Weimar Cinema

This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

Markenwaren bilden nicht das profane ‚Andere‛ der Kultur. Vielmehr eröffnen sie der Literatur seit mehr als hundert Jahren neue poetologische Spielräume. Die Studie zeigt, wie Werke von Edmund Edel (Berlin W., 1906), Thomas Mann (Der Zauberberg, 1924), Irmgard Keun (Das kunstseidene Mädchen, 1932), Wolfgang Koeppen (Tauben im Gras, 1951) und Christian Kracht (1979, 2001) materielle, semiologische und kulturtheoretische Aspekte der Konsumkultur reflektieren und in literarische Verfahren überführen: von Warenhauskatalogen und Fetischisierungen bis zu kapitalistischen Zirkulationsprozessen und der Faszination glänzender Oberflächen. Die close readings öffnen den Blick für die kulturpoetologische Dimension literarischer Texte und für die Bedingungen von Kultur im Kapitalismus.

Die Arbeit wurde mit dem Tiburtius-Anerkennungpreis 2012 – Preis der Berliner Hochschulen ausgezeichnet (http://www.hu-berlin.de/pr/nachrichten/nr1212/nr_121210_01).

Aus den Rezensionen

“Weyands gründliche Studie im Stil des New Historicism dürfte auch dem letzten Kritiker, der Popliteratur mit ‘Geschmacksterrorismus’ assoziiert, deutlich machen: Kein Markenkult ist Zufall.  […] Der Literaturwissenschaftler kann sich nicht mehr herausreden, er muss Markenwelten genauso studieren wie klassische Mythen und Topoi.” Marc Reichwein, literaturkritik.de (05/2014)

“Björn Weyands materialreiche, mit beeindruckender Akribie erarbeitete und anschaulich verfasste Studie zur Poetik der Marke schließt eine signifikante Lücke in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Forschung zum Zusammenhang von Literatur und Ökonomie.” Annemarie Opp, Zeitschrift für Germanistik (3/2014)

In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it.

Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany.

Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.

https://iupress.org/9780253052001/yiddish-writers-in-weimar-berlin/

The contingent instant that Walter Benjamin, among others, claims photography uniquely makes palpable has no place in film. Cinema relies on the impermanence of such elusive moments to generate continuity and presence. This article shows how Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 experimental short "Walking from Munich to Berlin" combines photography and film in a way that stages the incompatibility of these technologies, while also forging a new visual language – a radical form of animation – with which to overcome it. The article examines Fischinger’s work as a singular contribution to animation and the avant-garde of the Weimar era and beyond, unraveling its philosophical implications for theories of collecting, film, photography, and animation

Walter Benjamin is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Often captured in pensive pose, his image is now that of a serious intellectual. But Benjamin was also a fan of the comedies of Adolphe Menjou, Mickey Mouse, and Charlie Chaplin. As an antidote to repressive civilization, he developed, through these figures, a theory of laughter. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film is the first monograph to thoroughly analyse Benjamin's film writings, contextualizing them within his oeuvre whilst also paying attention to the various films, actors, and directors that sparked his interest. The book situates all these writings within Benjamin's 'anthropological materialism', a concept that analyses the transformations of the human sensorium through technology. Through the term 'innervation', Benjamin thought of film spectatorship as an empowering reception that, through a rush of energy, would form a collective body within the audience, interpenetrating a liberated technology into the distracted spectators. Benjamin's writings on Soviet film and German cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse are analysed in relation to this posthuman constellation that Benjamin had started to dream of in the early twenties, long before he began to theorize about films.

Os zoológicos humanos eram mostras ou exibições de povos tidos como exóticos, de grande apelo popular durante o século XIX e início do XX. Esta pesquisa analisa o fenômeno dos zoológicos humanos, focando-se em casos de exibições de indígenas Botocudos brasileiros, demonstrando as relações estabelecidas entre estas mostras populares e a fundação de museus etnográficos, sociedades antropológicas e o desenvolvimento do cinema. Esta tese está dividida em duas partes. A primeira discute e define o fenômeno dos zoológicos humanos em geral, analisando, em seguida, casos de exibição de indígenas no Brasil, Inglaterra, Estados Unidos e Alemanha. A Parte II discute as influências dos zoológicos humanos sobre o campo das artes, analisando filmes alemães da República de Weimar que se utilizaram de cenografia e trupes de zoológicos humanos. Em seguida, analisa-se a influência dessas formas de espetáculo sobre o expressionismo alemão, discutindo, por fim, a crítica aos zoológicos humanos na literatura. Utilizando como fio condutor a análise da circulação e trânsito de pessoas, objetos e narrativas entre os campos do cinema, museus e zoológicos humanos, a presente tese constrói um mapa que atravessa campos científicos e do entretenimento popular, buscando compreender as estratégias utilizadas para a construção do exotismo: as figurações primitivistas que marcam o mercado do exótico.

