In a culture of light: Cinema and technology in 1920s German

This dissertation examines the use of light in eleven narrative films produced in Weimar Germany. The films use light to represent the transformation to a modern life fashioned by technological advance in 1920s Germany. Through a use of light, the films represent the transformation of space, conceptions of time and history, modes of representation, and the pivotal role played by industrial entertainment in 1920s Germany. All of these cultural transformations are the effects upon the everyday that result from Germany's intense and belated advance to technological modernity, an advance that began with unification in 1871.;Each film boasts a threefold filmic use of light. Light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the temporal narrative, and the central thematic concern. Thus, light and cinema are used to represent the very social world they simultaneously influence. The films' self-conscious technical displays in light are in tension with the melodramatic or mythical narrative also structured in light. This tension spawns the films' complicated relationship to technological modernity. This characteristic ambivalence towards technology---captured in the films' discursive heterogeneity---represents the films' unique contribution in 1920s European modernism.;The films' engagement with the technological world is based on the confluence in 1920s Germany of three histories. First, Germany's accelerated rise to technological modernity; second the development of artificial light for dissemination into everyday life; third the development of cinema in Germany. The intensity of Germany's pursuit of industrial dominance on an international market rendered its cultural production a particularly conspicuous site of contestation over the blessings and traumas of technological modernity. Similarly, the hallmark of the new, regenerated, post-World War I modernity was the beauty, utility and omnipresence of public electrical lighting. Displays in light flaunted Germany's newly found industrial and economic strength. In 1920s Germany, film workers marshaled the available technologies---in particular those of light and the camera apparatus---for their creative articulation of the historical moment in which they were living. Thus, the Weimar films both represent and contribute to the social changes brought by Germany's intensified advance to industrial modernity.