Despotic Orientalism in Disguise:
Depictions of the Exotic East in Popular Weimar Cinema
Sara Khosrawi (12111627)
MA Film Studies (Media Studies)
Graduate School of Humanities
University of Amsterdam, 2019
Supervisor: Dr. Floris J. J. W. Paalman
Second Reader: Dr. Gerwin van der Pol
KEYWORDS
Orientalism, Eurocentric Difference, Alterity, Stereotypical Representation, Postcolonial Theory, Film History, Weimar Cinema.
ABSTRACT
In the Weimar era, between 1918/19 and 1933, German filmmakers have been conspicuously preoccupied with depictions of the Orient, which positions many of their films within ethico-political frameworks, especially considered retrospectively from today’s postcolonial perspective. Numerous significant Weimar critics, film theorists or historians, including Siegfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisner and, more recently, Thomas Elsaesser, have, at most, merely touched upon such depictions, and largely disregard the consequential connotations they entail. This thesis aims to explore these implications by focusing on the work of three Weimar directors in which Eastern representations are treated disparately, especially regarding their stylistic elements, production procedures and contents: Ernst Lubitsch’s costume films, Franz Osten’s German-Indian collaborations, and Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette animations. Analyzing these films from a postcolonial perspective in the light of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, this study considers the relevant political, sociological and ethical contexts of the Weimar Republic – particularly its relation to colonialism and the rise of anti-Semitism in the given era – and links them with the ways in which foreign Eastern cultures are portrayed cinematically within the contents of the films. The majority of such representations, even if they are commonly interpreted as escapist fantasies or cinematic tourism, tend to conform to Orientalist positions by othering the represented culture and stressing Eurocentric difference. Examining the different approaches of the three above-mentioned directors, the aim is to identify the diverse forms of Orientalism that are at work, and to stress the significance of critical thinking regarding this matter from a contemporary postcolonial point of view.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction . . . 04
2 Theoretical Framework . . . . 09
2.1 Orientalism . . . . 09
2.2 Orientalism in Weimar Germany . . . . 10
2.3 Evading the Postcolonial Contexts of Orientalism in Weimar Cinema . . . . 13
2.4 Debates on Orientalism in Weimar Cinema . . . .15
3 Methodology and Selection of Cases . . . . 20
3.1 The Cases . . . 20
3.2 Analytical Methods . . . 22
4 Sumurun’s Portrayal of the Middle East . . . .24
4.1 Background – Commercialism or Progressive Activism? . . . .24
4.2 An Analysis of Sumurun’s Orientalist Structures . . . .25
4.2.1 The Oriental Stereotype and the Appropriation of a Western Imaginary Model . . .25
4.2.2 The Eroticization of the Otherized Female Body . . . .29
5 The Representation of India in Die Leuchte Asiens. . . .33
5.1 Literary and Filmic Background . . . .33
5.2 Identifying Orientalism in Die Leuchte Asiens . . . .34
5.2.1 On Authenticity and Spirituality . . . 35
5.2.2 Idealizing and Domesticating Otherness . . . 38
6 The Oriental Potpourri of Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed . . . .41
6.1 Narrative Context . . . .41
6.2 Reading Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed from an Orientalist Perspective . . . .42
6.2.1 The Hyperbolic Stereotype . . . .42
6.2.2 The Eroticization of the Oriental Woman . . . 46
7 Conclusion . . . . 51
Appendix . . . .54
Bibliography . . . .85
1 INTRODUCTION
“[Sumurun] entführt seine Zuschauer in die Welt der Märchen aus 1001 Nacht,” states the film’s description in the program of the 2018 UFA Film Nights – an annual festival that brings the popular and sometimes forgotten films of Germany’s silent era to contemporary audiences.1
The vogue of this event, reflected in UFA’s enthusiasm as its organizer as well as its modern spectators’ eagerness to be transported into the mystic Oriental worlds of 1920s German filmmakers’ imaginations, can be considered one of many examples that demonstrate how such representations of foreign cultures are still widely celebrated today: in 2017, the Komische Oper Berlin curated a screening of Lotte Reiniger’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926) as part of a program titled Voyage Oriental, which, according to the venue, contains the fascination that the Orient has induced in the West from the beginning of time in travel images from Persia, newsreel reports from the far East, as well as films that allow for erotic fantasies to run wild, and incorporates Achmed as the “oldest feature-length animation that unites all that mythical creatures and Oriental atmospheres of the Arabian Nights have to offer.”2 Similarly, the
Internationale Stummfilmtage in Bonn screened Franz Osten’s Shiraz: Das Grabmal einer
Großen Liebe (1928) in 2018 as a film that appealed “for its romantic and moving story, its
great pictorial and poetic beauty, [and] the rich strangeness of the Eastern pageantry which it unfolds before our eyes.”3 On occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Weimar
Republic, the cinefest 2018/19 (Internationales Festival des deutschen Film-Erbes) celebrated the works of Joe May, “one of the era’s most significant filmmakers,” showing both parts of
Das Indische Grabmal (1921), among others, with which the May-Film GmbH, according to
the Murnau Stiftung, has outdone itself.4 Perhaps most prominently, the 2018 Retrospective
category of Berlinale, with its specific focus on Weimar cinema, included Franz Osten’s Die
Leuchte Asiens (1925), Robert Reiner’s Opium (1919), and Richard Eichberg’s Song: Die Liebe eines Armen Menschenkindes (1928). This event distinguishes Osten’s German-Indian
collaboration from other “exotic” pieces with the claim that its authenticity poses an opposition to “many of the outdoor films and travelogues” that share a form of “ambivalence about how the encounters with foreign people and subjects are tackled, with stereotypical ideas and bias found in both the documentary and narrative films.”5 What is distinctly evident in this particular
1 See appendix, figure 1.
2https://www.komische-oper-berlin.de/programm/spielplan/2017-11/stummfilm-voyage-oriental/413/
(accessed 02/05/2019), my translation.
3 See figure 2.
4https://www.cinefest.de/d/pro_uebersicht.php (accessed 02/05/2019), my translation;
https://www.murnau-stiftung.de/filmtheater/filmreihen/meister-des-weimarer-kinos-joe-may-und-das-wandernde-bild (accessed 02/05/2019); see figure 3.
program, while it praises Osten’s film nevertheless, is its explicit acknowledgment of the problematic connotations such representations comprise when considered in a postcolonial context, namely from a position that recognizes the ways in which foreign cultures and bodies are othered by means of stylistic and narrative devices that draw clear distinctions between the East and the West – a notion that today’s widespread awareness of postcolonialism should foreground in any case. In this regard, the screenings of such films in the present time entail striking repercussions that might not essentially apply when they are contemplated from the perspectives of other eras: while their contents offer the viewpoints of a different period, “reflect[ing] the public attitudes of the time, which assumed the superiority of European culture,” as outlined in the Berlinale program notes, their appreciation in the present time, if separated from its discriminating postcolonial context that highlights alterity, manifests a form of ignorance and oblivion toward the cultural delineations that are at work here.
