Moving picture puzzles: training urban perception in the Weimar ‘rebus films’

Looking over the history of cinema from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, recent research has increasingly highlighted the similarities between the sense of possibility characterizing cinema’s early decades and our own digital era, in which the proliferation of interactive media and variable screen formats has loosened the once dominant paradigm of the passive spectator immobilized in the illusory realm of Plato’s cave. As Tom Gunning long ago pointed out, however, while the dominance of narrative film and continuity editing might have marginalized other modes of spectatorship after 1910, it did not eliminate them. Much recent work has thus involved an archaeology of those other models for interaction with moving images and the persistence of a more ‘mobilized gaze’, whether in alternative spaces such as the museum and the planetarium or within the space of the cinema itself. In this essay, I shall focus on one such neglected model of alternative spectatorship from the Weimar era: namely the short-lived genre of the Rebus-Film, a series of short animated crossword puzzles by German director Paul Leni, scriptwriter Hans Brennert and cinematographer Guido Seeber, which ran in German theatres as a prelude to the main feature between 1925 and 1927. On one level, one might be tempted to read these filmic puzzles as the precursor to more recent interactive screen media; upon buying their tickets, spectators received puzzle cards which they filled out based on visual clues screened before the feature film and could check against the ‘solutions’ segment shown a week later (figure 1). Of course, this ‘interactive’ format, while participational to a certain extent, clearly differed from later varieties by its lack of a two-way interface: unlike input 1 On this tendency, the locus classicus is Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). See also Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Early film history and multi-media: an archeology of possible futures?’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Media: a History and Theory Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), pp. 13–27. For a reading of the connections between early and late modes of film exhibition in terms of their capacity for forge new public spheres, see Miriam Hansen, ‘Early cinema, late cinema: transformations of the public sphere’, in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions. Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 134–52. 2 See Tom Gunning, ‘The cinema of attractions: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), p. 57. 3 A good example of such archaeological work on spectatorship can be seen in Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive Gaze (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008), particularly the chapters on IMAX (pp. 79–113), the planetarium (pp. 114–58) and the museum (pp. 232–83). 4 See the entry for ‘Guido Seeber’, in Cinegraph. Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film, Volume V (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1984), Lieferung 23, F12–F13.