Docks of Berlin

The restored silent film The Docks of New York offers all sorts of enticing interconnections. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, The Docks of New York gives you a highly stylized view of a dive bar hotel back when New York was still a seaport.

George Bancroft plays a steam ship stoker who has a night on shore during which he rescues a woman who has just thrown herself into the East River. She is played seductively by Betty Compson. There is lots of lush lighting in the foggy night. George Bancroft swaggers around in his slick black jacket like he’s the tough old uncle Robert Mitchum tried to emulate. And Betty Compson is clearly the prototype for Marlene Dietrich. She vamps about like Courtney Love, looks enticingly disheveled throughout the movie. Clothes, putting them on, taking them off, runs as a theme throughout the movie. In fact, the plot ends with a court room drama about a tight-fitting, glittery dress.

There is a swath of restored silent movies out there to be seen. Makes you realize people made slinky, sexy movies long before sound and color. The restoration slows the movie down, gives the images a three dimensional quality, the lighting suddenly has depth and when the actors move you can see the sensuality in their swagger and stutter.

Just from reading the back of DVD packages, you would have thought that Josef von Sternberg was a Jewish Austrian count, who rose to fame in Berlin and then fled the Nazis. Yeah, but turns out he grew up in Queens, dropped out of Jamaica high school, and hung around as a kid in NY and NJ movie studios. Sure he became famous when he made Dietrich famous, but he shot these cinematographic wonders before going to Berlin, thereby complicating the old claim that it was German Expressionism that introduced Hollywood to the wonders of atmospheric effects in movies. --Maybe it was German intellectuals from Queens who learned their tricks in Berlin.

Can’t wait to see the next one in the queue.

Wilder Still

Sometimes you think that all film scholars are grumpy people with chips on their shoulders about not getting the respect they feel they lack

And then you read Gerd Gemünden’s delightful book on Billy Wilder: A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films (Berghahn Books, 2008).

Good cheer, wit and irony are the by-products of watching a Billy Wilder movie, and Gemünden does not spoil anything with his light, fast, smart analysis. As the title suggests, Gemünden shows how Wilder brings an immigrant’s perspective to Hollywood, the foreign affair is not in Berlin but LA. Not only does Gemünden compare Wilder to Adorno in SoCal exile, he sustains the juxtaposition across the book, so that the academic heavy-weight reader starts recognizing the cultural critique in Wilder’s fast-paced success.

Wilder’s Weimar Berlin career has always loomed just over the horizon in my mind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find an archival trove of early, early movies, screen plays from Wilder in 1920s Berlin. Gemünden carries that idea into the famous Hollywood films. We will surely never be able to download Wilder’s early screenplay credit Der Teufelsreporter: Nebel in der Grossstadt. Wilder and Gemünden assure us that it is crap, but I always want to believe that there is a dissertation’s worth of urban modernity in that film.

No need for such fantasies, Gemünden finds that same sensibility in Wilder’s American movies. More than Adorno, Gemünden’s argument seems motivated by Georg Simmel’s essay on The Stranger—that alien figure who resides amongst us, knows us perhaps too well and never quite stops being other. The outsider as insider does not just have to write Minima Moralia, he can also direct Marilyn Monroe.

English as facade

Fascinating interview in today's NZZ on the need to learn foreign languages. English serves as the language for foreign diplomacy and image building, which has little to do with local, or national, politics.

The quote below calls attention to the split between global English statements and native language talk, but it projects the source for this division onto some kind of foreign trickery, as if speaking in English were now a ruse. Really Western European and American readers have contributed to the separation of local and global discourses by not pursuing an education in foreign languages

NZZ Online: Herr Detweiler, als Sinologe sprechen Sie Chinesisch und haben in China gelebt. Nun gibt es in den Research-Abteilungen der Banken viele Experten, die noch nie einen Fuss auf chinesischen Boden gesetzt haben, aber ganze Research-Paper zum Thema verfassen. Kann man die chinesische Wirtschaft überhaupt analysieren und verstehen, ohne die Sprache, das Land, die Mentalität und die Politik zu kennen?

Christopher Detweiler: Analysieren geht. Aber in China gibt es zwei unterschiedliche Welten: Eine Welt für die Bevölkerung – die Zeitungen und die Reden der hohen Funktionäre der Partei sind auf Chinesisch –, und es gibt eine zweite, englische Welt, die allein für das Ausland bestimmt ist. Je nach Sprache liest und erfährt man ganz andere Sachen. Wer kein Chinesisch spricht, hat eine ganz andere Perspektive auf das Land als die Chinesen selbst.

New Future for Old Movies

Went to a film festival, --man was it fun to be in a crowded theater with an enthusiastic undergraduate crowd watching a classic. Michael Bérubé organized the “Bad Futures” film series this weekend as part of the Institute for Arts and Humanities. There are so many excellent things about a film festival

first, you see the movie on a giant screen, which really makes a ‘huge’ difference, especially if you are watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey You cannot experience the cinematic sublime on a small screen. Just as rock bands are better live, so too movies are better in a cinema.

