| The particular popularity of the Weimar exotic adventure film in the first quarter of the twentieth century can, in part, be attributed to its ability to articulate, shape, and satisfy the desires of spectators in postwar Germany. Defeat in World War I, economic crises, the change to democratic rule, and the onslaught of modernity resulted in wide-spread identity crises in the early years of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar exotic adventure film both informs and is informed by the struggle to come to terms with change and imagine a new postwar identity.;On the level of the genre, the Weimar exotic adventure film functions as a form of ritual storytelling. By providing individuals with a genre-specific repertoire of images denoting self and other, the adventure film invites spectators to distance themselves from the other and imagine themselves as a community.;On the level of the narrative, staged encounters with the exotic provide the various foils necessary for imagining a new identity. Adventure films indulge spectators' curiosity about the foreign, but more importantly allow spectators to imagine themselves in other situations. Ultimately, the thrill of the exotic adventure film lies not in the experience of an other culture projected on film, but rather in the cinematic experience of an other, projected self.;On the level of the cinema, this genre investigates the potential of film as an alternative reality. The cinematic experience instigated by the exotic adventure film combines edification and excitement, fact and fiction, information and diversion in order to create a forum in which to imagine a new kind of German identity.;In this dissertation I analyze five representative exotic adventure films: Die Herrin der Welt (Joe May, 1919), Das indische Grabmal (Joe May, 1921), Harakiri (Fritz Lang, 1919), Der mude Tod (Fritz Lang, 1921), and Die Spinnen (Fritz Lang, 1919/20), in order to determine the various roles which filmic representations of the foreign played in the redefinition of German national identity in the postwar period. |
