Archival Spaces

397: German Film Exile in Argentina

Archival Spaces 397:

Eternal Mask’s Art Director

Uploaded 17 April 2026

**Mathias Wiemann, Peter Petersen in *Die ewige Maske* (1935, Werner Hochbaum)**

I have been catching up on the films of Werner Hochbaum on YouTube, a filmmaker best known for his leftist feature, Brothers (1929), about a dock strike in Hamburg. Politically in danger after 1933, Hochbaum moved to Austria, where he directed several films, including what Robert Dassanowsky calls a masterpiece of Austrian cinema, Die ewige Maske (1935) / The Eternal Mask. With its narrative focused on medical ethics and malpractice, it is indeed a film that could not have been produced in Nazi-Germany, although its “Aryan” cast and crew would have been acceptable to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. The exception is the German-Jewish art director Hans Jacoby, who, after a long career in Berlin, stopped briefly in Austria before emigrating to Argentina, where he was active in the emerging film industry.

***Königin*** *Luise* (1928, Karl Grune)

*Land des Lächelns* (1930, Max Reichmann)

Born in Berlin in 1898, Hans Jacoby made his debut in Fritz Lang’s Four Around a Woman (1920), working as an assistant to Ernst Meiwers and Erich Czernowski on The Black Panther (1921). By 1923, Jacoby was receiving sole credit as art director, working with well-known foreign directors, like Benjamin Christensen, A.W. Sandberg, Jaap Speyer, Georg Asagaroff, and Gennnaro Righelli, as well as second-string Germans, like Fritz Wendhausen, Lothar Mendes, and Gerhard Lamprecht, all of them producing commercial melodramas and comedies. His career really takes off in the late 1920s, when he art directs six films in 1928 and five in 1929, including the big-budget costume film, Queen Luise (1928). With the coming of sound, Jacoby forms a partnership with director Max Reichmann, producing the Richard Tauber musicals, The Alluring Goal (1930) and Land of Smiles (1930), among others. His last productions in the Weimar Republic are Ellen Richter’s Manolescu, Prince of Thieves (1933) and Franz Osten’s The Judas of Tyrol (1933), both produced independently. Although co-produced in Berlin, the Heimat film The Lost Valley (1934) was shot in Switzerland.

*Die ewige Maske* (1935, Werner Hochbaum)

With The Eternal Mask, shot in Vienna, Jacoby reaches new aesthetic heights. The film opens in a busy hospital, the camera moving from a close-up of a cross inside a medical cabinet, then dolling back and following various nurses and doctors down an endless hospital corridor. A meningitis epidemic has broken out, and a young doctor, against his superior’s orders, injects a patient with an experimental serum, leading to the patient’s death; suffering from extreme guilt, the young doctor falls into a psychosis. In contrast to the sterile, realistic hospital setting, Hochbaum stages the psychosis in long expressionist dream images of light and shadow, which bleed into the hospital sets in the film’s final scenes. The juxtaposition between reality and psychotic perception is underscored by Jacoby’s striking art direction, which creates a 30-meter-wide waterway, an entire hospital block, and a dark labyrinth of corridors, reminiscent in its flatness and chiaroscuro lighting of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

*Así es el tango* (1937, **Eduardo Morera)**

Despite winning an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1935, the film was predictably banned in Germany; Hans Jacoby was expelled from the Reich’s Film Chamber in 1938, which begs the question: how did he get in? His identity as Jewish is not confirmed. Nevertheless, by that time, Jacoby had already emigrated to Buenos Aires, where in 1936 he was responsible for the art direction on the musical comedy, Así es el tango (1937). He is credited as Juan Jacoby Renard. However, finding work in Argentina was not so easy. It would be two years before Jacoby worked again, this time as a director on an independently produced film that utilized mostly amateur actors: Sombras en el río (1930) / Shadows of the River. It is a working-class story of the romance between an employee in a meatpacking plant and a fisherman. Argentine critics, however, panned the film of the novice director because its often beautiful images were marred by amateurish acting.

