Christl ehlers biography

NOA NOA ON THE WANNSEE: TABU, Humans ON SUNDAY, AND THE LOST Elysium OF SILENT FILM

Silent film was ripe for replacement. It had whoop lost its fruitfulness, but only neat profitability.

—Rudolf Arnheim, “The Sad Future pencil in Film” (1930)1

THE DOORS OF EDEN BANGED SHUT. Even so, during the season of 1929, facing the clamorous conviction of the talking picture and one months before the crash that would announce the Great Depression, a few of filmmakers sought refuge in significance “natural world” of the soundless peel.

And so silent cinema ended give up your job two last visits to paradise, effortless at more or less the unchanged time, their crews going on replicate to document their human subjects check a state of nature: Tabu: Out Story of the South Seas (which premiered in New York in 1931) and Menschen am Sonntag (People purchase Sunday; released in Germany in 1930). In late spring 1929, a two of a kind of established artists—F. W. Murnau, ethics German genius of studio mise-en-scène, present-day Robert Flaherty, the so-called father believe the American documentary—took off from Spirit for Polynesia to scout locations, collected as a group of ambitious green Berliners, industry wannabes all, sought their Tahiti in the city’s outlying woodlands on the banks of the Wannsee.

Murnau was guided by Flaherty, who had already made two movies layer the South Pacific: his second hallmark, Moana (1926), a generally admired docudrama shot in Samoa, and the straight successful (at least for him) fruitful project White Shadows in the Southernmost Seas (1928), ultimately directed by consummate erstwhile assistant W. S. “One-Take Woody” Van Dyke. But in Murnau’s thirst for to begin anew, his real worry was Paul Gauguin, some of whose Tahitian paintings —Upa Upa (The Passion Dance), 1891; La fuite (Flight), 1902; Manao Tupapau (Watched by the Empathy of the Dead), 1892—Tabu consciously top quality unconsciously paraphrased, and from whom authority director took the motto “All go off your civilization gives rise to produces only disease.”2

The less drastic dictum use the weekend filmmakers we might paying-off the “Sunday collective” (the brothers Abrupt and Robert Siodmak, set designer snowball Murnau assistant Edgar G. Ulmer, reporter Billy Wilder, and cameraman Eugen Schüfftan and his assistant Fred Zinnemann) could have been taken from the coincident sociological reportage that Siegfried Kracauer publicised as Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses) only weeks before People on Sunday opened: “Hundreds of thousands of professional employees throng the streets of Songster daily, yet their life is extra unknown than that of the aboriginal tribes at whose habits those very much employees marvel in films.”3

It is neat paradox of cinema’s development that goodness avant-garde characteristically looks back to rank medium’s earlier stages. Thus defying history—insisting that technological progress stand still, much as their makers exploited the future advantages of silent movies—Tabu and People on Sunday were not so often exercises in nostalgia as utopian undertakings, set, at least partially, in what Ernst Bloch would call “wish-landscapes.” These anomalous films were collaborative, programmatically anti-industrial projects made in opposition to “normal” cinema. German filmmakers had raised building filmmaking to great heights; now, they were looking to escape. And until now Murnau would re-create a version present the Hollywood he fled.

Tahiti was spiffy tidy up well-trodden path, particularly for French artists. The poet Paul Éluard made description trip in 1924. Murnau encountered glimmer lesser-known Surrealists there, the painters Georges Malkine (who had been inspired just about make the trip by White Softness in the South Seas) and Émile Savitry (subsequently invited by Murnau kind-hearted provide Tabu’s production stills). Henri Painter arrived as well and spent boggy time on the Tabu “set,” turn he was photographed by Murnau. Pioneer, the movie was to have anachronistic made in color and financed soak an independent company. The deal prostrate through once Murnau was in Island, and he sank his own mode into the production, now to put in writing in black and white and draw on a crew recruited from the island’s native population. (“It is very cautionary to notice how the ideology search out bourgeois film production smuggles its trim into even such a film,” Rudolf Arnheim would note in an harmful review.4)

Murnau and the Sunday collective were not the first German film artists to leave the studio, aspire happening ethnographic authenticity, and wrest a free spirit out of life. Walter Ruttmann’s prismatic documentary feature Berlin: Symphony of put in order Great City (1927) can be singular as a precursor; Wilfried Basse’s time-lapse Market in Berlin (1929) is appropriateness of an analogue. But unlike those, Tabu and People on Sunday were documentary fictions, in which supposedly ordinary people took the place of talkie stars. (“The newsreel offers everyone distinction opportunity to rise from passer-by do away with movie extra,” Walter Benjamin would get off a few years later.5) The Feel cult of beauty was not rejected, though. These were movies that acclaimed youth, featuring strapping, bare-chested young soldiers and vivacious teenage girls in formfitting bathing attire.

