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272: Boschwitz The Passenger

Archival Spaces 272

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz: The Passenger (1939/2020)

Uploaded 25 June 2021

I recently finished reading Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s “lost” novel. Der Reisende, published for the first time in German in 2018, and recently republished in English in a new translation as The Passenger, eighty years after its first quickly forgotten appearance; it has been hailed by critics as a masterpiece. A promising young German-Jewish author of 27 years with two novels under his belt, Boschwitz died in 1942, when the troop transport ship he was on was sunk by a German U-Boat, having previously survived a torpedo attack in 1940 en route to Australia. Like the luckless fictional Jewish hero of his novel, who desperately tries to flee Nazi Germany in the days after the November 1938 Pogrom, an event the Nazis-called Reichskristallnacht, Boschwitz could apparently not escape his fate.

The novel opens in the Berlin home of Otto Silbermann on the night of 9 November, when Nazi brown shirts, the Sturmabteilung (S.A.), try to break into his flat and arrest the middle-class businessman, just as thousands of other German Jews were arrested and beaten all over Germany. Leaving his Christian wife behind, Silbermann escapes out the back door, and after meeting his “Aryan” business partner who has bought the business for a tiny fraction of its actual value, – a process the Nazis termed “Aryanization” – gets on a train without a destination in mind. He tries unsuccessfully to cross the border illegally into Belgium with 40,000 Reichsmarks in his possession, – another crime, given the prohibition for Jewish citizens against taking any money out of Germany, – and spends the rest of the novel traveling by train from one place to another, eventually ending back in Berlin.

**Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz and his mother, 1938**

Silbermann is not only a completely assimilated German citizen of Jewish ancestry, he does not look “Jewish” and can therefore pass among both anti-Semites, Nazis, and ordinary, non-political Germans. It is this ability to move freely among the “Wolfmen,” as Curt Siodmak called the Nazis that had kept Silbermann from emigrating sooner, as his son had and now leads him to reproach himself obsessively for not seeing the writing on the wall, for not rescuing his capital sooner, for abandoning his wife, for not trying to attempt another border crossing. But he had served patriotically in World War I on the Western Front, and like many middle-class German Jews, he took pains not to call attention to his Jewishness. As time goes on, Silbermann becomes not only more and more frustrated, but also thin-skinned, even aggressive. When he meets an old Jewish business associate back in Berlin, he accuses the friend of putting him in danger, because Löwenstein looks Jewish. When he meets a sympathetic woman on a train, who makes clear to him she is not an anti-Semite, he verbally abuses her. “You look so irritated. I can understand that, but you should know I have nothing to do with all that. I’m not an anti-Semite. And if you were?, he said sharply. What would it change?” He even retorts aggressively to a German police official who is trying to find an excuse not to arrest him.

**German citizens of Jewish ancestry, arrested by S.A> and Police on 10 November 1938**

I’ve read dozens of novels, written by exiled German Jewish writers in my decades of research on German refugee filmmakers from Nazi Germany after 1933, but seldom have I read a writer who described the pain, suffering, disappointment, humiliation, and betrayal, as well as Boschwitz, himself a German citizen of Jewish ethnicity who was thoroughly assimilated, and even baptized. In fact, Boschwitz wrote the novel in one month immediately after the November Pogrom. It was published in Sweden and England under the title The Man Who Took Trains.

Boschwitz did escape and went to England, where his mother was already residing, but was arrested and deported as an enemy alien to Australia by Winston Churchill’s government. On 10 July 1940 2,542 detainees, almost all of them Jewish, anti-Nazi Germans, Austrians, and Italians, were loaded onto the HMT Dunera, where they were beaten, abused, and robbed by British military guards before arriving in Australia 57 days later. The ship was torpedoed twice, but one bomb was a dud, while the second narrowly missed the hull. Among the ship’s passengers were many famous refugee scientists, artists, and intellectuals. Boschwitz spent two years in an Australian internment camp, was then allowed to make the perilous journey back to England, if he enlisted. In his luggage was a revised version of the novel he hoped to republish, having previously sent revisions of the first 109 pages. He died on 29 October 1942, when the M.V. Abosso was sunk by a German torpedo 620 miles north of the Azores.

