{"id":5208,"date":"2014-04-06T22:21:31","date_gmt":"2014-04-07T04:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.csj.ualberta.ca\/imaginations\/?p=5208"},"modified":"2018-01-19T21:30:03","modified_gmt":"2018-01-20T04:30:03","slug":"filmstadt-in-the-vorstadt-locationality-in-the-filmmaking-practice-of-mihaly-michael-kertesz-curtiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/?p=5208","title":{"rendered":"Filmstadt in the Vorstadt: Locationality in the Filmmaking Practice of Mih\u00e1ly\/ Michael Kert\u00e9sz\/ Curtiz"},"content":{"rendered":"

5-1 | Table of Contents<\/a>\u00a0| http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.17742\/IMAGE.periph.5-1.7 | Ingram PDF<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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The article examines the largest and most monumental of the silent film epics produced in the Austrian republic: Sodom und Gomorrha <\/em>(1922). In seeking out the film\u2019s shooting location, an abandoned site of clay pits\u00a0 and hilly grasslands at the southern edge of Vienna,\u00a0the article explores what the site\u2019s history and current incarnation as part of a Kurpark<\/em> reveal about the filmmaker\u2019s urban imaginary and the role of technology in modernizing it, and it establishes parallels between the early work he did under the name Michael Kert\u00e9sz and the later success of his cult classic Casablanca<\/em>.<\/div>\n

Cet article examine le plus monumental film muet produit dans la r\u00e9publique d\u2019Autriche: Sodom und Gomorrha <\/em>(1922). Avec l\u2019exploration du site de tournage du film, une enclave de gr\u00e8s et de friches \u00e0 la fronti\u00e8re sud de Vienne, on examine comment l\u2019histoire pass\u00e9e du site et son incarnation actuelle comme Kurpark r\u00e9v\u00e8lent l\u2019imaginaire urbain du cin\u00e9aste et le r\u00f4le de la technologie dans sa participation \u00e0 la modernit\u00e9. On \u00e9tablit en outre certain parall\u00e8les entre les premiers films qu\u2019il a r\u00e9alis\u00e9s sous le nom de Michael Kert\u00e9sz et le succ\u00e8s plus tardif de son film-culte Casablanca<\/em>.<\/div>
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Susan Ingram | York University<\/p>\n

Filmstadt in the Vorstadt:
\nLocationality in the Filmmaking Practice of Mih\u00e1ly\/ Michael Kert\u00e9sz\/ Curtiz<\/h4>\n

In Vienna in the aftermath of World War I, amidst an economic crisis that resulted in hyperinflation, mass\u00a0unemployment, and political radicalization, silent film epics were produced of monumental scale with themes taken from history, the Old Testament and classical antiquity. One of the largest and most monumental of these films, and the most expensive film ever produced in Austria, was the 1922 Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> directed by Michael Kert\u00e9sz, as he was then called.[1]<\/a> The film juxtaposes a contemporary story of seduction, sin and redemption with a biblical tale that could be mobilized for designing, constructing and spectacularly destroying lavish, art deco-inspired sets of gigantic proportion.<\/p>\n

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The film is spectacular in many regards, and not simply for its production values or the brilliant restorative work that the Filmarchiv Austria did to make 98 minutes of the original three hour long production available in 2002 (Nord).[2]<\/a> As will be shown here, Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> not only substantiates claims like Loacker and Steiner\u2019s about film\u2019s suitability for creating and preserving images but also shows that even early film was able to interact with and affect the places it created and preserved images of.[3]<\/a> Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> is an unsung touchstone in cinematic history that allows one to open up new perspectives on, and relations between, classics like Metropolis<\/em> (1927, dir. Fritz Lang) and Casablanca<\/em> (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz) if one is willing to make a small detour through the outskirts of Vienna to its main filming location, which is the path this article takes. In resituating Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> in the place where it was made, this contribution taps into and reveals the film\u2019s emancipatory potential for a film historiography that is expanding to take in copies of long-lost films that have been resurfacing out of the archives of Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