In the Weimar era, the above-mentioned cases were by far no exception. German directors have been in large part preoccupied with Eastern depictions and thereby positioned their films within ethico-political frameworks by default. Considering the historical context of the Weimar Republic, the popularity of such films in the early twentieth century is predominantly attributed to the country’s post-war conditions, especially with regard to its social, political and economic situation. As a result of the lost war, the nation was faced with the “danger of mass starvation, of total economic breakdown,” and the imminent threat “that the German state would cease to exist” between the years 1918/19.6 As a counter-reaction to
their plight, and with images of death and destruction fresh in their memories, people were escaping into the diverting refuge of excess, which the abolition of censorship enabled immediately after the war, resulting in a proliferating sex wave.7 Alongside the vulgar post-war
excesses, the era witnessed an emergence of entertaining, historical pageant films which were promoted as ‘art’ and aimed to address a more sophisticated spectatorship.8 “Designed for mass
consumption,” their narratives largely distorted historical facts, incorporating stereotypical representations and exaggerations, for viewers who were no longer willing to “acknowledge history as an instrument of justice.”9 Such distortions included the depictions of European
countries, most prominently in Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Du Barry (1919) or Anna Boleyn (1920), as well as a great number of non-European Eastern nations, such as Fritz Lang’s
6 Laqueur, Walter. 2017. Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 7. 7 Ibid., 225; Kracauer, Siegfried. 1947. From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of German Film.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 44-45.
8 Kracauer, 47; These films were promoted as ‘art’ by the Ufa. They were initially perceived with caution, since
earlier Ufa films had been known to serve propaganda purposes.
Harakiri (1919), Artur Holz’ Das Geheimnis von Bombay (1921), or Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924), to name just a few examples that cover different Oriental regions.
Prisoners of their own country and in isolation from the rest of the world, Germany’s loss of the few colonies it had owned before the war became a further influential force that has been commonly linked to the thirst for non-German images in the media.10 From a postcolonial
viewpoint, “armchair tourism and fantasy colonialism” are the terms that are associated with this phenomenon today, as I will discuss in the following chapter.11
Beside the prevalent sex wave and the vogue of historical pageant films, a third popular cinematic strand evolved out of a style that was characterized as “fantastic, obsessive, dark, demonic, ghastly, and driven by deeply irrational motifs:” this stylistic approach refers to the films of German Expressionism which Weimar cinema is primarily associated with today.12
While such films are commonly read as allusions to the complex and “inaccessible layers of the German mind” – an interpretation initiated by Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler – the productions of the lavish and extravagant costume films are in contrast principally conceived in an economic and commercial context in which they serve as mere commodities.13
Whereas the contents of expressionist works can thus be deduced from the psychological states of the masses, the narratives of costume films function differently: they feed the consciousness of their viewers and provide a form of escapism from their immediate surroundings.
Next to the devastating aftermath of the war that resulted in a prevalent desire for distraction, as outlined above, there is a further essential socio-political aspect that must be considered with regard to Eastern representations in the Weimar Republic, namely the rise of anti-Semitism which witnessed its initial outbreak in the interwar period. By the time of WWI, a number of politically influential figures had already invigorated anti-Jewish prejudices in the German society.14 “Antisemitism at the grass-roots level became manifest in the fall of 1918,”
after physical attacks had taken place in Berlin and Munich, and again in 1923/24 when “Jewish
10 Kracauer, 57.
11 Ascárate, Richard John. 2008. “Cinematic Enlightenment: Franz Osten’s Die Leuchte Asiens (1925).” Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 25 (5): 360.
12 Kabatek, Wolfgang. 2003. Imagerie des Anderen im Weimarer Kino. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 12.
13 Kracauer, 60; Rogowski, Christian. “Introduction.” In The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering
Germany's Filmic Legacy, edited by Christian Rogowski. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 3; In fact,
Rogowski refers to the products of the Weimar era more generally when he addresses commercialism. However, I want to make an important distinction between the more artistic German expressionist style and the entertaining costume films that appealed to national as well as international audiences. One of the most influential film magazines of the Weimar era, the Lichtbildbühne, explicitly demanded such international approaches with the intention to eliminate correlations with propaganda films that were commonly associated with German cinema at the time.
14 Kater, Michael H. 1984. “Everyday Antisemitism in Pre-War Nazi Germany: The Popular Bases.” Yad Vashem
shopkeepers were manhandled and even killed.”15 This development constitutes an interesting
parallel to the German approaches of othering foreign cultures in their entertainment world: we are looking at a country in which the treatment of Jewish alterity itself became the primal form of Orientalism, a clear differentiation between the self and the Other, as Edward Said defines it.16 This act of othering certain groups within a society was evidently extended to the country’s
imaginary depictions of foreign nations. What is even more striking is the Nazis’ denunciation of the German film world by calling it a “Jewish industry,” which raises awareness of the fact that many of the films we are looking at in the context of Orientalism in fact originated from filmmakers who were themselves treated as an Other in their own country.17 The effects of
Anti-Semitism, not only as a general societal issue but also more specifically with regard to the individual directors’ histories, should therefore prompt us to treat such Oriental portrayals more critically.
This introductory chapter has established thus far how the aforementioned films and their exotic narratives and aesthetics are still widely appreciated today. Although this observation in itself does not pose a pivotal challenge per se, what renders such celebrations problematic is a neglect of the few significant debates that have criticized the political implications that these depictions entail in a postcolonial context. While a postcolonial understanding of these discourses that acknowledges the films’ underlying constructions of Occidental/Oriental differences principally remains underexposed, scholars like Théry Béord and Achim Alan Merlo, Robin Ellis, Sabine Hake, Christian Rogowski or Carl-Erdmann Schönfeld focus instead on the popularity of Oriental depictions from a perspective that favors ideas of escapism with reference to the country’s post-war state, whereas writers like Richard John Ascárate, Matthew Bernstein or Cynthia Walk draw connections with the country’s own colonial situation in the given era, holding the loss of Germany’s colonies responsible for the nation’s longing – and perhaps nostalgia – for images that establish fantasies of foreign relations. Such interpretations have a tendency to relate to the causes that have driven the production and popularity of such depictions and fail in large part to address the ways in which these could be read and construed. I am particularly referring to discussions that reflect on postcolonial theories à la Said – highlighting the fabrication of Eurocentric difference – which remain marginalized, having been explored perhaps most extensively by Wolfgang Kabatek, and more compendiously by Frank Scherer, who focus on the constructions of foreignness generated by a sense of ambivalence, a “hybrid positioning,” that feeds upon the positive as
15 Kater, 5.
16 Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 2. 17 Laqueur, 231.
