Concerns about the passages on race and physiognomy in Béla Balázs's film theoretical writings often focus on his references to cinema's promotion of a normative “white psyche.” Through comparative analyses of Balázs with the racial physiognomist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss as well as with Balázs's fellow Marxist Walter Benjamin, this article outlines key aspects of both right-wing and left-wing physiognomics. While Balázs did share with reactionary physiognomists the problematic idealist tendency to view the body as materialized soul, his views on physiognomy evaded racial essentialism, as he promoted cinematic physiognomics as a way to overcome boundaries of race and nation. Furthermore, Balázs and Benjamin used physiognomic perception to reconfigure social hierarchies and the relationship of spectators to technology and the material world, thus converting potentially reactionary concepts into ones that could be made serviceable for Marxism.
This chapter compares Hollywood and Nazi uses of melodrama during World War II and demonstrates that the American home front film portrayed the war effort as a defense of middle-class domesticity, while the Nazi home front melodrama suggested that war provided a means to intensified erotic experience. Home front melodramas featuring female main protagonists, contemporary settings, and a thematization of the war were produced in Hollywood and in Babelsberg, but the form and extent of this treatment was not identical in the two cinemas. The chapter considers the approaches to cinematic propaganda advocated by the leadership of both sides, by looking at the paradigmatic Hollywood home front films Mrs. Miniver and Since You Went Away (1944) in detail. It then examines Nazi home front melodramas in relation to conventions established by these Hollywood films.
This paper examines three phases in the career of exiled German-Jewish director Robert Siodmak: his late Weimar, Hollywood, and postwar German work. It argues that the exilic experience is reflected in a shift of temporal and spatial configurations in Siodmak's American film noirs and in his German films after his remigration to Europe after the war. This shift is visible in the differing treatment of modes of transport or spatial mobility and in alternative approaches to narrative progression.
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