SOURCE: Rentschler, Eric. “The Problematic Pabst: An Auteur Directed by History.” In The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema, edited by Eric Rentschler, pp. 1-23. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Rentschler discusses Pabst as a “problematic” figure in cinema.]

“None of us who knew Pabst well felt that we ever knew him at all. He was all things to all men, and nothing consistently. He would argue any side of the question with apparent complete conviction and sincerity, but to see this happen over and over was to suspect that he had no convictions at all. He worked like a scientist, presenting stimuli to his actors and watching their reactions with a cold-blooded detachment. He never made any comment, never explained himself. I always felt he lived his life completely alone.”

—Louise Brooks, in conversation with Richard Griffith¹

“Whereas the greatest artists carry their times, Pabst, as a passive contemporary, is carried by the times. He follows. Expressionism, naturalism, sexualism, Freudianism, internationalism, anti-Nazism, exoticism, Nazism, de-Nazification, mysticism, agnosticism; all of the phases experienced by his nation and his class appear again during his artistic career. This is not to say that he was a man without faith. On the contrary. But he received his faith and strength from the current trends, being too susceptible and too irresolute to find them in himself.”

—Barthélemy Amengual²

“Whether dealing with ‘content’ or ‘form,’ Pabst operated as a metteur en scène. He lacked a bold conception of film language, and was never the radical agitator some mistook him for.”

—Edgardo Cozarinsky³

AN EXTRATERRITORIAL LIFE, AN EXTRATERRITORIAL CAREER

G. W. Pabst is film history's ultimate nowhere man. An ambiguous figure, he remains a director whose biography and oeuvre do not readily lend themselves to fixed paradigms or comfortable generalizations. To speak of him as “problematic” seems warranted, given the word's multiple connotations: unresolved, hard to place, somewhat suspicious. Critics describing Pabst and his films invariably resort to formulations involving vacillation, oscillation, and uncertainty,⁴ to evaluations marked by frustration, disappointment, and anger.⁵ At one time an artist with a solid position in the canon of international cinema, he has been increasingly displaced, reduced to a tragic case, an instance of an individual compromised by his own lack of substance and subjectivity.⁶ Karsten Witte, echoing a phrase used by Harry Alan Potamkin to describe The Threepenny Opera, locates the “extraterritorial” as the privileged site in Pabst's Shanghai Drama, a space that in fact governs his work over many epochs in quite different settings.⁷ The term is an apposite one, I think, in the way it characterizes not only Pabst's films, but indeed his life, not only the content of his texts, but their formal shape as well, not only his curious relation to contemporaries, but also his disenfranchisement by film historians.⁸

The extraterritorial citizen is both a representative and an outsider, someone whose real place is elsewhere, a person who lives in one country while subject to the laws of another. Pabst, without a doubt, embodies this dialectical condition, a suspended state in both time and space. He never seemed to be identical with where he was: during the Weimar Republic, Pabst gained the reputation of a “red” and an internationalist, someone given to the seductions of foreign models, be they Soviet or American.⁹ When he went into exile, he was not able to adapt to foreign situations, to escape the suspicion that, deep down, he was a German after all.¹⁰ (He was, of course, Austrian by birth.) It is difficult to speak of Pabst as a German director with the same conviction used to discuss valorized figures in that national film history. Indeed, other famous emigrants like F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, despite similar changes of locale, remained true to themselves in the face of challenges to their integrity and vision.¹¹ Flexibility and lack of fixity, both in his life and in his work, become recurring themes in approaches to Pabst. It stands to reason that his favorite actor, Werner Krauss, and his most striking female persona, Louise Brooks, have so often been eulogized as chameleon-like spirits and ambiguous entities, in keeping with a director who himself was a creature of many masks and, so his critics would have us believe, a man without qualities.¹²

Perhaps, though, there is a more profound logic to this seeming indeterminateness, to this constant state of personal and textual instability, of not being quite at one with one's place, in one's life, in one's fictions. To be sure, Pabst's narratives feature a continuing cast of nomads, exiles, transients: the wayfaring apprentice Arno (The Treasure), a man not at home in his own household, whose greatest fear is his own dreams (Secrets of a Soul), treacherous and slippery Khalibiev (The Love of Jeanne Ney), fugitives from the Law like Lulu (Pandora's Box), inner emigrants (Don Quixote), a social climber never happy with his station, never secure in his place (A Modern Hero), individuals on the run from contemporaries, misunderstood by their times (Komödianten and Paracelsus), Carl Maria von Weber on the way to Prague (Through the Forests, through the Fields). These films, for all of Pabst's ostensible “realism” and social authenticity, seem more convincing in dissolving spaces, collapsing borders, leading the viewer inevitably and inexorably into singular, frenzied, indeed extraterrestrial milieux: the exotic climes of a dreamer, the brothel as an Arcadian site, the subterranean realm of desire in Atlantis, the eerie laboratory of Paracelsus where one searches for an elixir of life, the expansive bowels of the earth in Kameradschaft and Mysterious Depths, networks of trenches and corridors (Westfront, The Last Ten Days), an imaginary city inhabited by spies, collaborators, foreign interests (Shanghai Drama), make-believe London on whose streets walk Jack the Ripper and Mack the Knife.

The logic of extraterritoriality inheres in the formal shape of Pabst's films as well. He would enter film history as the master of fluid editing, whose continuity cutting would break down class borders and transcend spatial demarcations, unsettling, confusing, and recasting, a textual strategy that makes transitions unnoticeable and at the same time renders conventional distinctions inoperative.¹³ The knife serves as the dismemberer's privileged instrument; the tool figures as a conspicuous and continuing preoccupation throughout Pabst's work, as a motif, an obsession, an objective correlative to a mind interested in segmenting and reassembling, dissecting and undoing. Social observer, scientist, and sadist, the director captures his audience in a calculated play of distance and suspense, dispassion and identification, a game commingling displeasure and fascination. Blades sever links and create new boundaries. Mirrors, likewise, fix identities and confound the self. It is fitting that Pabst's early study of male anxiety, Secrets of a Soul, introduces both props into the opening sequence as pliers of uncertainty. Mirrors shatter with regularity in Pabst's cinema (as in The Love of Jeanne Ney or The Trial); they reveal images of our worst presentiments (the husband's self-denigrating travesty in Komödianten); they show us an askew world for what it is (the tilted frame we see in reflection in Shanghai Drama). These reflections, like Pabst's continuities, are spurious ones, in keeping with a cinema of false identities and unfixed borders, a place where spectators never really feel at home.

Pabst, too, is a homeless person, consigned by most film historians to the lesser lodgings of those who have lost their once considerable fortune. In the early thirties, Paul Rotha spoke of Pabst as “perhaps the one great genius of the film outside Soviet Russia, approached, though in an entirely different manner, by Carl Dreyer, Chaplin, and René Clair.”¹⁴ His career interrupted and sidetracked by exile, ultimately betrayed by re-emigration, Pabst would never find firm footing or regain his directorial hand after first leaving Germany.¹⁵ He is considered a seminal figure in Weimar cinema who, unfortunately, continued making films after 1931. The major studies of the director concentrate on the pre-1932 work as the only examples worthy of sustained discussion, as if the subjectivity (never a stable one at that) we associate with the signifier “Pabst” broke down, becoming an increasingly moot and, in the end, all but indistinct entity. The later films destroyed Pabst's reputation, causing us to relativize the importance of even his most revered efforts: Pabst appears now to have never been all there—a director without conviction, someone bound by circumstance and context. Had he died after completing Kameradschaft, he would, no doubt, figure much more centrally in our notions of international film history.¹⁶

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

At one time an ambassador for film art held in high international esteem, Pabst, was subsequently perceived as a betrayer of realism, an apostate and accommodator.¹⁷ Declared persona non grata, he was expelled from the Pantheon of cinema. His work flopped in France, failed miserably in America, hit moral rock bottom in Nazi Germany, and never recovered in a host of postwar sites. The espouser of a social film, the unrelenting observer, the progressive activist dissolved and disappeared, causing much concern, bewilderment, and irritation among his former defenders; Pabst, the “failed realist” remained the governing paradigm in film historiography into the fifties.¹⁸ With the rise of auteurism and a different inflection in standards of critical measure, Pabst now came under attack for his lack of a persistent vision, for his thematic meandering and his overall uncertainty. Present-day notions still feed on this image of the auteur manqué: “The Zeitgeist,” claims Edgardo Cozarinsky, “if anything, speaks through his work and makes it refractory to any politique des auteurs approach.”¹⁹ More virulent yet, David Thomson views Pabst as a prime example of authorial incapacity: “Few careers probe the theory of the director's influence on film more embarrassingly than Pabst's.”²⁰ Even at his best (prior to 1932), Pabst still suffered from impersonality, contentism, and superficiality; his social studies and authentic dramas do not lend themselves well to searches for creative volition behind the text. Oddly enough, ideologically encumbered artists like Leni Riefenstahl would find a more sympathetic reception among auteurists. Her formal achievements and aesthetic will outweighed the blatant political inscriptions of her films, it seemed. As the sixties progressed, Riefenstahl would enjoy increasing critical favor; at the same time, Pabst all but fell out of sight.

