Etched with the Emulsion: Weimar Dance and Body Culture in German Expressionist Cinema

Historical narratives of German expressionist cinema traditionally begin with Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), a film that incorporated the dark themes, angular mise-en-scène, crude makeup, and hyperbolic acting styles that were inspired by expressionist painting and drama. Less known is Wiene's subsequent film, released in 1920 and produced either before or simultaneously with Caligari, entitled Die drei Tänze der Mary Wilford. As Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg explain, this film is structured around three dance sequences (78). Unfortunately, this sister-film of Caligari exists only as a fragile nitrate print and is not available for analysis, but its very existence raises questions about the relationship between expressionist cinema and Weimar dance and body culture. This article argues that filmmakers embraced the work of contemporaneous dancers and choreographers and relied upon audiences' familiarity with dance culture, in order to address certain practical challenges in using cinema as an expressionist medium. Filmmakers drew upon both the practice and philosophy of modern dance in order to integrate the human form more effectively into expressionist aesthetics. This article focusses primarily on Karl Heinz Martin's Von morgens bis Mitternacht (1920), Hans Werckmeister's Algol – Tragödie der Macht (1920), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), and Henrik Galeen's Alraune (1928), each of which includes sequences featuring, variously, dance gymnastics, Ausdruckstanz, the work of major choreographers including Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, and performances by prominent dancers Sebastian Droste and Valeska Gert.

For several reasons, Weimar filmmakers and audiences were able to assume a mode of spectatorship competent with dance interpretation. First, filmmakers and dancers often used the same venues to display their work, as in the case of Gert's performance of a trademark "grotesque" dance with a screening of Walter Ruttmann's Opus II (1921), or Elisabeth Grube's live dance prologue at the 1922 Berlin premiere of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Toepfer 203, 372). Second, physical education in the Weimar period placed emphasis on merging dance, gymnastics, and other forms of rhythmic movement, so the general public had many opportunities to become familiar with these practices. Finally, and possibly most important, audiences received an education in dance by viewing dance on film.

The circulation of dance images on film was particularly significant in this period because it allowed choreography to cross temporal and spatial boundaries and to transcend the moment of performance. Lotte Eisner has commented on a similar phenomenon in film acting, where she suggests that the film record of acting styles allows a specific performance to extend its influence beyond its immediate historical context, where "Once etched with the emulsion, gestures take on a definitive shape, stereotypes for the future" (144). Eisner uses the example of Metropolis, a film in which the acting style owes much to expressionism, even though the techniques typified by "jerky movements and puppet-like gesticulations" had long gone out of fashion in theatrical acting (144). Not only did the cinema allow performers to revisit older styles of acting and dance, but it also ensured that audiences would recognize these references to the past from their own memories. Thus Weimar viewers, thanks in part to their experience with cinema, would be aware of the connotations of specific movements and would be able to differentiate particular dances. In this way, the filmic preservation and dissemination of dance performance allowed expressionist filmmakers to draw upon the work of multiple dancers and choreographers and integrate their philosophies of movement and bodily consciousness into their films.

Saying that Weimar filmmakers were able to make use of dance's gestural and philosophical vocabulary not only has implications for our interpretations of individual films, but also suggests a resolution to some of the traditional objections to cinema as an expressionist medium. When expressionist filmmaking began, some critics perceived a conflict between photographic realism and the distorted perspective, crude production style, and emphatic materiality of expressionist aesthetics. For example, Herbert Jhering, commenting on Caligari, complains that when a naturalistic bed is photographed in an otherwise expressionist room...