Archival Spaces

375: Smuggling Art

375: My career as an Art Smuggler

Archival Spaces 375

Uploaded 13 June 2025

**Mikuláš Medek: *Three Events* (1971)**

In Spring 1979 I was working as a free-lance curator on the exhibition, “Film und Foto der zwanziger Jahre/Film and Photo in the 1920s,” for the Würtembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany. At the time I was a year into my PhD. studies at Münster University, still living in a dormitory. I had gotten a call in September 1978 from a colleague, Ute Esklidsen, who I had met at George Eastman Museum in Rochester when we were both post-graduate interns, she a year after me. She had been hired by Tilman Osterwold, the director of the Kunstverein to curate the photography show and she asked me, if I would handle the film section. The exhibition was in fact a reconstruction of “Film und Foto,” which had been staged in Stuttgart exactly 50 years earlier in May 1929 by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Hans Richter, both hired by the German Werkbund; it brought together all the various avant-garde movements in Europe and America, as they pertained to the then new media of film and photography. Richter’s film program included everything from features, like Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera (1929), Marc Allégret’s Voyage au Congo (1927), Pabst’s Secrets of the Soul (1926) and Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), to avant-garde shorts, like Richter’s Inflation (1928), Ivens’ Rain (1929), Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1927), and Mol’s Life in Water Drops (1928).

**Marcel Duchamp: *Abemic Cinema* (1927)**

I had my first planning meeting with Ute in Fall 1978 in Essen, an hour South of Münster, where she was living and would soon become the photography curator at the Folkwang Museum. I immediately began working on and off researching the exhibition, particularly the 1929 film program, its participants, and also locating modern sources, where the surviving films could be accessed for our program, which was scheduled to open on May 16, 1979. In the early months of 1979, I made several research trips to Paris, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, then began writing my catalogue essay, while Ute worked on the photography and graphic design section that included examples of German New Realism, Soviet Constructivism, French Surrealism, Dutch de Stijl, American Straight and advertising Photography, and Czech Devětsil

It was in connection with the last-named art movement that Ute asked me to meet some people in Prague, where I was heading for Easter to see my Babi and Aunt Liba, and bring back some images for the exhibition. My girlfriend and I boarded a student bus to Prague in Kassel on 11 April, crossing the border to Communist Czechoslovakia in the early afternoon. Shortly behind the border, a gentleman got in and exchanged money for us into Czech Crowns at an exchange far better than the official government rate – I later learned this was sanctioned by the Státní bezpečnost (State Security). The next day, I met Mr. Venera below the King Wenceslas statue on Václavské náměstí, where he handed my three photo montages in a brown bag. I wrote in my diary:

“He was almost my height, gray hair, good-looking, badly made Czech clothing. I told him how I planned to smuggle them out of the country. His face immediately clouded over. He said if there was trouble, he couldn’t afford to have his name connected with these historical works of art. He told me that if they asked about them on the border, I should just say my father had made them in his youth and give them up without a fuss. He then quickly said he had to leave for Brno, because his son was ill. I gave him a bag with several jazz records Ute had told me to bring from Germany. He thanked me profusely, and then he was gone, disappearing into the crowd. I was suddenly in a total daze and incredibly moved by the experience, maybe because so much had been expressed, but left unsaid. I also felt really good, because I had done something concrete for someone, and suddenly felt more connected to my roots than I had ever been, maybe because my illegal work brought me closer to my father and his resistance work in 1948.” (See https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archival-spaces/2018/08/31/abduction-petr-zenkl)

**Eužen Markalous: *Fotomontage* (1926)**

**Eužen Markalous: *Fotomontage* (1927)**

I next visited Emilia Medekova, the widow of the famous Czech painter, Mikuláš Medek. I gave her money for the art historian Anna Farova, who had written a piece for our Film and Foto catalogue. I couldn’t meet Anna directly, because she was under heavy police surveillance, due to her signing Carta 77, which called for the Czechoslovak government to abide by its own human rights documents; she was also banned from working. Medekova and I only spoke briefly, but I felt the oppressive atmosphere under which her late husband and all Czech artists and writers suffered, with every inch of wall space covered with paintings that had never been seen in public.

Our journey out of the country turned out to be uneventful. No customs officials felt it necessary to search a bus full of poor German students. The Markalous images were exhibited for the first time in our exhibition and are now a part of the Folkwang Museum Collections.

Postscript: In November 1986, I was nearly arrested at the Czech border for attempting to smuggle “pornography” into the country. In fact, I was a legitimate courier, carrying Muybridge “Animal Locomotion” images from George Eastman Museum, to be exchanged for E.-J. Marey photographs from the Technical Museum in Prague, and I had a letter to prove it.

