The final sequence of Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 (Germany, 1928) shows several illuminated streets of Berlin at night.1I am grateful to Anke Mebold of the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, who made me aware of and generously provided me with a digitized restoration of the film. Watching a digitized version of this film on my laptop, bright blue spots appear along the center of the frame, barely moving, and the dark outlines of pointed church towers become recognizable in front of a blue-greyish sky [fig. 1].2The mindful members of the Film Studies Colloquium at the University of Mainz Colloquium made me aware of the fact that what I saw may just be one version of the film as differently colored versions might have been in circulation. I have only seen a digital file of the film and not the original analog material, so all my impressions are bound to this dispositive. The same applies to the following images of sidewalks and streets, where the prominently visible parts of the frames are the electric light bulbs of advertisement signs, headlights and electric street lamps [fig. 2]. People are seen just briefly as grey shadows in the underdeveloped parts of the digitized celluloid.
Produced by Berlin based production company Naturfilm Hubert Schonger,3After the election of the Nazis, Schonger produced nature documentaries, fairytales and air raid education pictures, as well as the antisemitic cartoon short film Vom Bäumlein, das andere Blätter hat gewollt (Heinz Tischmeyer, 1940). this film is the first part of a series of seven documentary style short films about the titular invisible force electricity.4Only the first part has been digitized. The Bundesarchiv stores Zensurkarten (censorship cards) for all seven parts, which carry the intertitles. The Zensurkarten are digitized and can be accessed through their website. In the following, I will discuss this ‘finale’ of Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 on two levels: first, the material and aesthetic execution of the film, that shows the specific choices that were made to depict night on film, when this was still somewhat troublesome due to technological constraints; I will then, secondly, move on to the contents of Unsichtbare Kräfte 1, that are concerned with the production of electricity that results in the L/Nightscapes depicted in the film’s final sequence and try to contextualize it within other contemporary film productions about Berlin, such as Berlin – Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927).5During the Third Reich, Ruttmann directed several advertisement films for the Wehrmacht as well as industry films. Deutsche Panzer (GER 1940) for example is a propagandistic film about the technological ‘brilliance’ of German tank engineering. By showing how film, light and modernity are connected I will ultimately arrive at what I understand as film-technological modernity.
Celluloid Nights
Capturing moving images in the night is difficult if there is insufficient lighting. Daylight granted enough illumination for capturing detailed film images with about 16 frames per second in the 1920s, while filming at night proved exponentially more difficult for achieving naturalistic/realistic images. Or as one contemporary of Unsichtbare Kräfte 1, Anton Kutter, put it in 1927: “the actual night exterior recordings seem to be the stepchildren or problem children of our recording technicians.”6“So scheinen die wirklichen Nacht-Aufnahmen die Stief- oder Sorgenkinder unserer Aufnahmetechniker zu sein.” Anton Kutter, “Nacht bei Tag,” Filmtechnik 3, no. 25 (1927): 440 [all translations by author]. His article Nacht bei Tag (Night by Day) in the film-technology magazine Filmtechnik deals with the problem of how to control these ‘step children’, one solution being the titular shooting of night-by-day, or as it is commonly known now: day-for-night. This pragmatic work-around strategy acknowledges the limitations of the available film stock by filming in daylight and adding the night as an aesthetic, but according to Kutter, unsatisfying effect: “Night is simply copied dark [i.e. images are decidedly underdeveloped] and toned blue. A recipe from the childhood days of the movies.”7“Nacht wird einfach dunkel kopiert und blau getont. Ein Rezept aus der Kinderzeit des Filmes.” Kutter, “Nacht bei Tag,” 440. This technique is still in use in digital cinema in the 21st Century. Big budget productions like Mad Max: Fury Road (AUS 2015) or Nope (USA 2022) are exemplary here. Kutter thus expresses his frustration about the lack of innovation in night-filming; a sentiment in line with the dominant narrative that sees all visual media continuously striving towards utmost iconicity in image media.