In the postwar German Federal Republic, no one was interested in publishing Boschwitz’s novel, although none other than Heinrich Böll (Group Portrait with Lady) tried in vain to convince a publisher. Not until Peter Graf, the editor of Der Reisende, found the German manuscript in 2015 in the “Exile Archive” of the German National Library in Marbach was The Passenger discovered.

**German Jewish citizens paraded through streets, November 1938**

**German Anti-Nazis being forcibly deported, London 1940**

271: Ozaphan 16mm

Archival Spaces 271

Ozaphan, 16mm on Cellophane

Uploaded 11 June 2021

Ozaphan was a non-flammable safety film format marketed for home use in France and Germany from the late 1920s to the 1950s, which had the peculiarity that it neither used a conventional photographic emulsion, nor was its base di-acetate. Rather, Ozaphan employed a system of image reproduction akin to blue line printing on a cellophane base. Despite the fact that it could not be utilized as a production medium, but only as a projection format, it was relatively popular as a distribution medium for amateurs wishing to screen commercial fiction, documentary, and animated films in their own homes. Ozaphan was produced through a cooperation between the French Le Cellophane, Agfa, and the German manufacturer Kalle & Co. AG. Despite attempts to form a French-German-American partnership in 1937-38 to distribute Ozaphan films in the United States, negotiations broke down, due to resistance from Ansco, the American subsidiary of Agfa, which saw as a competitor to its 16mm film. A new monograph by Ralf Forster and Jeanpaul Goergen, Heimkino auf Ozaphan. Mediengeschichte eines vergessenen Filmmaterials (CineGraph Babelsberg, 2021) details the history of this weird film format.

Cellophane was invented and patented between 1908-10 by the Swiss chemist, Jacques Edwin Brandenberger, as a clear, waterproof tablecloth for restaurant use, but was quickly marketed as packaging material for everything from food and candies to drugs and books. By 1912, Whitman Candy Company was packaging their sampler in cellophane. In 1924, Brandenberger sold the rights to cellophane production in America to E. I. du Pont de Nemours. While cellophane was contemplated as a base for photographic film, the fact that it lost its dimensionality when soaked in developer, made it unsuitable. Invented in 1917, Kalle & Co. introduced a diazotype photographic process in 1924, under the brand name Ozalid, which was able to accurately reproduce blue-line drawings on paper. Ozalid’s dry developing process used gas, rather than water, making a marriage of the two technologies feasible.

**Ozolid blue line architectural drawing**

With the expansion of the amateur film market in the 1920s, numerous raw film manufacturers attempted to find a safe alternative to highly flammable nitrate film. Pathé introduced a 9.5mm format in 1922 for their “Baby-Pathé” camera and projector, and Eastman Kodak brought their 16mm system to market in 1924, both based on a di-acetate based film. Shortly thereafter, Kalle, which had been absorbed by I.G. Farben, formed a partnership with Le Cellophane S.A. to create a non-flammable amateur film format, Ozaphan, which was also significantly cheaper to produce than di-acetate. In April 1928, Agfa introduced its 16mm Ozaphan film, having marketed a 22mm format (Edison) a year earlier, and two years later an X-ray film and film for soundtracks.

One advantage of Ozaphan was it was approximately half as thick as di-acetate, decreasing shipping costs, and also cheaper to produce because it did not use silver salts. Instead, cellophane was impregnated with a photosensitive ferric compound and dried. Utilizing a 16mm photochemical positive print, reduced from a 35mm negative as a matrix, Ozaphan prints were contact-printed under light, then developed under pressure in ammonia gas, a process that took 6-7 hours. Despite increased cost for matrices and developing, the cost of a finished Ozaphan film was 15 Pfennings, rather than 90 Pfennings per meter for di-acetate. This process obviously precluded the production of images in a camera, and was thus only used to make copies. Drawbacks to the process were that cellophane continued to have dimensional and shrinkage issues, and the quality of the yellow tinted black and white image was inferior to photographic film, lacking most grey tones.