Human zoos were exhibitions of peoples regarded as exotic that had great popular appeal during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research analyses the human zoo phenomenon, focusing on cases of exhibitions of Brazilian Botocudo Indians, demonstrating the relationships established between these popular exhibitions and the founding of ethnographic museums, anthropological societies and the development of cinema. This thesis is divided into two parts, the first discusses and defines the human zoo phenomenon in general, then analyses cases of exhibitions of indigenous peoples in Brazil, England, the United States and Germany. Part II discusses the influences of human zoos on the field of arts, analysing German Weimar Republic films that made use of the scenography and troupes from human zoos. Next, the influence of these forms of spectacle on German expressionism is analysed, ending up with a discussion on the critique of human zoos in literature. Employing as central theme the analysis of the circulation and traffic of people, objects and narratives between the fields of cinema, museums and human zoos, this thesis builds a map that spans both scientific and popular entertainment fields, seeking to understand the strategies used to construct exoticism: the primitivist figurations that distinguish the exotic market.

Contrary to the mainstream view held by film critics, Weimar cinema does not patently represent society’s degenerate psychological drives and sexual behaviours that accompanied the horrors of industrial warfare, nor does it clearly represent the destabilization of the bourgeois family induced by political and socio-economic modernization. Rather, Weimar cinema reflects the deep German ambivalence of modernity experienced in the 1920s, blurring a distinctive sexual identity and gendered authority crisis. This is explicit within Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). On one hand, the dialogue, symbolism and mise- en-scéne of these films foreground the prevailing threats that the “new man” and “new woman” posed on conservative family morals and the stable patriarchal order. However, on the other hand, these films simultaneously fortify feminist liberation away from a strict patriarchal order, and fantasize sexual emancipation in the form of extramarital affairs and homosexuality. Thus, Weimar cinema recognizes the ambivalence of this new cultural environment, obscuring a definite decline in “idealized” moral and cultural structures. This sense of ambiguity represents the torn German response to modernity that both inspired the desire for gendered and sexual liberation away from traditional norms, and provoked contradictory fears of sexual violence, political aggression and familial fragility.

Chystaya-Young, Yuliya
Representation of Prostituted Women in Weimar Cinema: Bachelor thesis / Yuliya Chystaya-Young ; supervisor MA Inesa Khatkovskaya ; European Humanities University. Academic Department of Media. – Vilnius, 2016. – 41, [p.] - Bibliogr.: p. 40-41 (30 titles).
Key words: Weimar Republic, Weimar cinema, prostitution, psychoanalysis, gender, sexuality, radical feminism.
The object of this bachelor thesis – Weimar films featuring prostituted women. The goal of the thesis – to analyse specific ways of representation of prostitutes in Weimar cinema. Main tasks of the thesis: to look into historical and social context of Weimar cinema; to explore different approaches to the problem of prostitution; to investigate the way prostitutes were treated by German society in Weimar period; to look at representation of prostitutes in Weimar culture; to analyse different ways prostituted women are portrayed in Weimar cinema. To look into various clichés prostitutes are often associated with.
The usage of such methods as semiotic analysis and psychoanalysis led to a conclusion that all the films I analysed are containing stereotyped images of prostituted women. I distinguished two popular clichés – “femmes fatales” and “damsels in distress”. Prostitutes in these selected films ended up either punished or unpunished and either way could be applicable both to “evil” ones and “victims”.
This bachelor thesis can be useful to the researchers, lecturers and students.

The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin's compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin's mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin's work as well as argue that Maddin's films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.

The opulent colours and ornamentation, exotic characters and landscapes, as well as astonishing journeys and magic may resemble other European adaptations of Arabian Nights fairy tales. Yet remarkable technical and political innovations distinguish Lotte Reiniger's 1926 'Scherenschnitte' shadow animation film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. Engaging with various readings of Reiniger's evolving technical and narrative approaches, this article complicates unproblematized celebrations of the film's innovations as well as critiques of the film as Orientalist, arguing that both facets are in complex ways interdependent. The technical feats and orientalist tropes at once veil the progressive messaging and permit the audience to imagine a different world.

