The Long Century's Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern By Kenneth S.Calhoun, University of Toronto Press. 2021. 267pp. $70.00 (hardcover or ebook)

The theme of Weimar expressionist cinema and its roots in German Romanticism has most notably received scholarly attention in Lotte Eisner's groundbreaking work first published in France in 1952, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (translated by Roger Greaves, 1969), in which she looked to Romantic influences such as the land and seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich and the literature of writers such as Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Novalis to note the “visual delirium and volatility of fixed forms” (8). In Kenneth Calhoun's book, The Long Century's Long Shadow, the idea that German cinema borrowed from the darkness of German Romanticism is further explored through analysis of the social and cultural configurations of the modern age. Calhoun remarks on the proto-cinematic work of Friedrich from 1807 to 1839: “Sharp and transparent often to the point of surreality, these unique canvases anchor the fixed frame in a viewer who stands transfixed before a succession of distinct parallel planes” (11). He contends that cinema presents “internal connections between external events” (15). It is not fixed only on material things but on “vectors of direction, approach, recession, and so on” (22). Drawing on a wide range of prose, poetry, painting, and philosophy, the author presents analyses of expressionist cinema including Nosferatu (1922), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and The Blue Angel (1930). He concludes the study with a discussion of Disney's film Fantasia (1940) as an addition to this extension of German Romantic thought and aesthetics. For Calhoun, Weimar cinema is a “de facto extension of the avant-garde that was German Romanticism” (16). The book begins with two excellent chapters foregrounding Romanticism's relationship to Weimar Cinema. Chapter 1, entitled “The Turmoil of Forces,” goes into great detail to show how Romanticism is a “template” for Weimar cinema. Drawing on Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity from 1915 noting how the space between material objects is an electromagnetic field that moves like the “surface of a lake” (23), Calhoun applies the notion of unseen forces of movement to Caspar David Friedrich's painting Monk by the Sea (1808/10) and F.W. Murnau's film Nosferatu. In Friedrich's painting, we have a static figure juxtaposed to the “immensity of sea and sky” with storm clouds gathering (32). Similarly, there is the evocation of meaning in Nosferatu’s “chill wind” through the seascapes, the deserted ship, and the moon (26). Additionally, Fritz Lang's film Siegfried (1924) shows how two-dimensional surfaces open up momentarily. The character Alberich shows Siegfried a moving image of the Nibelung's toil as a “shimmering tableau,” which disappears into the flat cavern wall as quickly as it appears (44). Chapter 2, entitled “Under the Sign of Insomnia,” features a discussion of the notion that cinema displays objects on the screen that do not exist in space at the time of projection: The spectator, through the projector, is all present on the screen in which s/he is visually absent (51). This “act of seeing” is analogous to Caspar David Friedrich's painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Mists (1818), which acts to suspend the viewer in a motionless manner akin to the cinematic spectator (52). This effect is also evident in films like Caligari where the viewer is positioned as a spectator within the diegesis (69). In all these films, Calhoun argues that the cinematic spectacle is an immersive experience that completely envelops its audience. The stunning number and variety of texts used by Calhoon may sometimes overwhelm the reader, diverting the focus away from expressionist cinema. Chapter 6, entitled “Necessary Advances,” generally avoids this issue by offering a close reading of Karl Grune's film The Street (1923). Calhoun discusses the male protagonist's fantasies that come from a bright light from the outside that projects images onto the ceiling. He gives the reader a detailed rendering of each image as it overlaps with others (a clown, a fire-eater, a roller coaster, etc.). Calhoun's more focused approach here provides an in-depth analysis of this fantasy scene featuring a set of eight stills, allowing the reader to linger on this important filmic text. Drawing on various Romantic texts including paintings, poetry, and prose, as well as expressionist Weimar cinema, Calhoun grounds his interpretations of the marriage between German Romanticism and works of expressionist cinema. The work is informed by aesthetic concerns as well as psychoanalytic theory as Calhoun contends that early 20th-century cinema was in essence modern in its tribute to realism and Romantic in its projection of the unseen and dream-like image. The Long Century's Long Shadow shows that the end sympathetically borrows from the beginning. This volume is recommended for both advanced students and scholars working in the field of Weimar cinema and Germanic studies.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.