Lotte Eisner: a reappraisal Introduction

A curious paradox haunts the work of the exile Jewish writer, archivist and curator Lotte H. Eisner. Fabled for her writings on Weimar cinema as well as auteur studies of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, Eisner also enjoys legendary status as a doyenne of the French and German New Waves during her three decades as Chief Curator at the Cinémathèque française.¹ But she is at the same time a strangely elusive presence, even amongst critics who share her view of ‘visceral […] atmospheric’ mise-en-scene as Weimar cinema’s signal contribution to film art. Patrice Petro deems Eisner ‘almost certainly right’ for her incisive delineation, in her seminal post-war study The Haunted Screen, of Weimar cinema’s ‘distinctive moods’.² Thomas Elsaesser similarly counts himself amongst Eisner’s ‘followers’, and draws at length on her writings on lighting, set design, camera, editing and directorial practice for his account of Weimar cinema as ‘Germany’s historical imaginary’.³ Elsaesser recognizes Eisner’s incisive grasp of cinema as a medium with the capacity to shape both fictional and lived worlds, and in so doing to help generate new social imaginaries. Yet Eisner remains for him a writer engaged in an ‘essentially stylistic history’ of German aesthetic practice from Romanticism through Expressionism to interwar film.⁴ In histories of Weimar criticism, Eisner’s significance is similarly underplayed, despite her extensive contributions during her time as journalist and editor on the daily trade paper Film-Kurier to the period’s lively cultural discourse on the new film medium. Archive histories, meanwhile, hint at but do not extensively investigate Eisner’s formative role in building, documenting and presenting the vast archival collections of the Cinémathèque française;⁵ conversely, critics have been quick to disparage her views on the apparently ‘innate’ German sensibility or ‘soul’ of Weimar cineastes – terms dismissed as critically obsolete, even while Eisner’s status as a venerated film-historical grande dame seems secure.⁶

Our dossier seeks to adjust this often impoverished account of Eisner’s work. Contributors explore continuities as well as discontinuities and productive anachronisms in Eisner’s critical and archival practice; they pursue strands from intellectual histories that shed new light on her contribution to film aesthetics; and they present insights from the archive that restore living contours to the figure once hypostasized by filmmaker Werner Herzog as ‘the last mammoth living among us’.⁷ Originating in an October 2018 symposium staged at King’s College London and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, the dossier makes five related arguments for a reframing of Eisner’s work within contemporary moving image aesthetics and media historiography.

Our first claim relates to Eisner’s film aesthetics. It was for many years the fate of Weimar film scholars to find their work indiscriminately bracketed under the heading of ‘German expressionism’. Eisner’s writing represents an early counter-model – and one that demands renewed attention in a field now richly populated by revisionist histories of Weimar cinema as a complex constellation of variegated star, genre and auteur practices, competing styles and industrial models, disputatious film-critical discourses, and exile, émigré and cosmopolitan mobilities. In the newly translated 1984 Cahiers du cinéma article on set design that accompanies this dossier, Eisner prefigures this recent scholarship when she cautions against tracing ‘to some assumed expressionist penchant’ Weimar cineastes’ ‘shap[ing of] the world around an interior vision.’ While for Eisner, Fritz Lang’s characteristic play with light and shadow may evoke expressionist style, his Die Nibelungen (1924) creates through set design and architecturally structured performance a monumental geometry that is, writes Eisner, the very ‘opposite of expressionism’. Lang’s ‘judicious […] mixing [of] different doses of light and shadow’ moves indeed well beyond stylistic innovation, becoming from her perspective an affectively generative practice that uses mise-en-scene, camera and performance ‘to create the necessary Stimmung (atmosphere)’.