well as negative perceptions of the represented Other.18 Despite the fact that exotic
representations are often read as escapist fantasies or take the form of seemingly innocuous armchair tourism, they must nonetheless be considered in a postcolonial context that acknowledges their act of othering non-European nations by highlighting characteristics that imply clear differences between the represented Eastern culture and the Western spectator. Taking the above-mentioned preconditions of Weimar Germany into consideration, and with Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism as the fundamental starting point of my assessment, this thesis sets out to analyze selected films of Ernst Lubitsch, Franz Osten and Lotte Reiniger, who have frequently depicted foreign cultures in their work. Sumurun, Die Leuchte Asiens and Die
Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed are three films that are set in different Oriental regions and thus
provide insights into the role of geographic factors in the portrayals of the diverse types of
Orientalism they incorporate: from the Middle East to India, all the way to China. Taking their
different cinematic styles and the diverse countries and cultures that their narratives cover into consideration, I intend to examine the ways in which the aforementioned Eurocentric distinctions between the Orient and the Occident are articulated by investigating the dynamics of the complex and paradoxical ambivalences that the films establish.
In the subsequent chapter, I will outline the different ideas around the concept of
Orientalism that have been circulating in critical debates in the past seventy years. Taking a
closer look at Weimar Germany and the fabrication of its very own forms of Orientalism, I will then point out how significant investigations of that era, especially with regard to the cinema, tend to neglect the postcolonial connotations that such films entail. Finally, I will give an overview of how the concept of Orientalism has been addressed in cinematic debates more specifically. Followed by a chapter on the particular selection of cases and the analytical methods that I intend to apply for an investigation of their underlying discourses to reveal the films’ discriminating structures, chapters four to six will finally focus on the films themselves and take a look at the ways in which Orientalism governs their foreign Eastern representations.
18 Kabatek, 10; Scherer, Frank F. 2011. “Ufa Orientalism – The ‘Orient’ in Early German Film: Lubitsch and
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 ORIENTALISM
Research conducted on Eastern representations from Western perspectives should be considered within the field of postcolonial studies as the delineations of such perspectives often involve viewpoints that are discriminatory and pejorative. The discussions that revolve around these depictions in the popular media almost invariably take Edward Said’s concept of
Orientalism, which is often recognized as the groundwork for the study of postcolonial theory,
as their starting point.Said places the preconceived or misconceived Occidental views of the Orient and stereotypical representations in attempts to produce the Orient at the center of his debate.19 The result of such representations is the construction of a clear distinction between
the West and the East, a division of self and Other, with an explicit fabrication of “geopolitical awareness,” highlighting forms of domination and superiority.20 The role of the stereotype in
this constellation, which Homi Bhabha pays special attention to, becomes not only crucial in the construction of the degraded Other, but also confirms the stereotyper’s own identity and detachment from the Other, a condition that the concept of fixity enables by signifying difference.21 While Said generally omits Germany in his elucidation of European Orientalist
histories, claiming that the county has never had “actual” relationships with Eastern nations, and focuses especially on the ramifications of imperialism, considering Britain and France as the primal forces, his definition nonetheless implicitly implicates German as well as more general Western world involvements:22
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.23
Such correlations, as Leela Gandhi points out, form an “exposition of the reciprocal relationship between colonial knowledge and colonial power,” based on a Foucauldian discourse that examines how knowledge generates power, and power, in turn, transforms knowledge.24 While these discourses might appear to be extrinsically concerned with
knowledge in the first place, they nonetheless constitute clear power structures that are often concealed “beneath layers of mystification.25
19 Said, 26. 20 Ibid., 2, 12.
21 Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 66.
22 Said, 1; Marchand, Suzanne L. 2009. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and
Scholarship. New York and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press and German Historical Institute, xviii.
23 Said, 2.
24 Gandhi, Leela. (1998) 2007. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Crows Nest: Allen&Unwin, 67-68,
74.
Posing a great paradox in comparison to its constructions of supremacy, the notion of
Orientalism concurrently implicates an evaluation of the Other as an object of fascination and
curiosity. Victor Segalen, who explores this side of the concept in his book on Exoticism, boldly defines the term as a celebration of the aesthetic of diversity.26 However, Segalen’s conceptions,
offering the perspective of a French ethnologist from the colonial era, must be treated with caution. I include them here for two reasons: not only do they comprise an understanding of the concept in the era that I am examining, but they also become relevant as the terms Orientalism and Exoticism still tend to be applied as mere aesthetic or stylistic tools on examinations of the early twentieth century today, after a model that is reminiscent of Segalen’s. His definition of
Exoticism can be interpreted as a need for difference and heterogeneity that was becoming
increasingly less retainable as a result of the growing power of imperialism which appropriated every corner of the world that it came in contact with. In this context, Charles Forsdick refers to Renato Rosaldo’s notion of an “imperialist nostalgia” that describes the “Western desire to resurrect what colonial contact has destroyed,” a yearning that can also be identified in Segalen’s writings.27 The two oppositions outlined in this section – the deliberate act of othering
foreign cultures and the desire for diversity – are closely related and easily interchangeable, making Orientalism and Exoticism complex and paradoxical concepts that have a tendency to obscure their intrinsic binary oppositions.
2.2 ORIENTALISM IN WEIMAR GERMANY
Similar interests in diversity have been circulating among literary scholars in the Weimar Republic around the same time: Hanns Heiß, for instance, who considers the expression of
Exoticism as one of the most iridescent terms in the history of literature, defines it as the “Freude
am Fremdartigen” in the broadest sense, an attitude that prevailed among many Germans.28 A
few years earlier, the sociologist Georg Schimmel had already attributed the yearning for foreignness to the German national character. He asserts that the German mentality comprises
26 Segalen, Victor. (1918) 2002. Essay on Exoticism – An Aesthetic of Diversity, translated and edited by Yael
Rachel Schlick. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1.
27 Rosaldo, Renato. 1993. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. New York and London: Routledge,
quoted in Charles Forsdick. 2001. “Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism.” Paragraph 24 (3): 20.
