Archival Spaces

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.

361: Accidental Archivism

Archival Spaces 361

Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past

Uploaded 29 November 2024

As anyone knows, who has been following the fortunes of AMIA (Association of Moving Images), film preservation before the 1980s was the purview of major, mostly state-funded, national film archives, which felt responsible mainly for fiction feature films. Since then, countless smaller often privately financed moving image archives have sprung up, which are more concerned with previously neglected genres, like industrial and amateur films, TV news programming medical films, etc. making them accessible through digitization. Recently, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Vinzenz Hediger published AccidentalArchivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures With Remnants of the Past (Meson Press, 2023), which presents not only the preservation efforts of many smaller international archives, but also of individual filmmakers, critics, and historians, especially in the so-called Third World. Most of the projects introduced here originated in and around the Berliner Arsenal-Institut für Film und Videokunst, which since 1963, has gathered together an impressive collection of experimental, documentary, and art films, many the only surviving copies, usually in connection with its long-standing film programming (including its annual “Film Forum” at the Berlinale).

The title, Accidental Archivism refers not only to the preservation and accessibility of historic film material, but also to the accidental discovery and recovery of such films/videos, and their preservation in political and social contexts, where the major national archives have apparently failed. Sonia Campanini writes, e.g. in her essay: “Such fortuitous discoveries are often followed by a moment when the accidental encounter unfolds in incidental care, a point in which a single person, collective group, or institution decides to take in charge that object, to claim responsibility over that document, to deal with the memory inscribed in its material“ (p. 74). With no less than 45 contributors, the monograph is less a critical or historical analysis, than a contemporary survey, plaidoyer, and manifesto of a new generation of media archivists.

*SOLEIL Ô* (1970, **Med Hondo, Mauritania)**

*Manilla in the Claws of Light* (1975, Lino Bracka, Phillippines)

Several theses about film/video archiving history can be culled from the collected essays. Some authors accuse European archives of „the global North“ of practicing a form of neocolonialism because they have collected films from Africa, South America, and Asia, but prevent or severely curtail through legal restrictions their circulation in the countries of origin (p. 399). This thesis is at the very least debatable, given for example the work of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation which for years has restored important films from the Third World and made them digitally accessible through commercial partners. Furthermore, the Berlin Arsenal and this publication also counter that assertion.

Another thesis can be formulated as follows: Since the established film archives employ aesthetic criteria in their selection process, they neglect unfinished films, outtakes, uncut or unidentified material which Vincent Hediger calls „scrap films“(p. 49). Just how important such material can be for the identity and history of repressed communities is illustrated in numerous essays, whether in Nigeria, in the queer communities of Turkey, in the women’s collectives of Indonesia, or the film estates of documentary filmmakers, like Harun Farocki. Such material can serve as raw material for other films.

Ellen Harrington (DFF), Edmund Peters (NFC), graduate National Film Institute, Prof. Tor Iorapuu (University Jos), Stefanie Schulte Strathaus (Arsenal), Prof. Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe-University), Didi Cheeka (Lagos Film Society) and unidentified journalist. (Photo: Fabienne Wolf)

Especially film archives in Africa and Asia suffer from inadequate funding, infrastructure, and expertise, to properly store and digitize their patrimony while humid climates also do their part to decompose collections. In such cases, accidental archivists sometimes move in, e.g. in Nigeria, where with the help of the Arsenal a film archiving training course was established. In some countries, where the original film producers are politically under attack, even forced to emigrate, films disappear completely and are only reconstructed years later.

**Cinemateca Brasiliana fire, 29 July 2021**

What unifies all of the contributors in the volume is an activist archival politic, which sees the work of archivists not only as a passive or reactive collecting of moving image media, but also considers film preservation, film programming, and historical criticism as inseparable activities. Thus, curators become archivists, and film archivists become historians so that the visual record is not only preserved but also points to the future.

Accidental Archivism is therefore highly recommended reading for media archivists, curators, and film historians alike, while bibliographies at the end of every chapter encourage further reading.

