Zwischenspiele der Filmgeschichte. Zur Rezeption des Kinos der Weimarer Republik in Südafrika 1928–1933 (review)

This dissertation in the field of Communication and Media Studies (University of Göttingen) is striking for three distinct reasons suggested by the study's subtitle: it aims to shed light on a blind spot of traditional national film historiography that has tended to focus exclusively on the dominant Hollywood and European cinemas; it implements a strongly accented sociological methodology of reception and influence studies in order to contribute to a structural history of South African cinema; and it narrows its scope to a brief but crucial five-year period during which German films suddenly entered the South African distribution market as the strongest rival of the traditional American and British imports. Eckardt approaches South Africa's cinema as unique because it was the only African country to develop prior to decolonization, as early as 1910, its own national movie industry and infrastructure. As a result, he finds the patterns of colonial and post-colonial analysis that otherwise characterize Africa-centric film historiography to be inadequate. By analyzing local South African reviews of specific Weimar film imports and comparing them to their German and international reception, the author strives to establish the contours of the South African cinema context.

Like many dissertations, the study begins with a series of framing chapters: chapter 1 summarizes recent approaches to film historiography in general as well as the few histories of South African cinema and sets out the methodological premises for the reception approach undertaken here; chapter 2 sketches the historical and social context of South African cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s; chapter 3 surveys the status of South African film journalism in the same period, including the bifurcation of English and Afrikaans publications; and chapter 4 reviews the general status of film imports during the period under investigation. These introductory chapters reflect not only Eckardt's wide-ranging expertise in South African history, society, economics, and journalism but also his thorough exploration of the relevant yet nonetheless spotty South African and German archival resources.

The first third of the study establishes, then, the parameters for the empirical statistical evidence that will enable the author to contextualize the reasons for and function of German movie imports within this local cinema economy. At the same time, the difficulty of gathering and interpreting this evidence constitutes a detective story in its own right. Eckardt shows how economic and racial demography limited the movie-going audience in this period to middle-class European settlers and immigrants, i.e., the "whites" who made up about 20% of the entire population and who were further distinguished by their English or Afrikaans linguistic communities. He also details the shift from a monopoly distribution and exhibition structure before 1927, which provided the movie audience almost exclusively with Hollywood films, to a slightly more competitive oligarchic structure during the phase under consideration, a fact that helps explain the brief spike both in British and German imports after 1927. Beyond these audience structures and market forms, Eckardt describes the status of film journalism in this early phase, since his own reception analysis largely draws on local film reviews for its evidence. He elucidates the widespread practice of anonymous reviews, the lack of professionally trained reviewers, and the dependency of film reviewing on the demands of culture editors, who regarded the cinema generally with skepticism, and advertising agents, who considered critical reviews a threat to ad revenues from the movie houses. This situation was exacerbated further by the lack of dedicated movie-industry publications. All of these factors define both the possibilities and limits of the empirical evidence in this study. For many film scholars these introductory survey sections may be the most informative part of the dissertation.

In order to undertake the reception study envisioned here, Eckardt first has to define the corpus of films under investigation, a step that involved not only identifying representative English and Afrikaans daily and weekly...