Eva Kuttenberg, Pennsylvania State University, Erie

Arthur Schnitzler’s Cinematography: Getting the Image Out of the Book

“Try to get the image out of the box” August and Louis Lumière’s father told his sons, after seeing Thomas Alva Edison’s Kinetoscop in Paris in 1894. Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) had a similar idea in mind – trying to get the image out of the book – with his innovative literary style. His works challenge the way we have learned to see and emphasize vision, optics, and perspectives. Schnitzler played several distinct roles in reference to film: he was a true film buff, especially in the 1920s; he was a highly skilled screenwriter and an active collaborator with the film industry; and he was a writer whose stylistic experiments anticipated a wide array of cinematographic techniques, including long shots, close-ups, parallel cuts, and montage, to enhance action and create suspense. Last but not least, he was a key witness of the emerging new medium in Austria-Hungary, where it shaped national identity by using folkloristic themes and specific Viennese settings. While the short films shown at the Viennese Kaiserpanorama brought the world to Austria and included images from Gibraltar, Athens, Chile, or Bangkok, the Austrian national movie industry sought to bring Austrian cultural heritage to the big screen.

Schnitzler’s attitude toward film was ambivalent at best and driven by both financial and artistic incentives, combining an impressive technical understanding with an open contempt for film as less than art. As an enthusiastic consumer of mass culture, he indiscriminately watched everything form Schund to the masterworks of silent film. As a writer, he favored montage to construct focal points of imagination, attention, action, creating a seemingly objective view point that is then consistently undermined by subjective sentiments and disruptive gestures, objects, or gazes, causing the action to spin in an entirely different direction. What interested him most in the new medium of film, beyond the opportunity to make dreams visual or show close-ups of characters to emphasize their emotional state, was the freedom to move beyond strictures of time and space imposed by the state of a theater.

These strategies of reconfiguring space and time, determining the angle from which characters and actions are viewed, and directing or redirecting the reader/viewer’s gaze had already surfaced in his early prose, as select passages from Frau Berta Garlan (1900), Das neue Lied (1905), and Der Weg ins Freie (1905-1907) illustrate. Schnitzler’s characters enact a surface story beneath which several subplots evolve. These fantasies, projections, or dreams of the various characters function as independent episodes within the larger text. They are inserted as face in and fade outs and both triggered and ruptured by what Slavoj Zizek called the object, the Thing, the turning point around which everything evolves, the “detail that cannot be integrated into symbolic reality.”

Although Schnitzler repeatedly expressed doubts about the artistic potential of film, cinematographic techniques are so prominent and effective in this works that their presence cannot be random. Thus this essay explores striking convergences between the language of film and that of Schnitzler’s prose.