festival. Tauber plays a man disillusioned with love, who returns home to Germany as a sailor. There he must stand by his young colleague, who falls in love with a prostitute, not knowing it is his own sister. In between the Sturm und Drang, Tauber gets to sing a lot of folk and sailor songs. While the film addresses a serious problem among Germany’s working classes, Tauber is a man of mystery, coyly deflecting any questions about his origins, but certainly not working class.

What this festival demonstrated was that beyond the art house classics by Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst and Robert Siodmak, the German film industry produced numerous high-quality commercial music films in the early sound period. Unfortunately, Hitler would drive almost all of their makers into exile, including many composers, like Paul Abraham, Michael Eisemann, Artur Guttmann, W.R. Heymann, Friedrich Hollaender, Robert Stolz, and Franz Waxman.

*Bomben auf Monte Carlo* (1931, Hanns Schwarz)

335: Alfred Zeisler

Archival Spaces 335

Alfred Zeisler

Uploaded 24 November 2023

**Warren William** and Peter Cookson in *Fear (1946)*

I first interviewed Alfred Zeisler in April 1983, when he attended a Berlinale Retrospective; I was in the final throws of writing my dissertation which included a chapter on Zeisler’s biopic of Dr. Joseph Paul Goebbels, Enemy of Women (1944). Zeisler had been a powerful producer at UFA, heading one of four production units, along with Erich Pommer, Bruno Duday, and Günter Stapenhorst. Unlike many German émigrés, Zeisler was seemingly not Jewish, because he continued working in Germany until at least 1935, having been born an American citizen. Why had he left? Zeisler hinted it was political because he and Goebbels had crossed swords. Surprisingly, no files for Zeisler were to be found at the Berlin Document Center (now Bundesarchiv), where all Nazi Party documents are archived. I’ve now returned to my Zeisler research by writing an article on his popular detective films.

**Zeisler in *The house on 92nd Street* (1945)**

Henry Alfred Zeisler was born in Chicago on 26 September 1892. His father, Moritz Zeisler, born in Moravia, Austro-Hungary, in 1856, and was Jewish, the family was probably originally from the Ukraine. Moritz Zeisler was an actor, who spent at least two years in America, acting on German language stages in New York and Chicago, where he played middle-aged character parts. Alfred’s mother, Metha E. Engelbrecht, was born around 1870 in Austria. The family moved back to Berlin in May 1894, when Moritz Zeisler joined the company of the Königliches Schauspielhaus (Royal Theatre), while little Henry attended school in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
Zeisler was eighteen when his father died, so he followed in his father’s footsteps, a journeyman actor in Zwickau, Berlin, Vienna, and Prague over the next ten years. He returned to Berlin in 1921, having made up his mind to work in the film industry, since his acting career was not going anywhere fast. Through Albert Pommer, Erich’s brother, he got a job as a production assistant at UFA for Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), but quickly moved on to the Harry Piel Film Company, writing three detective-adventure films for the producer-director-actor. In writing crime scripts for Piel, Zeisler learned the craft from one of the best, setting Zeisler on his future path as a crime specialist.

By the mid-1920s Zeisler was working as a successful producer for the Deulig Company, then moved back to UFA in the same capacity in 1927. However, Zeisler’s biggest successes came with the coming of sound. He directed and produced Der Schuβ im Tonfilmatelier/Shot in the Film Studio (1930), a murder mystery, which was a commercial and critical success; in it, Zeisler’s police detective actually solves the crime using sound film technology. Zeisler received a bonus, because he had in his hyphenated role brought the film in far under budget. His next crime drama, Express 13 (1931) featured night scenes on location – a first – and involved an attempted assassination on a night train. With his crime film Der Schuβ im Morgengrauen/Shot at Dawn (1932), Zeisler became the golden boy at UFA, having shot German and French language versions simultaneously for the price of one film. Thus, in Spring 1932 he was made head of his own production unit, and in 1935 Zeisler named production head for the whole studio.

**Cary Grant in *The Amazing Quest of Mr. Ernest Bliss* (1936)**

Why Zeisler chose to emigrate in September 1935 is not completely clear since his Dutch wife, Lien Dyers, was a film star at the studio and she had to give up a flowering career. One can assume that as an American citizen, Zeisler was not forced to prove his Aryan lineage, so the Nazis might not have known his father was Jewish (in their eyes) or was he allowed to work, despite being “Half-Jewish,” like Reinhold Schünzel or company executive Hugo Corell? Zeisler recalled that the Gestapo searched his offices at UFA, because an illegal anti-Nazi publication, Das Braunbuch (1934), which uncovered the truth about the Reichstag’s fire, was circulating on the lot. Zeisler said he not only read it but was involved in a resistance cell. Apparently, Goebbels also hated Zeisler, so he asked Ludwig Klitsch, his boss at UFA, to take a leave of absence to produce a film in London. On the other hand, Zeisler’s grandson, Dillon Beresford reports, Zeisler had confessed to his daughter that he was working as a spy for the Soviet Union, given he knew Hitler personally and had access to information. In Hollywood rumors surfaced he was a Communist, complicating his American career and making him a constant FBI target, leading ultimately to him losing his US citizenship.

Once in England, Zeisler teamed up with the émigré producer Otto Klement to direct The Amazing Quest of Mr. Ernest Bliss (1936) with Cary Grant. After two more films, Zeisler and Dyers moved to Hollywood in October 1937. But neither he nor his wife had any luck. They would soon divorce and he would not direct again until 1943, when he produced Enemy of Women, which was cut by 50 minutes by the distributor, turning a serious biography into an exploitation film. He then directed three very low-budget crime dramas for Monogram and Eagle-Lion, including Fear (1945) a well-reviewed adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. After a few minor acting gigs, Zeisler called it quits. Exile had not been kind to him.

