Caligari's Legacy?

The connection between German Expressionist cinema and American film noir has become one of the commonplaces of film history. ¹ Examining it once more, recalling or explaining it might be regarded as a matter of simple historical scholarship: tracing the stylistic or iconographic echoes, ² researching film maker's biographies, ³ and inserting both in European political history and — if a more sophisticated account is called for — in the context of national and international film economics. ⁴ I shall argue that before proceeding, there is an important question to ask. Does the connection itself rest on a sort of historical double bind that conflates two 'histories' (i.e. of German Expressionism and of Hollywood film noir), which are not only distinct, but to a large extent 'imaginary'? By placing them back to back, across a listing of German émigré directors, the histories are made to mirror each other in an infinite regress that has tended to produce a self-validating tautology, where mutually sustaining causalities pass off as film history what is in effect more like a time loop. However, precisely because this lineage from Weimar cinema to American film noir does not ultimately make sense as history if considered in terms of demonstrable cause and effect, agency and consequence, it is — and probably remains — of interest to film history. Both complexes describe aspects of the cinema that should be regarded as 'a veritable history of the false' in the cinema, rather than as examples of 'false history': another version of the German cinema's 'historical imaginary'. ⁵ This chapter, then, tries to sketch the affinity between the German cinema as a national cinema especially rich in such historical imaginaries, and film noir as a case pointing to the transnational nature of such historical imaginaries in the course of cinema's developments. ⁶