Eisner’s identification in Lang of a neo-classical geometry overlaid with Expressionist elements is one instance of what Elsaesser calls the ‘fervent art-historical exegesis’ that she practises throughout her accounts of Weimar film.⁸ Michael Wedel and Janet Bergstrom join Elsaesser in emphasizing in this dossier the significance of Eisner’s art-historical background for an understanding of her work. As Wedel demonstrates, the acuity of Eisner’s aesthetic vision derives from an art-historical attunement to her object that alerts her to aesthetic qualities beyond the formal elements of film style. Centring his discussion on questions of mood and atmosphere, Wedel shows how Eisner’s grasp of film’s capacity to shape fictional worlds imbued with viscerally experienced atmosphere derives from earlier encounters during her art history training with German aesthetic theory. Wedel observes in Eisner in this context a recourse to her art historian mentor Heinrich Wölfflin, whose influential taxonomy of style was first elaborated in his 1915 study Kunstgeschichtliche Begriffe; das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Fundamental Concepts of Art History).⁹ As Wedel affirms, Wölfflin’s encounters with contemporary aesthetic theory, including the empathy theories of Johannes Volkelt and Robert Vischer, led him to root this stylistic history in conceptions of artistic expression as the ‘physical appearance of a mental process’.¹⁰

In her writings on Weimar film, Eisner developed this embodied approach to image analysis, extending Wölfflin’s idea of Stimmung in painting to film as a time-based medium that mobilizes the image, using a dynamic interplay between camera, mobile bodies and objects, shadow and light to infuse ‘life into surfaces’.¹¹ Although Eisner was neither a philosopher nor a film theorist – as Janet Bergstrom indicates in this dossier, her writing in her Murnau book in particular eschews the abstraction of universal pronouncements – in her aesthetic histories she nonetheless prefigures writings by 21st-century film philosophers whose concern is with film’s atmospheric enfolding of its audiences in lived fictional worlds. Echoing Wedel, Robert Sinnerbrink thus invokes ‘the great German film critic and historian Lotte Eisner’ as one source for a 21st-century aesthetics that understands mood – Stimmung – as ‘essential to our aesthetic and emotional engagement with film’ because it is ‘a way of revealing or opening up a cinematic world’.¹² In her account of a term also central to Eisner’s aesthetics – Umwelt, or surrounding world – Inga Pollmann pays similar tribute to Eisner alongside Weimar contemporaries including Willy Haas and Béla Balázs. For Pollmann, as previously for Eisner, Umwelt is the product of a process of cinematic world-making in which technologically produced environments define the horizon of spectatorial perceptions, but are also reshaped by spectators who mobilize their ‘perceptual capacities’ as ‘living beings’ to integrate and ‘innervate’ cinematic worlds.¹³

The first call this dossier makes in this context is for a closer attention to Eisner’s art-historical background as the source of a historical aesthetics that revolves around conceptions of what later writers will call cinematic world-making. Yet art history is not the sole disciplinary precursor for Eisner’s writings. The Haunted Screen, for instance, shows her sustaining a lively dialogue with early film theories (Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Kurtz); literary Romanticism and modernism (Jean Paul, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Gottfried Benn); aesthetic philosophy (Wilhelm Worringer); film history and criticism (Iris Barry, Paul Rotha); and perhaps most centrally, theatre criticism and history (Herbert Ihering, alongside Benno Fleischmann, whose study of theatre impresario Max Reinhardt amplifies Eisner’s own extensive insights into Reinhardt’s influence on interwar German film). Eisner’s polymorphous intellectual engagements generate across her writings a composite account of Weimar film in which Romantic conceptions of Germanic soul exist in uneasy friction with a parallel narrative of German national cinema as a dynamic and historically fluid intermedial assemblage. Eisner’s expansive references to painting, theatre, architecture, Romantic literature and the like reveal a conception of film as the product of a constellation of historically situated aesthetic practices which it is the historian’s task to reconstruct. At the same time, references to soul or spirit, as found in her comments in The Haunted Screen on Max Reinhard’s reconstruction of ‘Nordic man’s Faustian soul’, seem to locate Eisner’s writing within an idealist metaphysics of Nordic identity or Germanic soul.¹⁴