To a degree, then, the ostensible discourse of Pabst is a function of discourse about Pabst. The harshness of recent reckonings extends not only to the post-Weimar output that had troubled Pabst's contemporaries and caused his erstwhile champions to despair. The fierce taking of stock exerts a retrospective force as well, neutralizing the entire corpus, rendering the figure as a lesser light, a surveyor of social surfaces, a craftsman whose talents were ones of organization and instrumentation—and definitely not mise en scène. A cinema of extraterritoriality and an extraterritorial career, Pabst's work and life fail to impress with a first person. If we choose, as the politique des auteurs did, “the personal factor in artistic creation as a standard of reference” and assume “that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next,”²¹ then Pabst does not stand up well to his competitors.

The cards have been stacked against him, to be sure. Even his most uncontested films—The Joyless Street, The Love of Jeanne Ney, Diary of Lost Girl—underwent substantial revisions at the hands of censors and foreign distributors, making them at times all but incomprehensible. A director lauded for his invisible editing, he found his carefully crafted work recut, indeed mutilated. Other films simply no longer exist and can only be discussed on the basis of contemporary reviews. In the United States, only a bare dozen of Pabst's thirty-three films—many in questionable versions—are presently available, all of them either Weimar or Nazi films.²² In this way, our images of Pabst accord to a very limited access to his work, a quite circumscribed notion of his career as a whole, a critical methodology that posits his lack of directorial personality, and a current situation that, by and large, does not allow us ready opportunity to test these notions on the basis of his entire work. What is uncertain here is not only Pabst's presence, but the presence of his films—and present-day images of him and his oeuvre which derive from partial evidence and superannuated paradigms.

The present collection of essays seeks to rethink Pabst's films as a textual body and to reconsider his career as a whole. An important element in these approaches is an examination of how Pabst has been imaged by contemporaries and subsequent historians and the way in which these portraits involve insight and oversight. The contributors here have a variety of motivations and clearly different agendas. Some revisit Pabst to establish links between the discourses of the films and the social discourses in which they are embedded. Others use his films to actualize or dramatize certain current debates about such matters as spectatorship, gender, and subjectivity. In several instances we find appreciations of works obscured by the passage of time as well as research offering missing information. And, in the case of the Nazi films, we encounter the first substantial attempts to engage (but not indulge) Pabst's output at its most problematic. The following comments provide a backdrop for the volume as a whole, setting the individual essays within the life's script of one of film history's premier displaced persons.

SHAKY FOUNDATIONS

The first shot of Pabst's first film fixes on an edifice, a house, the dwelling of a bell-founder somewhere in Southern Styria, Pabst's homeland. This is a precarious structure: it has once before burned to the ground and will come crashing down at the end of the film. The film explores the foundations of the house, offering glimpses of the space's interior topography on a map, revealing hidden secrets as its inhabitants skulk through dark corridors and labyrinthine passages. The initial sequence contrasts images of apparent domestic stability (a craftsman, his wife and daughter, an assistant) with ones of wandering. The final scene will picture a couple disappearing into the distance, their goal uncertain, at best an undefined away-from-here: flight from a site of greed and calamity, escape from a home that no longer exists. Beate and Arno move down a road into the receding spaces before them, away from the camera in a deep-focus composition, from a full foreground into the uncertainties of a vanishing point. If Pabst's cinema is one of extraterritoriality, The Treasure (1923) stands as a compelling founding text, a debut film that points ahead in various directions.

Bernhard Riff does much to rethink popular notions of the film as simple fantastic indulgence couched in a fairy-tale world, insisting that the studio-bound production involves constructive energies from different directions, a curious mix of expressionism, impressionism, and naturalism which makes the film hard to place. As Riff points out, critics, oddly enough, tend to locate the film in a medieval setting, despite clear markers that fix it in a much later period. Riff initially clarifies our understanding of the film's own relation to its textual basis, the egregious blood-and-soil fustian of Rudolf Hans Bartsch, as well as the manner in which it addresses a contemporary context of inflation and anti-Semitism. Seen in this light, The Treasure ceases to be an example of “classical expressionism,” a film “set in an imaginary medieval locale … against an architecture of bizarrely distorted forms.”²³ Instead of concentrating on composition and set design alone, Riff scrutinizes the film's play of oppositions at both a thematic and a stylistic level. The Treasure suggests the way to The Joyless Street, from a rudimentary cinema of contrast and obvious formal dialectic to a more ambiguous exploration of space, a less certain mode of providing spatial orientation, a finding he demonstrates with a scene near the film's end. Breaking out of a pattern of contrasts, of cross-cuts between frenzied gold-seekers and innocent romantics, a schematic textuality, Pabst surprises us by dispersing the camera eye, displacing it into an unseen space that opens up when the couple enter a room. If there is a logic in Pabst's development, suggests Riff, it has to do with a movement towards a cinema which denies us easy fixities and collapses firm foundations.

WOMEN WAITING

The Joyless Street (1925) explores an equally tenuous space, a locale without orientation, a site of aimlessness and anxiety: the street. In Pabst's film, big city avenues do not offer succor to the flâneur and serve as semiotic playgrounds which inspire reveries and dream-images.²⁴ Here one does not walk; one waits. Unlike Kracauer's “Wartende,” however, spirits living in abeyance, devoid of religious sustenance, plagued by feelings of alienation, bereft of hope and orientation, Pabst's protagonists seem frantic, possessed, and angry.²⁵ It is not horror vacui or temps morts they face, but rather the urgency of the most immediate material concerns. The author of From Caligari to Hitler would chide the director for his insufficient depiction of the inflation era and its ambience of economic chaos and moral ambiguity. Many progressive contemporaries nevertheless viewed the film as a stirring “moral protest, if not a socialist manifestation.” Pabst, according to Kracauer, did not go far enough, even if he clearly grasped the social dimensions of the predicament. His realism was undermined by both the film's melodramatic schematics and his infatuation with his female players.²⁶

Patrice Petro's discussion of The Joyless Street, part of her lengthier study on Weimar cinema and photojournalism, stresses an extra territory worthy of exploration and explanation: the place of women.²⁷ Petro suggests a similarity between the way female figures are positioned in this film and how they were positioned by the cinematic institution in the mid-twenties. Put another way, we find a convergence between the women who wait and the women who watch: both harbor an intense anger and dramatic potential, an excess that spills over into the filmic fiction and—censor officials feared—activates latent energies averse to patriarchy. Pabst's recourse to melodrama here, according to Petro, does not vitiate the film's realism; it heightens the value of The Joyless Street as a document telling multiple stories and reflecting the non-simultaneity between male and female responses to modernity. The film features two dramas, that of Grete Rumfort and that of Maria Lechner. The first is a tale of virtue rewarded, the second one is less reassuring. Rather, it exudes “guilt, desire, and repression,” incorporating a woman's frightful recognition of her lover's betrayal (in a shot taken from behind a patterned window which evokes a similar scene in Secrets of a Soul) and her murderous impulse—and deed. Maria acts out a repressed female anger, an anger that returns with a vengeance in the film's closing sequence, despite the seeming neatness with which Grete's destiny has just been resolved.

The denouement betrays signs of editorial intervention which render it seemingly incoherent and yet strikingly emphatic. Petro sees the passage as the manifestation of an uncontained female ire, drawing attention to a singular motif to essentialize the dynamics: the images of Maria's friend, who stands outside the butcher's shop and demands entry, “knocking, then pounding, as if to express the force of an ineffable desire and anger.”²⁸ The final version of the film depicts the result of this unleashed potential (the butcher's bloodied face) even if the actual murder scene has been excised, apparently by the censors. In this reading, Pabst becomes a filmmaker who surveys the same site and reveals its different realities, engaging both the male anxiety of the Angestellten class as well as acknowledging female rage, supplying in the end two resolutions, one comforting in its patriarchal logic, the other transgressive in its expression of repressed female desire.²⁹

THE UNEXPLORED SPACES OF DREAM ANALYSIS

Secrets of a Soul (1926) is both symptomatic and ironic, a text that reflects the double concern of many important Weimar films. It interrogates male subjectivity and, likewise, the nature of cinema itself, providing a scintillating metafilmic inquiry. Focussing on a troubled psyche, the film discloses an unacceptable identity, an alternative person and unbearable self, a man who can no longer direct his own actions. The protagonist slips from the symbolic into the imaginary, regressing from the head of a household to a dependent child and mother's boy. The film's dynamics will allow him to reassume, in a hyperbolic and overdetermined way, a position of authority and control over himself, his household, and his wife. Cinema, likewise, appears here as a medium whose task it is to order images, to provide pleasing self-images, to harness the seemingly irrational and arbitrary. The impetus of film and psychoanalysis is a common one: both involve a medium, both have to do with a quest for narrative, both also employ similar mechanisms, acting as institutions, dream factories, indeed textual apparatuses, as Anne Friedberg points out in her contribution. Pabst, argues Friedberg, succeeded—despite Freud's own misgivings and hostilities—in translating a talking cure into a silent film. In so doing, Pabst created a dynamics wherein the analyst in the text corresponds to the analyst outside the text, placing the spectator in a discursive relation to the onscreen exchange.