To approximate the actual visual impression of the night, scenes were filmed by day and the filmstock was subsequently tinted blue.8The night sky is actually blue due to the scattering of light waves from the sun. This color, however, is only perceptible to the human eye under certain conditions, e.g. a full moon, since color perception changes at night: the photoreceptive cells in the eyes switch to ‘night-mode’, in which less color vision is experienced. For more see Michael Vollmer, Atmosphärische Optik für Einsteiger. Lichtspiele in der Luft (Springer, 2019), 254. This particular pragmatic choice of color coding filmic images, with e.g. blue representing night, has often been observed by film historians and has sometimes been regarded as an established, universal system to imbue images with additional (narrative) meaning.9See for instance Peter Deleput, “Questions of Colors. Taking Sides” and Elena Gipponi, “Fireworks and Carnivals. Applied and Natural Colors in Italian Home Movies” in The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, ed. by Giovanna Fossati et. al. (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). See also Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 22. However, Jelena Rakin has convincingly shown that its reading is dependent on narrative context and color might sometimes ‘just’ add attraction value, beyond narrative meaning.10As Jelena Rakin demonstrates, color and dyeing were subject of renewed scientific, industrial and social interest around 1900. Cheaper production of dyes (e.g. aniline dye in Germany) led to their industrialization and mass production, adding cost efficiency to my argument about pragmatism. Scientific and theoretical discourses established color theories and promoted the standardization of color codes by the film industry at the time. Jelena Rakin, Film Farbe Fläche. Ästhetik des kolorierten Bildes im Kino 1895-1930 (Schüren, 2021), 169-223.
While the ending of Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 is still tinted blue, I am convinced it was shot at night, since the L/Nightscape scenes are underdeveloped and therefore lead to dark and undetailed images. Why, then, did the producers add the blue color to images that have already been filmed at night? One goal might have been to ensure that their audience ‘correctly’ reads these images as ‘night’ and not as insufficient, accepting the sudden ‘loss’ of detail. Another reason for this duplication might have been the producer’s adherence to convention, as to satisfy certain expectations. Yet another reason could be that color was added for additional aesthetic value, since the rest of the film already has a slightly brownish, artificial tone. Additional dyeing of the night scenes thus might simply be a matter of chromatic continuity.
Although the images in the ‘finale’ of Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 remain largely undetailed, the fact that these night images exist at all is somewhat impressive, due to the material constraints of the celluloid. In resonance with Anton Kutters frustration about the lack of suitable filmstock, the 1920s Weimar Republic saw film-technicians successively sensitizing film material to be more light-receptive to overcome these material restrictions, leading to the development of a so-called hypersensitized filmstock for night-filming, attributed to Reimar Kuntze and Mois Safra.11“Aus der Werkstatt. Einsendungen aus der Industrie,” Kinematograph 21, no. 1062 (1927): 29 and Michael Simmons, “Theater Equipment and Management. Films in the Dark,” The Film Daily 39, no. 54 (1927): 10. It was first commercially used in 1927 for Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, with one contemporary even claiming the film’s night images would be “herald[ing] a new era in the history of the development of the living image.”12“Man geht wohl nicht fehl, wenn man mit diesem Ruttmann-Film eine neue Epoche in der Entwicklungsgeschichte des lebenden Bildes einleitet.“ Fritz Olimsky, “Ein Wendepunkt in der Entwicklung des Films?,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung 73, no. 448 (1927): 3. The process of hypersensitization aimed at increasing the overall sensitivity for the full spectrum of the visible light, since the silver halide’s own photochemical sensitivity is skewed towards the blue end of the spectrum (orthochromatic). Hypersensitized film stock was therefore most effective for night cinematography, as they exploit their color sensitivity in the red and infrared spectral range – which was essential, since commonly used electric light bulbs radiated significantly in this range- , becoming panchromatic, and increasing their overall sensitivity.13Kurt Jacobsohn, “Hypersensibilisierung und panchromatischer Film in der Aufnahmepraxis,” Die Kinotechnik 10, no. 7 (1927): 175-176. While this enhancement allowed for the desired and required short exposure time of 16 frames per second,14“Nachtaufnahmen mit normaler Frequenz (16 Bilder in der Sekunde) herzustellen.” Kurt Jacobsohn, Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis der Hypersensibilisierung (Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1930), 57-58. recording a night-scene in absence of artificial lighting remained a futuristic vision.15 Jacobsohn, Theorie und Praxis der Hypersensibilisierung, 57f.