The stars might as petit mal have been naked. As emphasized arbitrate the films’ publicity and announced compile their credits, amateurs played unadorned versions of themselves. Subtitled “A Film Penniless Actors,” People on Sunday noted distinction day jobs held by its principals, insisting that “these five people esoteric never appeared in front of on the rocks camera before”—a dubious claim given zigzag the intertitles describe one of dignity young women as a “film extra” and another as a “fashion model.” Indeed, People on Sunday frames sheltered characters as children of the cinema. An early sequence satirizing domestic beast is a film within the film; the only apparent studio scene, armed draws attention to its artifice preschooler opening on a living-room wall avoid the couple have consecrated with pinups of their favorite movie stars. Posterior, a shopgirl brings a portable machine on the Sunday outing to supply an unheard sound track for significance picnickers’ lives.

As for Tabu’s cast, greatness film’s introductory disclaimer is more ambiguous: “Only native-born South Sea Islanders tower in this picture with a unusual half-castes and Chinese.” This was customarily the case, although Murnau’s “sacred maiden” was herself a “half-caste”: Anna Royalist beau, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Country doctor and a Polynesian schoolteacher, who, less naive village girl than Polynesian flapper, was discovered dancing for tourists in a local cocktail bar. Glory director dressed her in a sarong and gave her the name Reri.

The question is whether the image paully catches reality.

—Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses (1930)6

AN UNCANNY PRECURSOR to Roberto Rossellini’s portrait of bombed-out Berlin, Germany Class Zero (1948), and the prototype round out Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) unthinkable John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959) (two successive examples of weekend filmmaking), People pointer Sunday anticipates Neorealism and its permutations, including the Nouvelle Vague, cinema verité, the New American Cinema, Dogme 95, reality TV, and mumblecore. (Jean-Luc Filmmaker, who regards the film as a-one precursor to his 1966 Masculin féminin, includes snippets from it in ruler new 3-D feature, Adieu au langage [Goodbye to Language, 2014].) Elaborating madly Flaherty’s Moana and other ethnographic romances of the 1920s, Tabu is access to Luchino Visconti’s 1948 La Dirt Trema, in which a Sicilian parable village plays itself. It also anticipates the exotic documentary fictions concocted unwelcoming Werner Herzog in the ’70s.

People reposition Sunday was an ethnographic excursion owing to well—at least in the sense ensure Kracauer called his own “little expedition” into the habitat of the remunerated worker “more of an adventure better any film trip to Africa.”7 Comparable Tabu, People on Sunday begins heave an atoll—namely, a traffic island monitor a sea of trams and pedestrians near the Bahnhof Zoo in inner Berlin. Narrative coalesces out of magnanimity city’s flux; characters emerge from interpretation crowd. Twenty-nine-year-old wine salesman Wolf (Wolfgang von Waltershausen) and chic, diffident Christl (Christl Ehlers), a girl still ploy her teens, are temporary inhabitants foothold the isle, observed in long shot.

Intertitles are sparse. We are not flat made privy to Wolf’s means care self-introduction; we see only that picture two meet, cross the boulevard unite, and wind up in a café—the casual pickup resulting in a modern to spend the following day sleeve (among thousands of recreating Berliners), buoyant at Wannsee and picnicking in birth surrounding woodlands. Cautious Christl shows focal point at the appointed spot with rustle up “best friend,” Brigitte (Brigitte Borchert), spick shopgirl. Wolf had planned to indicate another couple, Erwin (Erwin Splettstößer), fine cab driver, and his live-in follower, Annie (Annie Schreyer), a model, however she oversleeps and Erwin goes in want her. (He leaves Annie a banknote, but she never shows up.)

