Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0012
Bastian Heinsohn
This chapter presents an analysis of cinematic space and set design in The Last Warning, Leni’s fourth and final film for Universal Pictures. Mood and atmosphere are two crucial aspects of Leni’s oeuvre, and he achieved them through light, shadow, and innovative set designs. Using The Last Warning as a case in point, this chapter demonstrates how Leni’s mastery at creating uncanny décor translated within the new spatial context of extravagant Hollywood sets. The film illustrates Leni’s 1924 call to set designers to express mood in their work instead of simply producing faithful replicas of certain locations. In The Last Warning, Leni manipulates space to great effect, drawing the spectator into a haunted labyrinth of hidden corridors, secret passages, and dark staircases. This contribution explores The Last Warning’s set design within several contexts: the film’s limited plot; its unity of space, time, and action; and Leni’s general views on film architecture.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0003
Jason J. Doerre
This chapter explores the influence of literary naturalism on German Expressionist cinema as reflected in Leni’s 1921 film Backstairs, co-directed with Leopold Jessner. As this chapter suggests, Backstairs is a continuation of the styles of literary naturalism, a tendency frequently taken up in German cinema of the 1920s. Although specific visual elements of the film demonstrate an expressionistic impulse, other aspects including milieu and story are clearly leftovers of the literary naturalism of the pre-war period. Using Backstairs as a case in point, this contribution counters the overemphasised focus on expressionism in Weimar-era films by highlighting the multivalent styles present throughout this period. Taking into consideration the film’s set, story, acting, and direction, this chapter provides a close examination of a film often overlooked among the classics of Weimar cinema.
{"title":"The Unnatural in the Natural: Leopold Jessner and Paul Leni’s Early Weimar Film Backstairs","authors":"Jason J. Doerre","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the influence of literary naturalism on German Expressionist cinema as reflected in Leni’s 1921 film Backstairs, co-directed with Leopold Jessner. As this chapter suggests, Backstairs is a continuation of the styles of literary naturalism, a tendency frequently taken up in German cinema of the 1920s. Although specific visual elements of the film demonstrate an expressionistic impulse, other aspects including milieu and story are clearly leftovers of the literary naturalism of the pre-war period. Using Backstairs as a case in point, this contribution counters the overemphasised focus on expressionism in Weimar-era films by highlighting the multivalent styles present throughout this period. Taking into consideration the film’s set, story, acting, and direction, this chapter provides a close examination of a film often overlooked among the classics of Weimar cinema.","PeriodicalId":373009,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125985740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0004
Erik Born
“Cinema Panopticum” explores the central conceit of Waxworks—wax figures that come to life and threaten their creator—in the context of popular wax displays in the Weimar Republic. Commonly credited as a cult classic horror film, Waxworks is better understood in the period’s terminology as an “Episodenfilm,” a popular form of early narrative cinema that presented distinct episodes within a unifying frame narrative. Like other early German anthology films, Waxworks participates in the Weimar critique of historicism, foregoing the particularities of historical periods in favour of universal drives and philosophical themes. In this case, the framing narrative updates the classical Pygmalion myth for film-obsessed German modernity. The film is a testament to early cinema’s so-called “encyclopaedic ambition” and a cautionary tale about the potential fetishisation of the filmic image during the transitional period when cinema was establishing itself in opposition to older forms of representation such as wax figure displays.
{"title":"Cinema Panopticum: Wax, Work, Waxworks","authors":"Erik Born","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"“Cinema Panopticum” explores the central conceit of Waxworks—wax figures that come to life and threaten their creator—in the context of popular wax displays in the Weimar Republic. Commonly credited as a cult classic horror film, Waxworks is better understood in the period’s terminology as an “Episodenfilm,” a popular form of early narrative cinema that presented distinct episodes within a unifying frame narrative. Like other early German anthology films, Waxworks participates in the Weimar critique of historicism, foregoing the particularities of historical periods in favour of universal drives and philosophical themes. In this case, the framing narrative updates the classical Pygmalion myth for film-obsessed German modernity. The film is a testament to early cinema’s so-called “encyclopaedic ambition” and a cautionary tale about the potential fetishisation of the filmic image during the transitional period when cinema was establishing itself in opposition to older forms of representation such as wax figure displays.","PeriodicalId":373009,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127966855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0011
Bruce Henderson
“Masculinity and Facial Disfigurement” examines Leni’s film through the lens of disability studies in film. This chapter offers a reading of The Man Who Laughs that addresses the creative liberties that Leni took when adapting the Hugo novel to the screen and that accounted for the representation of physical disfigurement otherwise lost in Hugo’s original text. As the chapter shows, the cinematic representation of Gwynplaine’s disability, in contrast to that in the novelization, “restores a kind of lost masculinity to Gwynplaine, reminding us, in ways the novel never quite does, that Gwynplaine’s body was as ‘fit’ as any other man’s,” in Henderson’s words. This chapter thus reconceptualizes Leni’s adaptation as a positive portrayal of disability, finding equilibrium between Gwynplaine’s contrasting characteristics of masculinity-femininity and ability-disability that are absent in both the novel and other films in this era.