In Friedberg's discussion of the suggested equation “between dream analysis and film analysis,” it becomes apparent that Secrets of a Soul presents much that remains, in the end, unanalyzed and left out of the psychoanalyst's closing statement. In essence, we find an element of repression in the doctor's account. What results is an ironic tension between the exclusions of the inscribed explanation and our knowledge as onlookers of what it leaves out.³⁰ As Friedberg puts it: “The spectator of Secrets of a Soul is positioned as a more astute psychoanalyst than the fictional surrogate.” It would seem, then, that Pabst's cinema calls into question the power of simple answers and straightforward solutions. The psychoanalytical treatment will exorcise the impossible self, banish the man's feelings of insufficiency and trace them back to a childhood trauma, and enable him once again to wield the phallus. Nonetheless, certain excess baggage remains: we can never really dispel the possibility of a liaison between the cousin and the wife. He lurks offscreen with the wife when the husband returns home, suggesting another scene in keeping with the patient's worst dreams. And, to be sure, the wish-fulfilling final sequence provides an all too neat bit of closure; the resolution is overly emphatic, almost hysterically thorough. The doctor urges his subject at one juncture to tell him everything that passes before his mental eye. Later, he prompts the troubled man in no uncertain terms: “Do not repress a single thought, even if you think it is unimportant or absurd.” In this way, the film establishes certain standards that are not fully met by the would-be practitioner. The film analyst is challenged to do better.

Secrets of a Soul, from its very first shots, provides the spectator with an admonition not to be deluded by initial impressions, not to be fooled by spurious connections. The opening image shows a strip of material being used to sharpen a blade, suggesting a strip of celluloid and the hand and tool that cuts it. The introductory passage makes it clear just how convincingly editing can manipulate and distort. A number of shots lead us to believe the husband and wife are in the same room; eyeline matches and directionals deceive, though, for the two inhabit separate spaces and are hardly as intimate as it would seem: a wall stands between them, in fact. The editing creates a false image that we come to recognize as such after we regain our bearings. In the same way, the psychoanalyst edits a story derived from his patient's mental images, a “final cut” that seems to edify. If the psychoanalyst entered the man's life by returning a key, it is significant that the object both opens and closes, just as the ultimate explanation privileges certain moments and memories while blocking out others. The epilogue, which otherwise would be superfluous, provides a further perspective beyond the initial closure, one both ironic and unsettling.³¹

The final sequence contains a fair bit of residue from the main body of the film: we see the now vigorous man pulling fish out of a stream, recalling the dream image of his wife pulling a doll from the water. During analysis, the doctor “read” the image as one suggesting “an imminent or desired birth.” The moment is pregnant with possibility, but the undeniable link between the two “scenes” is immediately disavowed as the man dumps the bucket of fish back into the water, thus aborting meaning, graphically depressing any recall of the disturbing premonition of his wife's infidelity. The ensuing handheld shot of him bounding up the incline to his wife recalls the first shots with an outside perspective—glimpses of onlookers and police running toward the house of murder—echoing again in all the apparent exuberance another previous instance of disquiet. What about his fears of a woman with an independent gaze (something the film confirms as not his projection alone) and a sexuality that excludes him? (Is their child also his child—or his cousin's?) The film deals with secrets of his soul; it also suggests that his wife may have ones of her own. As he rejoins his spouse on the hilltop and lifts their child, we remember an earlier fantasy image of togetherness and fertility against a white screen backdrop. There is no trace now of the cousin; that disturbing factor has departed. The pair exists in a no-place, a utopia of wishful thinking, a dreamscape. Once again, certain footing gives way to precarious ground and here the film ends.

STORY OUTSIDE OF HISTORY

In Pabst's rendering of Ilya Ehrenburg's novel, the love of Jeanne Ney takes precedence over the forces of revolution and history. The adaptation enraged the author, who protested that Ufa had depoliticized and trivialized his book: “With what moving idiocy do they latch onto foreign names and props in order to fabricate yet another bit of nonsense with the best of all happy ends!”³² Do the happy end and the overall affirmative dynamics of The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) substantiate the claims that Pabst compromised Ehrenburg, buckling under studio pressure to fulfill Babelsberg's desire to emulate Hollywood, to make a film about Soviet experience, but in the American style? David Bathrick remains sensitive to the film's many determinants, its inherently contradictory project “as an attempt to negotiate precisely the conflicting discourses of Soviet and American styles … as they influenced Weimar cinema.” A progressive film artist working for a studio hardly sympathetic to his politics, Pabst steered a cinematic course that maneuvered between differing notions of montage and divergent approaches to the representation of history. Both a social document and a melodrama, the film provides a striking sense of milieux, place, and time, yet likewise privileges a character and an aesthetics working in opposition to “the film's understanding of itself as an historical or social document of twentieth-century life.” Pabst empowers Jeanne's gaze and allows her focus ultimately to determine how the narrative will unfold: namely, as “an inexorably forward-moving love story which subordinated history to the overriding imperatives of melodrama.” As in The Joyless Street, Pabst studies a historical setting and supplies multiple “fixes” on a time and its places. Jeanne stands as a curious expression of extraterritoriality, a variation on Pabst's cinema of life in the elsewhere: her perspective freely dispenses time, granting us access to the past (three flashbacks) and disposing over the future (two flashforwards). She administers story—and yet she embodies a force whose personal volition militates against history at large. In a manner similar to the epilogue of Secrets of a Soul, her happiness comes at the cost of the film's ultimate retreat from the world of social reality and historical process, a private triumph in a sphere determined above all by generic dictates.

THE STAKES OF SEXUALITY, SEXUALITY AT STAKE

Woman's position in The Love of Jeanne Ney at once activates story and enervates history. A circumscribed frame of reference, Jeanne, like other female protagonists in Pabst's narratives, is a source of control and disturbance. The dominion of Louise Brooks exerts an even more compelling power; her fascination as a screen presence and a fictional character threatens the very authority of the director himself. Critics have repeatedly suggested that the ultimate energy fueling Pandora's Box (1929) comes from an actress's sterling performance and persona rather than Pabst's directorial intelligence, in essence recasting the auteur in a secondary role as recorder; if he showed any talent here, it was above all his aplomb with a found subject.³³ The two essays in this volume devoted to Pabst's films with Louise Brooks, Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), remain much more skeptical about the ostensible sovereignty ascribed to women in Pabst's films and Weimar cinema as a whole.

Mary Ann Doane and Heide Schlüpmann both agree with Thomas Elsaesser that Pabst represents “sexuality in the cinema as the sexuality of the cinema.”³⁴ Sexuality stands out as a remarkable zone of disturbance both in Pabst's works and the discussions of them. In his reading of Pandora's Box, Elsaesser stresses Lulu's androgyny and indeterminacy, seeing her as image incarnate, as an embodiment of cinema and its imaginary arsenal; if Lulu, as he claims “is forever image,” she represents the hopes vested in filmic modernism.³⁵ Doane scrutinizes the same image and, likewise, recognizes how Lulu's countenance interrupts narrative flow in an otherwise classical continuity and fragments space by dint of its eroticism. In fact: “In her most desirous (and disruptive) state, Lulu is outside of the mise en scène. There is a somewhat fantastic hallucinatory quality attached to her image.” This image fascinates and frightens, existing above all in the space of male projection, both for the needy men in the text and for smitten male critics outside the film.³⁶ If Lulu exists as an embodiment of male lack, she bears a Pabstian inflection: despatialized and ahistoricized, a freefloating signifier, circulating in a sphere of desire and obsession, subject to the Law of an endangered subjectivity. Contrary to Elsaesser, Doane sees the sexuality of Pabst's cinema, at least in the case of Pandora's Box, as a lethal one. Lulu may fascinate, captivate, and scintillate; in the end, she—and every other trace of femininity in the film—“constitutes a danger which must be systematically eradicated.” Pabst's modernism of disjunctive cuts and disturbed identifications places woman in an extra territory governed nonetheless by conventional notions of sexual difference.

Heide Schlüpmann's article on Diary of a Lost Girl likewise insists that the enigma of woman in cinema is that of male projection. As an institution among others in Weimar Germany, cinema served to assist in the reconstruction of a mortally wounded patriarchy, participating in a larger project of restoring certain privileges and powers. This, in Schlüpmann's account, explains the particularly strained and precarious position of woman within Pabst's narrative as well as the problematic situation of the actress before the camera and the female spectator in the cinema. Pabst's second film with Louise Brooks involves a lost girl—and a lost diary, a personal voice present in the literary source not incorporated in the adaptation and ultimately abandoned as a prop in the film (it simply disappears without explanation). A floundering personage, Thymian is cast out of her home, separated from her father, and deposited in a brutal reform school. Distraught and disaffected, she escapes into a brothel, finding there what would seem to be a modicum of stability in a scenario that otherwise denies her happiness and succor. Throughout it all, and even in the apparently Arcadian bordello, Thymian is the object of an everpresent monitoring institutional gaze. The would-be kind madame with her eyeglasses replicates the workings of the filmic apparatus as a whole; just as she oversees the goings-on in her house, so too does the enunciator behind the camera exercise a specular omnipotence. Diary of a Lost Girl offers the male spectator a position similar to the filmmaker's imagined control over his objects. Female suffering corresponds to lacking male presence; in this way, the absent-present male viewer “can always imagine himself to be the basis and fulfillment of this erotic longing.” Male fantasy finds its ideal partner in a sadistic apparatus with which the male spectator can readily identify, for it restores lost power and authority. The female spectator retains at best a secondary identification with the Brooks character, an alignment with a self-denying and diminished image of woman.

