Vienna, girls, and Jewish authorship: Topographies of a cinematic city, 1920-1940

This study examines the cinematic image of the city of Vienna in American and European filmmaking in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result of migration of personel, the cinematic image of the city started to travel and was reinvented, remembered, and (re)constructed in different geographical locations and time periods. Depending on the time period, the geographical and cultural contexts of the films, the cinematic city came to take on different layers of meanings, structured by the experiences of the migrating directors.The investigation focuses on Vienna-set films by canonized auteurs such as Erich von Stroheim, G. W. Pabst, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Ophuls, and elaborates on the intimate relationship between their narratives and the type of urban experience bound up with the cultural specificity of Viennese modernity. By filtering my analysis of "Vienna films" through the "spatial lens" of the actual city, various themes and motifs come into sight. The overall argument contends that Vienna's common association, on film, with anti-modern imagery of the nostalgic glorification of the Habsburg Myth is directly tied to crucial issues of modernity: displacement due to emigration; changing gender relations; an increasing commodification of social exchange; growing political tensions; and anti-Semitism. These are all tangibly evident in the representations of this city in cinema.Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2008.School code: 0146