**Movector CS 16mm projector, modified filmgate for Ozaphan film, 1935**

Nevertheless, Ozaphan became a popular amateur projection film format in Europe. By 1934, Agfa was distributing more than seventy-five titles (all of them silent) in the Ozaphan format. Virtually all of them were severely abridged versions of previously released commercial films, including German “Kultur” films from the Ufa, and other companies, and even American films, like “Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood.” Agfa, and after 1937, Kalle, continued to distribute films in a large catalog during the Third Reich, including Nazi propaganda films. And while the company went dormant in 1945, it was revived in 1949 in the German Federal Republic and continued to operate until 1958, even spawning an Ozaphan-Film Club movement with more than 10,000 members. As a result, at least two generations of amateur film lovers were influenced by the process. Several hundred Ozaphan prints survive in German film archives, but copying them was impossible until digital technologies were introduced.

**Ozaphan Film Club Membership Card, 1950s**

Film history is filled with such anomalies, technological dead-ends, and brief shooting stars! As a non-photographic process, Ozaphan was one of the most interesting. For those who don’t read German, Ralf Forster and Jeanpaul Goergen published their preliminary research, “Ozaphan: Home Cinema on Cellophane,” in Film History, No. 4, 2007, 372-383.

**French Ozaphan film formats**: **17.5 mm, 22mm, 24mm, 35mm sound**

270: Warner Bros. abandon DVDs?

Archival Spaces 270

Will Warner Brothers Abandon DVDs/blu-rays?

Uploaded 28 May 2021

Several weeks ago, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites blew up with the news that AT & T’s Warner Media had announced that the WB would be abandoning the distribution of physical movie media, i.e., DVDs and Blu-rays, turning sales over to a third-party company. While the rumors were quickly denied, the Warner Archive Collection site now sends consumers to Amazon for the purchase of its classic DVS/Blu-Rays.

The Warner Archive Collection is the home video division for releasing classic and cult films from the company’s library. It began in March 2009 as a manufactured-on-demand DVD series with the goal of making available to consumers previously unreleased catalog films on DVD, without the major expense (advertising, packaging, extras) of a full DVD release. Although the digital transfers without clean-up were from existing prints, the initiative was in fact quite successful; it seems, for now, the Collection will continue operating, but the question is for how long?

The rumors started flying back in January when Warner Pictures Home Entertainment and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment announced that they would form a new joint venture to distribute DVDs in North America for new releases, library titles, and TV content. According to a report in Variety (15 January 2021), the new company was expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2021 but has yet to go public. The deal came as sales of all video disc formats (DVDs. blu-rays, UltraHD Blu-Rays) fell more than 50% between 2014 and 2018, sales dropping from $ 25.2 billion to $13.1 billion. In 2019, sales fell another 9.4% to $5.9 billion.

Meanwhile, in the first half of 2020, digital movie sales ($1.61 billion) overtook DVD/Blu-ray sales ($1.275) for the first time in the US, but those figures don’t even include streaming rentals or subscriptions. Since 2011, platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO have seen sales balloon 1,231% to $12.9 billion. According to Zoe Mills, an analyst at GlobalData, “Streaming has been a significant disruptor in the video market, with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video enticing consumers to invest in their services at the detriment of physical DVD and Blu-ray sales.” She noted further in a report on the website, Advanced Television: “The Covid-19 pandemic is set to exasperate (sic) this market even further as not only is there a major new entrant to streaming but also with more people spending time at home, investment in these subscription services appears more worthwhile as consumers are able to use them more regularly.”

Format changes are of course nothing new to the film business. For more than 100 years, from its invention in 1895 to 2009, when 35mm prints as a medium for theatrical projection suddenly became obsolete with the introduction of so-called Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs). However, 35mm as a film distribution medium had already been impacted by the introduction of 16mm in 1924, which quickly became a format for home viewing and for non-theatrical screenings in educational institutions. By the 1950s, virtually all the major studios operated non-theatrical divisions to distribute their new and classic films, once the 35mm theatrical market had been saturated.

