Visions of Vienna Seibel, Alexandra
2017, 2017., 20171215, 2017-12-15
eBook
This book offers a close look at how directors such as Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Oph ls made use of the city of Vienna, and how the nostalgic glorification of the Habsburg era can ...be seen as directly tied to crucial issues of modernity.
Vienna, with its stunning architecture and unforgettable streetscape, has long provided a backdrop for filmmakers. Visions of Vienna offers a close look at how directors such as Erich von Stroheim, ...Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Ophüls made use of the city, and how the nostalgic glorification of the Habsburg era can be seen as directly tied to crucial issues of modernity. Films set in Vienna, Alexandra Seibel shows, persistently articulate the experience of displacement due to emigration, changing gender relations and anti-feminism, class distinction, and anti-Semitism, themes that run counter to the ongoing mystification of Vienna as the incarnation of waltz dreams and schmaltz.
When, in December of 1925, the silent operetta film Ein Walzertraum, by German director Ludwig Berger, opened in Berlin, it did not go unnoticed by the US trade paperVariety. Writing under the ...pseudonym ‘Trask’, a reviewer had some sardonic observations to make about Berger’s otherwise highly praised work:
So, this is the great German film for which Germany has been waiting so long! Universally received by the press as a masterpiece. There can be no doubt that this picture will do very nicely on the Continent and will probably finish up by showing a profit for its producers.
But
The American film public would have witnessed the demise of the Austrian monarchy and the misery of postwar Vienna on screen as early as 1923—were it not for the fact that Erich von Stroheim had been ...replaced by Rupert Julian in the course of shooting Merry-Go-Round. In Stroheim’s original film script, the narrative ended after World War I and portrayed the aftermath of the cruel devastation inflicted upon the city and her habitants. Like the male protagonist in Merry-Go-Round, the former Count Hohenegg who comes back to Vienna with a wooden leg, and his valet who returns with an
In 2003, on a trip through China, the Japanese film historian Komatsu Hiroshi happened to discover a film fragment in an antique shop.¹ As it turned out, the approximately four minutes long piece of ...celluloid came from Josef von Sternberg’s vanished The Case of Lena Smith, his last silent movie from 1929, made in Hollywood. The Case of Lena Smith was considered a lost masterpiece of film history and evokes personal memories of the director’s native city. Sternberg was born in Vienna 1894 and spent his childhood there before emigrating to the United States in 1908. A central topos of
Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March failed to be a success. The film drew lukewarm critical response and disappointed at the box office. The reasons for this letdown were multifaceted. The heavy ...cutting of the original material, for example, asVarietypointed out, ‘has not added pace. Root of the evil is the time given the Corpus Christi event from which the succeeding action never recovers, being none too swift in itself’ (Variety, 17 October 1928). Another clue as to what might have hurt Stroheim’s Viennese film was given by Mordaunt Hall in theNew York Times. Hall specifically complained