It also adds to the scholarship on Curtiz, whose under-appreciation is underscored in the few biographical studies of him there are (cf. Portuges, Robertson) and by the title of the 2012 documentary, Michael Curtiz: <\/em>The Greatest Director You Never Heard Of. <\/em>When Curtiz\u2019s films receive attention, it is usually on account of their thematics, such as the nostalgia in Casablanca <\/em>that interested Homi Bhabha and Umberto Eco, among others. Both Film Studies and Austrian Studies tend to be dismissive of Curtiz\u2019s accomplishments, and allusions and references to his work are often overlooked. To cite a recent example, in an article on Billy Wilder\u2019s Austrian connections, Robert Dassanovsky attributes the \u201ctrue name of the helpless Belgian wife searching for her missing husband in Wilder\u2019s truncated Sherlock Holmes tribute,\u201d namely, Ilse von Hofmannsthal, to \u201cthe equally untrustworthy femme fatale (Marlene Dietrich) in A Foreign Affair<\/em> (1948)\u201d because that character \u201cinsists on the recognition of her nobility (the von in her name) in the very same manner\u201d (Dassanovsky 5). Rather than referring to Erika von Schluetow, whom Wilder, like everyone else, would associate with Berlin, something at odds with the allusion to Vienna in the last name to \u201cAustria\u2019s most anti-Prussian Viennese author (Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 1874\u2013 1929)\u201d (6), a stronger case for a Viennese\/ Central European connection could be made by not ignoring but rather positing that Wilder was alluding to the heroine in Curtiz\u2019s 1942 Casablanca, <\/em>Ilsa Lund, and then referencing Curtiz\u2019s career as I do here. In revealing Kert\u00e9sz\/ Curtiz\u2019s minoritarian proclivity for peripheral locations and the potentiality of technology, this article draws attention to hitherto underappreciated aspects that demonstrate the consistency and coherence of the filmmaker\u2019s progressive oeuvre.<\/p>\n

Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em><\/h4>\n

One of Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em>\u2019s many remarkable qualities is the complexity of its plot structure. It may begin conventionally enough with the archetypical story of a beautiful young girl (Miss Mary Conway, Figure 1), whose mother pressures her into renouncing the well-known sculptor she is in love with (Harry Lighton, Figure 2) in order to marry an evil capitalist (Mr. Harbers, Figure 3), who is old enough to be her father and has just caused the London Stock Exchange to crash to his benefit.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 1 Mary Conway<\/p>\n

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Fig. 2 Harry Lighton<\/p>\n

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Fig. 3 Mr Harbers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two plot twists are then introduced. First, there is a flashback to the biblical city of Sodom, which is depicted as a parallel to contemporary hedonistic Vienna. This link is made explicit with the same actress who plays Mary playing Lot\u2019s wife (both parts are played by Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s then wife, Lucy Doraine) as well as in the intertitles that precede the shift to Sodom. When Mary catches sight of them building her \u201cBlutger\u00fcst,\u201d she throws herself at the priest, who replies: \u201cYou, daughter of Sodom! Even in your last moments you\u2019re thinking only of your sinful body and not of freeing your soul?!\u201d \u201cSuffering world, you new Sodom and Gomorrah\u201d \u201cYou are ripe for destruction!\u201d \u201cIn your palaces orgies are held just as they were in Lot\u2019s city\u2026!\u201d (\u201eDu Tochter Sodoms! Auch in Deinen letzten Augenblicken denkst Du nur an Deinen s\u00fcndhaften K\u00f6rper und nicht an die Befreiung Deiner Seele?!\u201c \u201eWehe Dir, elende Welt, Du neues Sodom und Gomorrrha! Du bist reif, um vernichtet zu werden.\u201c \u201eIn Deinen Pal\u00e4sten feiert das Laster Orgien wie einstmals in der Stadt des Lot\u2026!\u201c).<\/p>\n

