MASSES AND MONUMENT – MIGRATION AND HOLLYWOOD
Film series selected by Diedrich Diederichsen (23 April – 15 May 04)

Opening lecture by Diedrich Diederichsen
Thursday, 22 April 2004, 7 pm.

In classical Hollywood cinema crowd scenes are regarded as an indication of high production costs. At the same time, they satisfy a very particular and specific cinematographic viewing pleasure that goes back to the beginnings of moving pictures. For Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, cinema was the first medium that made the new metropolitan masses of modernism visible and also decisively contributed to both their self-image and their self-deception: to mobilization and well as to immobilization. In many discourses on migration it is also the mass of migrants that accounts for their crucial and also psychologically and propagandistically significant components. This applies particularly to the phobic notions of invading hordes and floods that are so central to the mobilization of xenophobia and racism. In the USA and thus also in Hollywood cinema there are always two kinds of crowds: these kinds of phobically perceived natural disaster-like dehumanized floods of evil masses (Indians, aliens, Vietnamese) and alongside and contrary to these, the positively perceived crowds of settlers, but also of migrants, who productively contribute to the melting pot.

Who is a good crowd and who is an evil one and how this has been changed and fought over in the history of Hollywood is to be shown in this series of selected examples: although certainly none of these films are uninteresting, they are also not exemplary, and they have not been selected for their quality, but rather because of their symptomatic characteristics.

The earliest of the films presented here, "Intolerance" by the film pioneer Griffith, already shows that the ambivalence of describing masses must take the path of monumentalizing them. At the moment where the crowds attain a face of their own beyond the summation or intensification of the individual, they are suitable for both dehumanization and for idealization. Griffith's film was a kind of apology for his racist classic "Birth of a Nation", which drastically demonized Afro-Americans. In both films, though, one can see how fleeing or conquering, threatened or threatening crowds can be dehumanized – and sometimes also rehumanized - with minimal cinematographical measures. Another film in this series was also intended as an apology: "Cheyenne Autumn" was supposed to revise the demonization of the Native Americans in so many Hollywood productions.

To this end it invents an image from the arsenal of the history of European migrants that emigrated to the USA, who are usually depicted in a positive way: the Cheyenne become the displaced, but unlike the migrants from Europe, there is no "new homeland" awaiting them. The pop festival monumentalization "Woodstock" correspondingly identifies the hippie masses with a nation of displaced persons seeking a new territory. Although differently accentuated, "Days of Heaven", "Heavens Gate" and "Gangs of New York" all show the situation of European migrants to the USA in the 19th century also as a class destiny and, despite various weaknesses, outside the realm of idealization. Migrants in Hollywood have rarely managed to become revolutionary masses, despite the more biblical "Spartacus", but as a sought-after and desired special effect, especially in the first half of its history, their image was always a lacuna open to different ideological instrumentalizations. Standards and cliches resulted from this, which still influence notions of crowds today, which are not represented by a form of state or any other regulated collective identity.

Program:

Kino in der Brücke
Kölnischer Kunstverein
Hahnenstraße 6
D - 50667 Köln

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Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford) USA 1964, 165 min
In John Ford's own words, in discussion with Peter Bogdanovich, this is his attempt to apologize for all the injustice that he has done to Native Americans in his westerns. The bitter fate of the displaced Cheyenne betrayed by politicians in Washington leads the film for half an hour in the middle through a fantastically condensed western that seems completely unreal, against which the slowly and stolidly described misery of the Indians is posed as a language of realism.
Friday, 23 April, 7 pm.

Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) USA 1916, 163 min
A few years after Griffth founded narrative cinema with what was probably the most blatantly epic racism that Hollywood has ever seen ("Birth of a Nation"), in "Intolerance" he summarizes the "tragedy of humanity" (old German distribution title) in the metaphor of the witch hunt, not wholly unfamiliar in the USA. On the one hand it becomes recognizable as the primal scene of every displacement (Huguenot episode), on the other the potential of every crowd.
Sunday, 2 May 7 pm.

Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese) USA/D/I/GB/NL 2002, 166 min
With this film it is instructive to keep in mind statements from Theodore W. Allen's "Invention of the White Race". Generations of migrants battle against one another to define "American" and "white", their social revolutionary uprisings against the ruling capitalists end in pogroms against the Afro-American population.
Friday, 7 May, 7 pm.

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick) USA 1978, 95 min
A "family" of immigrants that is illegitimate in every respect flees from Chicago, scattering and accepting servitude in an as yet little coded and codified rural area.
Saturday, 8 May, 7 pm.

Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino) USA 1980, 174 min
The battle against Eastern European immigrants is simultaneously the battle of the direction of extras against the difficulties of the crowd scene in the postmodern era. Cimino's grand financial flop also failed because after a decade of New Hollywood, its criticism of the founding myths of the USA was no longer opportune.
Friday, 14 May, 7 pm.

Red River (Howard Hawks) USA 1948, 133 min
No other western shows with the same psychological precision that and how the Hollywood cowboy holds a concept of nomadism, which is in turn derived from the settlement and migration history of the USA. A primal horde engaged in work, cattle herding, patricide and all that is Freudian along the trail from Texas to the North.
Saturday, 15 May, 7 pm.

Project Migration – an initiative project of the

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