A REALISM OF THE HYPERBOLICALLY FALSE

No matter the gender, claims Thomas Elsaesser in his study of The Threepenny Opera (1931), identification does not come easily in Pabst's cinema or in Weimar film. Contrary to what previous critics have maintained, The Threepenny Opera does not compromise Brecht's anti-illusionist impetus, relativizing “epic” subversion and undermining the play's critical impact. Employing a strategy similar to David Bathrick's, Elsaesser views the adaptation on its own terms, instead of reiterating the well-known brouhaha about putative creative and political violence wreaked by the director on a progressive author. Rather than chide the director for his betrayal of Brecht's discursive endeavors, for his atmospheric effects, artificial sets, precious camera work and impressionistic lighting, his fetishization of female physiognomies, Elsaesser glimpses in the film a remarkably incisive attack on social reality and established authority.³⁷ Pabst, unlike Brecht, did not stop at exposing the gap between bourgeois illusions and bourgeois institutions, revealing the bankruptcy, immorality, and ruthlessness of middle-class ideology.³⁸ The filmmaker addressed power at its base and traced the appeal of authority to its source, namely “the duplicity of representation” itself, refunctionalizing the cinematic medium—in a way not contemplated by Brecht—as a means to depict and dismantle the modern machinery of false images and affirmative culture.

As an artist, Pabst, so it would seem, wavered between realistic impulse and fantastic indulgence; his films move back and forth between social surfaces and exotic depths, traversing alternatively gritty streets and artificial interiors, peregrinating from concrete settings to imaginary locations. In a related way, Pabst is identified as a filmmaker caught between a reverence for the classical continuities (seamless editing, cause-and-effect narrative construction) and an attraction to certain modernist techniques, endeavoring to be both popular and progressive, accessible and transgressive.³⁹ Elsaesser sees these oppositions as specious, unequal to the textual challenges of The Threepenny Opera, whose hero, Mackie Messer—like Lang's Mabuse and Haghi—is a man of many guises, a figure who exists, above all, as an illusive, fascinating, and seductive image. Macheath dramatizes and embodies Weimar film's awareness of the “fascination of the false,” assuming (how could it be different?) a curious status and eccentric position as pure surface, show value, fetish, as gaze and gesture which control the narrative and yet become the ultimate objects of on- and offscreen spectators as well. The most telling space of the film, avers Elsaesser, is a no-man's-land of imaginary effects which reveals symbolic functions, “a kind of meta- or hyper-space of representation … constructed in the form of an infinite regress, en-abyme, in which a show appears within a show, a frame framing a frame.”

Elsaesser's conclusions illustrate a basic variance in recent discussions of gender in Weimar cinema.⁴⁰The Threepenny Opera revolves around illusionary appearances and imaginary spaces, disclosing the appeal and dominion of sham organizations (beggars, police, criminals, banks, entertainment apparatuses) in a play of props, dummies, and doubles. Macheath, according to Elsaesser, bears out the fact that in matters of gender “the power of fascination is ambivalent.” The character assumes a position redolent of Lulu, both center of attention and producer/product of the narrative action. (Doane would stress, however, the different ways in which the two narratives ultimately dispose over these images.) Pabst's film grants Polly at one point the definitive enabling power in German film, that of invisibility. She stands as an unseen authority to which thieves-turned-bankers defer. If the illusion of the image triumphs in The Threepenny Opera, it appears here in the guise of a woman who assumes the power of the image defined in male terms.

BREAKING DOWN BORDERS

Polly's sovereignty might, of course, be read differently, as a mirror reflection of a precarious subjectivity that exists as a shell and an empty signifier, or as the appearance of an illusion, every bit as much of a void as her male counterpart, Macheath, for whom she acts as a stand-in during the bank scene. Her reign is of short duration, at any rate: the final sequence will show her looking at the returned Mackie in rapture as he performs with his old war comrade, Tiger Brown. Viewed as a whole, Pabst's films feature men with deficient egos and indeterminate identities governed by frenzy, anxiety, irresolution. Caddish bon vivants and avuncular lechers abound, from Khalibiev and Raymond Ney to Meinert and Henning (Diary of a Lost Girl), the forsaken and betrayed lover in Shanghai Drama, Philine's would-be rapist in Komödianten, or the effete abductor of Through the Forests, through the Fields. Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (1931), quite conspicuously demonstrate the dynamics of the male bond and, as social documents, articulate the fluidity between men's self-images and their images of women.⁴¹

Michael Geisler shows how Westfront breaks down borders, spatial and temporal ones. Perhaps because the film destroyed boundaries in such a thoroughgoing way, it was criticized for its lack of “consistent effect” and a “guiding idea” (Herbert Ihering) amounting to, at best, “a noncommittal survey of war horrors” (Kracauer). As a pacifist exclamation, it situates soldiers, regardless of homeland, as inherent allies, as brothers under the uniform. The vicissitudes on the battlefield extend to the homefront where starvation and desperation also take their toll. Geisler explores how Pabst's war film displaces the bewilderment and chaos of late twenties Weimar onto the historical site of World War I, replacing the city of New Objectivity with the horrors of modern warfare and suggesting a perceived affinity between metropolis, modernity, and apocalypse. A further transgressed border, as Barthélemy Amengual indicates, is that between the realism of the trenches and combat and Pabst's visual expressionism of markers and signs, a function not so much of aesthetic zeal as of a will to capture dynamics that reduce the natural to mere raw material, the human shape to abstract form.⁴² At the center of the film, in Geisler's account, is an idyllic moment of repose in a barren landscape which in nuce characterizes the neusachliche condition. Karl and the student recline at the edge of a bomb crater and make themselves comfortable. They speak of plentiful food in Brussels, a joyful return home, and, to be certain, of their mutual desire for missing women. The intimate moment ends in a shared gaze, a pat on the back, and laughter. We then cut to a large hall and watch a lively audience partake of a revue whose first offering is a song by “Miss Forget-Me-Not.” The camera fixes longingly on her legs and her performance, not for a moment allowing one to forget the special place of women, even in the revelry of the male bond.

Kameradschaft contains many links to Westfront and can, as Geisler says, be seen as a continuation of the earlier film: the opening agonistic struggle between two boys over marbles reasserts as puerile the oppositions overcome by Westfront. The closing sequence of Kameradschaft celebrates international worker solidarity—but appearances deceive. The jubilation of the moment is undermined by a scene which reinstates the underground border between France and Germany—the “Frontière 1919” the narrative had sought to render inoperative. The old arrangement is put back in place as government officials look on; a document passes from one side of the barrier to the other, representatives sign and stamp it. For Russell Berman, this is not just an ironic epilogue. It corresponds to the hollowness of the film's overall message, essentializing the manner in which the text breaks down national borders only to erect others. The workers of the world, in Berman's provocative allegorical reading, unite—not against management or political oppression, but rather in a struggle against nature itself, against subterranean powers beneath the earth's surface and in their own persons. Male solidarity, in fact, seems grounded in a conspicuous exclusion of women, having as its criterion an embrace of one's like with decidedly homoerotic overtones. Kameradschaft, as a historical document, provides in retrospect an etiology and a pathology, unwittingly presaging the collapse of internationalist ideals and demonstrating why working-class comradeship would succumb to the forces of reaction. In this vein, the film offers insights into “the libidinal economy” of instrumental rationality as internalized by the proletariat. If anything prevails, it is repression, denial, and discipline, the powers of technology and organization. Women no doubt play a diminished role in this scenario, a subordinate element on the margins of the narrative; they wait before the mine gates and demand entry. They embody a potentially disruptive energy we have seen explode in The Joyless Street, an energy restrained in Kameradschaft in a way that makes it all the more conspicuous.