With the introduction of VHS, a videotape format for home use in 1976, home viewing became much more practical and lead to a huge expansion in the market. By 1977, the first video rental store opened in Los Angeles. But the industry was worried that VHS would cannibalize box-office and so they sued SONY in 1976. As the cost of VHS players dropped to practically nothing, though, home video sales increased to $ 18 billion, creating a huge new income stream without effecting theatrical sales. In March 1997, the first DVD players were introduced and soon drove VHS from the market, given its superior image quality and ease of use.

However, with each of these format changes, fewer and fewer classic films have been available. Indeed, while VHS lead to the founding of numerous smaller distributors for public domain content, given the extremely low cost of transferring films to video, the introduction of DVDs lead to a shrinkage in the market, given digitals much higher production costs. With the new streaming services, classic and foreign films have become even more difficult to find and see. Yes, we have the Criterion Collection and You-Tube, but old American films from the classic studio era are virtually invisible on Netflix and many other streaming services. It remains to be seen, how many classic titles will be available on HBO Max (Warners), and the Paramount and Disney Channels.

Meanwhile, a number of smaller vendors, including Kino, Milestone, Shout Factory, Flicker Alley, and Drafthouse Films are betting that DVDs will stay around a bit longer, because a small but dedicated group of consumers still want to collect films, like holding the physical object in their hands, and believe the image quality of physical media still beats streaming.

269: 1970s Women Directors

Archival Spaces 269

Liberating Hollywood. Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema

Uploaded 14 May 2021

The following review was originally written in October 2019 but remained unpublished. With a woman of color winning an Oscar for directing this year, this book remains hugely relevant.

In October 2019, it was announced in the trade press that Elaine May was, at 86 years old, making her first film in more than three decades, Crackpot, starring Dakota Johnson (a project that has still not materialized). May, the former partner of Mike Nichols, belonged to the first generation of Hollywood women film directors, influenced by 1970s feminism. Elaine May is one of the subjects in Maya Montañez Smukler‘s book, Liberating Hollywood. Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2019), based on her dissertation at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). The book won the Richard Wall Book Award of the Theatre Library Association.

While American fiction filmmaking in the silent era featured literally dozens of women as writers, directors, and producers, the consolidation of the industry in 1920s Hollywood into a monopolistic system of production, distribution, and exhibition transformed filmmaking into a bastion of male privilege. While a small cadre of women survived as scriptwriters into the 1930s and 40s, only two women directors are known to have had modest careers between 1930 and 1970: Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. With the rise of feminism, women began pushing for more responsibility behind the camera, and Smukler’s book analyses for the first time the success or lack thereof of the sixteen women who directed their first features in this period. It is a fascinating tale of small victories and major frustrations, involving gender issues that have yet to be resolved even now, exemplified by Elaine May’s banishment for 32 years after the mega-flop, Ishtar (1987), a film which has enjoyed rehabilitation in the last decade.

Before discussing the first attempts of women to reform Hollywood in the 1970s, Smukler offers a brief prologue that pays homage to independent women filmmakers who worked out of New York in the 1960s, making fiction features, including Shirley Clarke and Juleen Compton. Clarke’s The Connection (1961), The Cool World (1963), and Portrait of Jason (1967) were art houses successes, before she moved to Los Angeles, taught at UCLA in the late 1970s, and made an unsuccessful run at Hollywood. Compton’s films, Stranded (1964) and The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean (1966) were produced independently and then promptly forgotten after very limited runs. They were recently preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive.

In Chapter 1, Smukler sets the stage by noting that in 1970 the country’s two film schools most closely tied to Hollywood, UCLA and the University of Southern California (USC), matriculated only fifty women but 850 men. Clearly, this stepping stone to Hollywood – mythologized by the „movie brat generation“ of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – was for men only, so women had to organize. Smukler discusses various political attempts to influence Hollywood. In March 1969, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) conducted hearings in Los Angeles, revealing gender and racial discrimination in the film industry’s hiring practices, but enforcement proved impossible in the face of indifference and intransigence. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was also brought into play, but the equally guilty studios and craft unions blamed each other, so nothing changed. Finally, the Writer’s Guild Women’s Committee, founded in 1972, began aggregating employment information to prove gender bias, but their repeated meetings with studio executives also ran aground. The studios argued that the marketplace and the industry’s self-regulation would lead to change, not government intervention.