In the second plot twist, just as Lot\u2019s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt, we discover that a good part of Mary\u2019s adventures before the flashback to Sodom has been a dream. She is shown waking up in terror and smiling when she recognizes that she is not in the jail cell she was taken to for inciting Mr Harber\u2019s son Eduard to stab his father, but rather the bedroom of the palatial villa where her wild engagement party took place, at which Harry threatened to shoot himself and Mary then, in what turns out to have been a dream sequence, went about seducing both Eduard and his priest-guardian. When we return to Mary at the end of the film, she looks at a clock and declares that in the past half hour she has experienced a terrible tragedy (\u201eIn einer halben Stunden durchlebte ich eine f\u00fcrchterliche Trag\u00f6die\u201c), forcing the viewer to think back over the course of the film to determine the point at which the apparent reality of the filmic narrative had actually become a dream.<\/p>\n

Also noteworthy is the film\u2019s situating of Mary as a dreamer-protagonist, something that warrants a comparison with Metropolis<\/em> (1927, dir. Fritz Lang). Andreas Huyssen has suggested that \u201cit is precisely the doubling of Maria, the use of religious symbolism, the embodiment of technology in a woman-robot and Freder\u2019s complex relationship to women and machines, sexuality and technology, which give us a key to [Metropolis\u2019s<\/em>] social and ideological imaginary\u201d (66). Sodom und Gomorrha <\/em>also features a doubling of the female protagonist, religious symbolism and a father-son rivalry; however, it is not about the son\u2019s complex relationship to women, machines, sexuality and technology, but rather the woman\u2019s complex relationship to men, technology, urbanity, and history. It is not a case of a female heart mediating in a Tower of Babel conflict between a clearly class-based male head and hands, but rather of a female soul trying to make her way through depraved surroundings and mediate between the waking dream of her phantasmagorical consumer-based existence and what her dream teaches her about her heart. There are not two Marys in Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> the way there are two Marias in Metropolis<\/em>: one innocent, pristine and bucolic, the other a vampish machine that wreaks havoc and destruction on a city. Rather both Mary and Lot\u2019s wife Sarah are vampish, lascivious temptresses, but their lasciviousness is not destructive, only self-destructive. Sodom is destroyed not by one woman\u2019s desires but rather by the general mores of the place. In other words, it is not a fear of woman per se, but a woman\u2019s fears that are the central concern in Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s film, something with political implications. As Huyssen has shown, the fear of woman in Metropolis<\/em> is also a fear of the masses:<\/p>\n

The fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass. \u2026 Male fears of an engulfing femininity are here projected onto the metropolitan masses, who did indeed represent a threat to the rational bourgeois order. The haunting specter of a loss of power combines with fear of losing one’s fortified and stable ego boundaries, which represent the sine qua non of male psychology in that bourgeois order. (52-53)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What then of female fears? By equating Mary and Lot\u2019s wife, Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> shows how women have been barred from accessing technologically driven progress. The only resource Mary has to mobilize is depicted as precisely the same as in the biblical tales: namely, her decidedly low-tech womanly charms. Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s film encourages one to conclude that the female lot in life, if one may be permitted to put it like that, has not improved over the millennia. Rather, it is up to women to learn from the bad dream that has historically been their reality and wake up and follow their hearts.<\/p>\n

It is here that the film implicitly makes a neat leap. After all, if women are to learn from their dreams, then where better for them to turn than the dream factory of cinema? In staging an intricate example of pedagogy, Kert\u00e9sz can be seen to be raising awareness of the potential of the new technology to motivate emancipatory dreams, something that is mirrored in his own production practice. Kert\u00e9sz obviously did not feel the need to depict either the unruly masses or technology as a threat the way the much more bourgeois Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou did. As Huyssen reminds us:<\/p>\n