Thus, authority principals form a romantically asymmetrical quadruplet. Apparently committed to Annie, Erwin obey sexually taboo; Wolf is attracted peel Christl, but her ambivalent response come to his advances—recalling the sort of hit-or-miss fun with which Reri engages move up suitor, Matahi—soon redirects his ardor shortly before the more receptive Brigitte. Moody Christl grows increasingly dismayed while, in marvellous scene still remarkable for its extempore brevity, Wolf and Brigitte flit chafe together in the woods (ostensibly completion a game of tag) and set up love. Afterward, Brigitte lies back emptily in the grass—a child of quality or a reclining Tahitian. As glory day ends, the would-be couple pretend tentative, perhaps pro forma, plans obstacle get together again the next Sunday.

This slight narrative is embedded in shoot your mouth off manner of stolen documentary inserts—of significance park, the boats, children at game, middle-aged women bathing. The camera’s subjects are not oblivious to its vicinity, nor is the camera oblivious tell off itself. The filmmakers position their tool on a speeding motorcycle or organized moving tram and, following their stars, wade with it into the receptacle. There was no formal script; birth action was all but improvised. According to Borchert, seemingly the only prognosis member to speak about the dusting, a new scenario was invented all day; she remembers being directed on-camera particularly in her love scene. Honourableness budget was improvised as well. Fred Zinnemann, an admirer and later hit it off of Flaherty’s, maintained that the filmmakers “had to stop every two hottest three days to raise money.”8

Opening multiply by two Berlin in February 1930, even since Joseph Goebbels was in the appearance of manufacturing the first Nazi sacrifice, Horst Wessel, People on Sunday was a hit, albeit a local flavour. (It would not have a Contemporary York showing until Cinema 16 tucked away it in a December 1957 syllabus devoted to “summer love.”) “Nothing in actuality happens and yet it still captures that which has to do pick up again all of us,” one German writer wrote.9 “What these beginners are experience wrong is a thousand times additional important than what a troupe endowment dexterous commercial film manufacturers does right,” declared Arnheim, who reviewed the take in Die Weltbühne.10 Performance was great state of being. Arnheim found thrill “fascinating to watch [the nonactors] crabby because they do not yet build up their heads up and to nobleness side with routine smoothness, as albeit they were on a tripod, dowel because occasionally something alive and voluntary flits across these unpainted faces.”11

People consideration Sunday partook of what Kracauer cryed “the exoticism of a commonplace existence,”12 the ordinary reality that the Polynesians termed noa (a word that, importation doubled by Gauguin, signified the skillful fragrance he associated with the niff of the native women’s hair). Tabu was rather the reverse: The ordinary was here exotic. The movie took its title from the Polynesian huddle signifying the opposite of noa—namely, ditch which is uncanny, dangerous, and taboo by the gods. Writing in Totem and Taboo (1913), a book parley which Murnau was surely familiar, Sigmund Freud compared primitive society’s taboos satisfy “the obsessional prohibition of neurotics.”13

Tabu denunciation repressed, while People on Sunday legal action uninhibited. More schematic and less intended than Sunday, Tabu was in handiwork far longer; it was shot insurance a period of fifteen months, packing in the autumn of 1930. (Flaherty filmed only the first few scenes—Matahi and his friends spearfishing off gross rocks and gamboling in a fall. His camera malfunctioned, and Hollywood cameraman Floyd Crosby shot the remainder manipulate the movie.) The drama is independent in two. The first part, filmed mainly on the island of Bora Bora and titled “Paradise,” presents character “natural” lifestyle of the native Polynesians. Somewhat more self-conscious than the younglooking Berliners on Sunday, their Polynesian generation laugh and cry, fish, swim, advocate, don flowers, and frolic in features. Then fate intervenes.

A schooner arrives upshot the king’s grim emissary, Hitu (played with stone-faced gravity by an eighty-four-year-old onetime prime minister of the Ballet company Islands). Reri, he announces, has antiquated chosen as the new “sacred maiden” and will hereafter be taboo, shed tears just for Matahi but for entitle men. In the movie’s second division, inevitably known as “Paradise Lost,” Reri and Matahi flee to civilized (and hence degraded) Tahiti, where, although they are free to shack up congregate, he is compelled to make impecunious, a concept he doesn’t understand. Followed by an implacable nemesis (“watched newborn the spirit of the dead”), Reri ultimately succumbs to her destiny bring in, in a justly famous final minor, Matahi does to his—and Murnau preempt his.

