The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder by Paul Dobryden (review)

The late nineteenth century saw concerted efforts in Germany to mitigate the destabilizing effects of unfettered industrial capitalism, such as environmental pollution and the unsanitary living conditions of an immiserated urban working class, by seeking to optimize efficiency in production (for instance, by reducing harmful waste) and by aiming to improve working and living conditions (primarily in order to maintain a productive workforce). In his introduction to this fascinating book, Paul Dobryden outlines how the medium of cinema that emerged during that same period can be viewed as an “apparatus of modernity” (10) that participated in this pursuit of “hygiene,” defined broadly as a conglomerate of practices that “strove to produce a kind of order, which in turn was meant to stabilize social life” (14). The multiple crises that followed the defeat of Germany in World War I confronted Weimar-era cinema with the challenge of counteracting “environmental disorder” by contributing toward reestablishing psychological, social, and political stability—hence the book’s somewhat enigmatic title and subtitle.

The author’s highly original, eclectic, and thought-provoking approach, combining sophisticated theoretical reflection with impressive archival research, enables him to address a dazzling multitude of fascinating topics in the book’s five chapters. In a brief review such as this, it is impossible to convey the full complexity of the book’s multi-layered and nuanced overarching argument. The first chapter is dedicated to the connection between the moralizing concerns of the Kinoreform movement and debates over the design of exhibition spaces during the transition from storefront movie theaters to large-scale picture palaces. The close proximity with other people in the insufficiently ventilated and poorly lit cramped spaces of early storefront cinemas exposed moviegoers to multiple “threats”—to their physical health, to their moral fortitude, and to their political reliability (as spaces of collective experience that potentially engendered politicized solidarity). The cinema thus became “a site where experts in design, architecture, traffic, and urban planning articulated a narrative of hygienic modernization and demonstrated hygienic ways of thinking about, perceiving, and acting in the spaces of everyday life” (38). The second chapter discusses the quasi-documentary genre of the Kulturfilme, educational films that sought to transform audiences into communities of self-regulating “hygienic subjects” functioning optimally within an existing social order. Such films, Dobryden rightly points out, largely adhered to patriarchal and ableist norms. For instance, women were generally relegated to the domestic sphere, with housewives instructed in using the ergonomically designed “Frankfurt Kitchen” to maintain order at home, while public spaces were primarily construed as arenas for the circulation of able-bodied working males, with the “unproductive” parts of the population (children, the elderly, the physically or mentally handicapped) sequestered in special spaces that purported to best meet their specific needs.

Chapter three reads F. W. Murnau’s film Faust (1926) as a kind of double allegory—of the environmental pollution wrought by unregulated industrial capitalism and of the redemptive power of the cinematic imagination. Smoke and vapor fill the screen, visualizing disease and the devil’s shape-shifting magic in a manner that, through visual distraction, makes possible a distinctly modern cinematic magic. The fourth chapter applies ideas about disability and aging developed in chapter two to a discussion of two canonical Weimar-era feature films. In Dobryden’s readings of Karl Grune’s Die Straße (The Street, 1923) and Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), the modern urban environment emerges as the site that mercilessly excludes those who do not or cannot any longer conform to the “hygienic” logic of moral self-regulation or to discriminatory standards of workplace efficiency. The final chapter discusses key leftist films from the late Weimar period, such as Phil Jutzi’s Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (1932). Rather than participating in efforts to mitigate the detrimental effects of exploitative industrial capitalism, these films shift the focus to...