The expressionist view emphasizes technology\u2019s oppressive and destructive potential and is clearly rooted in the experiences of the mechanized battlefields of World War I. During the 1920s and especially during the stabilization phase of the Weimar Republic this expressionist view was slowly replaced by the technology cult of the Neue Sachlichkeit<\/em> and its unbridled confidence in technical progress and social engineering. Both these views inform [Metropolis<\/em>]. (67)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kert\u00e9sz, who had been born in Budapest in 1886 and would die in Los Angeles in 1962, seems to have sided more solidly with the latter view. His filmmaking practice shows him to have been aware of the powerful good that his medium of choice could do. His monumental films employed literally thousands at a time when unemployment in Vienna was rampant, as films like the Greta Garbo vehicle Die freudlose Gasse\/ Joyless Street<\/em> made a point of depicting by ostensibly setting the mis\u00e8re in Vienna (though the film was actually made in Berlin).<\/p>\n

Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em>\u2019s Location<\/h4>\n

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Fig. 4 Filmstadt<\/p>\n

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Fig. 5 Kurpark Oberlaa, #20 Filmstadt<\/p>\n

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Fig. 6 Filmpark, Google maps<\/p>\n

Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s filming of Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> had a transformative effect on the Laaerberg. First, as Loacker details, infrastructure had to be provided: \u201cpaths were established, barracks for the carpenters and set builders had to be built as well as dressing rooms for the actors; even a separate telephone network was installed on the wide fields. For water provision and to create a further artificial lake, a thousand-meter long water pipe was laid into the dry area of the Laaerberg\u201d (31). The site became popular for academic outings led by professors of art history and archeology, who took classes there to show them characteristic elements of the antique styles. The 64m tall temple of Astarte could be seen from a great distance and was very popular. Filming took almost a year, ending on 14 June 1922 (38), which lent the initial infrastructure a more permanent quality, particularly when it was followed by further lengthy shoots, such as an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler\u2019s Der junge Medardus<\/em> (1923), Die Sklavenk\u00f6nigin\/ Moon over Israel <\/em>(1925), and the outside scenes of Salammbo <\/em>(Pierre Marodon, 1924).<\/p>\n

This initial infrastructure encouraged neighbouring areas to be developed after the filming was over. The films were thus part of a larger movement that soon saw the development of humane housing and recreation areas for the rapidly expanding proletarian population in Vienna\u2019s Vorstadt<\/em>. As Maderthaner and Musner detail, Favoriten<\/p>\n

was established in 1874 from the increasingly proletarianized parts of the third, fourth and fifth districts. Through the operation of land prices, an \u2018economy based on division of labor\u2019 had led \u2018under profit pressures\u2019 to \u2018a functional specialization of the urban space\u2019 as well as a \u2018marked social segregation of the population.\u2019 The steady expansion of development took place according to a strict pattern in which housing and industrial plots intermingled. On the edge of the Wienerberg and Laaerberg hills there thus grew up what was for Viennese standards a uniquely homogeneous and dynamically expanding quarter. Medium-sized plants in metalworking and machine-building in particular were built here, as well as the innovative and capital-intensive electrical industry, without breaking the prescribed block-grid system. (41)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A direct product of industry, the area, \u201cwhich mushroomed in open country in the wake of the railroad construction\u201d (41), became \u201ca virtual refuge for numerous families who had no other resources but their children, could not manage to exist in other parts of the city given the significantly higher rents and provision costs, and were pressed into the low-rent tenth district\u201d (Lichtenberger, cited in Maderthaner and Musner 42, Figure 7).<\/p>\n

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Fig. 7 Artificial pond on the Laaerberg, 1910<\/p>\n

According to former inhabitants interviewed by Robert Wegs, prior to WWII Favoriten comprised three distinct social and cultural areas:<\/p>\n

