Early German Cinema

In the years before the first World War there developed in Germany a form of narrative film production very different from the Weimar cinema with which we are familiar. If we want to bring to light again (as Patrice Petro (1989) has done) the female public's connection with films made under the rubric of Autorenkino (auteur cinema), we may do so on the basis of the surviving examples from before the war. In particular between 1910 and 1912 German film production seems to have focused on stories portraying love and marriage; not until 1913 were they pushed aside by crime and adventure films. It is evident from the film publicity of the time how controversial women's participation in cinema-going was. Indispensable from an economic standpoint, their very presence among men in the dark space of the cinema seemed a danger to culture and society. In this chapter it will be argued that this conflict over women's participation in cinema is evident in the films themselves: on the one hand in the recognition in the films of their everyday lives, their interests and needs, and on the other in the regulation and suppression of this presence of female desire. Two modes in which early German cinema dealt with love stories may be distinguished: social drama and melodrama. The former has its origin in Danish film, the latter in traditions of light fiction and art. The coexistence of both forms indicates that aesthetic development is not a single process in which expression and censorship are inextricably linked. Cinema of this period displays rather the power of the expression of social reality against an official culture that denied reality, a power over and against which the new medium's mechanisms of reality denial were soon used to advantage.