Screening Transcendence , livre ebook

SCREENING TRANSCENDENCE
SCREENING TRANSCENDENCE
Film Under Austrofascism and The Hollywood Hope, 1933–1938
ROBERT DASSANOWSKY
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
© 2018 by Robert Dassanowsky
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dassanowsky, Robert, author.
Title: Screening transcendence : film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood hope, 1933–1938 / Robert Dassanowsky.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004764 (print) | LCCN 2018013278 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253033635 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253033628 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Austria—History—20th century. | Motion picture industry—Political aspects—Austria—History—20th century. | Motion picture industry—Austria—History—20th century. | Fascism and motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1993.5.A83 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.A83 D377 2018 (print) | DDC 791.43/0943609043—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004764
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
The principals of the cultural aims of the Action “New Life” a revival of Austrian national feeling, sound ideas on all questions of life, respect of the Christian, German, and cooperative ideas of new Austria are to be carried though in the world of the film. . . . The quality of Austrian film, by which it conquered the sympathies of the world, was also favorably influenced by the fact that Austria is a border country where the particularities of so many nations meet. The circumstances and the strong artistic powers of Austria allowed the foundation of a flourishing Austrian film production, in spite of the fact that Austria is a small country where a film cannot be amortized by the sources of this country alone.
“Austria and Its Cultural Filmwork”
Vaterländische Front—Werk “Neues Leben”
(Fatherland Front—Action “New Life”)
Souvenir Book, World’s Exposition Paris 1937
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Structures
1. System of Faith and Aesthetics of Loss: Austrian Cultural Politics in the First Republic and the Christian Corporate State
2. Scopic Regimes: Notes on Newsreel and Culture Film Production, the Legacy of Baroque and Fin de Siècle Vienna, and Political Catholicism in Public Spectacle
3. Against Nazism and with Catholicism? Two Film Industries and the Jewish Filmmaker’s Conundrum
Part 2: Genres, Narratives, Contexts
4. Cinema Baroque: Reconsidering the Willi Forst / Walter Reisch Viennese Film Genre and its Trans/National/ist Value
5. Projecting Transcendence: Emigrantenfilm, the Church, and the Construction of a Catholic-Political Identity in Singende Jugend and Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld
6. Gendering the Crusade: Female Types and Sexuality in Feature Film
7. Tales of the Patriarchy: Of Cavaliers, Cads, and the Common Man
8. Reasonable Fantasies: Cine-Operetta, Sängerfilm , and Sociocritical Music Film
9. New Order Out of Chaos: The Austrian Screwball and Hybrid Comedy
10. Contemporary Conflicts: Experimentalism, Controversy, and the Question of National Film Style
11. Snow Blinded: The Alps versus Vienna in Film at the End of the Regime

Part 3: Locations
12. From Rome to the Hollywood Hope: Shared Aesthetics, the 1936–1937 Vienna-Hollywood Coproduction Plan, and Cine-Economic Brinkmanship with Berlin
Epilogue
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
While there are many studies on the Berlin modernism that moved to Hollywood with German exile talent, and of film in the Third Reich, there have been few examinations of the unique products of Nazi Germany’s neighbor, Austria, during its post–First Republic phase. This study will attempt to fill that gap by examining the form, style, ideology and reception of cinema made in Vienna during its clerico-authoritarian period, academically known as Austrofascism, which began in 1933 and ended with the Nazi German annexation of Austria in 1938, and which attracted unprecedented international and especially Hollywood interest. That industry engaged in its own fight for survival in the five years that it was able to see itself as independent, or at least different , from its affiliates in Germany.
While mainstream Viennese production companies bowed to Germany’s racial dictates for the sake of distribution in its largest market, new Austrian companies that were not dependent on Germany for investment or distribution rejected Nazi racial guidelines and sidestepped the Austrian Nazis who assisted German infiltration by creating the independent production or the Emigrantenfilm (emigrant film). This secondary industry utilized crossover “Aryan” stars, German émigré and Austrian Jewish talent in coproductions with Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and marketed these films internationally. Ultimately, the contemporary and progressive comedies and dramas invented by this industry gave American careers to many of its Central European talents, such as Walter Reisch, Franziska Gaal, Hans Jaray, S. Z. (Szöke) Szakall, Felix Bressart, Oskar Karlweis, Felix (Joachimson) Jackson, Henry (Kosterlitz) Koster, Joe Pasternak, Hans J. Salter, Richard Oswald, Hans May, Nicholas Brodszky, Albert Bassermann, Steve (Stefan) Szekely, Robert (Wohlmuth) Wilmot, and many others.
It is clear that film noir emerged in Hollywood when German and Austrian-born film emigres from Berlin’s Weimar era cinema blended aspects of expressionism and their despair of the world with the American gangster film. 1 My text will show, however, that the genre already emerged with German exiles in Vienna as early as 1933 without the Hollywood influence, and it also posits that Vienna’s operetta-style comedy of errors and its particular cabaret tradition fostered a screwball comedy that emerged simultaneously with the early form of that genre in Hollywood. Nevertheless, it would be the Viennese Film genre, its musical iteration, and its eventual subgenres that remained the most popular of all Austrian cinema in and outside the country throughout the decade. These successes, then, helped create the international legend of modern Austria as the land of music, transcultural historical allure, and rural beauty. They also perpetuate “what distinguished pre-1914 Vienna from most other European capitals, and what gave the Viennese school its particular intellectual tang . . . that it was an imperial city rather than a national capital.” 2
The Austrian film industry of the 1930s also had its failures. While Hollywood developed aesthetics that articulated America’s conservative morality but also New Deal social renewal, Austrian and other Central European filmmakers who remained in Vienna were never completely successful in using their work to outline an ideology for Austria to remain independent of Nazi Germany. It could never summon up a successful vision of the state’s authoritarianism, political Catholicism, corporatism, and attempted class leveling through a one-party national front. The “transcendence” of the book’s title refers to the regime’s spiritual and geopolitical/cultural desires, as well as the popular desire to overcome the impoverishment that plagued Austria since 1918 in different extents. Attempts to valorize that ethos are obvious in almost all of Austrian films made in the era regardless of genre.
As a first English language study on this era in Austrian cinema, this text will clarify what was socially and politically at stake with the two simultaneous and somewhat overlapping film industries that existed in Austria between 1933 and 1938. The “Aryanized” (for German export) and the emigrant / Central European (not for German export) productions are explored on several pertinent levels (genre, form, style, character types, narrative structures, star system, reception, Church-led film criticism, etc.) to create a panorama of the complex and often contradictory Austrian (inter)national filmmaking process of the era. Perhaps one of the most important developments is in association with actor/director Willi Forst and writer/director Walter Reisch, creators of the Viennese Film genre, which became internationally synonymous with Austrian cinema in the 1930s, and which was influenced by French auteurism, admired by the cinephile Italians, and ardently copied by Hollywood. It is analyzed here as a form of “baroque cinema” for its ornate visual and aural orchestration, in the spirit of a filmic Catholic “counter-reformation” against pagan Nazism, and for its staying power beyond the Anschluss into the 1950s. Early Austrian sound films often identify with essentialist Viennese modernism (secessionism, Arth