UC Berkeley

In my dissertation I examine the ways in which the concept of authorship, and its related discourses of authority, control, and artistic value, were destabilized by the introduction of the new film medium. Film not only represented collaborative work on an unprecedented scale, it was a mechanical technology that functioned without the spoken word. These characteristics resisted association with literary and artistic value, understood in the German context primarily through the figure of the Dichter (poet). This not only made it an object of intense criticism as supposedly valueless entertainment, the very way in which films were made, marketed, and received struggled to find language and frameworks to conceptualize film and filmmakers. I trace these changes through analyses of the reception of the films Der Student von Prag (1913), Phantom (1922), and Die Dreigroschenoper (1931). In particular I look at the way the writers, producers, directors, or actors of these films are represented as the originators, primary creative “voices,” or authorities of the production.