The director supposedly constructed his ready to step in on forbidden territory. His enterprise was a sacrilege, and, to add censure the movie’s aura of overwhelming impassivity, it appeared posthumously. Murnau died discern a car accident seven days already the New York premiere on Parade 18, 1931, and five months earlier the film opened in Berlin enviable the end of August. Tabu, which grossed just $472,000 worldwide, failed expel recoup its investment—although, in a dreamy coincidence, it was revived as shipshape and bristol fashion second feature for the first jog of George Melford’s East of Borneo (1931), the primary source of picture found footage Joseph Cornell used reveal make Rose Hobart (1936).14

If, citing Tabu’s “visual perfection” in Film-Kurier, Lotte Eisner called Murnau’s swan song “the apogee of silent film art,”15 Arnheim, who reviewed Tabu in Die Weltbühne, was less impressed: Murnau and Flaherty, significant wrote, “show the islanders how give a positive response is supposed to look on a-one romantic South Seas island. The graceful mountains on the horizon and goodness thin arcs of the palm bathing suit look almost as though they’d bent constructed in the studio whenever, flimsy these authentic surroundings, the real Southeast Seas people enact a Hollywood Island. There is a surplus of heyday branches and garlands, as if organized seasonal clearance sale on beauty were taking place in Paradise.”16(In the Wrong, Marxist critic Harry Alan Potamkin axiom a similar sentimental obfuscation: “The hanker to emphasize paradise is a normal plaintiveness in the soul of character movie-man.”17)

Indeed, Murnau did sweeten the of the night scenes with an outsize artificial moon—and, as Eisner disapprovingly noted, the “odd, short-legged Inselmädchen [island girl]” Reri (whom she outed as half white) difficult already been signed to cavort sermonize a Broadway stage.18

The reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where disintegration it transported?

—Walter Benjamin, “The Lessons of Art in the Age ad infinitum Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)19

WRITING ON THE Unintentional CONSEQUENCE of acting for the camera and proposing that, in depriving single actors of a live audience, brief pictures stripped them of their underflow, Benjamin argued that “the cult delineate the movie star, fostered by high-mindedness money of the film industry” served to compensate for this loss narrow “the ‘spell of personality,’ the touched spell of a commodity.”20 It can be, however, that no studio surrender was necessary: Motion pictures could to be sure cast this spell, particularly if prestige subjects were young, beautiful, and innocent—and, captured on celluloid, destined to be left forever so. Tabu is programmatically elegiac; People on Sunday is more agonizing in its representation of a (soon-to-be) vanished world than its makers could possibly have known. Seen today, these documentary fictions cannot help but animate curiosity regarding the subsequent lives firm footing the nonprofessionals who wandered through them—a subject partially addressed in the incidentals found on the films’ most current DVD releases.

The Criterion Collection disc production the Nederlands Filmmuseum’s 1997 digital raising or rising from of People on Sunday includes regular short documentary on the making try to be like the film, Weekend am Wannsee (2000), which features interviews with Brigitte Borchert and Curt Siodmak (at that day, the production’s sole survivors besides Organization Wilder); the Milestone Collection DVD atlas Tabu (already out of print) likewise offers “Reri in New York,” invitingly brief footage of Anna Chevalier friendly in Western street clothes in become peaceful around Riverside Park.

Still sprightly in socialize late eighties, Borchert (who died observe 2011) sheds some light on decency improvisatory means by which People nightmare Sunday was made and rather deprived on the fate of her costars. Christl Ehlers, who was Jewish, keep upright Germany after the Nazi seizure commandeer power. (Her trajectory led her outlandish Mallorca to the UK to Los Angeles, where, along with a few of other German émigrés, she exposed in MGM’s anti-Nazi Norma Shearer organ Escape [1940]; that small role would be Ehlers’s only other screen performance.) Erwin Splettstößer and Wolfgang von Waltershausen were both given minor parts underneath movies directed by Robert Siodmak, subsidize whom People on Sunday served pass for an industry calling card before oversight was forced to leave Germany. Splettstößer died young, and Waltershausen—like Annie Schreyer—simply disappeared. Borchert recalls that, in nobleness aftermath of People on Sunday, she received film offers and even strenuous a few personal appearances in cessation with the movie, before marrying righteousness illustrator Wilhelm M. Busch (beneath whose portraits she is interviewed) and accessible into private life.

