Archival Spaces

365: Nicholas Baer’s Historical Turns

Archival Spaces 365:

Nicholas Baer: Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (2024)

Uploaded 24 January 2025

Nicholas Baer’s now-published dissertation, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2024), attempts to read five canonical German films from the Weimar Republic in the light of the early 20th-century crisis in historicism, to demonstrate that these films not only reflected that crisis but through formal experimentation embodied it. The guiding light here is Siegfried Kracauer who had since the 1920s contributed to the historicism debate by pointing out the parallelism between the writing of history and photographic media, e.g. in his 1927 essay about photography and in his posthumously published History: The Last Things before the Last (1969). Walter Benjamin also published two essays in exile, which critiqued German historian Leopold von Ranke’s conception of historicism because it created a homogeneous and therefore false image of the past.

Employing hermeneutics, historians had since the middle of the 19^th century demanded a new kind of “objective” history, which gathered facts in the context of a precisely defined period and ordered them in a logical and chronological narrative; conclusions were only valid for the defined era. according to Baer, Kracauer and other contemporary philosophers questioned this methodology because they understood that historians could neither free themselves from their own subjectivity nor from influences of the time in which they lived. In the following chapter Baer describes Kracauer’s intellectual and methodological engagement with the cinema, beginning with his early film reviews in the 1920s for the Frankfurter Zeitung, in which he initially praised historical costume pictures, like Danton (1921, Dmitri Buchowetzki), but then found fault with subsequent films, like Peter the Great (1922, Dmitri Buchowetzki), due to their seemingly coherent portrayal of historical events. Baer then traces Kracauer’s development in his Marxist and social-psychologically influenced books from the late Weimar Republic to his exile, From Caligari to Hitler (1947)and Theory of Film (1960). In the last-named work historical costume films are decried as a betrayal of the cinema’s inherent realism.

Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover in *Cabinet of Dr. Caligarri*

Dedicated to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene), Chapter 3 illustrates the way different figures in the film – the somnambulist Cesare, Dr. Caligari, Francis, Alan – embody completely contradictory narratives of events, i.e. the film rejects realism in favor of a subjective, expressionistically formed relativism. Baer hypothesizes, then, that Caligari inserts itself directly into the debate on historicism: “Wiene’s film perpetually reveals epistemic insufficiency of external signs, featuring figures who deceive sensory perception, assume alternate names or identities, are driven by obsessive ideas, or are even unaware of their own actions.” (p. 81)

*Der muede Tod/Destiny* (1921, Fritz Lang)

Der müde Tod/Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921) is all about the inevitability of death, however, (hi)story is no longer tied to a specific spatial or historical moment, but evolves in a circular fashion through numerous countries and epochs, thus denying coherence or meaning to history itself, thereby again contradicting the tenants of historicism. About Hans Richter’s abstract animated film, Rhythmus 21 (1925), Baer notes that it is a radical, avant-garde repudiation of the cinema’s narrative function, and therefore of historicism, placing the viewer in the position of the “nonsimultaneousness of simultaneity/Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen” (p. 107), whereby the present is seen from the perspective of the future.

The mountain film, The Holy Mountain (1925, Dr. Arnold Fanck), draws its ambivalent position to historicism dialectically by deriving its concrete and seemingly authentic visualization of nature from an ahistorical myth of the eternally male and female: Paradoxically, “… the film suggests a disharmony with human consciousness and nature, with catastrophe and ruinous fragmentation in the place of classical balance and universal totality.” (S. 141) Baer reads Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in a final chapter designated as Epilogue as a critique of capitalism, viewing the crisis in historicism in the context of the “disunified incoherence of Weimar culture” (p. 149), but also as a trope for a vertical class structure, which reappears in such modern films as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019). However, this attempt at topicality seems forced, lacking details to be convincing.

