Mahler's Forgotten Conductor: Heinz Unger and His Search for Jewish Meaning, 1895–1965 by Hernan Tesler-Mabé (review)

Abstract

or can it be expressive and emotional? Special effects let cinema express emotions through machinery. Is film idealist or materialist? Via special effects, “machine technology fulfilled the requirements of idealist aesthetics” (22). The hyphen in the word “techno-romantic” can function as a figure for Loew’s overall critical project: the excavation of hyphens in the archive that hold together seemingly contradictory ideas about the cinema. This structure of argument holds Loew, the critic herself, at a distance from the material she is studying. She never attempts to theorize herself the materialism of the cinematic apparatus, for example. Rather, she relentlessly re-locates the object of her study in the discourse network of early twentieth century Germany. This is a benefit for students of that period: at times, Special Effects and German Silent Cinema can be read like a literature review—an exhaustive survey of the key debates from the 1920’s and earlier about the cultural significance of cinematic techniques that will guide many future scholars through this period. (Particularly wonderful are several “see also” footnotes that casually rattle-off a whole spin-off article’s worth of primary and secondary literature.) If there is one downside to this approach, it is that, in the chorus of other thinkers’ voices, Loew risks marginalizing her own original contributions. Without a prominent theorizing voice arguing for one side or the other in the historical debates she rehearses, it can seem like she is failing to register a real sense of irreconcilability between materialist and idealist conceptions of film—ways in which special effects may not easily or perfectly resolve these debates; how film may still not be a perfect balance of art and technology. Nevertheless, some theory of her own becomes clear in the way she sutures her sources together: narrativizing special effects as having succeeded in establishing film as a technological art is, itself, a kind of strong theory about film, even if it emerges only implicitly. Loew’s monograph sheds light on an understudied topic within film studies, especially in comparison to other cinematic techniques: special effects. Her research makes a compelling case for the impact of special effects on debates about cinema’s value as an art form. Future scholars of this period will find this monograph invaluable, as much for the fascinating argument as for the vast repertoire of archival material that Loew offers. Sean Lambert, University of California, Berkeley