The Unnatural in the Natural: Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni’s Early Weimar Film Backstairs

2021 ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Jason Doerre
Keyword(s):  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
German Cinema ◽  
Weimar Cinema ◽  
Story Acting

This chapter explores the influence of literary naturalism on German Expressionist cinema as reflected in Leni’s 1921 film Backstairs, co-directed with Leopold Jessner. As this chapter suggests, Backstairs is a continuation of the styles of literary naturalism, a tendency frequently taken up in German cinema of the 1920s. Although specific visual elements of the film demonstrate an expressionistic impulse, other aspects including milieu and story are clearly leftovers of the literary naturalism of the pre-war period. Using Backstairs as a case in point, this contribution counters the overemphasised focus on expressionism in Weimar-era films by highlighting the multivalent styles present throughout this period. Taking into consideration the film’s set, story, acting, and direction, this chapter provides a close examination of a film often overlooked among the classics of Weimar cinema.

Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-322
Author(s):  
Sara F. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Cultural Reproduction ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Location Choices ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Specific Combination ◽  
German Cinema ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Weimar Cinema

AbstractCentered on Richard Dyer’s model of pastiche, this essay posits that the German television series Babylon Berlin engages in a unique and timely practice of cultural reproduction shaped by a specific combination of historical subject matter and the present media-historical moment. Through digital effects, narrational layering, and multivalent location choices, Babylon Berlin pastiches Weimar cinema, and self-consciously invites comparisons between the so-called golden age of German cinema and the present. It activates cinephilic recall, establishes an intermedial dialogue between analog and digital forms, and affectively engenders a historically oriented conversation about the fragility of modern democracy in the Brexit/Trump era. The cultural work of pastiche it performs warrants the series’ inclusion in the conversation around the European remake.

scholarly journals From Weimar to Winnipeg: German Expressionism and Guy Maddin

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Andrew Burke
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Political Life ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Visual Vocabulary ◽  
German Cinema ◽  
Weimar Cinema ◽  
The City ◽  
Narrative Conventions

Abstract The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin’s mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin’s work as well as argue that Maddin’s films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.

Can Storytelling and Story-Acting by Low-Income Preschoolers Promote School Readiness?

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ageliki Nicolopoulou ◽  
Aline de Sa ◽  
Hande Ilgaz ◽  
Kai Schnabel-Cortina ◽  
Carolyn Brockmeyer
Keyword(s):  
School Readiness ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Story Acting

Visual Elements of "Semar Calligraphy" on Cirebon Glass Painting of Kusdono’s Work

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 43-47
Author(s):  
Yayah Rukiah
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Qualitative Research Methods ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Arabic Calligraphy ◽  
Main Figure ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

This research is focused on the visual elements contained on Kusdono's Cirebon glass painting. The writer uses descriptive qualitative research methods to examine the visual elements, with the technique of collecting data from books and journals that relates to the research object. The purpose of this study is to examine and find the meaning of Cirebon glass paintings. The results of this research are Semar as the main figure in the clown who always do good, keep the truth and obey the tenet that closely related to Islam. Arabic calligraphy reinforces Semar's figure. On the Cirebon glass painting, there are many mega mendung ornaments and wadasan which are Cirebon batik motifs, as well as the colors used in the coastal colors due to the geographical location of Cirebon City near the beach.  

The Shop-Girl Revolutionary in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Public House ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Marginal Characters

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.

Cinema and the Haptic in Modern Japan

Screen Bodies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Daisuke Miyao
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Visual Medium ◽  
German Cinema ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Modern Japan

The process of modernization in Japan appeared as a separation of the senses and remapping of the body, particularly privileging the sense of vision. How did the filmmakers, critics, and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s respond to such a reorganization of the body and the elevation of vision in the context of film culture? How did they formulate a cinematic discourse on remapping the body when the status of cinema was still in flux and its definition was debated? Focusing on cinematic commentary made by different writers, this article tackles these questions. Sato Haruo, Ozu Yasujiro, and Iwasaki Akira questioned the separation of the senses, which was often enforced by state. Inspired by German cinema released in Japan at that time, they explored the notion of the haptic in cinema and problematized the privileged sense of vision in this new visual medium.

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