28 Heiss, Hanns. (1920) 1923. “Rezension zu Friedrich Brie: Exotismus der Sinne. Eine Studie zur Psychologie
der Romantik.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 46: 339, quoted in Thomas Schwarz. 2010. “Exotismus: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Revision” German Studies in India. Beiträge aus der Germanistik in
not only a love for Germanness itself but also for otherness, embracing wanderlust and the “historische Sinn,” the ability to appropriate the spirits of other nations.29
However, Thomas Schwarz notes that this widespread appreciation of diversity was not perceived positively by all Germans. The nineteenth century had already marked a nationalistic turning point that opposed compliances with cosmopolitanism and Exoticism in its ‘positive’ sense, i.e. as a genuine interest in foreign cultures.30 Especially rooted in anti-Semitic ideals,
this fascination with foreignness became partly associated with the notion of “Ausländerei” – an addiction to foreignness – which was considered a problematic quality of Germans by the early twentieth century, with claims that they were reluctant to resist the invasion of ‘ungerman’ conventions.31 Turning away from the anti-Semitic mindset, further criticism was expressed in
the art world, inspired by an influential literary estate publication of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings in 1906, in which he associates the exotic mentality with the desire to imitate, resulting in the consequential disguise of the soul.32 Such readings already implicate notions of
idealization – which I will return to in my analyses of the selected films – and pose a paradoxical viewpoint in comparison to the mostly negative connotations that ideas around Exoticism and
Orientalism entail. Most remarkable for the era, art historian Carl Einstein describes Exoticism
as a means to sustain the pre-war imperialism, followed by a publication by the cultural historian Wilhelm Hausenstein, who asserts that it was the “colonialist policy of the nineteenth century” which induced the “interest for the exotic” in the first place.33
German Exoticism, or Orientalism, (both terms refer to a similar approach here, namely the treatment of a non-European Other) has thus never been one “single, shared discourse,” as Suzanne Marchand points out.34 Rather, there have been divergent modes of thought, not only
in terms of historical meanings that evolved over time, but also in the form of opposing stances within the very same eras. Marchand herself distinguishes between four strains of Orientalism in Germany: the positivist, furious, sociological and racial. The sociological and racial strains became more pervasive in academic circles from 1933 onwards, the former especially among
Islamforscher who were interested in modern Eastern religions, politics and cultures, and the
latter as a development out of the “Aryanist and hyperdiffusionist traditions of Leopold von
29 Simmel, Georg. (1916) 1999. “Die Dialektik des deutschen Geistes.” In Der Krieg und die geistigen
Entscheidungen, Gesamtausgabe, edited by Ottheim Rammstedt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 30, quoted in
Schwarz, 5.
30 Schwarz, 3. 31 Ibid., 2-4.
32 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1906. Der Wille zur Macht. Stuttgart: Kröner, 62, quoted in Schwarz, 6.
33 Einstein, Carl. (1926) 1988. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Leipzig: Reclam, 225, quoted in Schwarz, 6;
Hausenstein, Wilhelm. 1927. Kunstgeschichte. Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, quoted in Schwarz, 6, my translation.
Schroeder,” which position the Aryan (Indo-German) origin as the single “‘culture-carrying’ branch” of our spiritual existence, shaping the foundations for the impending progression of racism and the denial of “Christianity’s Jewish roots.”35
Much earlier, the notion of a positivist Orientalism was initiated by Franz Bopp who, in questioning linguistic origins, began searching for relations between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and German, and in his studies neglected Semitic languages completely, which became the starting point of the segregations of “Semitic and Indo-European languages” altogether.36 What
followed was a series of investigations that on one hand singled out the “‘darker’ peoples of the East” in some cases, the Semites in others, culturally as well as linguistically, and on the other hand, attempt to identify a “common root” among them.37 What the latter demonstrates in the
first half of the nineteenth century, is that “race was not yet a stable concept.”38
The “furious generation,” in Marchand’s terms, originated with a movement in the late nineteenth century when “classical learning and scholarly positivism came under attack” as a result of growing dissatisfactions with “cultural institutions that seemed outdated and unable to provide Germans with either a reliable account of their descent or an inspiring vision of their future.” The furors consequentially turned to “a wider, deeper, and more powerful Orient,” an idealized vision of the East.39
By the end of the Great War, many influential furors had died.40 Furthermore, recalling
Germany’s devastating post-war conditions as outlined in the introduction of this thesis, Oriental practices became more difficult to execute as a result of the economic crisis that prevented people from traveling, as well as Germany’s wounded relations to other European and non-European countries, the loss of its colonies, and “the collapse of its great ‘oriental’ ally, the Ottoman Empire,” which led to the country’s total isolation.41 However, one notable
consequence of these conditions was their “intensification of the positivistic linguistic tradition in academic circles,” and, as a counterreaction to it, the rise of neoromantic Orientalism, which was predominantly interested in the “mystery, sexuality and soulfulness” of exotic countries.42
More and more writers turned to Oriental narratives and motives in their works and became interested in the spirituality of Eastern nations.43 The establishment of the Schule der Weisheit
35 Schröder, Leopold von. 1909. “Wesen und Ursprung der Religion, ihre Wurzeln und deren Entfaltung.” Aus
baltischer Geistesarbeit 9: 135, quoted in Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 483, 313.
36 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 126. 37 Ibid., 127. 38 Ibid., 130. 39 Ibid., 216. 40 Ibid., 476-487. 41 Ibid., 480. 42 Ibid., 481. 43 Ibid.
in 1919 by Hermann Graf Keyserling marks a new chapter in this field with a focus on the “Orient as the starting point for critiques of European utilitarianism and spiritual shallowness.”44
2.3 EVADING THE POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXTS OF ORIENTALISM IN WEIMAR CINEMA
Proceeding towards retrospective readings of the Weimar era, especially from the late 1940s onwards, and focusing primarily on its entertainment world, I want to start by looking at two historically influential works that are today considered the building blocks for analyses conducted on Weimar cinema more generally, but are also often criticized for omitting certain aspects in their accounts of the given era.45 These works are Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari
to Hitler (1947) and Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen (1952).
While Eisner is primarily concerned with the aesthetics that emerged in the Weimar era, focusing first and foremost on the style of Expressionism, Kracauer’s psycho-historical approach centers around the psychological layers of a collective mentality’s subconscious mind, and inevitably involves an analysis of Germany’s political implications.46 Both readings
are to some extent restrictive. Kracauer deals with a constrained timeframe that begins with the emergence of German cinema in 1895 and ends in the pre-Hitler period around 1933 without consulting further historical derivations that might have developed a national identity over longer periods time.47 Whereas Eisner, on the contrary, does not limit her analysis to the early
twentieth century by placing Expressionism in connection with the theatrical influences of German Romanticism, she largely remains within the realm of aesthetics and thus lacks the political connotations that Kracauer insists on.