{"title":"Masculinity and Facial Disfigurement in The Man Who Laughs","authors":"Bruce Henderson","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"“Masculinity and Facial Disfigurement” examines Leni’s film through the lens of disability studies in film. This chapter offers a reading of The Man Who Laughs that addresses the creative liberties that Leni took when adapting the Hugo novel to the screen and that accounted for the representation of physical disfigurement otherwise lost in Hugo’s original text. As the chapter shows, the cinematic representation of Gwynplaine’s disability, in contrast to that in the novelization, “restores a kind of lost masculinity to Gwynplaine, reminding us, in ways the novel never quite does, that Gwynplaine’s body was as ‘fit’ as any other man’s,” in Henderson’s words. This chapter thus reconceptualizes Leni’s adaptation as a positive portrayal of disability, finding equilibrium between Gwynplaine’s contrasting characteristics of masculinity-femininity and ability-disability that are absent in both the novel and other films in this era.","PeriodicalId":373009,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123092921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0013
S. Shimpach
This chapter considers Universal’s relationship with its audiences at the end of the silent period of Hollywood cinema. Specifically, it presents The Last Warning as a case study and focuses on the ways that Universal promoted this film—a “partial-talkie”—to exhibitors and advertised it to the public. This analysis suggests how Universal imagined the audience for this film and explores the studio’s strategies for connecting the film’s narrative to this imagined audience during the transitional period to synchronised sound. For example, Universal tried to entice exhibitors to book the film by providing survey cards that audience members could fill out during a break in the film’s narrative. The cards would allow them to guess “whodunnit” before the film resumed. Universal therefore engaged in a creative and playful approach to making the film experience more interactive, albeit in a decidedly low-tech way. The studio imagined a specific, rather sophisticated type of audience engagement with a stylistically creative but narratively banal genre film at the end of the silent era.
{"title":"The Last Warning: Uncertainty, Exploitation, and Horror","authors":"S. Shimpach","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers Universal’s relationship with its audiences at the end of the silent period of Hollywood cinema. Specifically, it presents The Last Warning as a case study and focuses on the ways that Universal promoted this film—a “partial-talkie”—to exhibitors and advertised it to the public. This analysis suggests how Universal imagined the audience for this film and explores the studio’s strategies for connecting the film’s narrative to this imagined audience during the transitional period to synchronised sound. For example, Universal tried to entice exhibitors to book the film by providing survey cards that audience members could fill out during a break in the film’s narrative. The cards would allow them to guess “whodunnit” before the film resumed. Universal therefore engaged in a creative and playful approach to making the film experience more interactive, albeit in a decidedly low-tech way. The studio imagined a specific, rather sophisticated type of audience engagement with a stylistically creative but narratively banal genre film at the end of the silent era.","PeriodicalId":373009,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124099264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0005
Joel Westerdale
Westerdale’s chapter revisits the place of Waxworks within the canon of expressionist cinema emerging from Germany in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Waxworks is among a key group of films, which also includes Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Carl Boese’s The Golem (1920), Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), that frequently functions as metonymic shorthand for early Weimar cinema as a whole. As this essay argues, however, Waxworks is also significant for its contributions as a comedy. Though the episodes with Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper are predictably grim, the film’s longest sequence presents a Baghdad burlesque in which Emil Jannings’ lecherous caliph Harun al-Rashid is more clown than villain. Such an episode sits uneasily in the “historical imaginary” (to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s term) that continues to dominate discussions of early Weimar film.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0007
Martin F. Norden
This chapter looks at the conclusion of Leni’s film-related work in Germany and the beginning of his employment with Universal Studios. “Bravura Beginnings” argues that the bridge between these two phases of Leni’s career was his work on a series of prologues: live stage productions that led into others’ films. Relying heavily on contemporaneous newspaper and trade-journal accounts, this chapter examines Leni’s work immediately before and after his arrival in Manhattan in 1926. In particular, it explores the prologues he staged in Berlin for Ernst Lubitsch’s Forbidden Paradise, E. A. Dupont’s Varieté, and Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan, and two he created for Universal: ‘The Police Sergeant’s Story,’ performed as a lead-in to Tod Browning’s Outside the Law, and ‘Tremendous Trifles,’ which served a similar introductory function for William Seiter’s Rolling Home. This chapter posits that Leni’s work on these live productions paved the way for his brief but successful career as a Hollywood director and carried themes and motifs that later appeared in his films for Universal.