Nicholas Baer’s Historical Turns thus significantly enlarges our understanding of Weimar art cinema through its contextualization of the crisis of historicism, framing the former as a modernist art that privileges fragmentation over unity, disjuncture over narrative coherence. Based on the book’s title, though, one may ask the question, can the discussed art films function pars pro toto as “Weimar Cinema” as a whole, or as German film studies have established over the past twenty years, art cinema is only one of a multitude of genres defining Weimar German cinema in the 1920s.

364: Mr. Moto

Archival Spaces 364

Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto Detective Series

Uploaded 10 January 2025

*Think Fast, Mr. Moto* (1937, Norman Foster)

When Adolf Hitler ascended to power on 30 January 1933, Peter Lorre knew he would be at the top of Joseph Goebbels’ enemies list, having been the star of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a film that called for sympathy for a mentally ill mass murderer. While it took the Nazis until July 1934 to ban M, Lorre had left for Paris in March 1933, where he joined fellow penniless, German Jewish refugees, like Billy Wilder, Franz Waxmann, and Friedrich Holländer at the Hotel Ansonia, an establishment that didn’t ask too closely about police permits. While in France, Lorre appeared in two French films by German émigrés, including Du haut en bas (1933, G.W. Pabst), in which Lorre had a cameo as a beggar, reflecting his actual real-life status. Lorre then moved on to London, where Ivor Montegue suggested the actor to Alfred Hitchcock, who cast him as the criminal mastermind in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1935), shot in Spring 1934, before Lorre and his wife, Celia Lovsky embarked in July for America and Hollywood. After starring roles in Mad Love (1935, Karl Freund), Crime and Punishment (1935, Joseph von Sternberg), and Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936), Lorre accepted a contract at 20th Century-Fox to star in a new series, featuring the Japanese amateur detective, Mr. Moto.

Mr. Moto had been the subject of a series of extremely popular novels by John P. Marquand, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, beginning with No Hero (1935), which the writer consciously created as a successor to the Charlie Chan novels, whose creator Earl Derr Biggers had died in April 1933. Given that Japanese aggression in Manchuria (1931) and Shanghai (1932) was well-known, it is surprising that Marquand and Fox would choose a Japanese hero for their detective series, but then most Americans only slowly perceived a Japanese threat across the Pacific. It was however the third Marquand novel, Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937, Norman Foster) that became the basis for the first film adaptation, starring Peter Lorre.

**Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto in *Think Fast, Mr. Moto* (1937)**

In contrast to today’s prohibitions against “yellow face,” no one in Hollywood seems to have been bothered by an Austrian Jew playing an Asian detective, – except probably Asian actors – or the fact that his Japanese character sounded more like a German. Eschewing prosthetics, Lorre slipped convincingly into the role with a bit of eye make-up, round glasses, and black-dyed hair. Ever polite and speaking in soft measured tones, one can imagine that Lorre was initially drawn to the character because he was both a positive, intelligent figure and an action hero who could use judo to neutralize foes – a double handled the judo – unlike the typecast monsters and villains he had been playing. The film was a major box office hit, leading to the production of seven more Mr. Moto films until Lorre bowed out in 1939.

As Lorre soon realized, the Mr. Moto programmers, running barely more than an hour, were extremely formulaic, even silly, souring him on the character, even if Lorre could have fun slipping into numerous disguises. But within the narratives, the disguises also reveal Mr. Moto as a morally ambiguous character who the Caucasian hero and heroine often have trouble reading. Through the first half of Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937, Norman Foster) it is unclear where Moto’s sympathies lie, with the smugglers or the police. His face is often a tabula rasa, even with friends, thus conforming to “the mysterious Oriental” racist stereotype. White supremacy demanded vigilance, especially in Hollywood. In Thank You, Mr. Moto (1938, Norman Foster), the second in the series, there is likewise, a hint of moral ambiguity, given how Moto covers up his killing of one person, then kills several others. The white hero and heroine wonder repeatedly, whether they can trust the non-white Moto.