EXPEDITION INTO THE IMAGINARY

In keeping with tendencies in German cinema prompted by the switchover to sound technology, Pabst's career became an increasingly international one, with a single production like The Threepenny Opera encompassing two language versions with different casts and variant running times; critics began to voice suspicions that Pabst, like many of his peers, was escaping into a world of elaborate sets, high production values, and artificial effects. (Thomas Elsaesser has addressed how we might come to different conclusions.) While conservative and nationalist sensibilities exercised a growing grip on film production in the Germany of the early thirties, one found fewer outspoken and engaged films and a larger number of generic effusions that, in Rudolf Arnheim's description, took flight “from the horrors of reality into the horrors of irreality.” According to Arnheim, The Mistress of Atlantis (1932) demonstrated how a once politically correct, intellectually ambitious, if not artistically overendowed, filmmaker had fallen prey to outside pressures and run for cover.⁴³

Karl Sierek's analysis of selected fragments from the relatively unknown film presents it not as a document of artistic ambiguity lacking authorship, or a spiritual impasse, but rather as a work that interrogates the cinematic apparatus itself, revealing the processes of representation, enunciation, and spectatorship in the guise of a crazed man's retrospective tale of search and desire. Saint-Avit's peregrination into an imaginary realm, into the world of Antinea and Atlantis, involves a quest to find his missing friend, Morhange—and more. In Sierek's essay, The Mistress of Atlantis amounts to a subterranean fantasy, an allegory of a cave, indeed a film about cinema, whose narrative gaps open up the functionings of meaning construction, whose breaks in patterned identification (matching eyelines and directionals) divulge other spaces and different sites, allowing the (male) viewer at once to study his onscreen surrogate and recognize the pathological constitution of the subject by a projection mechanism. Treading a nether world of dream and fantasy, The Mistress of Atlantis offers a modernist experiment. Here “the screen no longer presents the world of film, but rather the world of cinema,” a primal realm in which male desire becomes intoxicated with the image of a woman, but above all recognizes itself as a split entity, as a subject whose ultimate object is the image of its own self.

HERR PABST GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

A Modern Hero, so runs common consensus, marks the downfall of the once modernist filmmaker/hero, the director repeatedly celebrated in the journal Close Up and lauded as late as 1933 as Europe's “strongest director” and a source of continuing hope. In the words of Harry Alan Potamkin: “To find in the bourgeois cinema, within its commercial realm, as socially conscientious an artist as Pabst is indeed a discovery!”⁴⁴ Unlike Lubitsch or Murnau, Pabst did not travel well. Contrary to Lang, he lacked the will to assert himself, “the arrogant, hard-nosed tenacity and ruthlessness to survive in the Hollywood studio.”⁴⁵ The sojourn in the United States (Pabst's second one) would prove traumatic, resulting in what seems to have been a compromised film by a filmmaker who would never recover from the experience. This is a narrative shared by a wide spectrum of commentators, from Leni Riefenstahl⁴⁶ to Lee Atwell.⁴⁷

Jan-Christopher Horak has done thorough detective work, tracking down correspondence, documents, and press releases, offering a more exact account of what transpired during this period. In looking through Pabst's correspondence with Warner Bros. officials about A Modern Hero, we indeed bear witness to a tense exchange; the director received repeated admonitions to respect the script, to heed editing conventions, to provide more close-ups and backup footage. It is indeed an instance of a foreigner being forced to toe the line; as Hal B. Wallis insisted to his employee, “You will have to get used to our way of shooting pictures.”

Horak goes on to scrutinize the final product and recognizes much that would suggest a not utterly compromised endeavor. We find a trajectory quite in keeping with other Pabst films: an ever-wanting male subject rises in the world on the shirt tails of women, ultimately capitulating in the wake of financial ruin and domestic catastrophe, retreating to a domineering mother and contemplating a return to Europe, in a conclusion that replicates Kracauer's privileged Weimar scenario, wherein a thwarted son takes refuge in a maternal lap. As Horak observes, Paul Rader is a problematic figure, a questionable focus for spectator identification. The precarious happy end involves an overdetermined regression, an Oedipal fixation with incestuous underpinnings. More than just a critique of capitalism, a disillusioned rendering of the American dream, a film about the signifying chain love, sex, and money, Pabst's sole Hollywood film is a distinctly perverse text that despite differences of place and production can be read within the logic of his previous—and subsequent work.

THE EMIGRATION TRILOGY

The pre-1933 films of Pabst have a consistent cast and an insistent dynamics. They feature the obsessed, the dispossessed, the displaced, the placeless, figures without shelter, individuals orphaned, women waiting and men on the run, a cinema of extraterritorial uncertainty in which characters exist on dangerous ground, where history provides the most uncommodious sanctuary, where utopian dreams betray above all a will to renounce the real. Pabst respected, confronted, and reflected upon the constructive potential of a machinery anchored in a harsh reality and circumscribed by inhospitable constellations. Despite imposing circumstances, he gained world renown and wide admiration during the Weimar years, standing as a role model for a cinema of the future, an individual admired for his courage and conviction. He would pay the price of these convictions, leaving Germany as the nation journeyed into night, recognizing that the country had no place for his like.

An exile by choice, Pabst once again (he had been imprisoned in a P.O.W. camp during World War I) became an extraterritorial citizen, crafting films that turned on this dilemma. One might call Don Quixote (1933), High and Low (1933), and Shanghai Drama (1938) his “Emigration Trilogy,” films that, despite their differences of time and place, explore the problematics of exile. A tri-lingual production in Pabst's rendering, Don Quixote offers a tale of a man who takes flight from mercenary contemporaries and changing conditions into a realm of enchantment and adventure. It is likewise a tale of male desire for an idealized image of woman; if any obsession sustains the hero's readings, it is an unrequited erotic energy. The drama unfolds as an episodic, indeed epic, construction.⁴⁸ The film's opening sequence shows the printed words of the Cervantes novel, leafing through the volume as words give rise to moving images, the animated figures of Lotte Reiniger. We then see the transfixed reader as he declaims an epic romance and we watch a film portraying the mental images that come of these encounters. The final shots picture a broken man, incarcerated and disenfranchised, his treasured tomes burning in a public square. (Pabst finished the film late in 1932 prior to similar demonstrations in Nazi Germany.) We hear the knight's funeral dirge and watch the apparatus reconstitute his story from the flames, the reverse-motion photography reclaiming, in an act of discursive resistance, the pages with which the film began.

High and Low, the trilogy's second leg, is not just a failed comedy of manners, a jejune example of French Poetic Realism, as is commonly maintained. Does it make sense to read this film within the contexts of generic convention or a national cinema? asks Gertrud Koch. Is there not something inherently eccentric and singular about a German-language crew filming a Hungarian play about a Viennese apartment house in a Paris studio with a cast of French players and German emigrant actors? In her reevaluation of High and Low, Koch discovers a document about “social rupture and displacement,” a work that lacks local color and folkloric detail precisely because its emphasis lies elsewhere. High and Low, the product of an exile ensemble, portrays the destiny of emigrants, “stranded souls, rising and descending, individuals whose cards have been reshuffled, who lack the security of social fixity.” A comedy about an unbalanced world, it destabilizes—without putting things back into place in the end. Even the male icon, Jean Gabin, undergoes a transformation, an education at the hands of a woman. Emancipation and sexuality, it would seem, do not have to be mutually exclusive. The pert schoolteacher and the sensitized soccer player escape convention and a closed community, although the film denies us easy confirmation that paradise is near; as Koch concludes, “Whether they have arrived in a lovers' seventh heaven remains anyone's guess.”

Shanghai Drama seems to issue from an opium den. It supplies a hyperbolic extension of the Pabstian topography: more imaginary than The Threepenny Opera or The Mistress of Atlantis; a sultry space of intrigue and excess which rivals The Love of Jeanne Ney; a hallucinatory dreamscape similar in its punitive surrealism to Secrets of a Soul; a sphere of melodrama, noir, and spies whose prime locations are streets, a night club, and a torture chamber, whose leading players are both conspirators and performers. Contemporary critics laughed it off as a crude spy thriller, an absurd genre film that demonstrates “the exigencies of exile and the stupidity of producers,” whose director “isn't really here at all, except for a few seconds in a neat knifing,” as Graham Greene wrote in 1939.⁴⁹ A film whose plot is confused, indeed obscure, this would seem to be, as James Agee opined, André Malraux's Human Condition “redone for the pulps.”⁵⁰

In Karsten Witte's analysis, the film makes conceptual and narrative sense if one discerns the historical inscriptions and grasps the text as not just pure escapism or a romantic potboiler, but takes its neon-light promise as its premise. The film, quite literally, portrays “le rêve de Shanghai,” a spectacle of estrangement and displacement, thematizing exile as a continent and a condition. Shanghai Drama unfolds as a melodrama about dislocation where exiles seek escape to yet another station, where local inhabitants breathe uneasily in an ambience of foreign opportunism and imported cabal, where all involved remain subject to a constantly shifting and arbitrary Law. Shanghai stands as an emblem for the exotic, a cipher of the emigrant's uncertainty; Shanghai Drama, observes Witte, provides an interesting station in a directional career increasingly on the run from history, evidence that the filmmaker was quite conscious of his fugitive status and its precarious terms.

ANOTHER KIND OF FUGITIVE CINEMA

For complex reasons, the prodigal Pabst visited Austria and, as World War II broke out, found himself a captive of circumstance, as in 1914, in the wrong place at an unpropitious moment.⁵¹ He would later deny he had collaborated or conformed in his return to the German film industry, now under the tutelage of National Socialism. He is reputed to have kept a diary during these years, although it has thus far not been made available for public scrutiny.⁵² The completed films Pabst did leave behind have done irreparable damage to his image. Depending on one's perspective, they amount to aesthetic bankruptcy, redeemed at best by hints of a former mastery, on the one hand, or signs of opportunism and accommodation, proof of the director's inherent lack of volition. Anke Gleber's contribution on Komödianten (1941) and Regine Mihal Friedman's analysis of Paracelsus (1943) do not seek to point fingers and condemn Pabst, nor do they skirt difficult questions catalyzed by problematic films. Eluding sweeping judgments and avoiding neat cubbyholes, the two look at Pabst's costume dramas in the discursive context out of which they arose and in which they functioned.