360: Euthanasia in Film

Archival Spaces 360

Ich klage an / I accuse (1941)

Uploaded 15 November 2024

**Documentary image of patients being loaded into busses for T4-Aktion (1939-41)**

My German-born mother once confessed to me that she was in favor of mercy killing if someone was terminally ill because as a teenager in Cologne, she had seen Ich klage an (1941), Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s propagandistic endorsement of euthanasia, lavishly produced under close supervision of Joseph Goebbels. Having just reviewed Barbara Hales’ excellent new monograph, Transmitted Disease. Eugenics and Film in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Berghahn, 2024) for Medienwissenschaft, I had to think about my mother who told me that story when she was dying of cancer. I had rewatched Ich klage an after finishing the review but I wasn’t going to blog about it, until, by total accident, I viewed Berlin Correspondent (1942, Sidney Lanfield) on YouTube, a film I had not previously seen in my anti_nazi film research. Made less than a year after Ich klage an’s German premiere the American film directly responded to the prior film with an expose on Nazi euthanasia.

*Ich klage an* (1941) with Heidemarie Hatheyer, Paul Hartmann

Ich klage an pursues two separate narratives. In the first, Hanna, a beautiful, young, and vivacious woman, played by Heidemarie Hatheyer, is married to a famous research Professor of Medicine (Paul Hartmann). She contracts multiple sclerosis, finally asking her husband to poison her before she suffocates in the disease’s final stage. She dies a wonderful, romantic death in the arms of her husband, happy and pain-free. It is implied that both are aetheists, as was the National Socialist state. The Professor is put on trial but is acquitted when his close friend (Mathias Wiemann), a doctor who had turned down Hanna’s request for assisted suicide on moral grounds, has a change of heart about euthanasia. He has been treating little Tude, a baby who contracted meningitis and was now “blind, deaf and idiotic,” their parents wishing a mercy death for her.

**Mathias Wiemann in front of Children’s Ward**

*Ich klage an* (1941) Behind the door one finds the horror

In contrast to the first plot, the second story of the child’s birth, her treatment for the disease, and final vegetative state take only a few minutes of screen time, the stricken baby remaining invisible behind a closed door, her state only verbalized by the doctor as hopeless, a cross intimating her death. Ich klage an thus briefly mentions the possibility of a state-sponsored euthanasia program, but only abstractly, without revealing real human bodies, while allowing the viewer to bathe in the warm glow of a star-studded, romanticized euthanasia, based on personal choice. I’m not surprised my mom fell for the ploy, although she was otherwise anything but a Nazi.

**Hermann Pfannmueller**, **Doctor of Death**

The reality of the Nazi’s T-4 Program, implemented even before Ich klage an opened, was that 70,000 physically or mentally impaired German citizens were gassed, poisoned, or starved to death. Before May 1945, everyday German doctors, working conscientiously in public hospitals and institutions murdered another 130-180,000 helpless victims, doing their “patriotic” duty, for which virtually no one was prosecuted after the war. Only the Catholic Church, especially the pastoral letter and sermon of the Bishop of Münster, later Cardinal Clemens August Graf von Galen, in the fall of 1941, indicated there was passive resistance to the notion of state-sponsored euthanasia.

***Women in Bondage*** **(1944, Alfred Zeisler)**

**Gisela Werbesirk in *Women in Bondage* (1944)**

In my dissertation, I wrote about an anti-Nazi film, Women in Bondage (1943), which alluded to the Nazi euthanasia program. It was a low-budget Monogram film, produced by Herman Millakowsky, directed by Steve Sekely, and written Frank Wisbar, all three German-speaking émigrés. In visualizing the Nazi education of young women to become loyal child-birthing machines, Bondage shows an SS officer in an insane asylum preparing a deadly injection for a rebellious girl, then quotes her grandmother (the great Gisela Werbesirk): “I’m waiting to be led away to my death. Mercy killing they call it…”

The subject was possibly familiar to American readers through the New York Times which reported on Count von Galen’s condemnation (6-8-42) of “unauthorized killings of invalids and the insane,” and at least one non-fiction book had exposed these Nazi policies, Gergor Ziemer’s Education for Death (1941) noted: “The Hitler chamber was a little white hospital, where underprivileged weaklings went to sleep.”(p. 77). Otherwise, Nazi euthanasia remained virtually unreported in the American press during the war years.