*Apasionadamente* (1944, **Luis César Amadori)**

It would be five long years before Jacoby worked again, but in 1944, he became general manager of the country’s largest film production company, Argentina Sono Film. His second art direction for the company, Luis César Amadori’s Apasionadamente (1944), was a major success. According to Variety, the producers sought favor with the government by shooting in the Argentine lake district, which they were promoting for tourism: “The melodrama centered on a taciturn painter whose care for a paralytic daughter keeps him from the arms of a supposedly rich and certainly frivolous socialite.” For his next film, 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman (1944), Jacoby worked with the Hollywood-trained director, Carlos F. Borocosque. The fact that the story was based on Stefan Zweig’s short story and was a remake of a 1931 German film may have gotten Jacoby the job. It is the story of a wealthy widow whose monotonous life changes when she meets a gambler in a Monte Carlo casino. A Buenos film critic wrote of the film: “Juan J. Renard’s sets, including the magnificent reconstruction of the Monte Carlo casino and its surroundings, as well as a vast gaming room with hundreds of extras, were adorned with great visual beauty.”

***Madame Sans-Gêne*** **(1944, Luis César Amadori)**

Jacoby’s next big production was an adaptation of an often-filmed Victorien Sardou play from 1893, Madame Sans-Gêne, directed again by Luis César Amadori. The story of a laundress snubbed by the aristocrats in the court of Napoleon, who becomes a Duchess, was a parody of Sardou’s play. The film’s star, Niní Marshall, one of Argentina’s most famous actresses, also acted in Mexican films. According to Variety, “Its chief claim to distinction is the lavishness of period settings and costuming and the scope of its action, unusual for an Argentine director.”

***La Hostería Del Caballito Blanco*** **(1948, Benito Perojo)**

Hans Jacoby’s last two film productions before retiring or leaving the film industry were La Hosteria Del Caballito Blanco (1949), directed by Benito Perojo, and Cita en las estrellas (1949). The former was a loose adaptation of the Ralph Benatzky – Robert Stolz operetta, Im weißen Rößl /The White Horse Inn, which Erik Charell had staged so successfully in Berlin in 1930. Jacoby, who had designed several Heimat films, was more than qualified to create the Bavarian atmosphere of the plot. Premiering in Buenos Aires in June 1948, the film ran for five weeks in first run, grossing as much as the most star-studded Hollywood feature, and breaking a record for Argentine productions. Production costs at $250,000 were unusually high for a Buenos Aires studio, visible in prodigally lavish décor, original costumes, and crowd scenes with hordes of extras. In Cita en las estrellas, two lovers separate and marry other partners. When the former lover dies, his former partner becomes delirious, believing she can find him in heaven. According to an Argentine film critic, the film displayed elements of surrealism, which informed Jacoby’s depiction of heaven.

We don’t know why Hans Jacoby retired from the film industry, barely over 50. His life after that point remains hidden, although he apparently sent out feelers after 1949 for employment in Germany and Hollywood through Paul Kohner’s Agency. He died on 19 December 1967 in Buenos Aires. He was, as far as I know, the only prominent German Jewish film refugee to gain a foothold in the Argentine film industry.

***Cita en las estrellas*** **(1949, Benito Perojo)**

396: Austrians in Hollywood

Archival Spaces 396

Bernhard Frankfurter’s On the Road to Hollywood (1982)

Uploaded 3 April 2026

**Paul Henreid, Bernhard Frankfurter (back). Photo: © Gerhard P. Winter**

In April 1980, I began working as a researcher for Bernhard Frankfurter’s Austrian TV film, On the Road to Hollywood (1982), travelling to Vienna to meet the film crew and give them some of my exile research. Later that year, I flew to New York for my own film exile research, as well as film research for Bernhard. Friedrich Kahlenberg, the director of the Federal German Film Archive, had recommended me while I was a graduate student in Münster. I thought about my experience meeting and working with Bernhard after recently reading an excellent article in Filmblatt, a German-language film history journal, about the making of On the Road to Hollywood, authored by Brigitta Mayr and Michael Omasta. I had actually never seen the film, even though I had done background research for eight months – it was, after all, the topic of my dissertation – and found documentary and newsreel footage for the project. So I asked the editors whether I could get access to the film, and was able to see it, more than forty years after its completion.

**Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kahlenberg** in: *On the Road to Hollywood*

BTW, the footage I found at Sherman-Greenberg in New York was ultimately not used for aesthetic reasons. Bernhard chose to exclude any historical film footage – much as Claude Lanzmann did in Shoah around the same time – in his subjective quest to retrace the path of Austrian Jewish film artists from Berlin and Vienna to Hollywood, merely inserting photos, but perceived as objects of documentation. It was an approach that filtered the experiences of his subjects – survivors of the Holocaust, who had made it to the safety of America through the director’s subjectivity. Seeing the film forty years late, I was extremely moved, not only because I could hear myself in the narrative through a few details I contributed, but also because I had met several of the émigrés seen in the film. I was tickled pink, especially, to see Kahlenberg, a longtime mentor, lecturing to the camera about UFA’s shameful firing of their Jewish employees in 1933, while pacing around his archive office. Meanwhile, Bernhard Frankfurter, stationary, counters with his own expertise in matters of film exile.

Frankfurter, Paul Falkenberg, *On the Road to Hollywood*

When I met Bernhard Frankfurter in Vienna in 1980, he was in his thirties, already balding, but completely committed to his film project. Born in 1946 in Graz, Austria, Bernhard Frankfurter founded the left-liberal student party “Aktion,” which he also led during his studies in Vienna. I always assumed, but never asked him, whether his parents were Holocaust survivors. In 1970, Frankfurter was one of the first editors of Profil, an Austrian weekly news magazine. Two years later, he began working at the Austrian Broadcasting Corp. (ORF). Beginning in 1974, Frankfurter participated in numerous documentary film projects as a director and screenwriter. He was a co-founder of the Syndicate of Austrian Filmmakers, established in 1977, and served as chairman of the Association of Austrian Film Directors from 1979 to 1983. From 1976 onwards, he immersed himself in film exile research and the Austrian-Jewish emigration around the Anschluss. Brigitte Mayr and Michael Omasta, who rereleased the DVD of On the Road to Hollywood recently, and are the keepers of his estate, described him as a “vital spirit of resistance” who addressed forgotten and repressed topics of contemporary history. He was also an advocate for state film funding. I remember mourning for him. In February 1999, I was at Universal when I heard he had died at only 53 years of age.

Walter Reisch in *On the Road to Hollywood*

Ruydoph Cartier *On the Road to Hollywood*

On the Road to Hollywood opens with Bernard climbing a metal circular staircase, visually the proverbial hermeneutic spiral, while reading from his journal about researching the topic of film exile. This first scene keys us into Frankfurter’s aesthetic: This is a personal journal of discovery. First to be interviewed is Walter Reisch in Hollywood and then in Vienna, the great scriptwriter of Willi Forst’s Maskerade (1934) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), among countless others. I met Reisch twice, once when I interviewed him in summer 1975 for my AFI Oral History and once at the Venice Biennale symposium on German film émigrés in November 1981; he was a great raconteur, sometimes exaggerating, e.g., when he claimed that 25% of Hollywood in the 1930s came from Europe. I also interviewed Walter Kohner and Paul Falkenberg, who appear later in the film.

Next, Frankfurter interviews the former director of Filmarchiv Austria, Ludwig Gesek, about the institution of anti-Semitic laws in Austria, before travelling to London, where he looks through Fred Zinnemann’s clipping files, but doesn’t interview Zinnemann. Again and again, we see Frankfurter in the act of researching, at the Bundesarchiv, at the Berlin Document Center, trying “to find the stories of exile behind the stereotypical images.” He subsequently interviews, among others, Rudolph Cartier, Martha Feuchtwanger, Paul Henried, Johanna Hofer-Kortner, Fred Spielmann, Lotte Stein, and Curt Trepke, both the famous and not-so-famous. Surprisingly, Frankfurter also speaks with the notorious Nazi director of The Eternal Jew (1939), Fritz Hippler, who justifies the expulsion of German Jews from the film industry “because they represented a danger to German film culture.” Frankfurter trusts viewers will recognize anti-Semitism here, but I’m not so sure. He also travels to Terezín, where he interviews two surviving (non-Jewish) cameramen on Theresienstadt (1944), formerly known as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, directed by the famous German comedian Kurt Gerron, who was then deported to Auschwitz.

Between the interviews, Frankfurter cuts away to real locations: Vienna’s film district around the Neubaugasse, a long sequence in the Jewish ghetto of Prague, New York streets, and London’s Victoria Station. Bernhard Frankfurter takes the viewer on a journey through space and time, but also creates a monument to the hundreds of Austro-German filmmakers forced to flee anti-Semitic persecution, some of whom actually made it to Hollywood, where they had a profound influence, at least for a while.

