In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

144 ARRAYS
("Kult," 314). In K. 13513, which as a programmatic manifestation of
the "New Sobriety" inaugurates the genre of the Querschnittsfilm
("cross-section film"), the main protagonist is a banknote that travels
through a random sequence of transactions and existential situations.
In spite of-or perhaps because of-such ambitious projects, the German
film industry is entering a period of extreme economic pressure. In
return for an urgently needed loan of $4 million, the Ufa Company has
incurred the contractual obligation of featuring twenty Paramount and
Metro-Goldwyn productions per year: it must reserve 75 percent of the
screen time in its own theaters for these American movies (Jacobsen,
526). Astonishingly, European actors and directors seem to seek such
dependency on the American film world-even when it is not imposed
on them by the market. Some of German cinema's most outstanding
artists, among them Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, accept offers from
Hollywood [see Americans in Paris], and the Fascist critic Anton Giulio
Bragaglia recommends solving the current artistic crisis in the Italian
movie industry by sending aspiring filmmakers to work as apprentices in
Hollywood: "There's a lot of shouting back and forth. But where are the
Italian directors who know how to make films like the Americans? ...
It's clear that a handful of people representing the various branches of
this complex art should be sent off to America to study new film techniques,
photographic media, and chemical processing. Only after two
years of schooling should they be allowed to venture out" (Bragaglia,
253f£'). Through reflections of this kind, the film world becomes a
prominent medium for the self-reference of contemporary society. In
Siegfried Kracauer's view, moviegoers epitomize "the homogeneous cosmopolitan
audience, in which everyone has the same responses, from the
bank director to the sales clerk, from the diva to the stenographer"
("Kult," 313). [see Employees] The everyday life of this urban population,
according to Kracauer, is a life of tension and disjunction. [see
Present vs. Past] Film, instead of offering compensation, only heightens
this feeling of strain. The medium cannot help producing such effects,
explains Kracauer, because its very technique relies on the principle of
reconfiguring a disjointed world: "Instead of leaving the world in its
fragmented state, one is pulled back into it. With film, these pieces are
newly reassembled, their isolation eradicated and their grimace
smoothed away. From out of the tomb, they awaken to a semblance of
life" ("Kaliko-Welt," 277f£'). As "mosaics" (277), both the two-dimen-