The essay will argue that Metropolis is not only a film about a futuristic city in which class struggle occurs, but an allegory to the problems that modernity had brought in interwar Weimar Germany, with leitmotifs relevant to this day. Modernity is suggested to be interpreted by Lang and his wife Harbou as a lack of communication, or dialogue between humans and their own values, which will be explored and explained in the introduction and the context. The thesis of the lack of dialogue is then arbitrarily separated in three, namely the impending issues brought by the dehumanisation generated by the machine which disconnects humans from their very humanity, by the desacralisation of the robot which dissolves all human morals and spirituality, as well as the dictatorship, which profits from both dehumanisation and desacralisation by gaining profit and solidifying power, reinforcing at the same the issues voluntarily. Specific scenes will be analysed to back those three elements, while expressionist strategies will be examined in tandem with these scenes as they are useful both artistically and diegetically. The piece is more evidently recommended for those who are interested in the film Metropolis, as well as for those researching into the context of interwar Germany, which is examined and exemplified by the film at hand.

ABSTRACT

“Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: The Dolchstoßlegende and the Appropriation of Germany’s
Traumatic Past”

Scott P. Hogan and Professor Kai Evers (Mentor), European Languages and Studies

This paper looks at Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic and the rise of
Nazism between both World Wars. My thesis delves into how the Middle High German myth,
Das Nibelungenlied, was utilized after Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Propaganda of
the time used the myth’s hero, Siegfried, as a call to nationalism and to inspire the fallen nation.
Further, both the military and right-wing politicians used the infamous murder of Siegfried (by a
stab-in-the-back) to equate it with the “stab-in-the-back” suffered by the nation at the hands of
elements within the country, such as the Jews, pacifists, and Socialists, who were blamed for
Germany’s loss of the war. Thus, the Dolchstoßlegende (the stab-in-the-back myth) came into
being in 1919 and was used extensively by the Germany military and right-wing politicians to
explain how Germany lost the war. By looking at the myth itself and how Fritz Lang’s 1924 film
version, Die Nibelungen, depicted the story, this research will show how the many facets of the
Nibelungen were used to justify revenge taken upon those groups scapegoated for the loss of the First World War and for instilling loyalty and a fighting spirit (Kampfgeist) in the Germany Volk.

Film studies have been conventionally paired with literature or studies of the dramatic arts. Film, however, is an incredibly visual medium. The filmmaker encodes their frame with visual content, as does the painter with their canvas. Since antiquity visual rhetoricians have discussed the significance of images and art, and there have been many contributions to the existential debate of where the medium of film situates itself in the arts. This research aims to contribute to the overarching question of how, and to what extent fine art has influenced the development of film, focussing specifically on the pioneer of the Baroque movement, the infamous painter Caravaggio, and his Baroque aesthetic associated with German Expressionist films of the Weimar era. Therefore, a literary review of aesthetics and art theory is established, as well as the trajectory and style of the artist Caravaggio. This research also defines the components of cinematic mise-en-scène, of which is analysed in a case study. The case study itself presents a textual analysis of the German Expressionist films Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927) utilizing the framework of Panofsky’s iconographic analysis, thereby not only treating the film as a text to be analysed, but also as an art image
to be decoded. This particular mode of enquiry allows this research to thoroughly answer the research question of ‘how does the Caravaggesque Baroque fine art aesthetics, applied to the cinematic mise-en-scène, contribute to the developments of the visual style of the post-war Expressionist cinema?’

Centered on Richard Dyer's model of pastiche, this essay posits that the German television series Babylon Berlin engages in a unique and timely practice of cultural reproduction shaped by a specific combination of historical subject matter and the present media-historical moment. Through digital effects, narrational layering, and multivalent location choices, Babylon Berlin pastiches Weimar cinema, and self-consciously invites comparisons between the so-called golden age of German cinema and the present. It activates cinephilic recall, establishes an intermedial dialogue between analog and digital forms, and affectively engenders a historically oriented conversation about the fragility of modern democracy in the Brexit/Trump era. The cultural work of pastiche it performs warrants the series' inclusion in the conversation around the European remake.

The final shot of German director F. W. Murnau’s 1931 masterpiece, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, is an especially suitable coda to this silent-era filmmaker’s career – one that, despite its epic heights and lasting influence, was often shrouded in mystery and coloured by misfortune. The four-letter word ‘TABU’ materializes like a spectral apparition over dark and ominous swells, appearing as an esoteric warning against forbidden transgressions (Figure 1). Before one’s eyes the word transforms from mere text into a veritable icon, a cinematic image of impending doom and inescapable destiny. The portentous icon immediately follows the film’s dramatic finale, one that film critic Lotte Eisner called ‘the apogee of the art of silent film’ (Eisner 1973: 203). In this scene, the young protagonist, the native South Islander Matahi, swims after a ship bearing his forbidden love. Just as Matahi finally reaches the boat, Hitu, the priest, cuts the rope dangling from its deck. Ultimately overwhelmed by a dark and hostile sea, Matahi sinks silently beneath its waves as the ship’s white sail can be seen darting off into the distance...

