Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany by Steve Choe (review)

Steve Choe begins this insightful and theoretically sophisticated contribution to Weimar film studies by examining a key moment of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). He unpacks the famous and deceptively straightforward scene in which Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) coaxes the somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) from twenty-three years of sleep to the astonishment of bug-eyed carnival-goers. In a sequence of close-ups, the immobile, chalky-faced Cesare dramatically opens his eyes. Yet for all of its surface simplicity, this most basic of acts gives visual form to a key preoccupation of early German film and early film more broadly: the fascination with the inanimate becoming animate and the dead coming to life. Choe rightly points out that German films of this epoch teem with examples of the dead or inanimate coming to life: the robot Maria springs to action in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; the titular vampire of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu rises ominously from his coffin; the demonic wax figures of Paul Leni’s Waxworks are transformed into people; and the Golem of Paul Wegener’s film of the same name arises from inanimate clay. Even the abstract, flickering shapes of avant-garde films such as Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 or Walter Ruttmann’s Opus films offer themselves as experiments with the new medium’s unique ability to bring motion to the previously motionless still image.

Today, animation is easily taken for granted as a fundamental condition of motion pictures. Yet Choe builds the claim that it allegorizes the very act of film itself, whereby the filmmaker creates the illusion of life from dead celluloid. In the early years of Weimar Germany, this quality fascinated not only filmgoers, but also film critics, philosophers, and creative writers. They developed a “language of cinematic life” to describe it (6). And appropriately so: questions of life and death still loomed large after the Great War claimed the lives of over two million German soldiers. By framing his readings with reference to this conflict, Choe follows in the vein of Anton Kaes’s influential Shell Shock Cinema (2009) and other scholarship that seeks to understand Weimar film on its own historical terms and not, pace Siegfried Kracauer, as a precursor to National Socialism. Following Kaes, Choe emphasizes that film at this moment offered a means to think through the basic ontological question asked of Dr. Caligari at the carnival sideshow and that frightened soldiers asked themselves in the muddy trenches of the Western Front: “How long will I live?” (22).

More specifically, Choe states his book’s aim as “Theorizing the transformation from lifeless object to living naturalness” as the means to “elucidate an ontology of the film medium” (6). To advance this argument, he offers two fundamental claims about Weimar film history. The first is the premise that “the vital, moving image is at every moment haunted by its original, inanimate condition” (13). A second, related claim is that if scenes of animation like that of the awakening Cesare are allegories of the moving image, “they also allegorize the spectator’s relationship to it” (15). In this approach, early Weimar films are not simply texts that illustrate philosophical points. Rather, they are to be understood as philosophical texts themselves that enact and allegorize basic concerns of ontology. Film in Weimar Germany emerged as an important vehicle for thinking visually about fundamental philosophical problems. It was a philosophical medium no less than the written word.

Afterlives develops these arguments over five chapters that consider popular and art films as well as canonical and more obscure titles. The first three chapters connect the traumas of war to Weimar-era discourses of film, while chapters four and five build on these readings “to elucidate the ethics in relation to the cinema technology” (17). Chapter One, for instance, reads Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919) against a rich texture of psychoanalytic texts...