**Film und Foto** **opening, Essen Folkwang Museum, August 1979**

374: Alraune

Archival Spaces 374:

Hanns Heinz Ewers Novel, Alraune (1911)

Uploaded 30 May 2025

A couple of months ago, I recorded a Blu-ray commentary for the 1927 German horror film, Alraune, directed by Henryk Galeen, and distributed in America as Daughter of Destiny. The Blu-ray will be released by Deaf Crocodile around Halloween. The script by Galeen was adapted from the eponymous novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers from 1911. It became an immediate best seller in Germany and remained one for decades, although an English translation was not published until 1929 (New York: John Day Co.) and was long out of print. It was Ewers’ second novel in a trilogy around the character of Frank Braun.

In Alraune, Braun collaborates with Professor Jakob ten Brinken in creating a female homunculus by impregnating a prostitute with the semen from an executed murderer. Being interested in genetics, the Professor uses artificial insemination, then adopts the girl. The resulting young woman is without morals, commits numerous monstrous acts, and drives hosts of men to their ruin. The novel is much more perverse, even anarchistic and anti-capitalist, than the subsequent film versions. Unlike the Galeen film, which begins with a hanging and the retelling of the mandrake (Alraune) legend, the novel opens in the home of the lawyer Gontram, whose youngest child, Wölfchen, will later fall victim to the young woman. Both Countess Wolkonski, who finances the experiment, and ten Brinken are introduced there, but it is Frank Braun who suggests Brinken attempt artificial insemination of a human, while the Gontrams give ten Brinken an unwanted mandrake root. Braun revels in his role as the procurer of the prostitute who will become Alraune’s mother, the next several chapters devoted to the search for a suitable harlot, finding Alma Raune, a woman of unbridled lust. However, Ewers also makes clear she is a victim who is criminally manipulated by ten Brinken and exploited by a social structure that views her and the hanged man as trash.

The girl Alraune goes to a convent school where she teaches the other children how to mutilate and kill small animals, then to a girls’ academy for the well-to-do, expelled from both. She returns home to ten Brinken’s mansion, where she begins driving various men to their deaths, including the family chauffeur, two other rival lovers, and Wölfchen Gontram, who has grown up with little Alraune. When ten Brinken is to be arrested for molesting a young female child, Alraune refuses to flee abroad with him, so he hangs himself, leaving his ill-gained financial empire in ruins. But he names Alraune his sole heir and Frank Braun, who has been completely absent from the narrative, Alraune’s guardian. When Countess Wolkonski’s daughter, Olga, pleads with Alraune to give up her protected status to save her mother’s fortune, she refuses, driving Olga insane. In retaliation, the Countess Wolkonski reveals to Alraune the secret of her birth. Frank Braun, against his better judgment, begins an amour fou with Alraune, while Frieda Gontram, who had been Olga’s best friend, also falls under Alraune’s spell. Braun can’t tear himself away from the seductress, although he manages to burn the Mandrake that Alraune had nailed to the headboard of her bed. Soon after, Alraune and Frieda climb to the roof of the ten Brinken mansion in the moonlight and fall to their deaths in a double suicide.

**Brigitte Helm, Paul Wegener in *Alraune* (1927)**

The structure of the novel is that of the author’s twelve letters to his sister, with additional sections of florid flights of fancy, seemingly divorced from the narrative. The prose is for modern German readers quite archaic, but the most shocking aspect of the novel, given its publication date, is its description of sexual behavior. Alraune herself is consistently described as tender and slight, her body resembling that of a beautiful boy with tiny breasts, who drives both men and women to distraction. One particularly long scene, after which Wölfchen Gontram dies of pneumonia, describes how the pair switch gender roles at a masked ball. Alraune is dressed as a boy in the guise of the Chevalier de Maupin, a character from a 19th-century French novel by Théophile Gautier, while Wöflchen is in drag as Richard Strauss’s Roselinde, his angelic face previously being described as feminine. Frank Baum’s fatal attraction to Alraune, it is implied, is because her body is that of a slender boy, making her attractive to the sexually indeterminate Braun. Then, there is the issue of incest, because ten Brinken also becomes hopelessly infatuated with his adopted daughter, in particular her slim, boy-like body. The relationship between ten Brinken and his young nephew, Frank Braun, may also be incestuous, given the professor’s violent feelings of betrayal. Some of Ewers’ earlier writings had been deemed pornographic by the courts.