395: Far From the Revolution

Archival Spaces 395

White Russians in Hollywood

Uploaded 20 March 2026

**Emil Jannings, William Powell in *The Last Command* (1928, Joseph von Sternberg)**

A still photograph from Joseph von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) perfectly captures the mixture of reality and fantasy, of historical truth and aesthetic expression that is so much a part of Hollywood cinema and its White Russian colony: Standing in a World War I trench, Emil Jannings in costume as a Tsarist general looks intensely off screen, his sable drawn, the movie extra’s degradation already marking his face, his actions frozen in his own fantasy. He is seen almost incidentally at the bottom Left side of the image, while somewhat incongruously, the greater part of the image shows “Russian” soldiers standing relaxed on the set below a barbed-wire cordon, as William Powell, playing the movie director and former victim of the general, chats with them from his director’s chair above. It is the ironic pathos of defeat and degradation which captures our imagination in this story of royal blood in exile in Hollywood, of fabulous wealth and power lost, of a fall from grace to the ordinariness of everyday life: Grand Duke Sergius Alexander of the Imperial Russian Army forced to work as a Hollywood extra in films about the very Revolution to which he had fallen victim. Almost a true story.

**Marlene Dietrich in *The Scarlet Empress* (1934, Joseph von Sternberg)**

After the Russian Revolution and the anti-Communist Palmer Raids in America, Hollywood fell in love with Russia before the Revolution, paying homage to the autocratic regime of the Romanovs, the same way it adored the ante-Bellum, racist South. Russian movies were in, and Russian exiles were happy to oblige. One of the minor characters in The Last Command is played by Sam Savitsky, formerly General Viacheslav Savitsky, above in uniform with Czar Nicholas II. Exiled to the Hollywood backlot, the ex-officer continued to play “bit parts” for over twenty years in films, like The Scarlet Empress (1932), Song of Russia (1944), and Northwest Outpost (1947). Sternberg himself reports that “I had fortified my image of the Russian Revolution by including in my cast of extra players an assortment of Russian ex-Admirals and generals, a dozen Cossacks, and two former members of the Duma…and an expert on borscht by the name of Kobyliansky.” Nicholas Kobyliansky, who received a screen credit on The Last Command as a technical advisor, was also hired in the same capacity for Lubitsch’s The Patriot (1928). Through intermediaries, he hired almost 600 Russians from Boyle Heights, an L.A. suburb, where the exiles congregated, only to nearly cause a riot when only half that many were needed for the film. Several White Army generals supplied local color when a Russian landscape was required: Major General Alexander Ikonnikoff, Gen. Theodore Lodijenski, Maj. Gen. Michael N. Pleschnikov, Maj. Gen. Bogomoletz, Lieutenants George Blagoi and Gene Walski were seen in films such as The Eagle (1925), Into Her Kingdom (1926), Midnight Sun (1926), The Cossacks (1928), or Rasputin and the Empress (1932).

**Raymond Keane, Michael Vivitch, *The Midnight Sun* (1926)**

Another true story: Like the tragic hero Duke Sergius in The Last Command, Valentina Zimina escaped from Russia via Vladivostok to become a promising young actress in such films as La Boheme (1928), Woman on the Trail (1927), and Scarlet Lady (1928). Having survived the notorious “Battalion of Death,” an anti-Bolshevik woman’s brigade in which she fought as a teenager, brutal Russian winters, and a Siberian prison, Zimina died of the flu at the age of 29 in her own luxurious bed in Hollywood.

Pola Negri in *The Woman From Moscow* **(1928, Ludwig Berger)**

In contrast to the Austro-German-Jewish refugees who arrived en masse after 1933, the White Russian exile community remained relatively small and at the periphery of film studio life. Several thousand souls, who held on to their language and customs, and their past in a city where history is forgotten immediately, where your own value is measured no further back than your last film. They formed their own club, the Russian-American Art Club, on Harold Way in Los Angeles. Local anecdotes invariably revolved around the Russian émigrés’ boundless capacity for self-pity. Since the movie tsars often came from Jewish villages in the Pale, where they had been subjected to Cossack pogroms, they had few sympathies for the White Russians, who often never rose higher than the proverbial movie extra. Various Russian Cossack troupes toured the country, presenting dances and horsemanship at circuses and dinner clubs. Indeed, Russian exiles populated the ranks of restaranteurs and workers in Los Angeles’ burgeoning service industry: chauffeurs, masseurs, confidence men. The sometime actor, “Prince Michael Romanoff,” known to actually be a Lithuanian Jew, told stories about old Russia “at your table,” at one of Hollywood’s most fashionable restaurants on North Rodeo Drive. The Mdivani royal family married to maintain their lifestyles, Prince Serge marrying Pola Negri, Prince David wedding Mae Murray. Many created fictitious biographies of Imperial Russian origin, and only a handful had ever worked in the pre-revolutionary Russian film industry.