本章着眼于莱尼在德国的电影相关工作的结束以及他在环球影城工作的开始。《勇敢的开始》认为，莱尼职业生涯的这两个阶段之间的桥梁是他在一系列序曲中的工作:现场舞台作品，为其他人的电影奠定了基础。本章主要依靠当时的报纸和贸易杂志的报道，考察了莱尼1926年抵达曼哈顿前后的作品。这本书特别探讨了他在柏林为恩斯特·鲁比奇(Ernst Lubitsch)的《禁地》(Forbidden Paradise)、e·a·杜邦(E. a . Dupont)的《杂谈》(varietest)和赫伯特·布伦农(Herbert Brenon)的《彼得潘》(Peter Pan)和他为环球公司创作的两部开场白:《警察的故事》(the Police Sergeant’s Story)，作为托德·布朗宁(todd Browning)的《法外之徒》(Outside the Law)的引子，以及为威廉·塞特(William Seiter)的《翻滚的家》(Rolling Home)起到类似引子作用的《巨大的琐事》(Tremendous triles)。本章假定莱尼在这些现场制作上的工作为他短暂但成功的好莱坞导演生涯铺平了道路，并为他后来为环球影业制作的电影提供了主题和主题。
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Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0008
Rebecca M. Gordon
This chapter argues that Leni’s first film with Universal Pictures, The Cat and the Canary, created a visual and aural iconography that was essential for its cinematic progeny: namely, its remake in 1939, and the broader trend of ‘old spooky house’ narratives in Hollywood filmmaking. An early instalment in the horror-comedy genre, Leni’s 1927 film would later lend formal and affective shape to what trade magazines of the 1920s and 1930s called the thriller-chiller-comedy. Interweaving concurrent film reviews and memos between industry executives, Gordon’s chapter details Leni’s so-called “German” or “European” influence in reference to the film’s visual style and the effect of that style on its viewers. This chapter takes the position that The Cat and the Canary’s stylistic innovations became identifiable as parts of a pattern (or, indeed, a genre) by the 1930s, and, further, that Leni himself was responsible for developing an entirely new formula for Hollywood filmmaking.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0002
J. Fisher
Fisher’s chapter examines the titular film as an important historical document that chronicles both the changing institutional context of German cinema and the evolving perspectives on the “war to end all wars.” Subsidized by the German Supreme Army Command’s wartime propaganda unit—the Photo and Film Office—The Diary of Dr. Hart is a transitional and transformative instalment in Leni’s career and the wider landscape of German cinema during the latter stages of World War I. Combining a thorough production history of the film with early cinematic trends, such as the popularization of cinematic–medical discourses and the representation of contemporary European cosmopolitanism, this chapter shows how Leni’s directorial debut combines a number of styles to transform the war genre and how such genres were already evolving at this relatively early moment in German cinema history.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474454513.003.0006
Erica Tortolani
This chapter focuses on Leni’s eight-part short film series, Rebus-Film (1925-26), and the ways that it relates to various avant-garde art movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Using Rebus-Film Nr. 1 as a starting point, the essay analyses the series’ connections to contemporaneous artistic movements such as Cubism, Futurism, and Dada and to cinematic styles and genres of the time, including Soviet montage and the ‘City Symphony’ films. To supplement this analysis, the essay draws upon reviews, trade magazine articles, and other written records from the period. This chapter sheds light on the ways that critics and audiences received the films and regarded Leni’s use of experimental aesthetic styles. While it is debatable as to whether Leni considered himself a modern art practitioner, a close reading of these short films shows that they are in dialogue with the visual avant-garde. This chapter also discusses the ways that the series fits into, and extends, Leni’s German and American careers.
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