Both works, written after the Second World War, could have pointed out the disputable depictions of foreign nations, perhaps even in a colonial context, as Carl Einstein and Wilhelm Hausenstein had demonstrated in relation to the artworld much earlier. Especially Kracauer, who focuses explicitly on political circumstances, surprisingly disregards the connections between acts of stereotyping Others in film and acts of othering Jewish cultures in Germany’s unfortunate reality. Instead, he justifies the films’ exaggerations and their defiance to take historic accuracy seriously as a reaction to the war and a compensation for the soul: “characterizing history as meaningless” has “certainly poured balm on the wounds of
44 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 482. 45 Rogowski, The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, 2. 46 Kabatek, 13.
innumerable Germans.”48 Eisner labels “[t]he flood of historical films that swamped the
German cinema from 1919 to 1923-24” – a category that largely includes Oriental films –
Kostümfilme, and describes them as “an expression of the escapism of a poverty-stricken,
disappointed nation.”49 Her justification of the emergence as well as the popularity of such films
is thus similarly war-related, and her indications to any ‘Oriental’ qualities throughout her book refer merely to the aesthetics of exotic countries within the films’ constructions of their mise-en-scène.50
As opposed to the historical writings of Kracauer and Eisner, Thomas Elsaesser’s book on Weimar Cinema and After is a contemporary take on the films of the Weimar era and examines them in the context of the nation’s construction of a “historical imaginary.”51
Referring to “Kracauer’s sociopsychological speculation about Germans’ authoritarian leanings and Eisner’s art-historical focus on Germans’ soul-searching solipsism,” Christian Rogowski outlines the substance of Elsaesser’s analysis as follows:
Giving the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan a socio-political twist, Elsaesser labels these closely related – but not identical – notions of a supposedly stable German identity a ‘historical imaginary,’ a term that highlights the constructedness of national identity as a product of projection and desire (rather than an expression of an inner essence or actuality) on the part of Weimar-era domestic and international audiences.52
While Elsaesser thus clearly takes the role of the spectator into consideration, and thereby concurrently consults the social, political and economic contexts that this “projection and desire” of the audience is inevitably implicated in, he nonetheless fails to use his all-encompassing contextual approach to its full potential. The importance of Elsaesser’s omission here is rooted in his acknowledgement of the spectator’s and the nation’s construction of the “imaginary” in question. If, according to Rogowski, acts of projecting and desiring are the driving forces as part of such a construction, Elsaesser should have been aware of notions like escapism or a nostalgia for colonialism that the cinematic products of the Weimar era – especially the films that incorporate foreign depictions – distinctly imply. Consequently, what he fails to identify is that the fabrication of an image on which such desires can be projected in the first place presupposes certain forms of difference between the creator of the image and its subjectby default, no matter if these desires tend toward positive conceptions (for instance by means of idealizations of certain cultures) or negatives ones (by constructing stereotypes).
48 Kracauer, 53.
49 Eisner, Lotte. (1952) 1965. The Haunted Screen. London: Thames and Hudson, 75. 50 Ibid., 118, 238.
51 Elsaesser, Thomas. 2000. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. Oxon and New York:
Routledge, 4.
Relying on his own methods of a new film historical analysis, prompting us to look at a film not merely in its autonomy, but to reflect on the influential forces that have informed its emergence and perceptions from the moments of its production throughout its existence across several decades, how come that this notion of the Other in a socio-political condition that is perhaps the most significant aspect of the era we are looking at remains simply unmentioned? What Elsaesser’s analysis omits has been partially picked up on by other scholars, albeit in discussions that, to the likes of Kracauer and Eisner’s assertions, tend to hold the country’s post-war conditions responsible for the emergence of Oriental fantasies. I will explore these debates in the following section of this chapter.
2.4 DEBATES ON ORIENTALISM IN WEIMAR CINEMA
With regard to Germany, many scholars attribute the popularity of Oriental motifs in the media to the nation’s thirst for escapism at the height of its post-war desolation (Béord and Merlo, Ellis, Hake, Rogowski, Carl-Erdmann Schönfeld). Others identify colonial associations, claiming that Eastern depictions were mainly induced by the loss of Germany’s colonies during the Great War (Ascárate, Bernstein, Walk, Ellis). Furthermore, there have been debates about the West’s idealization of the Orient as a reaction to modernism (Ascárate, Béord and Merlo). Fewer significant discussions focus on the postcolonial connections (á la Said) that these Oriental representations implicate (Kabatek, Scherer), while others deny such relations altogether (Christiane Schönfeld). Finally, from the production perspective, Oriental depictions are essentially seen as economic measures in the early twentieth century’s cinematic race between Europe and the United States (Thompson).
I want to begin by looking at one of the most prevalent interpretations that such depictions have precipitated: the cinematic escapism. Drawing on the socio-political and economic situation of the Weimar Republic after the lost war, as outlined above, Germans who were losing faith in “the culture of the West” were now longing for faraway lands to “escape the political instability and economic deprivation” that their country was facing.53 “[T]he lavish
sets and extravagant costumes, together with exotic locales and exciting adventures, appealed to the desire to indulge in visions of plenty, at times even of excess,” and allowed for retreats
53 Schönfeld, Carl-Erdmann. 1995. “Franz Osten’s The Light of Asia (1926): a German-Indian film of Prince
Buddha.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15 (4): 1; Ellis, Robin. 2012. “People-Watching:
Völkerschau Viewing Practices and The Indian Tomb (1921).” Ein Buch des Andenkens: Essays in Honor of Heidi Thomann Tewarson, edited by Steven R. Huff and Dorothea Kaufmann, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
from the country’s devastating realities.54 These are the readings of Christian Rogowski,
Carl-Erdmann Schönfeld, and Robin Ellis, similarly construed by Théry Béord and Achim Alan Merlo, who perceive the Oriental movement as “an art of escape,” and Sabine Hake, who especially addresses Ernst Lubitsch’s costume films in escapist contexts.55 Such readings
generally construct an Orientalism that stands “against the Occident,” an idea that is very much in correspondence with the idealization of the East.56
Gandhi draws attention to the functions of positive Oriental representations, especially with regard to “affirmative stereotypes,” which fashion “the ‘East’ as a utopian alternative to Europe.” These idealizations serve as a critique of “the aggressive capitalism and territorialism of the modern West.”57 While there was initially a common cultural belief among writers and
philosophers who perceived Asia as a spiritual, timeless haven, these views were quickly adapted by filmmakers and became the subjects of numerous storylines in the 1920s.58 In
Germany, there was a special interest in the Indian Buddhist culture, which became for many Germans an alternative to “the alienation engendered by industrial mass society.”59 But even
more generally, according to Béord and Merlo, Western fantasies and depictions of Eastern cultures idealized the Orient’s “pure social forms” and its authenticity, untouched by the progresses of modernism.60 This search for purity and authentic representation can also be
detected in other forms of mass entertainment, such as the Völkerschau, “the public display of exotic human specimens,” which Ellis places in direct comparison with the trend of ethnic depictions in film. Yet, as colonialism progressed, the untouched primitive authenticity became increasingly rare and resulted in a sentiment that Rosaldo refers to as “imperialist nostalgia,” which mourns the slow decline of the purity and primitiveness of the East with the rise of imperialism.61 What remains problematic about such readings, despite the fact that they appear
to praise the foreign cultures that are represented, is that this general interest in diversity as a result of a modern-time inclination toward standardizations stresses Eurocentric difference – a consequence that is often overlooked. While audiences outwardly appear to be longing for the pure and untouched primitiveness of the Other, what remains out of focus is the fact that the
54 Rogowski, Christian. 2009. “Movies, Money, and Mystique: Joe May’s Early Blockbuster, The Indian Tomb
(1921).” In Weimar Cinema. The Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, edited by Noah Isenberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 177.
