A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (review)
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A Culture of Light is among a number of recent books offering novel re-examinations of technology's importance for film history. The book's argument centers on analyses of eleven films made in Germany during the 1920s, which Guerin sees as symptomatic of Germany's "culture of light" at the time. The approach to film-technology history is mainly film-interpretive, with socio-technological contexts delineated for the purpose of close, case-study analyses of select films. The analyses center on moments of spectacular, light-enhanced technological display—in scenes featuring circus trapeze acts, nightclub musical revues, magical human-into-light-wave transformations, illuminated city centers, and fireworks displays—and how such moments trouble the films' melodramatic or fantastic narratives.
The author offers a novel account of film's potential, via film-lighting manipulation, for representing or simulating facets of a social world transformed during the 1920s through Germany's [End Page 397] emergence as a world leader in electric power. Germany's entry into "technological modernity" occurred later than that of other major Western countries, and was further interrupted by the First World War, a belatedness which, Guerin argues, endowed artificial illumination in 1920s Germany with strong cultural significance. As postwar Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and other cities electrified on a large scale, industrial light became a thrilling urban spectacle in itself, and a sign of Germany's status as a major industrial power.
Guerin mobilizes examples from a range of socio-cultural domains—including architecture, city planning, urban zoning policy, advertising regulations, popular theater, and film—to show how electric light's spectacular effects were cultivated in extraordinarily inventive ways in 1920s Berlin. Electricity's spread re-organized patterns of city life, radically re-working familiar boundaries between public and private, as is evident in practices relating to department store display windows, glass-faced office buildings and factories, light-intensive stage shows, photography, the lit-up façades of picture palace movie theatres, and the illuminated story worlds of movies themselves. Stark polarities were inherent in the new, electrified urban culture, which counted as a major national-cultural achievement but was also linked in the popular and academic press to a host of social troubles, in forms ranging from "sexual amorality" to horrific cases of street crime. German moviegoers of the time, in Guerin's account, understood particular lighting configurations in film in terms of class-defined aspects of urban experience.
Guerin's period specific analyses employ certain novel film-critical distinctions—between, for instance, representations of gas and electric light, or of natural sunlight and sunlight filtered, reflected, or otherwise technically manipulated. Guerin shows how electric light's contradictory cultural associations became manifest in film in magic-show bursts of visual display, which may suspend a film's narrative movement, the spectacle's flash obliterating momentarily the moralism of the melodramatic or allegorical plot. Interpretations of specific films turn on moments of technological self-reference, such as the opening scene of Der Golem (1921), in which the optical point-of-view shot showing Rabbi Loew's telescope-aided vision of the starlit sky implicitly collapses the character's science-magic with the cinema's. Grounding the film analyses is a historiography in which electricity's history reveals the film industry's embeddedness within its socio-technological environment. In the context of the historiography of German film, where questions of political history, in one form or another, can't but weigh heavily, Guerin's analyses of films in terms of electric illumination's cultural-political significance counts as a productive intervention, revealing how changes in movie aesthetics were socially and politically conditioned, while evolving from an internal dynamic, at rhythms of their own.
A question left unresolved in A Culture of Light concerns the risk in using a tiny corpus of films as the basis for generalizations regarding German cinema as a whole. In one sense, there is no problem because Guerin refuses to claim that the films...