**Yvgeni Petrov-Krayevsky in Stenka Razin (1908)**

Few of the most famous personalities from the pre-revolutionary period failed to make any impression in Hollywood. The greatest, Yevgeni Bauer, died in 1917, before the Revolution. Alexander Drankov, the pioneering Russian producer of Stenka Razin (1908), Crime and Punishment (1913), and He Who Gets Slapped (1916), went to Hollywood, but, like so many others, could only find work as a movie extra, according to a report by Victor Tourjannsky who visited him in 1928. He later opened a cafe in Santa Monica and lived out his days as a photographer in San Francisco.

**Ivan Mosjoukine *Feu Mathias Pascal* (1925)**

**Ivan Mosjoukine, Mary Philbin in *Surrender* (1927)**

The greatest actor of Russian cinema before 1918, Ivan Mosjoukine, worked steadily in France for the White Russian-owned Albatross Film Co., Paris, in such films as Le braiser ardent (1923) and Feu Mathias Pascal (1924), but was also briefly lured to Hollywood by Universal in 1926. He made one film, Surrender (1927), based on an old play “Lea Lyon,” playing a Cossack prince who falls in love with a Jewish girl in the Shtetl after raping her. Variety gave it only a lukewarm review, and the film failed to ignite the box office. Mosjoukine stayed on at Universal, even subjecting himself to a nose job and a name change to Moskine, ordered by Universal’s producers (who couldn’t pronounce his name), but when no more film offers came, he fled back to Paris. According to Mosjoukine, he was not willing to blindly obey the “cinema kings” and play in any script given to him, no matter how bad.

**Lionel Barrymore in *Rasputin and the Empress* (1932, Richard Boleslawski))**

394: 1960’s Avant-garde Film Program

Archival Spaces 394

Curating a 1960s Avant-Garde Program

Uploaded 6 March 2026

**Claes Oldenburg’s Snapshots from the City, performed during Ray Gun Spex at Judson Church, February 1960.**

For me, film archival work has always included curatorship through programming, making historical and therefore archival objects visible and accessible. While curator of the film department in what is now called the George Eastman Museum, I introduced this program at a “1960s photography” symposium in Rochester. “Avant-garde film in the 1960s” had its own blind spots. The argument for the program that the available evidence suggested these privileged white males constituted the canon was short-sighted. Today, I know I could have found avant-garde works, produced by people of color, by women, by LGBTQ people, in amateur film collections, in historical societies, archives not yet visible. To my own defense, I did program a Chicago Newsreel, which probably included persons of color among the makers. Below is my introduction, slightly edited, to the film program, the 1990s looking at the 1960s, now read from the 2020s:

**Black Panther Women, drilling, 1960s.**

No single film program can do justice to the 1960s, as they played themselves out in the basement haunts of the East Village, in Canyon cinema’s backyards in Berkeley, in the streets of Chicago, in the communes of California, but also in the manifestoes of the New American Cinema, the debates of the Free Speech movement, the reviews of Jonas Mekas in Film Culture, the demonstrations of the Peace movement, the Black Panther Party’s cry for revolution, the drug culture’s psychedelic illusions, the hard-driving rhythms of Rock & Roll and Soul. A myriad of contradictions – social, political, aesthetic, economic – mark the decade: a time of intense changes and strong continuities. So, how does one choose a program that encapsulates the 1960s? The present program privileges those films that seemed to be milestones but were actually enshrined in the official canon written by males, and thereby present merely a facet of the decade. And even in this selection, numerous canonized films are missing: Ron Rice’s homoerotic narratives, the dream films of Stan Brakhage, the semiotic films of Hollis Frampton, the kitsch-fantasies of the Kuchar Brothers, Ken Jacobs’ structuralist work, the films of the Black Panthers, Jonas Mekas’ personal diary films, Paul Sharits’ cinematic poems.