**Albert Basssermann, Brigitte Helm in *Alraune* (1930, Richard Oswald)**

Ewers was influenced by the ideas of the conservative eugenics movement, which defined modernity as an illness leading to degeneracy. Ewers himself belonged to the radical right with anarchist tendencies. Born in 1871 in Düsseldorf, Ewers began writing poetry at the age of 17. After completing his Abitur in March 1891, he volunteered for the military but was dismissed due to myopia. Ewers’ literary career began in 1901 with a volume of satiric verse. His first novel in the Braun trilogy, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, was published in 1909. A world traveler, Ewers was in South America at the beginning of World War I, relocating to New York City. There, he continued to write and publish, advocating to keep the United States from joining the war as an ally of Britain and becoming embroiled in the “Stegler Affair,” involving German agents. After the U.S. joined the war, he was arrested as an “active propagandist,” but never formally charged. He was sent to the internment camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and in 1921 released and deported to Germany. During the last years of the Weimar Republic, Ewers became involved with the Nazi Party, attracted by its nationalism, its Nietzschean moral philosophy, its initial anti-capitalism, and its cult of Teutonic culture, joining the NSDAP in 1931 with Hitler present at the ceremony. However, he did not agree with the Party’s anti-Semitism. His virulent anti-capitalism and his homosexuality soon upended his support with Nazi party leaders, especially after the Roehm Putsch in June 1934. The same year, most of his works were banned, and his assets and property were seized. After submitting many petitions, Ewers eventually secured the rescission of the ban. Ewers died in Berlin from tuberculosis in 1943. His books are mostly forgotten, although a newly translated edition of Alraune by Joe Bandel was published in 2011. Ewers is today only remembered for the three German film adaptations of Alraune and his script for The Student of Prague (1913).

**Hildegard Knef, Hans Cossy in *Alraune* (1952, Arthur Maria Rabenalt)**

373: IMAX à la 1900

Archival Spaces 373:

American Biograph Co. 68mm Films Added to UNESCO Register

Uploaded 16 May 2025

A month ago, the British Film Institute, London, and Holland’s Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, announced in a joint press release that their unique collection of 300 68mm films from the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company had been added to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register. In total, 341 68mm Biograph films are known to exist, with smaller collections from the Museum of Modern Art (36 titles), New York, and the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (5 titles), Paris. The wide-screen format from the turn of the last century was officially protected during the 221st session of UNESCO’s Executive Board meeting between 2 – 17 April 2025 in Paris. The films join previous collections added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2011: the Jean Desmet Collection of early cinema from the Eye Filmmuseum, the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection (See Archival Spaces 363) and the General Post Office Collection from the BFI, as well as the silent films of Alfred Hitchcock, which were inscribed on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register in 2012.

**William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson** **with a Biograph camera**

**Dickson at St. Mark’s Square, Venice (1898)**

In the earliest days of cinema, there were several successful competitors to the 35mm format. Founded in 1895 by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, who had worked for Thomas Edison, inventing both 35mm film and the Kinetoscope, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company patented a new 68mm format. Terry Ramseye claimed it was to circumvent Edison’s 35mm patents, but Paul Spehr has maintained Dickson believed image quality was at stake. Requiring significantly larger Biograph projectors, which were in competition with Thomas Edison’s Vitascope and the Lumiére Brother’s Cinematograph, 68mm films were produced for both big screen projection and viewing in Mutoscopes. The 68mm format was four times larger than 35mm, with an image area of 2 by 2+¹⁄₂ inches (51 mm × 64 mm), projected at 32 fps, resulting in an extraordinarily sharp image, without the flicker and jumpiness of its competitors, and is comparable to today’s IMAX format.

While the Biograph camera punched in perforations in the 68mm negative in order to keep the frame in registration, 68mm prints lacked lateral perforations; instead, projectors used a continuously moving friction feed device (mutilated rubber rollers), that had to be watched constantly in projection, lest the frame line creep south. Like 35mm full aperture frames, the 68mm format had a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The 68mm Mutoscope negatives were also used to produce paper-based images in a flip card system for the company’s Mutoscope peep-hole machines, which had begun competing with Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1897. The American Mustoscope and Biograph Company actually enjoyed a degree of success for several years with both projection and parlor machines, and only discontinued production of films in 1903.

Now digitized, these marvelous sights are accessible on the Eye Filmmuseum’s website and on YouTube. Stream The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe | Eye Film Player.