The new visibility of the night is evidently portrayed in two comparative shots from Kurt Jacobsohn’s16Jacobsohn frequently published articles about the hypersensitization of film material in the last half of the 1920s. dissertation on hypersensitization from 1930, which aims to prove the “superiority of the hypersensitized film over an ordinary film.”17“Überlegenheit des hypersensibilisierten Filmes über einen gewöhnlichen Film.” Jacobsohn, Theorie und Praxis der Hypersensibilisierung, 58. This comparison is used to give testament to Jacobsohn’s hypothesis, as the hypersensitized film strip (right) appears brighter and more detailed, compared to the orthochromatic film material (left), which captures the light sources, but melts the pedestrians into a black, opaque block (fig. 4). The right film strip reminds us of the detailed images of Berlin, while the left one looks more like a black-and-white version of Unsichtbare Kräfte 1, indicating that its final sequence was filmed in Berlin’s actual L/Nightscape.
The Flow of Modernity
Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 starts with a lively picture of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, where automobiles and cable cars drive past the iconic first traffic light tower in Germany. This shot is quickly followed by more moving images of public trains operating in the city. In this sequence, a shot from within one of these passenger cars directs our view out of the window, lingering on a factory building. Another scene places the camera at a low angle on rail level, which generates an impressive enlargement of the passing train. The filmic motif of trains and traffic is one of the signs of modernity commonly used in so-called city symphonies.18Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher, ”Introduction. The City Symphony Phenomenon 1920-40,” in The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, ed. Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher (Routledge 2019), 18-19. Although Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 initially adopts a playful editing style reminiscent of city symphonies, it soon abandons this approach in favor of an explanatory interplay of title cards and descriptive images.
Unsichtbare Kräfte’s main concern is another topic of modernity that Jacobs et al. (2019) also identify,19“Cinema-going is also a form of nocturnal entertainment—a topic often neglected in city films of the 1920s and 1930s due to technical limitations. Nonetheless, some city symphonies such as Berlin, Les Nuits électriques (Electric Nights, Eugène Deslaw, 1929), Rhapsody in Two Languages [Gordon Sparling, 1934], Prague by Night [Svatopluk Innemann, 1928], City of Contrasts (Irving Browning, 1931), and Manhattan Medley [Bonney Powell, 1931] helped pioneer the cinematic depiction of urban nightlife and electrical illumination, and are consistent with the fascination with electricity and electrification that had been such an important part of industrialization and urbanization in North American [sic!] since the 1880s, and that swept Europe in the 1920s.” Jacobs et al., “Introduction,” 20. namely electricity as an invisible force or power. The documentary and even didactic nature of the film becomes evident in an animation of a flow chart [fig. 5], which explains the infrastructure of electricity from the peripheries to the city center with illustrative moving images of corresponding places and processes. Starting at the brown and stone coal pits, the raw material is then burned in power plants where its energy is transformed into electricity. In various substations the voltage is stepped down to 220 V as it reaches the city centers. The flowchart is fully realized when the invisible force reaches the homes of Berlin’s inhabitants, where “electricity finds versatile use”20“Dort findet die Elektrizität die vielseitigste Verwendung.” Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1. in gendered work: cooking with an electric stove, washing clothes, or operating a workbench [fig. 6]. Finally, the night scenes of Berlin appear.