A second aim of this dossier is to point to ways of negotiating this contradiction between the putative idealism of Eisner’s writing on soul, and the grounding of her film history in a critical practice that is always attentive to the materiality and historicity of film art. The dossier joins Sarah Cooper in cautioning against any hasty dismissal of early film theories of soul, including Eisner’s. Arguing for recognition of the term’s ‘wide range of meanings’ in early cinema commentary, Cooper has identified in contemporary film theory a surprisingly similar interest in what can be understood as ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. Animation theory, for instance, mirrors early accounts of film’s spiritual dimensions in its discussions of animation as located ‘between a world in which everything is alive with spirit, and a world in which motion is governed by physical laws not subject to any vivifying agency’.¹⁵ Cooper’s related suggestion that ‘soul’, both in early film theory and in more recent film philosophy, becomes a secularized term that may displace idealist or spiritualist understandings, is pertinent to Eisner. As noted above, Eisner translates the uncanny feelings evoked by movements of light, shadow, bodies and camera in Weimar film into what are for her the palpably material qualities of mood and atmosphere. Her writing thus repeatedly shows Weimar cineastes drawing on aesthetic strategies and materials deriving from painting, theatre, music and architecture to create a ‘tapestry’ (an interestingly tangible metaphor) woven from both remembered and newly invented images, tropes, gestures, movements and forms.¹⁶

Bergstrom’s contribution to this dossier explores in more detail how Eisner charts the concrete practices through which Germany’s interwar filmmakers, such as F. W. Murnau, imbued film with soul or spirit by creating ‘total work[s] of film art, integrated on all levels, aesthetic and technical’. Bergstrom shows how Eisner in her Murnau book reconstructs in minute detail the production process of his films. This genetic-materialist approach, as Bergstrom also demonstrates, allows Eisner to mount a spirited defence of Murnau against detractors who attribute his style to other sources, such as the scriptwriter Carl Mayer. Julia Eisner and Naomi DeCelles continue this exploration of Eisner’s material film-cultural engagements when they turn to her biography to reconstruct the professional experiences that shaped her writing. Eisner the film historian emerges here as a figure intellectually and professionally formed by multifaceted activities first as journalist and critic, later as collector, archivist and Chief Curator at the Cinémathèque. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer and Michael Cowan paved the way to new anglophone understandings of this operative dimension to Eisner’s work when they included translated articles from her interwar journalism in their monumental document collection on German film theory across three pre- and post-World War I decades, The Promise of Cinema.¹⁷ Malte Hagener similarly presages our contributors’ perspectival shift from textual exegesis of Eisner’s works to an archive-based archaeology of her professional practice, when he notes Eisner’s ‘important work’ fostering ‘French cinephile culture’ through her collecting, archiving and curatorial activities at the Cinémathèque.¹⁸

Extracting from their own current research projects on Eisner in pre-war Berlin and post-war Paris, DeCelles and Julia Eisner complement the work of Kaes, Baer, Cowan and Hagener with case studies that show more clearly the specificities of Eisner’s contributions to what Hagener has termed ‘the emergence of film culture’.¹⁹ For DeCelles, Eisner’s interwar journalism at once ‘troubles distinctions between reportage, criticism, theory and commentary’, and unsettles the boundaries separating film commentary from other art-critical modes. The interdisciplinary richness noted by DeCelles as typical of Eisner situates her journalism squarely within interwar film culture as a ‘multidimensional and transnational complex’ through which ‘knowledge about the cinema [was] discursively produced, disseminated and propagated’.²⁰

Our dossier’s third argument, then, is for a reframing of Eisner’s journalistic, film-historical, archival and curatorial activities within the contemporary historiography of 20th-century film culture. A fourth contention is prefigured in a May 1928 feature article for Film-Kurier that we publish here in translation. Eisner recounts in this deliciously satirical piece the story of a visit to the Prussian Staatsbibliothek (State Library) to investigate what turn out to be the institution’s minimal and poorly catalogued holdings on film. She ends with a rhetorical question that points to our final dossier contribution, Julia Eisner’s reflections on Eisner’s archival activities at the Cinémathèque française. ‘What if’, Lotte Eisner muses, ‘within the framework of the Staatsbibliothek […] a systematic, comprehensive film library and the longed-for film archive were finally to be created, giving over to film the space that it deserves?’

