The Blue Angel Analysis

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In Germany, the advent of sound cinema was initially dismissed as American sensation seeking. The domestic success of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) then represents a turnabout of public sentiment. The film encapsulates the paradox of Weimar cinema as it relates to its American counterpart. While in opposition to the American industry, German cinema consistently looked to Hollywood as a point of reference and the film is a result of this. As Professor Rath is seduced in the film by the cabaret singer, Lola Lola, German audiences became seduced by the film and by the technology of sound cinema. The film is a showcase of its own technological achievement and arises from the paradoxical engagement of German with American cinema, an …show more content…

It is most commonly located within a national framework wherein it is contextualised exclusively in terms of the ‘transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany’. (Petro, 2009; 255) That is to say that the film serves as a ‘statement n the psychological situation at the time’; the relationship between Lola Lola and Professor Rath is seen to depict the moral decay which precipitates the rise of Nazi Germany. (Williams, 2013; 801) It ‘proves anew the problem of German immaturity’, as Siegfried Kracauer wrote in his book From Caligari To Hitler, a pioneering work of this sociological approach which links cinema to developments within the state. (Petro, 2009; 258) The Blue Angel however is not a political work and if it does happen to capture some sort of cultural zeitgeist then this is hardly its intention. This is evident in how the film has been adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat; any political subtext has been erased and the character of Professor Rath is a reflection of this, his having been reformed from being a villainous and irredeemable figure of authority to a pitiful fool. Theodor W. Adorno, a German sociologist wrote on these differences between the film and the novel claiming that the film had turned a ‘petit bourgeois demon into a sentimental comedy figure’. (Koch, 1986; 61) In this way he is less an allegorical figure onto whom the history of the nation is traced; instead Janning’s Rath is sympathetic and nationally nondescript

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