The title cards in Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 construct a narrative of technological and social progressiveness on the basis of public lighting against the backdrop of 1810: “In the fast pace of our times, who would think that 100 years ago the streets of Berlin were still ‘lit’ by oil lamps!”21“Wer denkt heute im rasenden Tempo unserer Zeit, daß vor 100 Jahren die Straßen Berlin’s noch durch Öllampen ‚erleuchtet‘ wurden!” Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1. In order to further emphasize this technological shift a quotation out of a Cologne newspaper from 1810 is given in intertitles, which deserves to be quoted in full:
1.) because it appears to interfere with God’s order. According to this, the night is set to darkness, which is only interrupted by moonlight at certain times. 2.) because street lighting aggravates morality. The artificial light scares away the fear of darkness in people’s minds, which prevents the weak from committing many sins. The light makes the drinker safe to indulge in the bar until late into the night, and it brings together couples in love.
These 117 year old beliefs are introduced as “peculiar […] opinions about street lighting,”22“Sonderbar muten die damaligen Ansichten über die Straßenbeleuchtung an.“ Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 as the newspaper claims that public lighting was regarded as a blasphemy against God’s natural creation, encouraging sinful and immoral behavior such as crime, drinking, and premarital sex. Furthermore, occasional nocturnal lighting as an event was supposed to strengthen the ‘national feeling’, an effect that is supposedly weakened by permanent public lighting:
4.) for popular reasons. Public festivals have the purpose of awakening national sentiment. Illuminations are excellently suited for this purpose. However, this impression is weakened if it is dulled by nightly quasi-illuminations. That’s why the countryman gawks at the glow of light more than the light-saturated city dweller.23See on this topic Elif Kaymaz contribution “Nocturnal Architectures of Allure” in this Dossier.
These ‘odd’ beliefs about public lighting [then with oil lamps] are decidedly presented in their outdatedness24The outdatedness is visually amplified by the usage of ‘Frakturschrift’ (black letter) for the newspaper statements. and contrasted with the progressiveness of contemporary electric lighting.
The key to this technological progress is attributed, via title cards, to the “invention of the dynamo machine by Werner von Siemens”, with which “the way is clear for never-ending development.”25“Und heute?… Durch die Erfindung der Dynamomaschine durch Werner von Siemens…ist der Weg für eine nie abgeschlossene Entwicklung frei.” Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1. In Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 the centrality of this inventive German figure (1816-1892) and his family run business for German electric power generation is underscored by showing a seemingly endless stream of production from the spacious manufacturing halls of the Dynamowerke in Berlin [fig. 6]. Siemens was at that time already the defining company of the German electrical industry.26In the 1930s the Siemens family seamlessly integrated into the new political reality under the National Socialists. Carl Friedrich von Siemens hosted a speaking event for Adolf Hitler in his Dynamowerk in Berlin, with an oral recommendation to his workers to vote for the NSDAP two days before the election on 10. November 1933. During the Second World War Siemens profited from forced laborers from Concentration Camps and produced equipment for war. Johannes Bähr, Carl Friedrich von Siemens 1872 – 1941 Entrepreneur in Times of Upheaval (Penguin Random House, 2023): 253-312.
By focusing on production and electrification, Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 thus paints a picture of the German capital that is complementary to representations like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, a picture that is grounded in technological innovation and industriousness, and shows the infrastructures and systems put in place to facilitate the electrification of the city, making it one of the beacons of modernity. While the final sequence of the film tries to show the inseparability of modernity and electric light, it also reveals how light and film too are inseparable from one another. The result for Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 is that the dream, desire and ideology of modernity as and through technological progress are still absent in these dark, blue images.
Berlin’s night scenes, in comparison, are an expression of what I understand as film-technological modernity, meaning these images capture and at the same time reflect modernity. This understanding then is not just about how film is able to represent the decadent radiance of modernity in detailed pictures, but also how film-technological progress itself is becoming evident in this newfound visibility. This dualistic understanding is based on the inseparability of light, film, and modernity,27Light and modernity are already prominent subjects in Weimar Cinema, as explored in Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light. Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). While the films analyzed in Guerin’s work were made in studios, my concept of film-technological modernity focuses more on a realistic approach to filming on actual streets. However, realism is a broad and complex concept, not only in film studies, and therefore deserves a thorough discussion in a separate article. since the electrification of the L/Nightscape is the foundation of night filming and, likewise, is it only through the technological innovation of hypersensitization that film became able to capture these illuminated city centers. It is then in this transitory phase in 1927, where moving image technology eventually follows technological modernity into the Nightscape of the city by adapting itself to and utilizing the electric Lightscape.