**Children on Marken Island** **(1898)**

The primary attraction of moving images in the days before even stationary cinemas had been founded was the visual pleasure of seeing the world move, seeing everyday life in faraway places, so Biograph’s cameramen travelled the world. Among the most popular films were images filmed from moving trains, with exotic landscapes rushing by, or, as in Irish Mail (1898), a steam locomotive’s speed captured by a cameraman riding on a parallel track, rushing through train stations, until the faster train passes out of frame. Conway Castle (1900) on Wales’ northern coast is even seen in hand-tinted images, the train passing through the castle’s walls. Other moving camera scenes filmed from boats depict the waterfront in Venice and its gondolas (1899), the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam (1899), and British Naval warships on the high seas.

What we would now term anthropological scenes were also popular, depicting images of daily life, like an encampment of Roma (1898), the women cooking over open fires, while the men pose for the camera, or Dickson and his family in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, feeding pidgeons, while his toddler runs in and out of frame. There are also memorable events, e.g., a funeral in Rome (1898), the casket of the departed and the mourners shrouded in black hoods, or a London fire brigade leaving the station (1899), a very popular motif memorialized later in Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1902). Other scenes reveal Hungarian peasants drinking at a pub, Italian peasants dancing the tarantella, or Dutch children from the Island of Marken at play. Given the large format and also the conventions of the time, close-ups were non-existent, although on occasion the camera will be close enough to reveal details on faces, as in a scene of a procession of Capuchin monks in the Vatican.

**Biograph Cameraman on Swiss Train (1903)**

In one remarkable scene, advertising a new Martini rear-engine automobile (1903), we see the car driving towards the camera across railroad tracks, then the cameraman and his camera on a flatbed, followed by another shot of the vehicle driving in a rail bed through the Swiss mountains. This kind of self-reflexivity, displaying both the image and the means of production, was rare, but not unique, e.g. Interior New York Subway (1905, Biograph), which I wrote about in my essay on Bill Morrison’s Outerborough (2005), reworks another 68mm Biograph, New York to Brooklyn Across Brooklyn Bridge (1899). Finally, while there are no views of the Biograph projector in action, there is a scene of audiences leaving a Biograph projection at the Carré Circus in Amsterdam (1899).

It seems miraculous to look into the living and breathing world of 125 years ago, as if it were an image from today.

371: German Genre Films II

Archival Spaces 371

Berlinale Retrospective II

Uploaded 18 April 2025

**Inga Seyric, Regina Jorn in *The Girls from Atlantis* (1970**)

Six weeks ago I posted my blog about the Berlinale Retrospective “Wild, Weird, Bloody. German Genre Films of the 70’s,” which included films from both East and West Germany: crime, horror, musicals, melodramas, not New German Cinema. I also noted that I missed a number of West German films, including Spare Parts (1979, Rainer Erler), The Tenderness of Wolves (1973, Ulli Lommel), and The Girls from Atlantis (1970, Eckhardt Schmidt), ostensibly a German crime drama, horror film, and a sci-fi, respectively. With many thanks to my former Munich Filmmuseum colleague and long-time friend, Robert Fischer-Ettel, I was able to now see these films on Vimeo. From my Berlin colleague, Philipp Stiasny, I also learned a bit more about the Austrian director Rolf Olsen who directed Bloody Friday (1972). While I had attributed the German film’s extreme violence and lurid aesthetics to Italian Giallo formulas, Stiasny in a DVD review of Olsen’s Playgirls of Frankfurt (1966) and The Devil’s Girls (1967) noted that the director cultivated a yellow journalism style, “creating a dynamic, explosive headline oriented cinema,” which certainly also applies to Bloody Friday.

*Fleisch* (1979, Rainer Erler) with Jutta Speidel

**Fleisch (1979) with Wolf Roth, Jutta Speidel**

Rainer Erler, a director who produced mostly films for German television, shot the crime drama, Spare Parts/Fleisch, in New Mexico and New York for ZDF (2^nd German Television). After the wedding of a German-American couple, the husband is abducted when they spend a night in a seedy Las Cruces, N.M. motel. Monika (Speidel), the bride, escapes and enlists Paul (Roth), a Polish-born cross-country trucker delivering meat to New York wholesalers, to help find her husband and they are soon on the trail of an ambulance service that delivers bodies to a Roswell hospital, where the bodies, whether dead or not, are harvested for organ transplants. The scenes with truckers using CB radio to track the ambulance and communicate with each other are a direct homage to Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978), made a year earlier and a big hit in Germany. After meeting the female doctor in charge of the hospital, Monika allows herself to be transported to New York, with both husband Mike (Herbert Herrmann)and Paul both comatose on the same flight. The film works quite well as a thriller, but unlike American genre films that usually end with the perpetrators brought to justice, there is no such satisfaction here for the audience. Indeed, although Dr. Jackson (Charlotte Kerr) regrets her actions and is killed by the bad guys, the film criticizes the American police for not following through to investigate the crime syndicate behind the organ dealing scheme.

