Vol. 19 · No. 3 · Issue 60 · Fall 2001 · pp. 94-102 (9)

Stars on the Screen, Strangers on the Streets

Sara Hall

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Abstract

Jans B. Wager, Dangerous Dames. Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999)

Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

According to most accounts, the field of German cinema studies has its origin in two books published after World War II outside of Germany: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, published in the United States in 1947, and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen, first published in France in 1952. As might be surmised from their titles, as well as their publication dates, both works reexamine films of the Weimar Republic for the messages they reveal about the German psychological disposition and its role in the events leading to World War II and the Holocaust. While maintaining that some of the social and aesthetic questions raised by Kracauer and Eisner are indeed central to current scholarship, late twentieth-century film historians have strongly challenged certain of these authors' respective methods and conclusions. Two recent contributions to the field of German cultural studies, Jans B. Wager's Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir and Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum, have followed suit by demonstrating the positive dimensions of the Eisner-Kracauer legacy. At the same time, both books work to loosen the authoritative hold that these titles have on scholarship on Weimar visual culture.