Taking it to the street: screening the advertising film in the Weimar Republic

It would be hard to thinkof amore archetypal scenario of theWeimar ‘street film’ than the opening sequence of Karl Grune’s Die Straße/The Street (1923). Attracted by the protocinematic spectacle of flickering shadows projected onto his ceiling, a hapless middle-class husband flees the drab interiorof his bourgeois apartment for the excitement of the city streets, only to encounter a realm full of strangely animated displays: an illuminated line on the pavement guides his feet towards a shop front (figure 1); moving boats in awindowdisplay promise the pleasures of exotic travel; and – in the most iconic shot of the film – a giant pair of glasses outside an optometrist’s shop lights up to reveal a pair of eyes, as if the street were looking back. Scholars of Weimar cinema have long been familiar with the interpretation of such representations by Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, who saw in Grune’s mise-en-scene of street-life a ‘demonic’ or irrational view of the cityas a realmofuncannyand instinctual forces.Kracauer inparticular read such scenes as symptomatic of a deep-seated collective fear of public space among postwar German audiences, which would eventually make them retreat– like theprotagonist at the endof the film– into theprotected spaceof the interior, and finally into the arms of a regime that promised to restore order by any means. Kracauer’s thesis on the collective psychology linking German Expressionism to Nazism has, by now, received its share of criticism, and it is notmy intention to revisit that debatehere.But Iwouldpoint out that such animated spectacles had a more tangible referent in the early years of the 1 See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: a Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 121; Lotter Eisner, TheHaunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (1952) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), p. 252. 2 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 122. 3 For a good reading of Kracauer’s book in context, see Thomas Elsaesser,Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 18–61.