55 Béord, Théry and Achim Alan Merlo. 2017. “Orientalism in Celluloid: The Production of the ‘Crazy Year.’”
Social and Management Research Journal 14 (2): 110.
56 Ibid., 118. 57 Ghandi, 78. 58 Ascárate, 360. 59 Ibid., 361; Ellis, 190. 60 Béord and Merlo, 111. 61 Ellis, 196, 189-190.
subject is otherized before it can be idealized in the first place, which is what Wolfgang Kabatek and Frank Scherer identify in their investigations, as I will outline below.
With the notion of the Völkerschau emerges a third reading of Oriental imagery in the Weimar era: the colonial gaze. Returning briefly to Germany’s colonial history, Said claims that “the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual.”62 Ellis and
Marchand, rejecting such claims, point out the country’s “‘actual’ relationship with the East,” as well as the significance of its colonial history to the nation:63
Beginning in 1885, Germany had acquired territories in parts of Africa, China and several islands in the Pacific Ocean. Although these holdings were few compared to those of Britain or France, the imagination of Germany as a colonial empire helped create a unified national identity.64
To look at Oriental depictions in a colonial context thus requires an implication of the nation’s desire to keep the “imperialist ideology” alive as a fantasy.65 Furthermore, Ellis claims
that these depictions were a means to elevate “the civilized spectator above primitive subjects on the basis of racial origin.”66 Since we are looking at an era before mass tourism, this was
largely only possible through cinematic excursions, leading to Ascárate’s allusion to the terms “armchair tourism and fantasy colonialism.”67
From a postcolonial perspective that highlights the act of othering non-European origins, Kabatek and Scherer offer discussions which consider the political implications that
Orientalism entails. Kabatek writes of the cinema as an imagination machine that in the modern
times allows powerful agents to represent the Other and its heterotopies. In Weimar cinema, he argues, authoritative characters wield power over them.68 In this process, the foreign Other is
conceptualized in an ambivalent depiction of what Kabatek calls “seduction and deterrence, enchantment and threat,” both of which are binaries that Europeans do not recognize in themselves.69 Scherer, who resorts to “psychoanalytical thought and post-colonial theory,”
focuses especially on the “concealing and supposedly healing [of] a narcissistic wound by way of its emphasis on Eurocentric difference.”70 He highlights the fact that the “Orientalist imagery
ideologically reinforces the alleged superiority of an advanced industrialized German
62 Said, 19.
63 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, xix. 64 Ellis, 188. 65 Ibid., 206. 66 Ibid., 189. 67 Ascárate, 360. 68 Kabatek, 10. 69 Ibid., 10, my translation. 70 Scherer, 94.
Gesellschaft.”71 Like Kabatek, he looks at the function of binary oppositions, starting with the
simplest, Occident versus Orient and West versus East, that then evolve into a series of further contrasts: “modern/traditional, civilized/primitive, advanced/backward, rational/irrational, self/other, male/female, active/passive, colonizer/colonized, and so forth.”72
McCormick’s essay on the politics of Sumurun goes even a step further and refers to Weimar Germany’s anti-Semitic context in relation to Oriental representations. It traces the director’s Jewish background, asking specifically what it meant for a Jew to make a film about exotic otherness in an era and a country where the idea of Orientalism did not address the Orient directly, but rather referred to Jews, or, more specifically, to Ostjuden. He notes that Said himself has made a reference to the possibility of equating anti-Semitism and Orientalism: “That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth.”73 This is a debate that deserves
more attention and should be taken into consideration when examining Oriental depictions in Weimar cinema.
To consider Kristin Thompson’s ideas around the economic drive behind Oriental motifs – although less relevant to this debate, but nonetheless considered a major motivation for the productions of such contents – we must look even further West. Matthew Bernstein points out that “[i]n Hollywood […] the representations of the East – typically titillating viewers with the thrills of unbridled passion, miscegenation, and wild adventure in a raw and natural setting – were by the teens conventional constructions.”74 Since the United States were
Europe’s biggest competitor, not only regarding the production of films, but also their film exports to other countries, the Lichtbildbühne – the first and one of the most significant German film magazines of that era – introduced the concept of ‘Film Europe’ in 1924, which asked the European film industry to stand in unity against its strong competitor, and suggested that “European filmmakers adopt an international approach” in order to avoid confusion with intentions of propaganda.75 Directors like Joe May or Ernst Lubitsch were already familiar with
such strategies: “their adventure films, historical costume dramas, and exotic fantasies camouflaged their German origins” from the outset.76 Other filmmakers, such as Franz Osten,
71 Scherer, 93. 72 Ibid., 94.
73 Said, 27-28, quoted in Richard W. McCormick. 2010. “Desire versus Despotism: The Politics of Sumurun
(1920), Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Oriental’ Fantasy.” In The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany's
Filmic Legacy, edited by Christian Rogowski. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 71.
74 Bernstein, Matthew. 1997. “Introduction.” In Visions of the East – Orientalism in Film, edited by Matthew
Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 3.
75 Thompson, Kristen. 1996. “National or International Films? The European Debate during the 1920s.” Film
History 8 (3): 284-285.
Richard Eichberg or Paul Wegener, quickly adapted this approach. For economic and political reasons, non-German depictions thus became more dominant in Weimar Germany’s film productions.