Seventeen years later, in 1945, Eisner would play her own part in building at the Cinématheque française precisely such a ‘longed-for film archive’. Returning from hiding in rural France after previously escaping imprisonment in the Gurs internment camp, Eisner was appointed Chief Curator at the Cinémathèque with responsibility for developing the institution’s fledgling archive. Given her job title, and the many years she spent building and presenting the Cinémathèque collections, one might expect Eisner to figure prominently in post-war archive history. Her contribution is, however, regularly eclipsed in a historiography that pits Cinémathèque director Henri Langlois against the British Film Institute’s Ernest Lindgren as representatives of a defining dichotomy in post-war archival practice. The split embodied by these two giants of archive history is that between a cinephile model (Langlois) that prioritizes the ‘showing and sharing’ of archive film, and a preservationist model (Lindgren) focused around restoration and preservation as practices securing ‘the core asset of the global film archive … that of film heritage’.²¹

Julia Eisner inserts Lotte Eisner as a gendered third figure who troubles this muscular tale of two post-war archival Titans. Her essay draws on Eisner’s correspondence with key figures in Weimar film history, including Kracauer and production designer Erich Kettelhut, in an effort to relocate her conceptually as a ‘major collector of the material culture of film history’, and as a key actor in the reconstruction of post-war cinephile and film exile networks. But the last word in our dossier – and our fifth and final argument for revisiting her work – goes to Lotte Eisner herself. DeCelles notes in Eisner’s post-war journalism a regular defence of the role of the critic as ‘expert interlocutor’ and ‘advocate’ for the art of film. Such an approach to journalistic writing demands a nuanced attention to positionality, voice and difference: the critic’s difference from her object, or spatio-temporal clefts in the film-historical continuum, including most centrally for Eisner the catastrophe of German fascism. Such attention is certainly evident in the two pieces translated for this dossier. Here, as in her longer essays and monographs, Eisner’s prose style is notable for the precision of her descriptions; for a heteroglossia deriving from strategies of citation (seen in the long quotes, even in these two short articles); intermediality (as in the photo essays that pepper her longer studies); and bricolage construction, whereby her insights emerge through counterpoint, juxtaposition and aphoristic observation, as opposed to narrative linearity or Hegelian movements from thesis through antithesis to synthetic conclusion. Eisner’s modernist sensitivity to the immediacy of the moment is captured meanwhile in staccato sentences, a telegraph style, or the use of a present tense that takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the history of set design in her Cahiers piece. Her presence is equally palpable in her writing’s voice and tone; hence the irony of her persiflage of Prussian mores in the Film-Kurier, her eye for the ridiculous in confrontation with ‘the suspicious face of a library underling, moustache bristling’, but also her self-assured authority as she dissects the production stages of Murnau’s films to arrive at a what Bergstrom terms a ‘confident analysis’ of the development of his style. Eisner’s spirited condemnation in her Cahiers article of Nazi cinema’s ‘oleaginous splendours’ completes the picture of a critic always immersed in her historical moment, whose analyses can be just as productive for studies of political aesthetics and the cinema experience as for histories of early film style. Our dossier is offered as a contribution to these and other future re-purposings of Eisner’s writing, but also as a tribute to a body of work that situates Eisner, we suggest, as a figure whose contributions to film history, archival and curatorial practice, and media aesthetics cry out to be discovered anew.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in funding the symposium from which this dossier derives. The symposium was hosted by the German Screen Studies Network, King’s College London and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) as part of the DAAD-funded project, Circulating Cinema: The Moving Image Archive as Anglo German Contact Zone.