Introduction by Erica Carter. Screen, Vol. 62, No. 3, 03.11.2021
A curious paradox haunts the work of the German-Jewish exile writer, archivist and curator Lotte H. Eisner. Her name is known, indeed she is to some extent revered in European film history for her writings on Weimar cinema as well as her monographs on Fritz Lang and F.W.Murnau. Less attention is paid to her early work as a journalist and editor in Weimar Berlin, or her 40-year career as a collector, archivist and curator at the Cinémathèque Française. Our dossier, by contrast, offers insight into the multifaceted aspects of Eisner’s fractured career as exile writer and archivist-curator. Two previously untranslated articles, one from the interwar German trade magazine Film-Kurier and a posthumously published piece from Cahiers du Cinéma, are accompanied by contributions that situate Eisner as a significant actor within a multipolar history of mid-twentieth century film culture. An introduction by Erica Carter outlines the dossier’s framing argument for a re-historicization of Eisner’s aesthetics, and for its critical relocation in the context on the one hand of histories of archive movements and film-cultural networks, and on the other, of film theory as an aesthetics of sensibility, atmosphere, embodied experience and mood. Michael Wedel develops this argument, arguing for a recuperation of Eisner as a source for contemporary film-aesthetic theory. Naomi de Celles and Julia Eisner draw on original archive work on Eisner to highlight the mutually generative relation between her contributions to film aesthetics and film history, and her extensive activities as a journalist, archivist, curator and collector in interwar Berlin and post-World War II Paris. Janet Bergstrom concludes the dossier with an exploration of shifts in Eisner’s writing in the context of her lifelong engagement with the films of F.W.Murnau.
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