Pabst's NS-films involve misunderstood geniuses, individuals whose great contributions to German culture receive retrospective tribute by a modern state film machinery. Caroline Neuber, actress and activist, envisions the German drama of the future and a more mature national audience, although she will see neither within her lifetime. Komödianten offers a monument to a failed genius, a woman whose triumph would consist of having given birth to a national theater. According to Anke Gleber, the film portrays Neuber as a self-denying and masochistic facilitator, a maternal figure who relinquishes her own desire for the sake of a larger calling. Quite literally, we will see how a dying woman becomes the material for the edifice celebrated in the closing sequence: the camera dissolves from a shot of Caroline's mid-body to the exterior of the National Theater where young Lessing's play is to premiere. With its cast of Käthe Dorsch, Hilde Krahl, and Henny Porten, an actresses' film for a female audience, Komödianten might at first glance be mistaken for an anomaly, a Nazi film that empowers women. An exchange between Neuber's surrogate daughter, Philine, and her protectoress, the Duchess, is crucial. Philine describes Caroline as “a great woman who had the stuff to be a great man!” The Duchess protests: “Stop! Neuberin should remain a woman and prove what we women are capable of!” The ideological mission of the film, claims Gleber, lay in addressing women left on the homefront of 1941 while their husbands were away at war. Komödianten is a Nazi woman's film, offering figures of identification and, ultimately, positions one was meant, by implication, to assume. Not so much a genius as an object lesson, Caroline Neuber, the activist and midwife, became the stuff for a Nazi film that evoked passions and freed feelings, “all the better to serve as a model of female submission for wartime female spectators.”

Where we can locate Pabst in these texts remains difficult: Komödianten and Paracelsus maintain a thematic consistency, it is true, and contain episodic structures and nomadic narratives typical of previous films. Still, even if Pabst apparently resisted the State film apparatus, greeting certain projects with uneasiness, it remains hard to find ambiguity in these quite tendentious productions.⁵³ What one can fix is the position these films assumed in a larger discourse, in Nazi culture and German cinemas, in Pabst's career and subsequent discussions of his work. Paracelsus is generally read as a curious blend of Autorenkino and Nazi film, one of Pabst's “most brilliant films” (Lee Atwell)⁵⁴ and yet, “not quite so politically innocent as some would have it” (David Stewart Hull).⁵⁵ Clearly the film reflects Nazi cinema's penchant for reaching into the grab bag of history and ransacking it for political purposes, transforming past events and personages into myth—the “tamed richness” spoken of by Roland Barthes which one alternately evokes and dismisses. One takes liberties with the past for a good reason: what really is at issue are present-day agendas. Paracelsus is a surrogate Führer, a genius ahead of his time, someone in touch with the elements, nature, and folk, a thinker who eschews narrow categories and embraces a wider view of things.

Regine Mihal Friedman shows how the sixteenth-century scientist was pressed into the service of Nazi hagiography, going on then to look more closely at the film's formal dynamics beyond blatant ideological histrionics. She concentrates on what she terms a “zone of disturbance” at the film's center, a moment of textual excess—a dance of death followed by a procession of flagellants—which serves no narrative purpose, but stands out markedly, so much so that most commentators have singled out these scenes as striking and noteworthy. This sequence, in Friedman's mind, serves a mise en abyme function, at once essentializing the film's own workings and yet turning in on the film as well, offering a glimpse at the ambiguities of its construction. The images of possessed dancers and tormented bodies present a discourse on the “manipulation of the human” and “the mechanization of the living,” expressing “the frenzied desires of bodies to be liberated, but also to be disciplined and punished.” Herein rest energies harnessed by National Socialism and inscribed in this film, a work that ultimately ruptures into a stunning “commentary on the present in the form of a grotesque tableau.”

THE POSTWAR ODYSSEY

The films Pabst made after 1945, with several exceptions, came under even harsher criticism than his Nazi output. The postwar work bears the label of genre and formula: costume dramas, literary adaptations, sappy melodramas, historical reconstructions, and even a bit of Heimat sentimentality. Hopelessly out of step with history, behind the times and unable to catch up, Pabst had lost all incisiveness. “In fact, the former advocate of social realism moved increasingly toward a position of mysticism or romantic evasion.”⁵⁶ The career of the late Pabst is a study in desperation: a bombastic attempt at rehabilitation (The Trial, 1948),⁵⁷ a subsequent casting about in the international scene (a failed production company in Vienna, Italian co-productions of little note), an odyssey that even included the ultimately forsaken plan to film Homer's epic about the long return home of a warrior. Pabst's own return to German-language productions hardly found admiring audiences and enthused critics. His melodramas, The Confession of Ina Kahr (1954) and Roses for Bettina (1955), appeared as recourses to the Ufa entertainments of the Nazi era, virulent manifestations of his own artistic deterioration. The two retrospective readings of the Third Reich, The Last Ten Days and The Jackboot Mutiny (both released in 1955) betrayed Pabst's predilection for wallowing in effects and obscuring causes. The historical portraits revisited the attempt on Hitler's life and the Führer's final days in the bunker, replicating a wider mythology of the Adenauer period which displaced guilt onto an inexorable destiny, portraying National Socialism as evil incarnate, a plague upon mankind. Freddy Buache castigated Pabst in no uncertain terms: “As a loyal servant to official morality, he makes excuses and provides the regime with alibis, or rather, he takes refuge in comfortable melodrama. He has become a zombie-director. His death, no doubt, occurred in 1932-33.”⁵⁸

These harsh judgments seem to obviate any need to scrutinize the later films more carefully. Yet when we do look at them with more attention and less impatience, we find much that warrants interest and extended discussion, even if these films hardly recommend themselves as misunderstood hallmarks of postwar European cinema. Based on a novel by Rudolf Brunngraber, The Trial is about a son who bears false witness against his father. A Jewish boy, cajoled, hounded, and seduced by mercenary opportunists, serves reactionary forces in their anti-Semitic campaign, a reenactment of an actual court case in late nineteenth-century Hungary. (Pabst had already contemplated a similar project early in the thirties.) The chauvinists conspire to force the youngster to claim he saw his elders commit the ritual murder of a village girl, prompting the boy to describe a fictional scene of violence allegedly glimpsed through a keyhole. Point of view becomes a prime issue in this primal scenario about an errant son made by German cinema's premier prodigal spirit. In his attempt to resurrect a forsaken legacy of social criticism and realistic resolve, Pabst placed the Jewish community between the fronts, at the mercy of larger political interests, a plaything for parties on both sides of the ideological spectrum. In a study of projections and false images, as Karl Prümm makes clear, we see precious few glimpses of the Jewish citizenry except from an outside perspective. Unlike Pabst's most compelling dramas about the disenfranchised, the ostensible objects of his sympathy do not enjoy a convincing presence—either as voice or gaze—in The Trial. For all of Pabst's great ambitions, Prümm concludes, the film disappoints because its critical viewpoint remains so short-sighted.

Pabst's postwar melodramas involve sadomasochistic dynamics that abound with excess and perversion. Roses for Bettina might be productively compared to R. W. Fassbinders's Martha (1973): both end with female protagonists paralyzed and dependent, bound to weelchairs and subservient to dominant—and creepy—males. There is a similar logic and common strategy at work in Diary of a Lost Girl, Shanghai Drama, Komödianten, The Confession of Ina Kahr, and Roses for Bettina, where “the structures of melodrama preside with such triumphant aggressiveness, excess, and imperialism that one thinks Pabst … is making an anti-melodrama.”⁵⁹ Tormented and destructive males (especially the self-effacingly sinister Paul of Ina Kahr portrayed by Curt Jürgens), jealous father figures, sacrificial heroines—and outbreaks of textual hysteria (what Amengual calls Pabst's “fêtes”⁶⁰) mark these shrill and overdetermined narratives, films one could well reconsider in terms of a shrewd mise en scène that undermines trivial stories.

Marc Silberman views Pabst's final years and his creative decline in the context of postwar German cinema as a whole. Adenauer's Federal Republic was a time and a place not beholden to creative impulse, stylistic zeal, and alternative endeavor. The film apparatus of the fifties in Germany did not allow authorship to flourish: think of the directorial fates of returned exiles like Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak and the difficulties experienced by outspoken spirits such as Wolfgang Staudte. In this way, The Last Ten Days becomes a function of an era's tunnel vision, a spectacle of history made with a documentary zeal and told from a melodramatic perspective, serving in the end to mystify fascism and cloud memories of that past, while participating in a larger collective desire to ward off traumatic and unpleasant recollections. History becomes melodrama, a tale of disintegration and male hysteria, an account of a demented figure's fantasies and fantasms in a subterranean setting. Here, too, we find one of Pabst's famous celebrations, a delirious scene where people become grotesque marionettes, mechanical bodies. Human beings succumb to an abandon that renders them frenzied apparatuses caught up in a dance of death. With visual attention and spectator interest bound in a fascination with a madman's delusions and his minions' desperate final hours, it makes sense, as Silberman argues, that the voices of resistance, conscience, and morality ring hollow and do not convince.

