"A Film in Words": Felix Dörmann's Search for Cinematic Writing

In a manuscript from 1923 titled Die Rubine Sutherlands, Felix Dörmann revised his typescript with the subtitle "Film in Worten." This article deploys Dörmann's marginalia as an invitation to test his notion of a "a fi lm in words." As an author often caught between artistic forms ranging from poetry to prose and drama, Dörmann's cinematic experiments reveal his interest in exploring the technological and representational possibilities offered by the new medium. Drawing on the interplay between his best- known surviving film fragment, Die Zirkusgräfin (1912), and Die Rubine der Sutherlands as case studies, the implicit conception of cinematic writing that emerges in Dörmann's work offers a concrete basis for considering the influence of early Austrian cinema on the aesthetic imagination of late Austrian modernism.