See PDF for full text.

This dissertation reconciles two interpretations of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) by linking the film’s anti-Semitic qualities with its transgressive sexual impulses. In doing so, I assert that Jewishness pervades in the body of the vampire Count Orlok while additional readings of the film are enacted. The methodological framework employed is far-reaching, as an expanded definition of allegory is required to attach both racial and sexual stereotypes to Count Orlok’s uncanny form. 
I found strong evidence for my application of allegory in the writings of critical theorists and philosophers such as Homi K. Bhabha and Sander L. Gilman, whose work on stereotypes accounts for the multiplicity of significances that converge on the vampire body. Scholars of Jewish history and gender in Germany provide background for the Jew’s sexual ambiguity, while psychoanalysis elucidates the amplification of transgressive sexual desire in Weimar. I also consulted the literature on Nosferatu and on the genres of horror and the fantastic, though there is more in these sources on the film’s sexual subtext than its racial undertones.
The dissertation commences with an examination of anti-Semitic iconography that fused femaleness and Jewishness, thus symbolically rendering the Jewish male both impotent and virile. I then analyse the acceleration of sadomasochistic and homoerotic impulses among German men in the Weimar Republic, and demonstrate how the Jew’s multivalent body was adapted to suit their fantasies. Finally, I reconstruct four spectatorial patterns in Nosferatu available to male viewers, each of which is charged with sadistic or masochistic impulses directed at a heterosexual or queer love-object. Within each pattern I identify Count Orlok as a different manifestation of the sexualised Jew, thereby confirming the compatibility of the film’s racial and sexual subtexts.

En el presente escrito se realiza un análisis de la influencia del considerado cine oscuro-expresionista alemán en la filmografía de Álex de la Iglesia. Para ello, se parte de algunas técnicas cinematográficas esenciales, como el uso de decorados tétricos, la utilización de claroscuros y la aplicación de sombras, así como de un esquema basado en la atracción por los elementos negativos de la representación, para encontrar las similitudes existentes entre aquel cine de Weimar y algunas películas del cineasta español, y dar cuenta de la he-rencia estilística recibida en cuanto a narración, iconografía y construcción de los personajes.

This thesis examines Walter Benjamin’s film aesthetics within the framework of his ‘anthropological-materialist’ project. His writings on film are dispersed among essays, notes and letters and may appear at first sight to be an incoherent collection of thoughts on film. However, I will try to argue that they form part of the same philosophical and political project as his ‘anthropological materialism.’ Thus, these writings sought, first, to analyse the transformation of the human senses brought about by the appearance of film technology; and secondly, to envisage the possibility of undoing the alienation of the senses in modernity through that very same technology in order to, eventually, create a collective body (Kollectivleib) out of the audience. This project dates back to Benjamin’s anthropological texts from the early 1920s and was central to texts such as One-Way Street, the Surrealism essay and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’ The reconfiguration of aesthetics as aisthēsis that takes place in the latter text is analysed as forming part of this project, in which Benjamin is concerned with the transformation of the human body according to its interaction with technology. 

From this anthropological-materialist perspective, I address from the second chapter onwards the film figures—directors, actors, characters—and films that most concerned Benjamin. Thus, I analyse his writings on Soviet film with regard to the use and conception of technology in the country; the impact of the bungled reception of technology in Germany upon films from the Weimar Republic and National Socialism, especially in their representation of mass movements; the rehabilitation of allegory in the twentieth century with Charlie Chaplin and the possibility of undoing the numbing of the senses through his gestic and allegorical performance; and, finally, Mickey Mouse as a representative of the new barbarism that Benjamin advocated within his critique of bourgeois humanism.

Written in French exile, this text by Siegfried Kracauer from December 1936 outlines a research project that the German-Jewish intellectual undertook with funding from the Institute for Social Research. The work outlined here would be a study of totalitarian propaganda in Germany and Italy through sustained comparison with communist and democratic countries, especially the Soviet Union and the United States. Appearing in English translation for the first time, this document from Kracauer's estate is crucial for a full understanding of his career as a sociologist, cultural critic, film theorist, and philosopher, demonstrating the global scope of his engagement with cinema, mass culture, and modernity.

Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of “theory” not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity’s most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, The Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.