**Bewrlin Corresponndent (1942) w/ Mona Marius, Martin Kosleck**

**Paul Andor, Sig Ruman in *Berlin Correspondent* (1942,**

Less than a year after the September 1941 release of Ich klage an, 20^th Century-Fox released Berlin Correspondent, which specifically addressed Nazi euthanasia. When an American radio reporter (Dana Andrews) sneaks information out of Nazi Germany, his German contact Mr. Hauen is arrested and sent to an insane asylum; his Nazi daughter (Virginia Gilmore) who had denounced him, complains to her Nazi boyfriend (Martin Kosleck): “I’ve heard of the Gründorf Asylum. He’ll be murdered there. People who are sick, crippled or puny, they send them there and they don’t come back.” In a later scene in the Gründorf facility, the head doctor (Sig Ruman) tries to convince a patient (Paul Andor) to sign a release, so they can operate/kill him, when he is interrupted by the reporter, disguised as a high-level Wehrmacht psychiatrist, who inquires about methods of mercy killing. The doctor admits that many inmates are not really insane, but deserve to disappear, like one very young girl in a cell with polio. He also shows him a cell with Hauen, explaining that sometimes politicals are sent to be disposed of.

*Berlin Correspondent* w/ Sig Ruman **as Nazi** **Doctor of Death**

Patient marked for euthanasia in *Berlin Correspondent*

Thus, while Berlin Correspondent’snarrative is highly improbable, even silly at times, it is worth noting that it is a rare example of a Hollywood anti-Nazi film directly addressing Nazi euthanasia when most mainstream media in America avoided discussion of these Nazi atrocities.

*Berlin Correspondent* w/ Martin Kosleck and Erwin Kalser

359: Pordenone Silent Films

Archival Spaces 359

Giornate del cinema muto/online

Uploaded 1 November 2024

This year’s Giornate del cinema muto again offered a small selection of ten feature films from the festival, as well as selected shorts, mostly little or never seen films from countries as diverse as France, Uzbekistan, Cuba, Germany, Mexico, and the USA. The films were available online for 48 hours through the MyMovies/It portal and presented for fans of silent film, a rare opportunity to see works that will probably never make it to your neighborhood theatre or even anywhere else online.

**Phyllis Nielson-Terry**, **Ivor Novello**

The online program opened with L’appel du sang/Call of the Blood (1919), a French film by Louis Mercanton, but included in the festival as part of the Sicily program of travelogues. The film debut of British actor Ivor Novello, the work features incredible vistas of early 20^th century Taormina, as well as documents of many local dances, costumes, and customs. Based on a 1906 novel by Robert Hitchens, the film concerns a wealthy English woman, Hermione Lester (Phyllis Nielson-Terry), who travels from her home in Rome to Sicily on holiday with her younger lover, Maurice (Novello), while maintaining an intense epistolary relationship with Emile Artois. Maurice becomes infatuated with a Sicilian peasant girl, Maddalena, while Hermione travels to North Africa, where her friend Artois has fallen gravely ill. After he seduces the girl, Maurice is murdered by the girl’s father, who then accidentally kills his own daughter. At graveside, Hermione realizes the truth. A wild melodrama for sure, but beautifully photographed with magnificent multi-color tints and tones and views of an Italy long gone.

**Nadezhda Vendelin** in *Minaret of Death*

Andrey Fayat, Ra Messerer in *The Leper*

The first of two films from the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Minaret Smerti/The Minaret of Death (1924, Vyacheslav Viskovsky) is nothing like the revolutionary films of the period, but rather a romantic adventure epic. Loosely based on a 15th-century Bukharan legend, a young woman, Dzhemal, and her foster sister are abducted by robbers when their caravan is attacked; they manage to escape and are eventually accompanied to their father’s house by Sadyk, a young nobleman. However, they are then captured by the Emir of Bukhara who offers Dzhemal as a prize in a competition which Sadyk wins, but she is then kidnapped by the Emir’s son who kills his father, leading to a revolution. There’s lots of fighting around the ancient walls of Bukhara, and many harem scenes with scantily dressed maidens, and exquisite costumes, but the Soviet authorities were apparently not happy with the film.