In Chapter 2, Smukler differentiates between studio, art-house, and exploitation films as production cultures where a limited number of the women found initial success. Elaine May is represented as the sole woman working in a mainstream studio environment when she directed A New Leaf (1971). Directors Barbara Loden (Wanda, 1971), Karen Arthur (Legacy, 1974), Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street, 1975), and Penny Allen (Property, 1979) all directed independent features which succeeded on the art house circuit. Stefanie Rothman was a Roger Corman protégé, directing It’s a Bikini World in 1967, before producing the box office exploitation smash, The Student Nurses (1970). Also working in the (s)exploitation field were Beverly Sebastian (The Love Clinic, 1968) and Barbara Peeters (Just the Two of Us, 1970). Not surprisingly, these female exploitation directors had to temper their feminist themes with nods to male fantasies. The Student Nurses, for example, featured strong and independent women who nevertheless had to expose their breasts like clockwork throughout the narrative.

Some, like Rothman, Silver, and Sebastian were helped by their producer husbands, but Smukler demonstrates that other male mentors, like Roger Corman, “rarely… created the stepping-stones for career progression that for their male colleagues were typical…” (p. 45). Other husband-wife partnerships included Joan Rivers/Edgar Rosenberg (Rabbit Test, 1978), Anne Bancroft/Mel Brooks (Fatso, 1980), and Jane Wagner/Lily Tomlin (Moment by Moment, 1978), all of whom directed their first and only films for mainstream distributors.

Smukler notes at the beginning of chapter 3 “While Hollywood seemed occasionally willing to appropriate feminism to boost its revenues and reputation, its unwillingness to hire women – both in front of and behind the camera – illustrated how the film business was determined to contain its female employees’ success – and with it, their power – even if doing so meant losing money that these directors and actresses could have made for their studios.”(p. 163). That is the essence of the story of women in Hollywood throughout this book. Smukler next discusses the directorial careers of Joan Darling (First Love, 1977), Jane Wagner, Joan Tewkesbury (Old Boyfriends, 1979), Joan Rivers, and Claudia Weill (Girlfriends, 1978), all of whom directed their first films in the late 1970s. Almost all the women named here enjoyed only very brief careers as feature film directors, but some of them were able to sustain themselves with television work, which was geared more towards female audiences. As Joan Tewkesbury noted: TV movies “were cheap to make and women watched them… The men watched sports and the women watched these TV movies.” (p. 186)

In the remaining pages of the chapter, Smukler discusses the history of the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women, founded in 1974, which had been set up after persistent complaints that the AFI program privileged men: Only three of the AFI’s first 65 filmmaking grants were given to women. The workshop initially trained, among others, Anne Bancroft, Lee Grant (Tell Me a Riddle, 1980), Nancy Walker (Can’t Stop the Music, 1980), and Maya Angelou (Down on the Delta, 1998). The first three of course had major careers as actresses. Yet for all the propaganda value the AFI has culled from the workshop, none of the women in the early cohorts transitioned to mainstream Hollywood film careers, although Grant would produce a sizable body of work in documentary and television movies.

Maya Angelou directing DAWN ON THE DELTA (1998)

Smukler’s final chapter analyses the tortured relationship of the Director’s Guild with women, and the efforts of a group of feminists to push the DGA to accept more women through its Women’s Steering Committee – founded in 1979 –, making a direct appeal to the film companies, and finally through an EEOC legal case which ultimately failed. DGA resistance came not only from a significant number of males in the DGA but, more surprisingly, from DGA members of colour, who expected their grievances to be resolved before women stepped up to the plate.

In her epilogue, Smukler points to women directors who produced their first films in the 1980s and in contrast to 70s women, were often able to sustain much longer careers, in part, thanks to the spadework of their older sisters. In 2020, women represented 16% of directors working on the 100 highest-grossing films in 2020, the best year ever for women, who only represented 4% of directors in 2018. By presenting the creative biographies of the first modern generation of women directors in tandem with their political struggles for employment equality, Maya Smukler has written an important contribution to the history of women behind the camera in Hollywood.