Several words about Pabst's final film, Through the Forests, through the Fields (1956), are in order. Its first shot provides an almost ironic textual allegory, essentializing the dialectical relationship between male self-images and men's images of women we find in so many of Pabst's films. The miniature of a woman, the famous opera singer, Caroline Brandt, rests on a Count's phallic soldierly headdress, suggesting her surrender and his conquest—an illusion on both counts, we will soon learn, a fraud and a fantasy. The Count has in fact acquired the portrait through a ruse. The film unfolds as a struggle between two men for the woman's favor. Count Schwarzenbrünn, a dandy and an idler, lacks a steady presence in his moribund existence. His competitor, the composer Carl Maria von Weber, needs his lover's voice and person as a medium for his music. In the end, the musician will triumph as his “Romantic Fantasy” is performed in a village square. What triumphs above all is the composer's own romantic fantasy—the phantasm of a woman. The last shot of Pabst's last film is striking: an artist looks offscreen during a moment of seeming victory, seeking the affirmative gaze of a woman who stands outside of the image, invisible, yet potent, the source of recognition the man needs if his success is to be complete. If the first image of Pabst's cinema showed us a house with questionable foundations, the last shot of his work fades out from a subject whose identity rests on equally precarious ground.

Notes

1. Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith, The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema (London: Spring, 1967), 584n.

2. Barthélemy Amengual, G. W. Pabst (Paris: Seghers, 1966), 16. Amengual goes on to quote Glauco Viazzi's appraisal of Pabst from 1949: “Pabst is a director who, bound to history, always wanted to answer questions posed by history. But first, he submits to history.”

3. Edgardo Cozarinsky, “G. W. Pabst,” in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 2 vols., ed. Richard Roud (New York: Viking, 1980), 2:752.

4. A preferred locution is the phrase “between,” a measure of Pabst's allegedly mercurial disposition, his constant indecision. In the end, one often simply speaks of him as someone whose mind and person pose an unsolvable riddle. See, for instance, Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema from Its Origins to 1970 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 190: “He is the most impassive of directors, the cold surface of his films being about as yielding as the monocled eye of a Junker officer. He remains enigmatic at every level; and whether or not he intended to be so, or was in fact ingenuous, is part of the Pabst enigma.”

5. See Rotha and Griffith, Film Till Now, 582ff. Griffith, in his reckoning with Pabst's career, shares Kracauer's analysis that the so-called social trilogy—Westfront, The Threepenny Opera, Kameradschaft—manifests a fatal political ignorance and ultimately “showed unmistakable symptoms of immaturity” in lacking awareness of one's historical spectatorship (582). “Pabst's case,” Griffith observes, “is a subtle, knotty and perhaps an insoluble one. … It is an all too significant commentary on film commentators, including the present writer. Our record has been for too long one of absorption in technique for its own sake, or alternatively of accepting sociological intentions at their face value” (584-585).

6. See, for example, the career assessment in rororo Film lexikon, ed. Liz-Anne Bawden and Wolfram Tichy (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 1246. Alexandre Arnoux, “Un déjeuner avec Pabst,” Pour Vous, 29 January 1931 (quoted in Amengual, Pabst, 17), traces, in the director's own words, this instability to the trauma experienced in World War I. “We belong,” Pabst explains, “to a sacrificed generation, cut in two. Our rhythm of life was broken; our generation carries within itself a rupture, an abyss between its youth and maturity. This explains the uncertainty and gasping of our works, their broken line, the difficulty we experience in finding a style.”

7. Harry Alan Potamkin, “Pabst and the Social Film,” in The Compound Cinema, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York and London: Teachers College, 1977), 416. The article originally appeared in Hound and Horn, January-March 1933.

8. Ulrich Gregor and Enno Patalas, Geschichte des Films. 1: 1895-1939, 2 vols. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1976), 61: Pabst is superficial, someone who glosses over surfaces and fails to penetrate them, taking recourse to the most obvious forms of melodrama and kitsch even in his Weimar films.

9. In his contribution, David Bathrick discusses this very dilemma in terms of Pabst's The Love of Jeanne Ney. The films of the early thirties in particular provoked this criticism on the Right.

10. See Cornelius Schnauber, Fritz Lang in Hollywood (Vienna, Munich and Zürich: Europaverlag, 1986), 147. Fritz Lang allegedly complained in a letter of 12 October 1966 to Lotte Eisner that Pabst, during his American sojourn, had spread rumors that Lang was in fact a secret agent for the National Socialists. Schnauber implicitly claims that Pabst (who returned to Vienna in 1939 and made “party line films”) was a more likely suspect.

11. In this light it makes sense that the nomadic German director of Wim Wenders's The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, 1982), a filmmaker whose quest for images shipwrecks on Hollywood's narrative bulwarks, is seen as sharing the fate of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. The film makes no mention of Pabst. Compare as well Lotte Eisner's treatment of Lang and Murnau (about whom she wrote exhaustive books) to her more problematical relationship to Pabst.

12. See Willi Forst's characterization of Krauss's talents of transformation in Robert Dachs, Willi Forst. Eine Biographie (Vienna: Kremayr & Scherlau, 1986), 81. Krauss, likewise, is reputed to have had a famous fear of close-ups. William Shawn, in his introduction to Louise Brooks's Lulu in Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 1983), ix, talks about how the actress's person became one with her screen image: “It is difficult to believe that Louise Brooks exists apart from her creation. Pabst himself identified the two, and even Louise Brooks has had her moments of confusion.”

13. See Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar, The Technique of Film Editing (New York: Hastings House, 1968), 48: “Pabst may have been one of the first film-makers to time most of his cuts on specific movements within the picture in an attempt to make the transitions as unnoticeable as possible.”

14. Rotha and Griffith, 263. See as well Potamkin's utopian document, “A Proposal for a School of the Motion Picture,” reprinted in The Compound Cinema, 587-592. Among the faculty to be responsible for “Theory of Direction” were Pabst, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Milestone, Flaherty, Howard, Clair, and Asquith. The proposal first appeared in Hound and Horn, October 1933.

15. Using organic metaphors, Langlois maintains that Pabst's fate bears out how a national hero languishes when uprooted from his native soil. The statement appears in the unpaginated brochure, Der Regisseur G. W. Pabst (Munich: Photo- und Filmmuseum, 1963).

16. Compare Amengual, 12: “In nine years, from 1923 to 1932, Pabst made fifteen films. His best work, or rather, all of his work is there.” Even more explicit is Warren French's “Editor's Foreword” to Lee Atwell, G. W. Pabst (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 7: “One cannot suppress the distressing thought that if Pabst had died, like Murnau, during his American visit in the 1930s, he would probably have a far more glorious reputation today.”

17. Rotha and Griffith, 582: Pabst presents “the most extraordinary and baffling case of the ‘accommodators,’” i.e. filmmakers who fell in with the National Socialists.

18. See Georges Sadoul's characterization of Pabst in Histoire de l'art du Cinéma des origines à nos jours, 4th ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1955).

19. Cozarinsky in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1: 752.

20. David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Morrow, 1981), 455.

21. André Bazin, “La politique des auteurs,” as rendered in Theories of Authorship, ed. John Caughie (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 45.

22. For particulars on the present availability of Pabst films in the United States, see Feature Films: A Directory of Feature Films on 16mm and Videotape Available for Rental, Sale, and Lease, ed. James L. Limbacher, 8th ed. (New York and London: Bowker, 1985).

23. Atwell, G. W. Pabst, 21.

24. Pabst seems aware of the distinctly gender-bound logic of the street. Loitering, wandering, and idle gazing when practiced by a male have an altogether different significance than when exercised by a woman. Pabst does not replicate the “street film” rhetoric of the metropolis as a phantasmagoria which we find, for instance, in Karl Grune's The Street (Die Strasse, 1923). Cf. Klaus Kreimeier, “Die Strasse im deutschen Film vor 1933,” epd Kirche und Film (December 1972): 10-16.

25. Compare the essay of 1922, “Die Wartenden,” reprinted in Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse, ed. Karsten Witte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 106-119.

26. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 170.

27. Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

28. This motif—one that recurs throughout Weimar productions, as Petro points out—is not considered in Kracauer's study, which he describes as “a history of motifs pervading films of all levels” (8).

29. See Kracauer's significant and regrettably still untranslated reportage, Die Angestellten. Aus dem neuesten Deutschland. The study first ran in 1929 and 1930 as a continuing serial in the Frankfurter Zeitung; the initial book edition appeared in 1930 (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, Abteilung Buchverlag).