Situated in exotic locales in Asian jungles, the deserts of North Africa and Iraq, or Chinese cities/Chinatown, Moto appearing in the stories as a mild-mannered art dealer or archeologist, covertly tracking criminals, the leaders of whom are often revealed to be upper class and close friends of the male and female hero, who Moto is protecting. In Mysterious Mr. Moto (1938, Norman Foster), the action moves from the swamps of Devil’s Island to the streets of East London, an urban jungle of Cockneys where people of color like Moto are openly subjected to racist slurs. Mr. Moto’s Gamble (1938, James Tinling) features more comedy with Moto playing a professor of criminology, one of whose students is a kleptomaniac who nevertheless helps solve the case.

Ultimately, the Mr. Moto film series are fast-paced good fun within their low budget and wildly incongruous plots. Lorre would, of course, soon move to Warner Brothers, where he became a featured character actor in off-beat roles, like Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston) and Ugarte in Casablanca (1943, Mi8chael Curtiz). Lorre would return to Germany only once after World War II, directing and starring in The Lost One (1951), a film about a Nazi mass murderer hiding out in a displaced persons camp; the film flopped miserably because no one in Germany wanted to be reminded of their culpability for the Holocaust.

**On the set of *Thank You, Mr. Moto* (1938)**

363: M&K Controversy

Archival Spaces 363

Mitchell and Kenyon Discovery in Dispute

Uploaded 27 December 2024

**Blackpool Pier (1904, Mitchell & Kenyon)**

I can’t quite remember when I first saw the Mitchell and Kenyon films but Andrea Leigh tells me it was at the AMIA Conference in 2001 when the British Film Institute first began circulating 35mm prints of their restorations. I was truly astounded by the clarity and detail of these non-fiction actualités, so unlike most of the washed-out and grey Edison and Lumiere films I had seen from the turn of the last century. It was as if you were actually looking through a window onto the world of 1900, the clothing and the faces looking back at you felt tactile, immediate, real. Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon had operated a local film production company between 1897 and 1913 in Blackburn, England but had previously warranted only a footnote in British film history, the glory going to Brighton filmmakers, like G.A. Smith and James Williamson. Their films of workers leaving factories, local processions, and parades, shot in the small towns of the industrial North of England and Ireland were often produced on spec for fairground operators so that local audiences could see themselves in the movies. As founding editor of The Moving Image, I published a piece in Fall 2003, co-authored by Vanessa Toulmin, which argued that the discovery of the M&K films in June 1994 forever changed our sense of British cinema history.

**Original M & K negatives, purchased by Cinema Museum**

According to Toulmin, workmen demolishing Mercers Toy Shop in Blackburn, an establishment previously owned by Mitchell until 1960, had found three metal drums filled with 826 short camera negatives. Toulmin, now a professor at Sheffield University, and founder of the National Fairgrounds and Circus Archive, as well as the academic most responsible for disseminating the collection in the modern era, goes on to quote Peter Worden, after whom the M&K Collection at the BFI is now named: “All were crammed solid with film, and if I didn’t ‘rate’ them, they were going into the skip.” I contacted the foreman of the work gang and, curbing my excitement, arranged for them to be delivered to me.” (p. 5) In July 2000, the collection was turned over to the BFI for restoration, resulting in a host of book publications and DVDs, including Electric Edwardians. The Films of Mitchell and Kenyon (2005), available in America through Milestone.