**Kurt Raab in Tenderness of Wolves (1972)**

***Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe*** **(1973) with Ingrid Caven**, **Kurt Raab**

Produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder who is featured in a supporting role, The Tenderness of Wolves/Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe is, like so much of Fassbinder’s early cinema, beholden to genre, in this case, horror and crime, but more akin to art cinema and melodrama. The director, Ulli Lommel, a Fassbinder collaborator who played in no less than twelve of the master’s films, casts Fassbinder regular Kurt Raab (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, 1970) in the title role of the Fritz Harrmann, the notorious Hannover serial killer who in the 1920s cut up his 27 young male victims and was rumored to have sold their human flesh to local restaurants as beef and pork. While Fritz Lang’s M (1931) transformed Haarmann into a child murderer who can’t help himself, Raab’s pederast is a lonely gay man, abandoned by his male lover and looking for love; he kills when he is disappointed. He lures vagrant young teens to his flat with the promise of food and work, then murders them by strangulation or biting into their adam’s apple, earning him the title of “Vampire of Hannover.” However, all but one of the murders are committed off screen, the major focus of the film being on Haarman’s relations with his non-biological family of pimps, prostitutes, and bar owners, and his attempts with his former lover to earn money through begging, police informing and other shady activities. Not surprisingly, the extended family consisted of Fassbinder regulars seen as supporting roles in numerous other films, including Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Brigitta Mira, Wolfgang Schenk, and Fassbinder himself as an unsavory pimp.

Ulli Lommel would move to New York shortly after the production of The Tenderness of Wolves, his directorial efforts moving continuously between exploitation and art with such films as Adolf and Marlene (1977), Cocaine Cowboys (1979), and Blank Generation (1983), the latter two shot for Warhol’s Factory. He was still directing direct-to-video films as late as 2018.

***Männer sind zum lieben da*** **(1970)**

Isi ter Jung, Barbara Capell in *Männer sind zum lieben da*

Eckhart Schmidt’s The Girls From Atlantis/Männer sind zum lieben da is a sci-fi film without any scenes in outer space, nor any special effects. Indeed, it is more a satire on the German softcore porn wave that dominated low-end, commercial filmmaking in Germany from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s. A group of pretty women in their 20s arise out of a forest lake near Munich, like Venus de Milo, except that they are clothed in Carnaby Street fashions, complete with tiny suitcase purses as fashion accessories. Their mission is to seduce as many young studs as possible, shrink them in the act of sex to 5 inches, and pack them in their handbags for transport back to an almost male-less planet in a far-off galaxy. All the women work hard to fulfill their quota by exposing their breasts at least once to the audience, except Atlantis (Isi ter Jung), who just can’t seem to get it right and even falls in love with one of her prospects. Raoul (Horst Letten) also loves her, too, so he volunteers to return to the stars with her. In the end, it is all a dream. Despite the superficial nudity, this is a sweet, almost innocent comedy, Schmidt poking fun at the German bourgeoisie and attitudes about sex – we see a traveling gay porn salesman, a thief disguised as a priest, a crooked village mayor, and his shrewish wife, a wife who begs Atlantis to seduce her gluttonous husband, and a voyeuristic professor of sexology who is afraid of physical contact, while the boys are all too willing to have casual sex.

Marianna Sock in *Männer sind zum lieben da* **(1970, Eckhart Schmidt)**

Watching Männer sind zum lieben da, I suffered a moment of melancholy and mourning because I had become friends in Munich with both Eckhart Schmidt and his wife of forty-plus years, Isi ter Jung. Back in 1997, as director of the Munich Filmmuseum, I had organized with Robert Fischer the first retrospective and monograph of Schmidt’s film work. He, like other more genre-orientated and less leftist Munich-based directors, e.g. Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke, had been snubbed by Enno Patalas and the critics around Filmkritik, and as a result, was excluded from the New German Cinema canon. When the Schmidts moved to L.A. in the early 2000s, we became good friends, lunching at least once a month at Petit Four on Sunset. Isi died tragically of cancer at 64 in 2007 – she was the most gracious person ever, both my wife and my mother-in-law Janet were mightily impressed with her – and Ecki passed away in October last year at 85, having moved back to Munich just before the pandemic. I still miss them both.