One wonders if the Soviets were any happier with the second Uzbeki film, Moxov Qiz/The Leper (1928). Directed by Oleg Frelikh, and based on a French novel, Kamir. Roman d’une femme arabe, the film is extremely sophisticated in its narrative and montage: Taking place in Czarist-controlled Turkestan, a beautiful young woman marries a wealthy merchant who beats her regularly, leading her to fall prey to a seduction by a decadent Russian officer. When her husband finds out, he sues her father in a Muslim Sharia court, leading to her abandonment. She is beaten to death on a country road after mistakenly entering a leper colony. The film implies that once a Muslim woman is divorced she is good as a leper. No revolutionary optimism here, although the film does attack the extreme patriarchy and misogyny of Uzbek/Muslim culture, e.g. when the father cruelly takes a young wife because the mother of his daughter is too old, or when it shows corrupt Czarist judges taking bribes. Frelikh likely fell prey to Stalin’s anti-Semitic and anti-ethnic cultural policy, since his last directed film was a Uzbeck production in 1931.

Ricardo Beltri, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela in *Santa (1918)*

Based on the famous novel by Federico Gamboa, Santa (1932) was Mexico’s first sound film, but there was an earlier version from 1918, directed by Luis Peredo. It is the age-old story of Santa, a young girl, seduced and abandoned, forced to move to Mexico City to become a prostitute, where she slowly sinks into the morass, despite the love of a blind pianist. The starring actress would become a pioneering journalist and founder of Mexico’s first film archive. While the sound version with Lupita Tovar is much more cinematically polished, the silent version retains the novel’s modernist focus on cityscapes but suffers from intertitles that overlong quotations from the novel.

Francisco Herrero, Miguel Santos in *La virgen de la caridad*

The last Cuban film to be shot without sound, La Virgen de la caridad (1930, Ramón Peón) is a socially critical melodrama. Yeyo, a young peasant is in love with Trina, the daughter of a local landowner, but her father objects to her marrying below her station; a more “suitable” middle-class husband turns out to be a swindler who attempts to dispossess Yeyo from his farm. Happily, the “Virgin of Charity” intervenes, falling off the wall to reveal the original deed that proves the grift. A Griffithian chase on horseback brings the film to its climax. Highly praised at the time of release, the film’s leftist politics are manifested in a critical view of the plight of Cuban peasants – its hero the son of a dead revolutionary – and a distrust of the bourgeoisie, yet it is also infused with a belief in the power of prayer.

Anny Ondra, John Franklyn in *Saxophon-Susi*

Starring Czech actress Anny Ondra, and directed in Berlin by boyfriend Carl Lamač, Saxophon-Susi (1928) is the kind of fluff Hollywood usually excelled in. She plays a baroness who would rather be a vaudeville dancer, so she trades places with her girlfriend who is being sent to the “Triller School” in London. The internationally famous Tiller-Girls, also prominent in many German films, practiced the kind of syncopated chorus line that became a staple of Flo Ziegfeld and later the Rockettes. On the boat train to London Anny meets a young British Lord who thinks she is a chorus girl, falls in love, and you can figure out the rest. There is a moment of unconscious racism when Anny and another dancer do an “ape dance” recognizable to contemporary audiences as a conscious parody of Josephine Baker’s 1920s dance routines.

**Mary Kidd, Heinrich George, Hans-Adelbert von Schlettow, Anna May Wong in *Song* (1928)**

Song. Die Liebes eines armen Menschenkindes/ Show Life (1928) was the first of five films German director Richard Eichberg would make with Anna May Wong, and one of her most successful, making her a European star. Jack Houben, a former vaudeville knife-thrower saves Song from a rape and she becomes his partner, caretaker, and want-to-be-lover but he is still in love with his old partner, Gloria, while the impresario Prager pines after Song. A well-financed UFA-B.I.P. co-production, the melodrama is situated between the squalor of a port city’s slums and low-life cafés, and the upper-class milieu of classical ballet and fancy nightclubs, each of the characters trapped in a different erotic obsession. However, as an Asian woman of color, Wong is doomed to play the Madame Butterfly role, sacrificing herself repeatedly for the white man she loves.

While I loved seeing these films online, I hope to be in Pordenone next year, given that the on-site program is much richer.