The eastern part of the district, overlooked by the Ankerbrotfabrik<\/em> (which became the largest bread factory in the world in the 1920s), was described by most of those I interviewed as the poorest part of Favoriten in the pre-WWI period. Known as Kreta to most local inhabitants, it housed many of the unskilled workers employed by the Ankerbrotfabrik<\/em>, the nearby South Railway Station (S\u00fcdbahnhof), and the cable factory, Felten und Guilleaume. <\/em>[26]\u2026 With few parks in the area, the children were forced to play in the narrow, dirty, and often dangerous streets. A 1912 report by Favoriten\u2019s city advisor complained about the rubbish and dust from the cable factory and rat-infested trash storage areas, which forced residents to keep their windows closed. (Wegs 25-26)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because of the terrible housing shortage and the inadequacy of the existing housing on the city\u2019s periphery, \u201cthe Social-Democrat-controlled city council launched a major building program in the interwar period. They reduced rents to such levels that private investors were driven out of the market. \u2026 But the SDAP was interested in more than merely providing housing for the poor. In their drive to create \u2018new people,\u2019 socialist leaders hoped to mould a new worker consciousness through a multitude of cooperative projects in the new housing projects, such as common kitchens, day-care centres, kindergartens, and numerous evening events\u201d (Wegs 38). That is, the area around where Kert\u00e9sz was filming his monumental films was soon being scouted out by city planners and architects such as Adolf Loos, who was responsible for encouraging the building of humane row houses which were equipped with gardens in the back so that vegetables could be passed conveniently into the new Frankfurt kitchens [Figures 8, 9].<\/p>\n

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Fig. 8 Laaerberg backyard<\/p>\n

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Fig. 9 View out window<\/p>\n

Perhaps it was Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s status as an immigrant in Vienna that gave him greater insight into, and empathy with, the plight of the masses there and the role that industry, including the cultural industries, could play in improving their working and living conditions, and which, as history has established, were indeed reasonably effective.[5]<\/a> Favoriten has remained predominantly ethnic and working class, but according to recent headlines, \u201cAusl\u00e4nderm\u00e4\u00dfig funktioniert’s!\u201d\u00a0(foreigner-wise, it works, Gu\u010danin and Puktalovi\u0107). Also noteworthy is the fact that, unlike Lang, Curtiz went to Hollywood on his own volition, in 1926, at the behest of Warner Bros, a move very much in keeping with an awareness of technology\u2019s ability to provide better life chances.<\/p>\n

Curtiz\u2019s New World Film and its Location<\/h4>\n

If we turn now to what has become Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s best-known work, the 1942 Casablanca<\/em>, we find a pattern similar to the one in his earlier monumental film. Once again we have the story of a woman under great external pressure to play the temptress and use her feminine charms for the benefit of others. Again her loyalties and desires are divided, and it is left up to her to decide what the right thing to do is so that she doesn\u2019t regret it: \u201cMaybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.\u201d[6]<\/a> And again access to technology proves not oppressive or destructive but rather enabling, indeed pivotal at the film\u2019s climax, as the bulky plane provides the means of escape out of a doomed city.<\/p>\n

The city in Casablanca<\/em> is as interesting as the female lead in its parallels to Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em>. Also a peripheral location, on the edge of the main theatres of WWII, it resembles Vienna\/ Sodom in that it is depicted as under the control of a sinful, evil force, and it also features a metonymic den of iniquity. Consideration of Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s earlier film thus implicitly situates Nazi-occupied Casablanca in a continuum that stretches back to include the worship of false idols in antiquity and the robber-baron capital crisis in the early twentieth century. If Alan K. Rode\u2019s assessment is correct that \u201cInexplicably, no other director remotely possessing [Curtiz\u2019s] credentials has been accorded less historical respect,\u201d[7]<\/a> the same claim can also be made of Sodom und Gomorrha, <\/em>especially if one keeps in mind that Metropolis<\/em>\u2019s way of vilifying \u201cactive and destructive female sexuality\u201d by pairing it with \u201cthe destructive potential of technology\u2026 is in no way unique to Lang\u2019s film. Apart from\u2026 literary examples\u2026, it can be found in numerous 19th-century allegorical representations of technology and industry as woman\u201d (Huyssen 77). Rather than the usual eruptions of nature into the heart of the metropolis in the form of wild animals or storms that then need to be tamed in order to restore bourgeois order, which one finds in, for example, King Kong<\/em>, Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s films offer an emancipatory reversal: insertions of the technological into the wild nature on the metropolis\u2019s periphery that open up lines of flight for those excluded from or trapped in the lower orders of oppressive hierarchies. That such a depiction is implicitly anti-national is underscored by Catherine Portuges, who describes Casablanca <\/em>as \u201c[t]he most international of productions, a film about anti-fascism, directed by a Hungarian, with a cast\u2026 most of whom speak accented English,\u201d and the one who mostly notably does not, Humphrey Bogart\u2019s Rick, when asked his nationality, responds \u201c’I\u2019m a drunkard’\u201d (Portuges 166).<\/p>\n