Notes
| ↑1 | I am grateful to Anke Mebold of the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, who made me aware of and generously provided me with a digitized restoration of the film. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | The mindful members of the Film Studies Colloquium at the University of Mainz Colloquium made me aware of the fact that what I saw may just be one version of the film as differently colored versions might have been in circulation. I have only seen a digital file of the film and not the original analog material, so all my impressions are bound to this dispositive. |
| ↑3 | After the election of the Nazis, Schonger produced nature documentaries, fairytales and air raid education pictures, as well as the antisemitic cartoon short film Vom Bäumlein, das andere Blätter hat gewollt (Heinz Tischmeyer, 1940). |
| ↑4 | Only the first part has been digitized. The Bundesarchiv stores Zensurkarten (censorship cards) for all seven parts, which carry the intertitles. The Zensurkarten are digitized and can be accessed through their website. |
| ↑5 | During the Third Reich, Ruttmann directed several advertisement films for the Wehrmacht as well as industry films. Deutsche Panzer (GER 1940) for example is a propagandistic film about the technological ‘brilliance’ of German tank engineering. |
| ↑6 | “So scheinen die wirklichen Nacht-Aufnahmen die Stief- oder Sorgenkinder unserer Aufnahmetechniker zu sein.” Anton Kutter, “Nacht bei Tag,” Filmtechnik 3, no. 25 (1927): 440 [all translations by author]. |
| ↑7 | “Nacht wird einfach dunkel kopiert und blau getont. Ein Rezept aus der Kinderzeit des Filmes.” Kutter, “Nacht bei Tag,” 440. This technique is still in use in digital cinema in the 21st Century. Big budget productions like Mad Max: Fury Road (AUS 2015) or Nope (USA 2022) are exemplary here. |
| ↑8 | The night sky is actually blue due to the scattering of light waves from the sun. This color, however, is only perceptible to the human eye under certain conditions, e.g. a full moon, since color perception changes at night: the photoreceptive cells in the eyes switch to ‘night-mode’, in which less color vision is experienced. For more see Michael Vollmer, Atmosphärische Optik für Einsteiger. Lichtspiele in der Luft (Springer, 2019), 254. |
| ↑9 | See for instance Peter Deleput, “Questions of Colors. Taking Sides” and Elena Gipponi, “Fireworks and Carnivals. Applied and Natural Colors in Italian Home Movies” in The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, ed. by Giovanna Fossati et. al. (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). See also Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 22. |
| ↑10 | As Jelena Rakin demonstrates, color and dyeing were subject of renewed scientific, industrial and social interest around 1900. Cheaper production of dyes (e.g. aniline dye in Germany) led to their industrialization and mass production, adding cost efficiency to my argument about pragmatism. Scientific and theoretical discourses established color theories and promoted the standardization of color codes by the film industry at the time. Jelena Rakin, Film Farbe Fläche. Ästhetik des kolorierten Bildes im Kino 1895-1930 (Schüren, 2021), 169-223. |
| ↑11 | “Aus der Werkstatt. Einsendungen aus der Industrie,” Kinematograph 21, no. 1062 (1927): 29 and Michael Simmons, “Theater Equipment and Management. Films in the Dark,” The Film Daily 39, no. 54 (1927): 10. |
| ↑12 | “Man geht wohl nicht fehl, wenn man mit diesem Ruttmann-Film eine neue Epoche in der Entwicklungsgeschichte des lebenden Bildes einleitet.“ Fritz Olimsky, “Ein Wendepunkt in der Entwicklung des Films?,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung 73, no. 448 (1927): 3. |
| ↑13 | Kurt Jacobsohn, “Hypersensibilisierung und panchromatischer Film in der Aufnahmepraxis,” Die Kinotechnik 10, no. 7 (1927): 175-176. |
| ↑14 | “Nachtaufnahmen mit normaler Frequenz (16 Bilder in der Sekunde) herzustellen.” Kurt Jacobsohn, Beiträge zur Theorie und Praxis der Hypersensibilisierung (Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1930), 57-58. |