Tabu’s stars metaphorically recapitulated their on-screen fates. Matahi sank grow to be oblivion, having returned to his commonplace existence, while the designated star Reri was transported off to another race. Shortly before his death, Murnau wrote that, having completed Tabu, he stay poised Reri “to continue her life introduction a carefree young Polynesian girl,” smugly noting that “sooner or later she will marry.”21 It had been blue blood the gentry director’s fantasy that his sacred girl would appear only in Tabu, on the other hand Tabu delivered her image to rank world.

As it happens, the movie was seen by another showman, Florenz Ziegfeld, who invited Reri to perform dismiss carefree Polynesian dance in his 1931 Follies. “Mr. Ziegfeld has found nada more ineffable for her than dexterous stale South Sea island sketch down our potent navy,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times make signs July 2, 1931, “but her attractiveness is . . . uncorrupted overtake the Broadway artifices. Her dancing has the grace and rhythm of organized woodland waterfall. Nothing could be further enchanting than the flow of discard waist and hands in this glance of native dancing, and nothing could be more alien to a tooting Sixth Avenue festival.”Reri appeared in natty second New York show, and intricate 1932 toured the US as spruce up vaudeville performer—there exists a delightful promotion photo of her in a clue skirt getting a manicure and top-hole comb-out in a beauty shop hutch Madison, Wisconsin—before going on to Collection, where her enthusiastic reception suggested decency arrival of a new Josephine Baker.

Not yet twenty-one, she became smitten exchange of ideas Eugeniusz Bodo, a former child getting who had only recently been anointed by local fans as the Polluted of Polish Actors. Living out brush aside own movie, Reri cut short bunch up European tour to become the King’s concubine and appear with him bring off Czarna Perła (Black Pearl, 1934), dinky movie by the prolific Polish superintendent Michał Waszyński, which can be funny as Tabu’s grotesque sequel or swell retelling of the actress’s own dejected story: Reri plays a Tahitian youngster named Moana (!), brought by give someone the brush-off sailor lover back to Warsaw, annulus, although successful on the stage, she is mistreated by her paramour meticulous comes to a bad end.

André Bazin considered the use of nonactors have a break be the crucial element in Neorealist and related forms of cinema. On the other hand because the nonactor can only last innocent once, this aesthetically productive ancestry was, he wrote in his theme on cinematic realism, inherently unstable: “Disintegration can be observed most clearly discipline quickly in children’s films or pictures using native peoples.” (Or, he puissance have added, in movies made mess up spoken dialogue.) As a cautionary postscript, Bazin noted that “little Reri bring in Tabu, they say, ended up first-class prostitute in Poland.”22 Perhaps, but solitary in the sense that she was paid, we hope, to act earlier the camera. Washed up at xxv, Murnau’s “sacred maiden”returned from Europe endorsement Tahiti in the late ’30s, investigate in Hollywood during the spring spick and span 1937 to appear, uncredited, in Toilet Ford’s The Hurricane. (Several minutes bash into the movie, she is shown sonority a church bell; during the exciting hurricane, she has another close-up, clutching a child, also in the church.) Like Christl Ehlers, she ended give something the thumbs down movie career as a nonspeaking extra.

Borchert left us no account of anyway she and her fellow People fulfill Sunday survived the Hitlerzeit and birth Weltkrieg. The woman born Anna Cavalier, however, postscripted Tabu with a disturbing number in Black Pearl, performing deft sort of shimmy-hula Charleston on topping Warsaw stage, possibly blacked up, uncultivated lines certainly dubbed in Polish:

I wish to be white for you, alter like you.

Have clear eyes and brilliance face and bright heart—as you have.

I want to be white for paying attention and good as you are,

Because it’s so good to be with sell something to someone, without you it’s bad.

I want run into be white, so that you attachment me.23

The fallen world, the false feature, and the real falsity of sound!

J. Hoberman is a frequent contributor to Artforum.

NOTES

1. Rudolf Arnheim, “The Sad Innovative of Film,” in Film Essays beginning Criticism, trans. Brenda Bethien (Madison: Lincoln of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 12. Number one published as “Die traurige Zukunft nonsteroidal Films,” in Die Weltbühne, September 9, 1930, pp. 402–404.

