From the Astonished Spectator to the Spectator in Movement: Exhibition Advertisements in 1920s Germany and Austria

Abstract

The image of a motionless spectator seated before a fixed screen once formed an unquestioned axiom of most film theory and history, but few today would see this as the only or even dominant model of spectatorship. The proliferation of mobile screens in the digital age, along with several decades of research into early forms of peripatetic spectatorship (the flâneur, the detective, pre-cinematic forms of urban spectacle, etc.), have attuned film scholars to other, more dynamic modalities of film reception. This attention to mobile audiences has been particularly pronounced in research on exhibitions. In part-and particularly in scholarship focused on film and video installations-the meeting of film and exhibition culture might appear as a new phenomenon. Dominique Paini thus famously argued that the migration of experimental film into galleries since the 1980s had liberated cinema audiences from their "frontal captivity," reviving the experience of the 19th-century flâneur and making the spectator-now free to move through the exhibition at his or her own tempo-an active contributor to the filmic experience.1 But while some scholars have insisted on the unprecedented nature of film's recent presence in the museum,2 other film historians have documented a much longer history of the multiple imbrications between film, museums, and exhibitions.' As historians of early cinema have argued, moreover, the cinema itself was no less influenced, in its very emergence, by 19lh-century exhibition culture. While this included popular forms such as vaudeville and wax museums, it also included "higher" forms such as the universal exhibitions which, as Tom Gunning has shown, helped to inculcate a mode of astonished spectatorship that would help to set the stage, alongside variety culture and scientific illustrations, for the cinema of attractions.As showcases for industrial progress, the universal exhibitions, with their emphasis on novelty and their future orientation, clearly differed from the institution of the museum as a safeguard of high culture and heritage. Rather than taking objects out of circulation to imbue them with aesthetic value, universal exhibitions displayed objects as prototypes for capitalist circulation. This futureoriented status helps to explain why, with few exceptions, one finds no avantgarde campaign against trade and technology exhibitions remotely comparable to the modernist critiques of the museum.5 On the contrary, avant-garde artists from Hans Richter to Herbert Bayer to El Lissitzky readily collaborated with exhibitions and industrial fairs, where they found ample opportunities to experiment with new forms of dynamic and kinetic reception.6 On account of this emphasis on novelty and dynamism, technology and trade exhibitions have long functioned as important arenas for the elaboration of more mobile forms of filmic reception. In this article, I want to examine some of the imbrications between film and exhibitions conceived as two technologies for eliciting and directing the movement of spectators and consumers. I will do so by focusing attention on a specific film genre that developed in the German-speaking world in the 1920s: the exhibition advertisement. Although commissioned as advertisements for specific exhibitions, these films, I argue, also thematized and worked through changing models of advertising and advertising spectatorship.Beginning just after WWI, one can find numerous publicity films intended as advertisements for trade and technology exhibitions in cities like Vienna, Berlin, and Basel. Well-known examples include Guido Seeber's advertisement for the 1925 Kipho exhibition of film and photography industries and Richter's Die neue Wohnung (1930), an advertisement for the Werkbund architecture exhibition in Basel.7 But there were also many other advertisements by well-known animators of the time such as Peter Eng, Hans Fischerkoesen, and Walter Ruttmann. While the proliferation of such advertisements in the 1920s attests to the appeal that exhibitions had for experimental filmmakers generally, they should also be seen as the result of broader institutional factors. …