**Anton Wohlbrück, Renate Müller** **in *Viktor und Viktoria* (1934)**

334: Ivo Blom’s Cabiria…

Archival Spaces 334

Ivo Blom’s Quo Vadis?, Cabiria and the Archaeologists

Uploaded 10 November 2023

**Reproduction Jean-Leon Gérôme’s *Pollice verso* (1872)**

In 2005, I published an article, “The Strange Case of the Fall of Jerusalem,” which won the Katherine Singer Essay Award and dealt with the archival identification of a biblically-themed film that was only known by its American States Rights release title. In describing the archival process of identification, I researched Italian costume epics from the pre-WWI era, thinking the film could be Italian and pre-war, before finally discovering it was a German film, Jeramias (1923, Eugen Illés). In that research, I also learned what a huge impact Italian costume pictures, like The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) and Cabiria (1914) had in America, actually forcing U.S. producers to switch to feature-length films, rather than continuing to make shorts, as dictated by the Motion Picture Patents Company. I was therefore particularly interested in Ivo Blom’s new book, Quo Vadis?, Cabiria and the Archaeologists. Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archeology (2023, edizione Kaplan) which quite unexpectedly discusses the amazing level of sophistication of these early cinematic representations of Roman and Carthaginian antiquity.

**Joaquin Phoenix in *Gladiator* (2000, Ridley Scott)**

In his introduction, Ivo Blom identifies the 19th-century historical genre painters Jean-Léon Gérôme, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse, and Henrí-Paul Motte as the archeologists of his book title. These insiders at the Paris Art Salons, at least for a while, used actual archeological objects to create a visual world of Roman antiquity that has entered into the collective imaginary, recycled, reused through a multitude of media, like Gérôme’s Pollice verso (1872), which has reverberated through our images of not only a Roman gladiator arena but the very idea of thumbs up or down. Ivo Blom defines that kind of channel-hopping in terms of transnationality and intermediality.

**Postcard reproduction from *Quo Vadis?* (1913, Enrico Guazzoni)**

One of the ironies of the early Italian cinema’s appropriation of paintings by Gérôme and other realist-trained painters of historical subjects was that by the time filmmakers borrowed their iconography for mise-en-scène, costumes, sets, and props, these painters had been out of fashion for at least two decades; their reuse in the new medium actually increased media presence. Thus, in his first chapter, Blom demonstrates how certain painted images of antiquity wandered from the easel to the operatic stage, to book illustrations, to postcards, to advertising, to magic lantern shows, so that Enrico Guazzoni and Giovanni Pastrone would not even have had to see Gérôme’s paintings in the flesh – although that possibility is also documented, – but only one of the many reproductions in circulation. Indeed, the early Italian epics were not the first cinematic form to appropriate historical paintings, Blom discusses the preponderance of so-called tableaux vivants or living pictures, which were popular as stage attractions and in cinema around 1900.

Luigi Maggi’s *The Last Days of Pompeii (1908)*

*The Sign of the Cross* (1932, Cecil B. DeMille)

Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1896 novel, Quo Vadis, was published in numerous illustrated versions in Italy before Enrico Guazzoni and the Italian Cines company released their film, Quo Vadis (1913) which included reproductions of Gérôme’s paintings. The first film version of Quo Vadis (1901), produced by Pathé and co-directed by Ferdinand Zecca, also quoted Pollice verso, as did Luigi Maggi’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1908), Stuart Blackton’s The Way of the Cross (1909, Vitagraph) and subsequent versions of The Sign of the Cross by Edison (1914) and Cecil B. DeMille (1932). Blom argues that Gérôme’s paintings were in fact proto-cinematic in their construction of space and therefore imminently adaptable to cinema.

Alma-Tadema’s *The Roses* of *Heliogabalus* **(1888)**

Another major influence on Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis was the paintings of Alma-Tadema in terms of staging, and “particularly the use of props and deep staging.” (p. 108) Like other painters of antiquity, Alma-Tadema made use of actual archeological objects from Roman times, especially furniture and other props. which then entered into the visual vocabulary of Guazzoni’s film and other Italian epics. Alma-Tadema’s composition in deep space also became a visual feature in many Italian silent epics, which layered space through set elements like curtains and stairs.

**Henrí-Paul Motte**‘s **Baal dévorant les prisonniers de guerre** **(1876)**

Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), which Blom considers “the apex of the historical genre in early Italian cinema” (p. 169), likewise, gives evidence of a rich iconography from previous sources, including the illustrations by Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse for the 1900 edition of Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 novel, Salammbô. Blom zeroes in on two set pieces, the Temple of the Moloch and the boudoir Sophonisba, both also described by Flaubert, to demonstrate how their iconography originated in earlier 19th-century sources, including paintings and opera stagings. Apparently, more than sixty “academic” paintings took their themes from Flaubert’s Salammbô. Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse’s Salammbô et les colombes (1895) functioned as a model for Sophonisba’s boudoir, while numerous other illustrations by the painter were also referenced in Cabiria.

**ReproductionGeorges-Antoine Rochegrosse’s *Salammbô et les colombes* (1895)**

In a final chapter, Blom doggedly researches the Carthaginian, Egyptian, and Roman collections in Italian and French archeological museums, finding that the painters used these sources for specific depictions of objects, while Pastrone owned a printed source of Carthaginian objects, now housed at the Museo del Cinema in Turin.

This is an incredibly well-researched and fascinating book at the intersection of cinema, archeology, and art history; its detailed footnotes alone could fill another book. A must-read for anyone interested in Italian and/or silent cinema, it proves once again the degree to which even popular entertainment cinema in the “transitional” era strove for aesthetic legitimacy through references to art and literature.