German Studies Review

In his latest publication Gerd Gemünden draws attention to the contribution of a variety of German-speaking film professionals to the Hollywood film industry from the 1930s to the 1950s. In highlighting the importance of German exile cinema’s contributions to Hollywood, he attempts to counteract the longstanding tradition of subsuming these film professionals’ works into U.S. film history.

Not only does Gemünden suggest a reconsideration of American national cinema in less monolithic terms, he also brings attention to how exile cinema differentiates itself from, while remaining in proximity to, mainstream American cinema. In doing so, he reads exile cinema “as a cinema of in-between that uses its very status of hybridity to its advantage” (11). Stressing this particular in-betweenness of exile cinema, he underscores its exilic dimension as well as its previously ignored multiple cultural and ethnic affiliations.

By taking into consideration three waves of emigration from Germany to the Unites States, peaking in the mid-1920s, 1933 and 1938, Gemünden provides a more comprehensive understanding of the political, class and professional reasons for the film professionals’ emigration. He therefore brings into focus an early period of German contribution to Hollywood which tends to be overlooked due to the research communities’ focus on emigration during the 1930s.

However, while broadening the scope of his analysis allows the inclusion of such [End Page 694] early-wave migrants such as Edgar G. Ulmer, it also leads to the questioning of what, exactly, characterizes the “exile” as opposed to the “migrant” or “émigré.” Gemünden acknowledges these inconsistencies in his introduction, referring to various definitions of “exile” in an attempt to bring clarity to the question. He contrasts Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of exile as “‘a damaged life,’” one of “‘anguish and suffering’” (8), with Edward Said and Salman Rushdie’s belief in the value of the “plurality of vision” of an exile perspective (9). Gemünden shares Said and Rushdie’s rather optimistic outlook, reading exile as a forced opportunity for “self-examination and social critique” (9).

Gemünden proposes a study of genre films and cycles in order to answer the question of exilic authorship in an inherently collaborative medium. This approach, he argues, reveals the ways in which “exile cinema, inflected, manipulated or subverted existing conventions” of the often formulaic genre film (14). Moreover, instead of perceiving exile cinema as an alternative or countercinema, Gemünden proposes to read exile cinema as subverting constraints of the Hollywood system from within (12). Gemünden offers close readings of six films, in which he at various points considers biographical influences, institutional pressures of the Hollywood apparatus, film production history, reception and thus the political landscape in which the movies are produced and released. His selection consists of The Black Cat (Ulmer, 1934), The Life of Emile Zola (Dieterle, 1937), To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1942), Hangmen Also Die (Lang, 1943), Act of Violence (Zinnemann, 1948), and Der Verlorene (Lorre, 1951).

In the horror film The Black Cat, Gemünden points to the careful balancing act Ulmer had to perform to maintain a sense of artistic freedom in the midst of restrictive studio and genre conventions, viewer expectations, and financial limitations. Although Gemünden acknowledges the collaborative effort of film production and attempts to downplay the importance of auteurism, he only points to two contributors’ efforts in connection with The Black Cat: the modernist camework of John Mescall, and the original composition of the score by Heinz Roemheld. Despite this apparent incongruity, his close reading of the film, which includes information on the revisions imposed onto the script, is successful in presenting the film as a means to revive “the memory of World War I as a warning to Americans not to repeat the mistakes of the past” (47). Gemünden’s exploration of the aesthetics in The Black Cat reveals a principle that holds true for all other films under investigation: a...