So much for the official story. But why had it taken six years before restoration began? Toulmin noted in an email to me (12-16-24) that Worden had spent £ 20,000 trying to restore the films himself, before turning them over to the BFI and that Anne Fleming at BFI and Janet McBain at North West Film Archive had negotiated with Worden for much of that period. But Nigel Garth Gregory, owner of Gregory Audiovisual in Blackburn, tells a different story in an undated blog (maybe 2005) on his website (https://gregoryav.co.uk/the-mitchell-and-kenyon-film-collection/). According to Gregory, the Irish workman who found the churns, first brought them to his video store to see if they were valuable. Not being a film historian, but a video techie, Gregory called Peter Worden, his optometrist who he knew to collect old films. When he heard where the films had been found, he almost immediately identified them as Mitchell and Kenyon films and asked Gregory to negotiate a price of £50 for their purchase. Worden placed the films in a freezer, then registered himself as a finder with his solicitor – a property that is not claimed after six years becomes the legal asset of the finder. Gregory never heard from Worden again and when the films began circulating, it was under the guise of the Peter Worden Collection.

**Cildren of Factory Workers (n.d., M&K)**

**On the** **Fairgroun**ds **(n.d., M&K)**

How true is this story? I have no idea. Worden has disputed Gregory’s claim. But the timeline does give one pause, and it’s interesting to note that Worden is no longer identified as the discoverer, e.g. in the Giornate del Cinema Muto program in 2003 when an 80-minute program of Mitchell and Kenyon films screened, the wording is as follows: “They were not rediscovered until the 1990s when Blackburn businessman and local historian Peter Worden retrieved them”

To be clear, Worden never tried to financially profit from the collection, but in my long experience as a film archivist, film collectors are a jealous lot, and many have rightly or wrongly claimed to have discovered lost films or owned the best surviving material. Sometimes did, sometimes they didn’t. Every film collector dreams of finding Lon Chaney’s London After Midnight (1927).

What seems more important is that the impact of that discovery has changed our notion not only of early British film production but also of early film exhibition. Before this discovery, film historians of early cinema tended to follow the American line that vaudeville and music halls were the primary sites of exhibition, followed by Nickelodeons. With the work of Vanessa Toulmin in Britain and Claude Bertemes and Martin Loiperdinger in Germany, we now know that ambulatory tent cinemas at fairgrounds and carnivals were much more important in Europe in disseminating this new medium of the 20th century. It was no accident that so many of the M&K films were produced for fairground operators.

**English Bourgeoisie leaving Chapel (n.d. M&K)**

362: Ufa Musicals 2

Archival Spaces 362

Kurt Gerron’s Ein toller Einfall (1932)

Uploaded 13 December 2024

*Ein toller Einfall* (1932, Kurt Gerron)

Back in June, I wrote about the UFA film operettas of the early 1930s, noting that many resisted the move to classical Hollywood narrative, displaying instead a high degree of self-reflexivity, employing direct address, featuring both song and dance, and emphasizing the artificiality of their settings in a mythical Europe. The cohort of UFA directors included Kurt Gerron, the German-Jewish actor-director and cabaret performer, whose films completely jettison any semblance of plot to create a cabaret of music, dance, and comedy. This was especially true for his 1932 production, Ein toller Einfall (A Mad Idea), which was loosely based on a boulevard farce (1890) by Carl Laufs, and scripted by Philipp Lothar Mayring and Fritz Zeckendorf. The film starred Willy Fritsch, Dorothea Wieck, Ellen Schwanneke, Rosy Barsody, and a host of character actors, including Max Adelbert, Jakob Tiedtke, Paul Hörbiger, Theo Lingen, Adele Sandrock, Oskar Sima, and Wilhelm Bendow.