Esta dissertação propõe-se a interpretar e comparar as narrativas construídas em uma amostra de filmes de ficção alemães e britânicos feitos entre 1919 e 1933 que tratam direta ou indiretamente do trauma da Primeira Guerra Mundial. Por meio de uma Análise Crítica de Discurso, caracterizada por um movimento constante entre o texto e o contexto social no qual ele foi produzido e que ele produz, esta pesquisa tem por foco os tipos de personagens masculinos que são projetados como ideais nestes filmes, buscando identificar como o trauma da guerra afetou a construção da “masculinidade hegemônica” no cinema dos dois países. Este conceito, proposto inicialmente por Connell (1995), é modificado pelas contribuições de Elias e Bourdieu na tentativa de emprestar a ele maior plasticidade, tornando-a adaptável às especificidades nacionais (Elias) e aos campos onde emergem diversas masculinidades dominantes (Bourdieu). A hipótese inicial, de que britânicos teriam uma masculinidade hegemônica mais pacifista projetada em seu cinema, enquanto filmes alemães apresentariam múltiplos ideais de masculinidade, foi superada. Do lado alemão, chegou-se à conclusão que a repressão do duplo trauma da guerra e da derrota, somada à profunda polarização política e social que caracterizou a República de Weimar, impediu a construção de um habitus masculino hegemônico. Enquanto filmes mais conservadores projetam um mesmo ideal – uma masculinidade bélica, que enobrece o sacrifício e a morte em nome da honra e de sua comunidade de homens –, os filmes mais críticos, que buscam subverter o ideal militar, acabam por não projetar qualquer ideal de masculinidade, deixando um vácuo no lugar do herói. Em contraste, a relativa estabilidade social e política da sociedade britânica permitiu o estabelecimento de um habitus masculino hegemônico, porém tão associado ao habitus da elite (e, portanto, ao status quo) que está longe de ser pacifista. Nos filmes britânicos, o gentleman – um homem elegante e educado, membro da classe dominante e consciente de sua responsabilidade social, que inclui ir para a guerra pela nação sem demonstrar suas emoções ou reclamar – é o tipo hegemônico.

Debruçando-nos na citação de Lotte Eisner  somos transportados para o período entre 1918 a 1933, época assinalada por dificuldades, agitação e incompatibilidades na Alemanha a diversos níveis. Nomeadamente ao nível económico e financeiro, as mudanças políticas, as repercussões na sociedade civil e inovação pedagógica onde a escola de Bauhaus se destaca neste período compreendido entre as duas Guerras Mundiais.  A literatura (poesia) Alemã expressionista marcou a década entre 1910 a 1920 em que vários grupos refletem o horror e a experiência da I Guerra, embebido de um sentimento de dor, apelando à solidariedade humana. Porém, a partir dos anos 20, o expressionismo na Alemanha tem a sua continuidade na dança, no teatro e na sétima arte. Apesar das consequências da I Guerra Mundial, a desvalorização da moeda alemã (Marco Alemão), o desemprego, a inflação e a instabilidade política sentida, esta época foi excecionalmente fértil para o cinema alemão, facilitando as exportações sem concorrência direta significativa.

En el presente artículo se hace un análisis estético de la película Die Nibelungen (1924), de Fritz Lang, partiendo de la base de que sigue una línea estética tradicional, en la que el juicio estético y el moral están unidos, oponiéndose a muchos de los filmes contemporáneos, en los que estos juicios se conciben por separado. Se defiende, por tanto, la existencia de una correspondencia entre temática e imágenes, en la que las ideas morales se reflejan visualmente mediante la iluminación o las apariencias de los personajes, entre otros elementos. Asimismo, se la ubica dentro de la tradición cinematográfica de los Groβfilme (películas monumentales), que se contrapone a la del Künstlerische Film (cine artístico), para dar cuenta de que se trata de modos de producción distintos, que presentan diferentes esquemas narrativos y distintas tradiciones estéticas.

The present article makes an aesthetic analysis of the film Die Nibelungen (1924), by Fritz Lang, on the basis that it follows a traditional aesthetic line, where both the aesthetic and the moral judgement are connected, opposing many of the contemporary films, where these judgements are thought separately. It is advocated therefore the existence of a correspondence between the topic and the images, where the moral ideas are visually reflected through the illumination and the appearances of the characters, among other elements. In addition, the film is placed within the filmmaking tradition of the Groβfilme (monumental films), which stands in opposition to the tradition of Künstlerische Film (art films), to realise that it involves different modes of production, which have different narrative structures and different aesthetic traditions.