Andreas Killen. Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany; Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; 280 pages; cloth edition £65; ISBN: 9780812249279

By Anna Toropova

Andreas Killen’s rich and incisive study takes its title from a 1919 press article linking the cinematic medium to the emergence of a new psycho-physiological type – a ‘cinematically conditioned mass man’ who was easily swayed and misled, held captive by the images unfolding on screen (2). Cinema’s power over the minds of its viewers continued to present a source of concern for German officials and scientific and medical experts in the interwar period.  Conservative critiques of the cinema as a public health risk that sapped viewers’ bodily capacities and corroded their morals and will could be heard in both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. As Killen shows, however, the medium’s capacity to act on and shape its publics was a source of intense fascination as well as anxiety. Showcasing the varied potentialities that cinema embodied during this period, Killen explores attempts to reform the medium and harness its powers for the tasks of enlightenment, scientific investigation and political persuasion. Whilst acknowledging that cinema’s harnessing to the task of social reform reached full fruition under the Nazis, Homo Cinematicus traces the origins of this enterprise to the period of the First World War. The cinema, Killen argues, formed a constitutive part of a new form of politics that set its sights on the regulation and management of the social body.  Exploring cinema’s participation in the project of human and social remaking, Homo Cinematicus is a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship on cinema’s coincidence with an ‘art of government’ centred on the cultivation and ‘improvement’ of human life, as well as a vital contribution to scholarship on the entanglement of cinema and medicine.

The book’s five chapters explore different facets of the interface between scientific and medical expertise, politics, and cinematic technology. Chapter one traces the deployment of film as an investigative, diagnostic, documentative and pedagogical tool, as well as a means of translating scientific ideas to a mass public. Killen’s account of film’s emergence as a resource across a wide range of scientific disciplines (including industrial psychology, neurology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis) showcases the medium’s development in parallel with the human sciences coming to assume an increasingly dominant role in the interpretation and resolution of social problems. Deployed in psychiatric classification and intelligence testing the cinematic medium was relied upon to produce new forms of knowledge about the population. The chapter’s exploration of cinema’s function not only as a means of scientific documentation but as a mass-media platform for voicing popular anxieties about the power of scientific knowledge introduces one of the book’s central themes— the unstable boundaries between the scientific and the fiction film.

Taking the extended campaign to cleanse the cinema of ‘trash’ as its subject, Chapter 2 hones in on physicians’ efforts to medicalise the problem of Schund, as it was called in German. Killen shows how the First World War enabled scientific experts to shift the terms of the censorship debate to the adverse health effects of ‘trash’ cinema. If Kara Ritzheimer’s recent work on the anti-Schund campaign in Germany drew attention to the depiction of censorship as a social welfare measure specifically targeted at protecting children and adolescents, Killen’s approach is to hone in on the new language assumed by censorship bodies after the war, a rhetoric that abounded with ‘medical tropes of disease, addiction, infection, and contagion’ (81). The Weimar period would see medical experts assuming an increasingly pivotal role in the evaluation, production and censorship of films. Homo Cinematicus thereby ties the aims of the cinema reform movement to the tasks of social and mental hygiene, situating the anti-Schund drive within broader medical campaigns to improve the population’s health. Chapter 3 turns the focus onto hypnosis, exploring not only its prominent place in scientific and medical discourses on the cinematic medium but also its emergence as a central theme in Weimar cinema. While the contemporary anxieties surrounding cinema’s ‘hypnotic properties’ will be well known to readers familiar with the work of Scott Curtis and Stefan Andriopoulos, Killen’s linking of cinematic portrayals of powerful mind-doctors in films such as Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Lang, 1922) to popular anxieties over the post-war expansion of human scientific knowledge casts the topic in a new light.  

The most well known ‘product’ of the cross-fertilisation of cinema and the human sciences in early twentieth-century Germany – the health enlightenment film – is the subject of chapter 4. Opening with reference to a Nazi production that makes the case for compulsory sterilisation (Inheritance, 1935), the chapter traces the origins of the race hygiene propaganda film to the social and sexual hygiene films of the Weimar era. Killen unravels the enlightenment film’s characteristic hybridity – its reliance on the conventions of commercial as well as scientific filmmaking – against the backdrop of post-war calls for ‘imperceptible’ or ‘veiled’ propaganda and greater attention to questions of viewer engagement. The chapter’s concluding reading of the audience strategies deployed in Inheritance illuminates the ‘hygienic’ mode of vision cultivated by the enlightenment film. The book’s final chapter turns the focus on a campaign that paralleled the drive to rid German cinema of Schund – hygienists’ protracted battle against superstition, culminating in the 1941 campaign against medical charlatanism. Despite forceful attempts to suppress lay practices of hypnosis and to reclaim the practice for medical science, the lines between charlatan and ‘man of science’ remained ill defined. The mesmerising occultists and corrupt clairvoyants incarnated on screen served, Killen argues, as the uncanny doubles of ‘all-powerful’ and ‘all-knowing’ medical experts. 

As Homo Cinematicus rightly acknowledges, one of the most striking manifestations of the early twentieth-century overlap between science, medicine and cinema was the emergence of attempts to scientifically study and manage film’s effects on audiences. The book’s persistent emphasis on the significance of ‘the science of reception’ is not, however, matched by an in-depth exploration of this development in interwar Germany. To be sure, chapter one refers to experimental attempts to test the impact of film stimuli on the psychophysiology of adult viewers in 1913 and chapter four mentions Nazi-era psychological research on adolescent and young adult viewers. A more extensive analysis of the research methods deployed in such investigations and the impact of audience studies on either official policies or film industry practices would help to further substantiate the book’s claim that scientists became ‘authorities on questions of audience reception’ (21).

Nevertheless, Homo Cinematicus is a rigorous, thought-provoking, eloquently argued and nuanced account of the partnership between cinema and science in political projects of mind-body transformation. In bringing to light the intricacies of cinema’s involvement in the task of human engineering, Killen is commendably sensitive to the limitations and frustrations of this undertaking. The desire to take full command of cinema’s ‘exceptional powers as a medium of “mass influencing”’, Homo Cinematicus contends, was an ambition that was only partially realised (197). The campaign against cinematic Schund, for example, was undermined by the sexual enlightenment film’s unsettling of the very distinction between ‘trash’ and ‘edification’. The difficulty of delimitating what was trash and what was not, Killen argues, continued to undermine censorship efforts. The persistence of public anxieties surrounding medical authority is another example of the disappointments encountered by efforts to mobilise cinema’s opinion molding potential. As Killen persuasively shows, Weimar cinema’s tradition of presenting ‘doctors of the mind’ as mesmerising criminal figures (an image underwritten by anti-semitic fantasies) proved difficult to diffuse in the context of Nazi policies that often seemed to confirm the public’s long-held suspicions of ill-intentioned physicians.

Many readers of Homo Cinematicus will be struck, no doubt, by the parallels between the medicalised discourse on the power of cinema in post-war Germany and efforts to transform the cinema into a tool of edification elsewhere. The foundation of the International Institute of Educational Cinematography in Rome in 1928 – a League of Nations-sponsored research centre that published its findings in five different languages – testifies to the way in which experts across interwar Europe and the US sought to harness cinema’s influence for the purpose of bettering society. Killen’s close attention to the particularities of the German case in Homo Cinematicus will be an invaluable source for future comparative work.

Anna Toropova is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. Her current project aims to shed light on the intersection of cinema and medicine in early Soviet Russia. She has recently published articles from this project in the Journal of Contemporary History and Slavic Review. Her monograph, Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2020.