Introduction

Writing for the Viennese musicology journal Anbruch in 1926, the film theorist Béla Balázs described the affinities between dance, pantomime, and film as follows:

Plötzlich ist es ein allgemeines Bedürfnis geworden, dem inneren Erlebnis unmittelbar-körperlichen Ausdruck zu geben. Über Nacht ist es zu einem Gemeinplatz geworden, daß die Sprache und die Begriffe unzulänglich seien. […] [D]ieses zweifellos gerechtfertigte Mißtrauen unseren Worten gegenüber [hat] die stummen Künste der Gebärde, in denen der Geist unmittelbar, ohne Zwischenschaltung des rationell Begrifflichen verkörpert wird, sehr populär gemacht. Diese Künste nennen sich: Tanz, Patomime und Film.

("Tanzdichtung" 109)

While Balázs goes on to mention the abstract dances of his contemporary Mary Wigman, his pairing of dance, pantomime, and film also points back to earlier endeavours such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Das fremde Mädchen, written as a pantomime in 1911 and released as a film in 1913 (Oksiloff). Like Hofmannsthal, whose famous Brief des Lord Chandos an Francis Bacon (1902) represented one of the definitive literary statements on the so-called "Sprachkrise" of German modernism, Balázs saw in these "silent arts of gesture" alternatives to the increasing conceptual abstractions of linguistic communication. Dance and film, he believed, could communicate aesthetic experience in a way that would resist the levelling power of the concept and reconnect audiences – directly through the body – to the living "inner experience" of the performer.

Two years later, in an article for the Prague music journal Der Auftakt, the labour theorist and cultural critic Fritz Giese also posited a fundamental link between film and dance, but he understood this affinity in a very different light. "Revue und Film," his article began, "gehören kunstwissenschaftlich zusammen, da sie uns als Ausdruck einer im technischen Zeitalter geborenen Darstellungsgattung wesentlich werden" ("Revue und Film" 172). Beyond the word "Ausdruck," Balázs's and Giese's reflections on the relations between film and dance have little in common. For Giese, film (now understood as a medium of montage) and dance (specifically the "dance machines" – Tanzmaschinen – of the Tiller-Girl style chorus lines) both function as a kind of training for life in a "technological" era, one defined by the demand for acceleration, rationalization, and the efficient use of bodily and mental energies (173). "Was ist das Ent-scheidende hier und dort?" Giese asks, "Schneller Wechsel! Keine langatmige Exposition, keine epische Breite! Kein Überanstrengung der Gedanken! Dazu Spannung, Kurzweil, wohlweise, industriell erwogene Hin- und Herleitung über alle mengenmenschlichen Instinkte" (174; emphasis in the original). Where Hofmannsthal and Balázs saw the "silent arts of gesture" as means of opposing the reduction of things to their exchange value by conceptual language, Giese celebrates the machinic rhythms of film and chorus lines, their affinity with "production-line assembly" (Serienarbeit). Above all, Giese insisted (sounding a catchword of the era of "Neue Sachlichkeit"), the two media are related by virtue of their sobriety: "Eben diese beiden, Revue und Film, einigten sich mit der nüchterenen, wirklichkeitsnäheren Weltanschaulichkeit des Tages" (175).

One could find similar arguments by both Balázs and Giese in earlier book publications: most notably in Balázs's Der sichtbare Mensch from 1924 and in Giese's Girlkultur: Vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem Rhythmus und Lebensgefühl from 1925. No doubt, a comparison of the two books and their different understandings of dance and film would yield fruitful insights into the respective imaginaries informing "expressionist" and "new objective" culture during the Weimar period. Despite these differences, however, the affinity between the two thinkers – the fact that both saw such a profound relation between film and dance and considered the two media to be the signature expressions of modern culture – suggests a broader insight into the function and understanding of moving images during the modern period. The articles in this issue are all motivated, in one way or another, by the conviction that an investigation of the links between film and dance can teach us much about modernity's understanding both of itself and of the cinema – its relation to epistemology, its calling as an art form, and...