Weimar Cinema

Notes on Methodology

The Featured Classics project provides an in-depth look at the history and legacy of several Weimar films that have become part of world cinema. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Metropolis are considered prototypes of global genre cinema, including horror, vampire, and science fiction films. However, their canonization has separated them from their original context. It is the aim of this project to recover and reconstruct the historical moment in which these classics first emerged. This restores the initial signifying power of these films and their rich resonances, while also charting their appropriations and ongoing presence in contemporary culture.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s archival approach in The Arcades Project and extending it to the digital era, the dossiers bring together various primary sources, including historical essays and reviews, posters, photographs, and film clips, as well as websites and other online materials. The dossiers allow the archival documents to speak for themselves and enter into dialogue with each other. This method suggests a non-linear, conceptual film history based on juxtaposition and montage of primary sources. The ever-changing constellations between the past and the present spark new insights and invite readers to engage with a film’s evolving historicity (Geschichtlichkeit). In this way, a dossier reveals how a single film can be seen as a dynamic archive in its own right that preserves the pastness of both form and function, yet it is activated and brought into the present by the reader. The chief concern of archival criticism is to unearth the historical and temporal dimension of the film in question; it uncovers and constitutes the text’s historicity (its pre-history and afterlives) and thus its potentiality. “The archive is the site where past and future become reversible” (Boris Groys).

Each Featured Classics dossier consists of the following six sections:

EXTENDED CANON

The Extended Canon dossiers provide archival documents to restore the historical force field of important but lesser-known Weimar films, Weimar film genres, and film-related events, such as censorship cases or the German reception of a film like Battleship Potemkin. These dossiers may also call attention to paratextual objects, such as film posters. Unlike the Featured Classics series, these dossiers do not follow a specific format.