| ↑15 | Jacobsohn, Theorie und Praxis der Hypersensibilisierung, 57f. |
| ↑16 | Jacobsohn frequently published articles about the hypersensitization of film material in the last half of the 1920s. |
| ↑17 | “Überlegenheit des hypersensibilisierten Filmes über einen gewöhnlichen Film.” Jacobsohn, Theorie und Praxis der Hypersensibilisierung, 58. |
| ↑18 | Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher, ”Introduction. The City Symphony Phenomenon 1920-40,” in The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, ed. Steven Jacobs, Anthony Kinik, and Eva Hielscher (Routledge 2019), 18-19. |
| ↑19 | “Cinema-going is also a form of nocturnal entertainment—a topic often neglected in city films of the 1920s and 1930s due to technical limitations. Nonetheless, some city symphonies such as Berlin, Les Nuits électriques (Electric Nights, Eugène Deslaw, 1929), Rhapsody in Two Languages [Gordon Sparling, 1934], Prague by Night [Svatopluk Innemann, 1928], City of Contrasts (Irving Browning, 1931), and Manhattan Medley [Bonney Powell, 1931] helped pioneer the cinematic depiction of urban nightlife and electrical illumination, and are consistent with the fascination with electricity and electrification that had been such an important part of industrialization and urbanization in North American [sic!] since the 1880s, and that swept Europe in the 1920s.” Jacobs et al., “Introduction,” 20. |
| ↑20 | “Dort findet die Elektrizität die vielseitigste Verwendung.” Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1. |
| ↑21 | “Wer denkt heute im rasenden Tempo unserer Zeit, daß vor 100 Jahren die Straßen Berlin’s noch durch Öllampen ‚erleuchtet‘ wurden!” Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1. |
| ↑22 | “Sonderbar muten die damaligen Ansichten über die Straßenbeleuchtung an.“ Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1 |
| ↑23 | See on this topic Elif Kaymaz contribution “Nocturnal Architectures of Allure” in this Dossier. |
| ↑24 | The outdatedness is visually amplified by the usage of ‘Frakturschrift’ (black letter) for the newspaper statements. |
| ↑25 | “Und heute?… Durch die Erfindung der Dynamomaschine durch Werner von Siemens…ist der Weg für eine nie abgeschlossene Entwicklung frei.” Titlecard from Unsichtbare Kräfte 1. |
| ↑26 | In the 1930s the Siemens family seamlessly integrated into the new political reality under the National Socialists. Carl Friedrich von Siemens hosted a speaking event for Adolf Hitler in his Dynamowerk in Berlin, with an oral recommendation to his workers to vote for the NSDAP two days before the election on 10. November 1933. During the Second World War Siemens profited from forced laborers from Concentration Camps and produced equipment for war. Johannes Bähr, Carl Friedrich von Siemens 1872 – 1941 Entrepreneur in Times of Upheaval (Penguin Random House, 2023): 253-312. |
| ↑27 | Light and modernity are already prominent subjects in Weimar Cinema, as explored in Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light. Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). While the films analyzed in Guerin’s work were made in studios, my concept of film-technological modernity focuses more on a realistic approach to filming on actual streets. However, realism is a broad and complex concept, not only in film studies, and therefore deserves a thorough discussion in a separate article. |
Simon Schiller is a PhD candidate at the research training group (Graduiertenkolleg) “Configurations of Film” at Goethe-University Frankfurt. His dissertation is a media-archeological exploration of the visual culture of moving night images, focusing on the relation of technology, aesthetics and politics. He earned his B.A. in Film Studies and Political Science and a B.Sc. in Economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where he also completed his M.A. in Film Studies. His further research interests lie in the areas of Phenomenology and Film Experience, Queer Theory, as well as Music Videos and German Film Histories. He is an Associate Member of the DFG-funded Research Network “Camera Studies.”