Second, the lobby was crowded with intensely wound up audience members all mingling about talking, getting snacks, watching each other. I was able to have more than a few conversations about the movie! How exciting is that! See a work of art, talk about it with other members of the audience. Much as I enjoy downloading movies, I relish hanging out and discussing the films with smart people I don’t normally get to see. This sense of a shared intellectual experience in public—get your Habermas ready, folks—inspires the audience to even more thought. A video going viral is the lonely version of an exciting evening at the theater.

Back in the seventies, when New York City had long stretches of low-rent sleaze, there were theaters up and down Broadway and across Bleecker St. that showed no end of great old movies, and the latest foreign releases. I got to see Truffaut to my hearts content, but also obscure Italian releases that barely made it over the ocean and ran for just a week. I remember vividly going to see “Il Prato” which the New York Times listed as interesting because it was the first major film performance by the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. I really liked Ingrid Bergman, so my friend Andrew and I wandered off to see Isabella Rossellini in a love triangle loosely based on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther with an Italian Marxist context. Instead of committing suicide, the unhappy lover dies of rabies after being bitten by a wild dog. Good stuff. Something about growing up in Queens in the 70s made me want to trek into the city to see the kind of movies television did not broadcast. If only I had started a movie company like the Weinstein brothers, rather than go to grad school. Living in the outer borough, you were close enough to see what was available in Manhattan, and yet far enough away still to really desire it intensely.

The point is that seeing films in a cinema with friends around where you can discuss and then reminisce about the movies adds enormously to the experience. Film festivals are well-suited to college campuses. Manhattan no longer has old movie houses, but the camaraderie and curiosity of universities makes them the perfect place to gather together in front of the big screen and then to talk, talk, talk about it afterwards, maybe even write the occasional blog entry as well.

Oakland

Oakland really did have a bit of Metropolis about it. We could go on about the segregation of the city into separate quarters, and even the buildings looked like they might have come off Fritz Lang's drawing board.

Critical Tenacity

Saw for the first time the author, psychoanalyst and former political prisoner, Karl-Heinz Bomberg, here on campus at a series of events hosted by Greg Eghigian. Bomberg has a warm, intense presence and a touch of the ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one in three. Listening to him talk about the psychological impact of being imprisoned in Communist Germany, I was struck by how urgent the topic still was in the moment, and yet how quickly contemporaries want to forget about all that.

There is a tendency, in myself as in others, to let the tortures of totalitarianism slip away into quiet forgetfulness. Hearing Ingrid Miethe a feminist historian at the University of Giessen speak at the recent German Studies Association conference brought across the same point. Miethe spoke about East German feminists with a lively polemical tone as if the DDR and its women’s movement were still in existence. She still spoke in the present tense about family and social policies that have been overrun by the West.

Miethe and Bomberg have a trait in common with the Nobel laureate, Herta Müller, namely the continued analysis, critique and revision of life under Communism. They surely do not share the same experiences nor hold the same political positions today, but for all three the Communist system has an actuality that most Westerners (with the exception of right-wing conservatives) and many Easterners who were born under Communism no longer recognize. Their engagement has nothing to do with nostalgia, it is more a sign of critical tenacity. Whereas right-wingers scare their listeners by talking about Socialism as if it were everywhere, these three writers preserve the vanishing reality of Communism because it is an inescapable part of their lives.

The GSA Experience

Back from Oakland and the German Studies Association conference, a serious scholarly affair where German professors get to hang out with their own kind, discuss the future of the profession, sniff out what's blowing in the wind (not always a delight) and trot out their newest ideas.

This year the conference was organized according to themes, which to some grad student in the future will give a fair summary of the buzz words big in 2010: money, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and cities were among the mix. But then again, these terms show themselves at most any humanities conference these days.

Underneath these catch phrases were a great number of papers that paid homage to the moment and then proceeded to discuss whatever the presenter was working on. So you can be busy in the eighteenth century, as I am, and still be transnational--a trend that was not obvious ten years ago, when transnational was confined to a handful of contemporary writers.

The other major trend: papers on Goethe, particularly his lyric poetry, which on the face of it would seem to be the antithesis of transnational, but only to the uninitiated. The string of Goethe panels was in many ways the bastion of literary analysis in the midst of cultural studies. If brand names rule the humanities as they do everything else, then Goethe was a name that a great number could rally around. Goethe is the big tent name. We could talk about Schiller of course, but Spinoza and God fit in as well, especially when there is a hard rain falling.

One lesson from the GSA: Goethe scholars still think like members of a guild, and most were delighted to see the Chicago master of Goethe scholarship give a paper that once again made clear to all in the room how it is supposed to be done. It was reassuring to watch a scholar so very excellent at his calling--made you think for a moment that the hierarchy of universities was actually correct, that tenure decisions at fine universities really were based on excellence. David Wellbery made everyone feel that there was an order to intellectual institutions, and we were all pleased.

And there was the old time favorite: I saw a wonderful paper by Ute Gerhardt, old school feminist historian, speaking in eloquent academic German, an essay ready for immediate publication in Die Zeit. If the audience was not enormous, my delight in hearing her speak certainly was.

A few steady old war horses, like Peter Albrecht, made the trek, but in general the West coast location meant that far fewer Germans attended. Usually there is a crowd of middle aged German political scientists at the GSA ready to discuss the meaning of Europe or the last election, this time there was hardly one in sight.