UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores early twentieth-century German film culture in the context of industrialization and its environmental effects. I argue that efforts to manage the environmental impacts of industrialization on urban space shaped film exhibition, production, and aesthetics.

Rapid modernization beginning in the late nineteenth century generated crowded and unsanitary living conditions in German cities. These problems in turn led to a range of responses on the part of public health experts, urban planners, architects, engineers, and others. As a paradigmatic technology of urban modernity, which many viewed as a symptom and agent of industrial blight, cinema became an object of environmental management. Municipal authorities regulated exhibition sites in order to safeguard urban space. Commercial theater operators saw potential profit in creating inviting and temperate spaces distinct from the urban environment outside. Advocates of the German film reform movement saw the image itself as an environmental hazard that placed excessive demands on the viewer's psyche and exposed audiences to undesirable aspects of modern life. Environmental controls were also instituted in film production in order to manage what would appear within the space of the frame.

Reformers and artists also worked to identify and exploit the medium's possibilities for promoting health. For the film reform movement, this meant disseminating hygienic knowledge (through educational films) or providing exposure to healthy environments (through nature films). Studio filmmaking privileged an aesthetic of individuation, in which objects in the image--particularly human bodies and faces--could be clearly distinguished from their surroundings. Street films like The Street (1923) and M (1931), moreover, used the studio and the camera to model urban space and render its ecology visible for consumption by film audiences.

Others saw in film a chance to transgress normative ideals of the relationship between environment and organism. For critics like Béla Balázs, rather than maintaining the organism-environment boundary, the film experience solicited a pleasurable fusion between spectator and image. In Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927), Walter Ruttmann depicted urban space as an inhuman visual ecology accessible only through the perceptual prosthesis of cinema. The political modernism of artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, and Erwin Piscator amalgamated transformative and normative visions of the organism-environment relationship. In projects like the poly-cinema and the Total Theater, they hoped to harness the moving image to recalibrate the spectator in a way that re-established human mastery over a mechanized environment.