3 METHODOLOGY AND SELECTION OF CASES
In this chapter, I will outline the driving forces that have motivated the specific selection of films I want to examine, as well as the analytical methods I intend to apply for such investigations, in order to demonstrate the ways in which the Orient has been dealt with in the popular media of the Weimar years.
3.1 THE CASES
Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun, Franz Osten’s Die Leuchte Asiens and Lotte Reiniger’s Die
Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed are three cases that not only exemplify the different Oriental
regions that Weimar Germany was essentially preoccupied with – namely, the Middle East, India, and the Far East, respectively – but also incorporate three different visual techniques and cinematic approaches to implement their Eastern representations. Their constructions constitute two extremes that range between seemingly authentic ethnographic delineations and fantastical portrayals. The former is represented in Franz Osten and Himansu Rai’s German-Indian collaboration that perhaps comes closest to accurate depictions of India according to its era, as it is based on an ancient Indian myth, was shot on location without the use of artificially constructed sets, and stars solely Indian actors in the roles of Indian characters. Lubitsch’s stereotypical and extravagant costume film is situated in-between the two oppositions, with a tendency toward imaginary delineations, and is commonly perceived as a fantasy or fairytale that takes the form of an overtly exaggerated mimicry of Middle Eastern cultures from a Western perspective. On the other side of the spectrum, we have Reiniger’s silhouette animation which creates fantastic Oriental worlds, ranging from fictional places evocative of the Middle East all the way to China, without being directly rooted in physical imitation.
These three films are representative models of the different prevalent cinematic approaches in the Weimar era and illustrate the ideas that are inherent in the country’s understandings of, and attitudes towards, foreignness and alterity: by covering the three broad territories of the Asian continent, which are, by and large, commonly generalized as the Orient, they offer insights into the implications such distinctive regions connote to the German mentality, and show to what extent the literary influences that prevailed during that time, which I have touched upon in the previous chapter, were affective or conflictive with their portrayals. Having made a selection based on their diverging approaches, I want to look at the ways in which such aspects play into the underlying predications that these films indicate. The two traits that are combined here – the geographical factors and the use of cinematic style – are, in fact, closely related and inform each other in the process of determining the nature of foreign cultural
representations inherent in the films’ narratives, as I will demonstrate in my analyses in the following chapters.
Some common issues that these narratives deal with, which exemplify the broader discourses that foreign depictions in the given era comprise, are related to prejudiced constructions of the stereotype, such as the evil despot, the oppressed woman, the subordinate slave or servant, and the wicked sorcerer. These stereotypes highlight Eurocentric difference by drawing out clear distinctions between the represented Other and the European self. Furthermore, the eroticization of the Oriental woman generates gendered power structures that stress patriarchal and often closely related and implied colonial differences. In the exceptional case of India, the portrayals transmit spiritualizations and idealizations of the othered culture with the effect of a domestication that trivializes and defangs the represented country.
The scenes that I want to focus on to explore such problematic assertions by means of a close textual reading of their underlying discourses reflect on these matters explicitly. Considering the Western assumptions that the harem entails, namely, in Edward Said’s terms, as a place that implies “sexual promise (and threat),” the first harem sequence of Sumurun explicitly lays out the power relations within such constellations under the influence that these assumptions implicate: a space that privileges male domination and allows for sexual fantasies to play out.77 The harem is often associated with Middle Eastern or Islamic countries more
broadly and becomes a means of generalizing the preconceived gendered hierarchies of the East from a Western standpoint. By using this space to construct a scene that brings together several elements and characters in the film’s careful design of such power structures, involving a representative of the outside world – the garment merchant, the despotic ruler and his rival son who are both after the desired Oriental woman, as well as depictions of the oppressed and maltreated eunuchs of the harem, this scene grants valuable insights into the ways in which such structures are generated through the film’s narrative by exposing the nature of the interactions between them.
The depictions of the harem in Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed differ in the sense that they focus predominantly on the explicit visualization of sexual fantasies that such a space implicates. I will consider this sequence with regard to the following scenes of Achmed’s voyeuristic discovery of Pari Banu and her subsequent abduction as well as the third act of the film in which the African Sorcerer sells Pari Banu to the Chinese emperor, in order to foreground certain parallels – primarily in terms of gendered power structures as similarly evident in Sumurun – that the different Oriental regions in the film establish. While the Middle
East is represented by places that partly remain unidentified (the city of the caliph), or are fictional (the magic island Wak-Wak), China is contrarily depicted as a real and concrete place, and despite being overtly imaginative in its aesthetic delineation, it features problematic stereotypical representations that degrade and otherize its culture, among others in the processes of the above-mentioned constructions of hierarchies.
In stark contrast to Sumurun and Achmed, the wedding ceremony of Die Leuchte Asiens is among the many sequences of the film that constitute spiritual portrayals of an idealized country, while simultaneously stressing its strangeness and otherness. What I consider crucial about this particular sequence is the fact that it is representative of the film’s overall position toward the Indian culture, while at the same time including certain elements – such as its direct treatment of the female body, which wedding scenes tend to particularly foreground, or the interactions between Gautama, the male hero of the film, and Gopa, who epitomizes the desired Oriental woman – that can be directly compared and contrasted with their regional counterparts as represented in the other two selected films. The scene shows not only closed interactions between individuals but also offers portrayals of the Indian culture with its rich traditions more broadly by depicting conventional rituals that involve the country’s population and take the action to the streets of India.
The parallels as well as differences between the three films can be pinpointed primarily through their geographical focus and inform the logic of the order in which I intend to tackle their underlying discourses. The imaginative world of the Middle East in Sumurun tends toward generalizations of Islamic countries that fall under the rubric of the Orient, and could be considered as a common and conventional model in medial delineations of Oriental narratives and aesthetics. Beginning with an analysis of Lubitsch’s classic stereotypical rendition of an Oriental fairytale, perhaps the most mainstream out of the three films, I will move on to Osten and Rai’s Die Leuchte Asiens with its explicit reference to a specific country and culture, which allows for concrete and thus relatively accurate representations. Ending with the least common example – the first ever feature-length animation – Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed combines both elements stated above, depicting the Middle East as an unspecified region, while rendering an image of China as a concrete place. My investigation thus turns from the vague toward the more specific definitions of the Orient, and finally looks at an example that covers both features.
