The Ambivalence of Ornament: Silhouette Advertisements in Print and Film in Early TwentiethCentury Germany

Introduction In his infl uential account of the genealogy of new media, Lev Manovich has taught us to understand the age of digital cinema, at least in part, as a rehabilitation of traditions of animation that once stood at the forefront of moving image spectacles before the consolidation of narrative cinema. Although long marginalized as fi lm’s ‘bastard relative’, a children’s art of the ‘graphic’ and the ‘trick’ considered inferior to the indexical promise of photographic realism, animation can today once again occupy centre stage as a ‘serious’ artistic activity – indeed as the cinema’s very ontological ground. But the new prominence of animation has also created a broader opening for investigations into its multifaceted history in the twentieth century. This is true particularly in light of the increased interest today in other marginalized (or ‘orphaned’) fi lmic traditions such as industrial and educational fi lm. A good example of such under-researched areas of animation history can be seen in early product advertising. At the very historical moment when feature fi lms were downplaying animation and special effects in the interest of narrative hegemony, advertising fi lm followed precisely the opposite path. While the earliest advertisements consisted of live action scenarios, advertising fi lm producers quickly turned towards tricks and animation. Thus the most prominent German advertising producer, Julius Pinschewer, having begun by making live-action advertisements such as Carmol tut wohl (Carmol Does You Good, 1911) and Die Suppe (The Soup, 1911), soon transitioned towards an aesthetics of trick photography in the tradition of Georges Méliès; in fi lms such as Sektzauber (Champagne Magic, 1912) and Der Nähkasten (The Sewing Box, 1913), Pinschewer’s imps and conjurers literally appear to summon commodities to life on the screen. By the 1920s, advertising fi lm overwhelmingly featured fl at and drawn animation, and a panoply of graphic artists – such as Robert Lortac in France, Hans Fischerkoesen in Germany and Peter Eng in Austria – found regular work in the service of advertising fi lm companies. In contrast to industrial fi lm, which used live cinematography to demonstrate industrial processes and technological apparatuses, advertising fi lm came to be considered precisely as a graphic art. Indeed, the concept of the ‘living poster’ emphasized just this point: for advertising fi lm was, as one advertising brochure for the company Werbedienst GmbH suggested, understood as an adaption of well-known poster genres to the medium of moving images (plate 1). So engrained was this identifi cation of advertising fi lm with graphic arts by the mid-1920s that the advertising theorist Käthe Kurtzig, in a 1926 article for the journal Industrielle Psychotechnik entitled ‘Types of advertising fi lm’ (Die Arten des Werbefi lms), could provide a Detail from Adelheid Schimz, illustration for Hans Christian Andersen, The Swineherd (plate 13).