CINEMATOGRAPHY IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

actuality filmmakers and pioneers like R. W. Paul and Fred and Joe Evans in England, Auguste and Luis Lumiere and Georges Melies in France, and Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton in America, who, by managing all the compositional, executional, and editorial facets of film production scripting, directing, acting, photographing, set, costume, and lighting design, editing, and marketing imposed their personal vision or authorship on the film. The dichotomy of the auteur and the production ensemble established a production hierarchy in most filmmaking. In formative German silent film, however, this hierarchy was less rank or class driven, because collaborative partnerships took precedence over single authorship. Whereas in silent film production in most countries the terms filmmaker and director were synonymous, in German silent film the plural term filmemacherin connoted both directors and cinematographers, along with the rest of the filmmaking crew. Thus, German silent filmmakers principle contribution to the new medium and art of film was less the representational iconographies of Expressionist, New Objective, and Naturalist styles than the executional practice of co-authorship and co-production, in distinctive cinematographer-director partnerships such as those of cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl and director Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Arno Wagner with F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst, Rudolf Mate with Carl Theodor Dreyer, Guido Seeber with Lang and Pabst, and Carl Hoffmann with Lang and Murnau.