From the vantage point of a post-structuralist, post-modernist, feminist, and progressive consciousness, 1960s avant-garde and independent cinema appeared to be dominated by a few young white guys, middle-class, well-educated, socially aware, but with a lot to learn. With that in mind, I would like to start at the beginning of the decade with Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray.

Cosmic Ray (1962) Where would MTV be today without Conner’s experimental, rapid-fire montage, rhythmically edited to the beat of a music track? Like one of those crazy Coke commercials, which features an image every 1/4 second, four images a second, 120 images in a thirty-second spot, Conner’s film causes information overload. Back in 1960, it was something new. Today’s kids are bored if the cutting is any slower. Conner’s film also makes exclusive use of found rather than original footage, decontextualizing the images, creating new meanings through their juxtaposition. In terms of its images, Cosmic Ray features an almost complete catalogue of 1960s iconography: Black music, comics, Native Americans, sex, War, military parades. In its use of the flicker effect and an endless repetition of academy leader, sound bleeps, and other technologically-based film images, Conner’s work is also self-reflexive, a metafilm, articulating a discourse on the possibilities of cinema.

Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) by Bruce Baille uses multiple exposures to create a complex, many-layered point of view in the same way that Conner uses montage. Structured as a Catholic mass, complete with Gregorian chants, Baille’s film, indeed all of Baille’s work, is a eulogy for man’s ruptured relationship to nature. The Native Americans of the film’s title never in fact make an appearance in the film, but are present as a structuring absence, as a metaphor for man’s former integration with and place in a natural environment. Baille quotes Black Elk: “Behold a good nation walking in a sacred manner in a good land,” before cutting to endless housing tracks.

Relativity (1966) Ed Emschwiller once said that he would love to be a camera. Indeed for him the camera is an extension of his body, swooping, swaying, constantly moving, discovering, probing, thrusting, even violating spaces. Made over a three-year period, Relativity takes a cosmic view and a microcosmic view of the universe: from the golf ball to the galaxy in two shots. Given the extreme physicality of Emshwiller’s moving camera, it is not surprising that he seems most interested in experiencing the textures of life, caressing a field of flowers, a pig’s innards, and miles of computer wires with the same fascination. More than other directors, Emshwiller gives his voyeuristic drive completely free rein, unabashedly scopophilic, implicating the viewer in his extreme subjectivity. True to many 1960s filmmakers, though, the medium is the message, the image is the idea.

Chicago Convention Challenge (1968) The Newsreel was founded in December 1967 in New York by a group of filmmakers, organizing a collective to record contemporary events in opposition to the ideological thrust of the American mass media. The Newsreel films look like battle footage, extremely grainy, without synchronous sound, almost consciously unprofessional, all overlaid with a first-person narration in manifest opposition to the disingenuous objectivity of the evening news. Chicago Convention Challenge, Newsreel # 17, was in many ways a diary film from the point of view of the grunt in the street, rather than from the podiums of power, covering the “Days of Rage” in those August nights of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. True to leftist politics, the film also contains its own critiques, uncertainties, and mistakes, thereby creating a sense of immediacy, of the process of history unfolding. The whole world was watching.

Soc. Sciences 127 (1969) Danny Lyon’s first film begins and ends with its hero, the tattooist/photographer Bill Sanders, lecturing on tattooing in what appears to be a college classroom. This is, in fact, only a ruse, since Lyon subsequently makes clear that Sanders’ knowledge is hardly taught in an institution of higher learning. The latter exists ostensibly to produce knowledge in a “production-profit” system. Sanders, on the other hand, turns his knowledge against the institutional conception of education when he quizzes a female client on the Latin root of “fellatio,” while ornamenting her naked breasts. For Danny Lyon, Sanders is a scientist, a philosopher, a documentarian. His polaroids mimic the scientific method of inquiry, of taxonomy, of classification. Like his near namesake, August Sander, Bill Sanders uses photographic media to capture human bodies. Each image is framed similarly. They are hung with thumb-tacks, side-by-side, row-by-row, for comparison and classification. While the institutions of learning utilize classification as an instrument for social control, Sanders’ photographs are not rarified: They are throw-away objects, as ephemeral as the serendipity at their root. They are indices of a freedom beyond institutional control.