30. Compare Nick Browne and Bruce McPherson, “Dream and Photography in a Psychoanalytic Film: Secrets of a Soul,” Dreamworks 1:1 (Spring 1980): 36-37: One of the problems posed here, claim the authors, has to do with the “disjunction in the film between the precise and voluminous psychological detail and the paucity, even disingenuousness, of its psychoanalytic explanation,” something that “calls for a more thoroughgoing analysis of the case than either the film or its commentators provide.”

31. Compare the more conventional interpretation of the epilogue as an entity, according to Kracauer (172), “which drags the whole plot into the sphere of melodrama, thus definitely nullifying its broader implications.”

32. This quotation is taken from Ehrenburg's flier, Protest gegen die Ufa (Stuttgart: Rhein, 1928).

33. See Lotte H. Eisner's incisive commentary in The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 296: “In Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl we have the miracle of Louise Brooks. Her gifts of profound intuition may seem purely passive to an inexperienced audience, yet she succeeded in stimulating an otherwise unequal director's talent to the extreme. Pabst's remarkable evolution must thus be seen as an encounter with an actress who needed no directing, but could move across the screen causing the work of art to be born by her mere presence.”

34. Thomas Elsaesser, “Lulu and the Meter Man,” Screen 24.4-5 (July-October 1983): 33.

35. Ibid., 36: “What Pabst could not prevent, in any case, was the momentous shift, whereby the film industry, seizing on the woman's body, and focusing gratification so much on the voyeuristic look, turned the cinema into an obsessional, fetishistic instrument, and thus betrayed in some sense its Modernist promise, by making this modernism instrumental and subservient to the logic of capital and the commodity.”

36. For an inventory of such celebrations, see Doane's essay. Compare Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1968), 151: The author remembers Pabst's work not because of its directorial presence, “but rather for the retroactive glory of Louise Brooks. … The preeminence of Miss Brooks as the beauty of the twenties indicates the classic nature of the cinema, and its built-in machinery for an appeal to the verdict of history.”

37. Compare Eisner's appraisal, 316: “In his adaptation for the cinema Pabst diluted the original [Threepenny Opera] by his attachment to chiaroscuro and Stimmung.” For a more favorable evaluation of the film's social dimension, see Potamkin, “Pabst and the Social Film,” 415f.

38. See Brecht's notes to The Threepenny Opera, “The Literarization of the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 43: “The Threepenny Opera is concerned with bourgeois conceptions not only as content, by representing them, but also through the manner in which it does.”

39. In this reading, Pabst would seem to span the boundaries of film as mass culture and modernism. For an articulation of this dialectic in the wider context of Weimar cinema, see Petro, Joyless Streets, 4-9.

40. Petro maintains that Kracauer posits a male subject as the object and spectator of Weimar films. Elsaesser, she goes on to say, circumvents “questions of sexual ambiguity and androgyny as they relate to the female spectator, in favor of a sliding or unstable identification, one that remains bound to a male spectator position” (17).

41. Compare Freddy Buache's indictment of the two films in G. W. Pabst (Lyon: Serdoc, 1965), 50: In Westfront, “the author … due to weakness of character or lack of conscience, abandons restating the sociological moment in the historic totalization. Westfront depicts war as a runaway Evil, descended from an unforeseeable Destiny, without economic and political origins.” In essence, then, Pabst “deliberately ignores the motives and horrible mechanics.”

42. Compare Amengual's comments on Westfront, 42: “Pabst, powerless to create the real in its blatancy here, tries to recover it in the fantastic by turning to expressionism. More than the war, he depicts the nightmare of war.”

43. Rudolf Arnheim, Kritiken und Aufsätze zum Film, ed. Helmut H. Diederichs (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), 259-260. Arnheim's notice originally appeared in Die Weltbühne on 13 September 1932 as “Flucht in die Kulisse.” Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler, 242, calls the film “an outright retrogression from ‘social conclusiveness’ into pure escapism.”

44. “Pabst and the Social Film,” 420.

45. Atwell, 116-117. Compare Herman F. Weinberg, “The Case of Pabst,” in Saint Cinema: Writings on Film, 1929-1970, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Ungar, 1980), 19: “Pabst floundered about the studios of France and Hollywood without being able to adjust himself to the terrible nightmare of this shocking reality, namely that the integrity of the artist was a myth so far as the world is concerned, that art is not universal, nor above the bickerings of politicians and dictators, that money rules all, and that this is pretty much the worst of all possible worlds. How else to explain the abortion made in Hollywood which carried his name as director?”

46. Riefenstahl describes her work with Pabst (who assisted in some scenes of Tiefland) in her Memoiren (Munich and Hamburg: Knaus, 1987), 369: Pabst “was no longer the man I had known twelve years before when we had worked so well on Piz Palü. His personality had changed. … Nothing remained of what had once been such a good eye for visual matters. Hollywood apparently had no positive influence on him, his approach now was perfunctory and seemed more in keeping with what one might expect for commercial films.”

47. Atwell, 116: “Pabst was bitterly disillusioned by the repressive system of Hollywood's assembly-line methods where he had virtually no creative control and was regarded primarily as a functionary rather than an artist.” Pabst reflected on how Hollywood had compromised his authorial endeavors in an essay of 1937, “Servitude et grandeur à Hollywood.”

48. Compare Edgardo Cozarinsky, “Foreign Filmmakers in France,” in Rediscovering French Film, ed. Mary Lea Bandy (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983), 140: “Though Jacques Ibert's score and Paul Morand's lyrics in Don Quichotte dilute into Parisian chic an approach obviously inspired by Brecht and Weill …, the ‘epic theater’ treatment of a selection of episodes from Cervantes suggests a possible reading of the classic that is as unexpected as it is engaging.” The epic treatment may well explain the disappointment experienced by critics like Otis Ferguson. See his review of 9 January 1935, reprinted in The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, ed. Robert Wilson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971), 64: “As far as such central matters as the dominant idea and its execution are concerned, the picture is a pretty straight flop. A few attitudes, a few big tableaux, and no flowing of one small thing into another.”

49. Review in The Spectator, 28 July 1939, reprinted in Graham Greene on Film. Collected Film Criticism 1935-1940, ed. John Russell Taylor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 235.

50. Agee's notice appeared on 3 February 1945 in The Nation. It is reprinted in Agee on Film, 2 vols. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969), 1: 140.

51. For a lengthy account, see the materials gathered in Atwell, 121-123, including a recollection by Pabst's widow. See as well Boguslaw Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938-1945. Ein Gesamtüberblick (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987), 66. Drewniak speaks of Pabst as Nazi Germany's most prominent re-emigrant: “After Pabst's return, the public was astonished. Every reader of the Philo Lexikon (Berlin, 1935) knew that the director Pabst was of pure Jewish descent.”

52. Michael Pabst related this fact in a recent conversation with Hans-Michael Bock.

53. For more particulars, see Hans-Michael Bock's essay in this volume. For a rather lame attempt to vindicate Pabst's wartime work, see Leo Lania, “In Defense of Pabst,” letter in The New York Times, 2 April 1950.

54. Atwell, 126. The author's account of the film, here as elsewhere, abounds with infelicities and errors. Renata, Pfefferkorn's daughter, is referred to as “the merchant's wife.” Fritz Rasp, the Magister, is called the “Schoolmaster” and characterized as “subdued” (!). The famous publisher Froben becomes “an invalid who is suffering from a leg injury.” Atwell goes on to confuse two central scenes, namely the visit of the ailing Ulrich von Hutten to Paracelsus and the fatal treatment of Froben by Paracelsus's assistant. In Atwell, we read: “When Ulrich von Hutten, a prominent citizen [!], is seized by the illness [presumably the plague, but in fact, syphilis, as the film makes clear], Paracelsus administers a potion that momentarily effects a miraculous cure, but when the man dies, Paracelsus is roughly expelled” (127).

55. David Stewart Hull, Film in the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 246.

56. Atwell, 135.

57. See Eisner, 329. She describes the persistence of the “mawkish perfection of the ‘Ufa style’” above all in the “pseudo-historical film.” “It introduces a false note into all the costume film productions made during the Third Reich, from Jud Süss (1940) and Rembrandt (1942) to Pabst's Paracelsus (1943) and Riefenstahl's Tiefland (1944).” This style “is still there to mar Pabst's post-Nazi film Prozess.”

58. Buache, 94.

59. Amengual, 40. The phrase is meant to describe Diary of a Lost Girl; Amengual likens it to Luis Buñuel's Mexican films.

60. These celebrations are ubiquitous in Pabst's work. According to Amengual, they both exalt and condemn eros (35). For an eloquent and expressive account of this motif and its larger significance in the Pabstian corpus, see Amengual, 78ff., esp. 81: “Celebrations, theatrical representations, dreams—few of Pabst's films ignore them. From the spectacle of Frau Greifer among her angels in Joyless Street, from the troupe's travels in Komödianten, to the cancan in Mistress of Atlantis and the café concerts in Mademoiselle Docteur, from the Shanghai Drama, from Peachum's revolutionary ‘masquerade’ to Michel Simon's pseudo-suicide in High and Low, not to mention the ‘opera’ diffused by images in The Threepenny Opera, love and life reveal themselves to be a universal conspiracy in which each brings its stone without being aware of it, a gigantic machine for conditioning reflexes.”