A Mad Idea takes place in an unnamed Swiss ski resort (location: St. Moritz), where Paul Lüders (Fritsch), an artist and nephew of a cash-poor millionaire, Michael Lüders (Tiedtke), moves into his uncle’s villa to escape his many ex-lovers. There, his art dealer sidekick, Birnstiel (Adelbert), begins inadvertently renting out rooms. Soon they are running a hotel, while a gaggle of ladies pursues Paul, including ex-girlfriend Anita (Barsony), Evelyn Müller (Schwanneke), the daughter of the head of the “Miller Girls” dance troupe (Leo Slezak), Mabel Miller (Wieck), the daughter of a prospective buyer for the villa, Marga (Genia Nikolajewa), the wife of a composer, and, of course, the Miller Girls. Paul falls for Evelyn but thinks she is Mabel, all the while fighting off Anita. Other couples form and split. Apart from the romance threads, there are subplots and running gags reinforcing the insanity. Like Gerron himself, of whom the critic Paul Marcs (PEM) wrote, “He shoots sentences. Words are whipped. Their rhythm electrifies, allowing no resistance. Speed and agitation breath down his back,” the film is frenetic, e.g. Borsody manically dancing in almost every scene, even alone in the hotel corridor. Indeed, numerous plot confusions highlight its carnivalesque narrative structure, a cabaret with musical and comedic sketches, set pieces around Alpine tourism, spiced with plenty of visual barbs against the wealthy.

Indeed, the film begins with a visual joke re: the rich: Following panoramic images of the Alps behind the credits, Uncle Lüders enters a neo-classical building (the tax authorities) from his limousine, then he and a dozen others leave in their underwear and ride away on scooters. It’s a dream, but then a taxman arrives. In another scene, Birntiel rants about the rich, who he expects to “bathe in champagne and spend money,” not haggle over the price of a hotel room, as does Evelyn. Birnstiel likes order, so he throws the framed photos of Paul’s harem in the trash and cancels his dates with dozens of women, dutifully checking them off the list. Birnstiel introduces the St. Moritz location with a self-reflexive description of Alpine stereotypes, a visual parody of travelogues. In a similar vein, Gerron references Ernst Lubitsch’s door fetish with an extended final scene in the hotel’s long corridor, as guests frantically search for their desired or real mates in the chaos of doors slamming.

**The Miiller Girls (otherwise uncredited)**

Born Kurt Gerson, Gerron had started his career on the legitimate stage – he played Tiger Brown in Brecht’s “Three Penny Opera,” – then gravitated to cabaret in the late 1920s, forming the Jewish comic duo “Beef and Steak” with Sig Arno in their own short-lived cabaret. In 1931, UFA hired him to direct a series of six cabaret short films for producer Bruno Duday, the latter also producing Ein toller Einfall. The film’s two hit songs were written by Fritz Rotter (music by Walter Jurman and Bronislav Kaper), who all specialized in cabaret Schlager. Small wonder that Gerron gives a wide berth to his comedians and their Schticks. For example, Wilhelm Bendow who plays a guest allergic to noise of any kind is constantly confronting loud guests, then gets drunk and becomes himself a nuisance. Paul Hörbiger plays a dim-witted butler but spends most of the film sampling the villa’s wine cellar and holding drunken soliloquies. The head waiter, Theo Lingen, continuously insults the guests, his smarminess in keeping with his star persona. Max Adelbert as Birnstiel is fast-talking throughout with an acid wit. Finally, I recognized Julius Falkenstein in a cameo as a pedantic hotel guest who pointedly corrects Paul’s grammar in the hotel corridor before disappearing. He is not credited in the print, nor in any filmographies but the tall, lanky Falkenstein was under contract at UFA. The actor was featured in no less than 26 films in 1932, many of them cameos, after appearing in The Congress Dances and Berlin Alexanderplatz, two major successes. He had also played a major supporting role in Lubitsch’s The Oyster Princess (1919), as had Jakob Tiedke, reminding viewers again that Jewish humor was very much at work here.

Ein toller Einfall opened in Berlin in May 1932. Within a year, tragically, numerous participants would be blacklisted by the Nazis for being Jewish, including Falkenstein, Barsony, Schwanneke, Nikolajewa, Rotter, Jurmann, Kaper, Harry Halm, and Ferdinand Hart. Even before the official Nazi blacklist was in place, Gerron and writer Fritz Zeckendorf were fired from the UFA on 1 April 1933; both were later murdered in Auschwitz.