ABSTRACT
Coming from outside the country, exiles have the privilege of being insider and yet removed from the cinematic tradition in Hollywood, acting as “strangers in the house” and directing a stranger’s gaze at what is familiar and unquestioned. The German filmmakers emigrating to the U.S. during World War II saw fascist practices, especially bigotry, violence, and scape-goating, emerge in their new homeland as well. Creating politically ambivalent fairy tales, their often horrific cinematic endeavors into film noir, they appended the Gothic and detective elements of these productions within the framework of a darker view of man’s existence and the moral universe of a gangster film filled with alienation and paranoia as well as criminals. Characters become both political allegories and pawns in the rhythms of alterity, all the while creating an ethics peculiar to this genre.