3.2 ANALYTICAL METHODS
As my introduction and theoretical framework indicate, my analysis below will be concerned not only with the text itself but will furthermore consider the social, political and economic
influences that played into the production and the reception of the films in question. A close textual reading of the films next to a Foucauldian discourse analysis – carrying out Said’s analytical model in his approach to Orientalism – will become my key methods to investigate the Oriental structures in the selected films, since they specifically examine the portrayals of superiority and power structures in discourse, and, in the case of the medium of film, in visual language and semiotics. Yet the circumstances of their emergence must further be explored alongside their existence as a whole, since the texts are intricately rooted in a historical context. I will therefore complement the above-mentioned method with a historical (and to a lesser extent with a new film historical) approach, which will allow me to look at the ways in which such discourses initially came into being, focusing not only on the “object of study” itself but equally reflecting on “what counts as evidence” – considering the object as a “complex historical, sociological, legal and economic phenomenon” and determining the external factors that might have influenced the Oriental portrayals in question.78 In this regard, the two
analytical methods have a tendency to overlap, as a certain cultural knowledge that is “passed on and collectively applied” forms a nation’s or a society’s consciousness, which is a concern that both approaches deal with.79 This knowledge is crucial in the constructions and
understandings of a film’s discourse, while it is rooted in broader societal structures that can be determined more distinctly by a new film historical analysis. A comparative look at the selected films will furthermore allow for an identification of the parallels and differences between them and gives insights into the dominating features that characterize ideas of foreignness in the country’s cinematic delineation of such issues more generally.
78 Elsaesser, Thomas. 1986. “The New Film History.” Sight and Sound 55 (4): 247; Note that my focus lies less
on critical reception studies that reflect first and foremost on the role of the audience, which Elsaesser’s New Film History considers as a key analytical element. By looking at the historical context, I want to examine and incorporate the literary and political influences that prevailed in the Weimar era.
79 Jäger, Siegfried, and Florentine Maier. 2009. “Discourse and Knowledge: Theoretical and methodological
aspects of critical discourse analysis and dispositive analysis.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, Second Edition, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage, 35.
4 SUMURUN’S PORTRAYAL OF THE MIDDLE EAST
4.1. BACKGROUND – COMMERCIALISM OR PROGRESSIVE ACTIVISM?
Born in Berlin with Russian Jewish roots, Ernst Lubitsch was often seen as the perennial outsider of a society he tried to fit in so imperatively.80 Despite the fact that he is considered
“the eternal German, the well-adjusted immigrant, the subversive immoralist, and the mercenary conformist,” the awareness of his “marginal position as a Jew in Germany” cannot be readily overlooked. Sabine Hake points out that many critics have problematically alluded to his attempts at disguising his origins by means of commercialism and his inclination to adapt a certain cinematic style in order to assimilate and acculturate.81 If we briefly review the
popularization of visual excesses and exotic motifs as outlined in the theoretical framework chapter of this thesis, Lubitsch’s Sumurun, among many other of his films, undoubtedly conforms to the trends of its era in terms of his visual compositions and the stylistic elements that he resorts to. On the other hand, Hake also makes reference to the revolutionary assertions inherent in the contents of his films; with regard to Sumurun, this particularly refers to the film’s empowerment of marginalized characters, especially of women and servants, as McCormick explores in greater detail.82 While his cinematic style perhaps corresponded to the mainstream
traditions of the given era, the underlying implications of his films are contrarily bold and subversive.
Sumurun is based on a pantomime by Friedrich Freksa (1909); its theatrical influences
are highly conspicuous in its overemphasis on physical gestures and facial expressions that fabricate an inclination toward a grotesque and farcical nature. The title page of the original theatrical script describes that the piece is “based on ‘oriental fairy-tale motifs,’”an element that we are also immediately introduced to with the opening titles of the film itself: “Orientalisches Spiel in sechs Akten.”83 From this information, we can prematurely deduce the
film’s conscious placement within popular culture and its intent to meet consumer demands by attracting spectators’ attention thematically from the very beginning. As a result of the film’s ambition to please its viewers, it feeds upon stereotypical representations by fantasizing about the spaces of harems and their connotations with sexual desire and polygamous relations from a Western perspective. Evil sheiks, oppressed slaves, demasculinized eunuchs, greedy jugglers, beautiful harem women in elaborate garments – Sumurun paints a picture of an Oriental world that does not lack any form of stereotype generated by the Occident. If the film’s principal
80 Hake, Sabine. 1992. Passions and Deceptions. The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 9.
81 Ibid., 7.
82 see McCormick. 83 Ibid., 68.
predications are revolutionary, it nonetheless fails to avoid the fabrications of discriminating delineations of the Middle East, as my analysis below will demonstrate.
4.2 AN ANALYSIS OF SUMURUN’S ORIENTALIST STRUCTURES
Based on Freksa’s pantomime, the tale of Sumurun is set in ninth century Baghdad.84 The fact
that this specific piece of information is not explicitly stated at any point throughout the film initiates a generalization of Middle Eastern cultures by offering an arbitrary perspective of distant lands and eras that are by no means worth specifying. Instead, the first reference to a geographical location is a slave’s allusion to the status of a slave trader who is allegedly the most esteemed dealer of the “Morgenland,” the Orient. In connection with such ambiguities regarding the film’s geographical and temporal setting, Germany’s lack of an actual affiliation with this part of the Asian continent entails an implicit permission to hyperbolize, dramatize and fantasize out of proportions. Such conditions become an essential component to facilitate the film’s stereotypical representations outlined in the previous section.
In this chapter, I want to take a closer look at a segment of the film’s first harem sequence (00:09:35-00:14:51) which combines in the short duration of a few minutes almost all of the stereotypical elements listed above. Next to the discriminating features established by the film’s development of the stereotype, the eroticization of the Eastern world, and especially of the Oriental woman, plays a crucial role in its construction of an appropriated image of the generalized East. The film’s tendency to otherize the represented culture in the process of appropriating its image is closely related to such eroticizations, as it seems to be a prerequisite for an erotic interest practiced by the West in the first place.
4.2.1 THE ORIENTAL STEREOTYPE AND THE APPROPRIATION OF A WESTERN IMAGINARY MODEL
As my sequence analysis table in the appendix of this thesis indicates, the segment opens with an establishing shot of the empty harem: a large room with high ceilings, vaulted passages that lead to other spaces in the far distance, an abundance of textiles (cushions and curtains) and decorative Oriental furniture (mostly side tables scattered across the room, as well as a chandelier) – a normative rendition of what the visualization of a Middle Eastern setting would comprise.85 The symmetry of this shot with the sheik entering through the curtains at the center
of the frame immediately defines his presence as an authoritative and majestic figure. Conducting himself as if he is in control of all activities that take place in this closed space, he
84http://www.murnau-stiftung.de/filmtheater/kinoprogramm/sumurun (accessed 24/04/19).
