Watch: Early German Images of the Anthropocene (Orphans Online 4a of 10)

Streaming now: an HD recording of the first of two Wednesday morning sessions, May 27, 2020, Orphans Online. 66 min.

This includes both the archival films and the slide presentations and discussion by the four originators of the session: Nicholas Baer, Katerina Korola, Katharina Loew, and Philipp Stiasny, who zoomed in from New York, Chicago, Munich, and Berlin, respectively. 

Click to enlarge, or visit vimeo.com/430242631.

Naturschutz: Tieraufnahmen, Germany 1915–1920, dir.: Hermann Hähnle. 4 films from Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart. 9 min.

Die Aran-Inseln (fragment), Germany 1928, dir.: Heinrich Hauser, Print: Bundesarchiv. 15 min. 

Here is their original abstract, submitted in 2019. 

The Natural World Viewed:
Early German Images of the Anthropocene

Over the course of the past century, humans have rediscovered the Earth’s fragility multiple times over. This collaborative presentation focuses on one such moment and site of (re)discovery—early twentieth-century Germany—and the key role that nature films played in efforts to recalibrate humankind’s relationship to a pliable, but still foreboding, world. During this period, the consequences of industrialization and mass migration to urban centers prompted some of the earliest reflections on the destructive effects of modern civilization on humans, other species, and the broader ecology (a term coined by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866). Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany saw the foundation of a host of natural preservation societies including the Naturfreunde (1895), Bund für Vogelschutz (1899), and Bund Heimat und Umwelt in Deutschland (1904) as well as alpine and hiking societies such as the Wandervogel youth groups (1896).

Cinema played an important role in this context. The new medium served to educate audiences and to cultivate enthusiasm and care for endangered plants, animals, and landscapes, while also celebrating unspoiled nature. At a time of heightened concern that rare species and biotopes would soon vanish due to human civilization’s destructive power, film also served a crucial archival function, creating lasting records of the natural world for subsequent generations.

Assembling neglected works from the vast archive of Wilhelmine and Weimar nature films, this four-person presentation will offer a prismatic look into the relationship between early twentieth-century German cinema and environmental discourse. It begins with films by Hermann Hähnle, an industrialist and conservationist who started filming rare birds in their natural habitats around 1900. Building on Hähnle’s pioneering achievements, figures like Hubert Schonger, Arnold Fanck, and Heinrich Hauser established nature films (Naturfilme) as an essential part of German film culture in the 1920s.

While Hähnle’s films depict a fragile ecosystem in need of protection, nature filmmakers also joined ethnographic expeditions in search of extreme and untamed environments, among them Greenland and Western Ireland. The images of Greenland’s icy landscapes in the Ufa production Bilder aus Grönland (1929) articulate a majestic and sublime vision of nature. Heinrich Hauser’s unfinished Die Aran-Inseln (1928)—a notable precursor to Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934)—imagines the Irish climate as an elemental force, occasioning prosaic challenges for those who live on the geographic and economic margins.

Prefiguring the works of later directors—from Jean Painlevé and Jacques Cousteau to David Attenborough, Werner Herzog, and Luc Jacquet—early German nature films resonate with contemporary scholarship on animal studies, ecologies, and the Anthropocene in Cinema and Media Studies and the Environmental Humanities more generally. Not least, they pose urgent questions regarding the responsibilities and possibilities for human intervention into the planetary ecosystem at a time of species loss, melting ice sheets, and rising sea levels.