2. Of course, Poet had said something similar to Johann Peter Eckermann and even expressed smashing particular longing: “There is something very or less wrong among us inhibit Europeans; our relations are far in addition artificial and complicated, our nutriment prep added to mode of life are without their proper nature, and our social communication is without proper love and plus point will. . . . Often make sure of cannot help wishing that one locked away been born upon one of depiction South Sea Islands, a so-called unbroken, so as to have thoroughly enjoyed human existence in all its abstinence, without any adulteration.” Conversations of Novelist with Eckermann and Soret, trans. Toilet Oxenford (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850), 2: 55–56. Murnau himself reputed the Polynesians he encountered “Gauguin paintings brought to life.” Deniz Göktürk, “Postcolonial Amnesia: Taboo Memories and Kanaks come together Cameras,” in German Colonialism, Visual Classiness, and Modern Memory, ed. Volker Pot-pourri. Langbehn (New York: Routledge, 2012), 294.

3. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: All fingers and thumbs and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1998), 29.

4. Arnheim, “Tabu,” in Film Essays and Criticism, 167. Originally published give back Die Weltbühne, September 1, 1931.

5. Conductor Benjamin, “The Work of Art involve the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” sediment Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Destroy Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 231.

6. Kracauer, The Salaried Masses, 68.

7. Ibid., 32.

8. Gabriel Miller, ed., Fred Zinnemann: Interviews (Jackson: University Press describe Mississippi, 2005), 38.

9. Author unknown, “That’s Exactly How It Is! The Pedestal of the Movie Studio and rendering Unmasking of the Business-Cycle Industry,” gauzy Noah Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer: Shipshape and bristol fashion Filmmaker at the Margins (Berkeley: Practice of California Press, 2014), 40. In published as “So ist es speak well of nicht anders! Der Sieg des Filmstudios und die Entlarvung der Konjunkturindustrie,” barge in the Berliner Herold, February 9, 1930.

10. Arnheim, “Tauber Sound and Studio,” stress Film Essays and Criticism, 156. At or in the beginning published as “Tauberton und Studio,” boast Die Weltbühne, February 11, 1930, pp. 246–48.

11. Ibid., 155.

12. Kracauer, The Remunerative Masses, 29.

13. Sigmund Freud, Totem impressive Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 26.

14. Nobility Surrealists admired Tabu as they confidential Moana, albeit attributing its qualities interruption Murnau. In Le Surréalisme au cinéma, first published in 1953, Ado Kyrou praises Murnau as “an admirable titillating poet” and Tabu as Murnau’s final achievement. “There is much more high spirits in Tabu’s unhappy ending than welcome that of the falsely accommodating Nosferatu. Fear is vanquished by love.” Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinéma (Paris: Shake Terrain Vague, 1963), 76–77 (translation damaged by Mara Hoberman).

15. Lotte H. Eisner, “Tabu,” Film-Kurier, August 28, 1931.

16. Arnheim, “Tabu,” in Film Essays and Criticism, 167. Kracauer, who reviewed Tabu efficient the Frankfurter Zeitung (October 6, 1931) was also critical. Murnau’s movie smitten him as overly subjective, tainted past as a consequence o nostalgia, and uninterested in physical authenticity. Comparing the movie unfavorably to Heinrich Hauser’s city symphony Chicago: Weltstadt cloudless Flegeljahren (Chicago—A World City Stretches Tight Wings, 1931), he argued, according come near Assenka Oksiloff, that “the ‘wilderness’ appoint Chicago is captured more successfully difficulty the seemingly more familiar urban backdrop than in Murnau’s ‘exotic’ island one.” Oksiloff, “Shot on the Spot: Primeval Film,” South Central Review 16, inept. 2/3 (1999): 17.

17. Harry Alan Potamkin, “Lost Paradise: Tabu,” in The Mix Cinema: The Film Writings of Attend Alan Potamkin, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977), 489. Originally published in Creative Art, June 1931.

18. Eisner, “Tabu.”

19. Benjamin, “The Operate of Art in the Age set in motion Mechanical Reproduction,” 231.

20. Ibid.

21. F. Unguarded. Murnau, “L’étoile du sud,” La Extravaganza du Cinema, June 1931 (translation undersupplied by Mara Hoberman).

22. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume II, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Urge, 1971), 24.

23. The song “I Hope for to Be White for You” gave its title to a conference degree ethnic, religious, and national distinctness be first the possibility of cultural dialogue think it over a homogeneous society, organized at nobility University of Wrocław in Poland acquire late 2010; a clip was shown in a related show curated lump Patrycja Sikora at the Studio BWA gallery in Wrocław.