What I would like to underscore here in concluding is the potential that Kert\u00e9sz saw in outskirts and peripheries when one had access to adequate technological means to transform them. That is what he discovered upon arriving in both Vienna and Hollywood: that to approach the centre, one had to look to the edges, of cities as well as of regions and continents; that was where one could find the paths to the greatest success, at least that is where, as I hope to have established with this contribution, the paths to his greatest successes were located.<\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/h4>\n

[1]<\/a> He was born Mih\u00e1ly Kaminer in Budapest in 1888 and worked there in theater and film as Mih\u00e1ly Kert\u00e9sz before fleeing in 1919 for Vienna (Portuges 161).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> The original version was 3,945 metres long, representing a running time of about 178 minutes (Wostry 163). The film was therefore generally shown in two parts: Part I:\u00a0Die S\u00fcnde\u00a0(“The Sin”) and Part II:\u00a0Die Strafe\u00a0(“The Punishment”). For details about what made the restoration of the film one of the most difficult cases in Austrian film history despite there being more material for it than for any other Austrian silent film (copies were found in archives in Moscow, Berlin, Prague, Bologna and Milan), see Wostry. \u201cAlthough the whole film is not recovered, all four sequences have now been restored. The restored version has a running time of 98 minutes\u201d (cf. the English Wikipedia entry).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> As Armin Loacker and Ines Steiner have shown, in these films the medium was really the message (11). In early monumental films, audiences encountered the founders of religion like Buddha, Moses and Jesus; historical heroes like Hannibal, Belsazar, Caesar, Mark Anthony, Nero, Spartacus, Alexander, Columbus, Danton, and Napoleon; legendary\u00a0femmes fortes\u00a0like Cleopatra, Judith, Esther, Kriemhild, Joan of Arc, Maria Stuart, Anne Boleyn; and\u00a0femmes fatales\u00a0like Salome, Delilah, the Queen of Saba, Lucrezia Borgia, and Mme. Dubarry (11). In contrast to film critics such as Kracauer, who dismissed early monumental film as problematic, escapist, aesthetically questionable and \u201cunfilmic\u201d (12), the work in Loacker and Steiner\u2019s\u00a0Imaginierte Antike <\/em>(Imagined Antiquity) shows that early film became not simply \u201cthe image repository of modernity\u201d but rather \u201cthe primary medium in which this modernity preserved images of everything that had been\u201d because it was suited to create \u201call possible, real and imaginary images in collective memory\u201d (11).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> I have left\u00a0Vorstadt\u00a0untranslated in order to highlight the specificity of the \u201cbefore the city\u201d aspect of the Viennese situation, which in the original German is in the singular. One could translate\u00a0Vorstadt\u00a0as \u201couter district,\u201d but then the singularity of the original space would go lost. By the same token, it would be culturally misleading to call Favoriten a suburb.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Portuges comments on \u201cCurtiz\u2019s multiple\u2013\u2013and conflicted\u2013\u2013identities as a Hungarian Jew, European intellectual, and Hollywood icon\u201d and relates a wonderful anecdote about his \u201cotherness as a foreigner\u201d which has \u201cCurtiz and Lagosi speaking Hungarian in a caf\u00e9 in Los Angeles in the 1930s; their loud conversation purportedly prompted Billy Wilder to admonish them: \u2018Enough Hungarian, boys! You\u2019re in America, so you should talk in German\u201d (164).<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> As Catherine Portuges points out, \u201cA number of Curtiz\u2019s films, such as\u00a0Mildred Pierce<\/em> (1945)\u2026 later an iconic text of feminist film theory\u2013\u2013portray intelligent, resourceful and ambitious women, clever survivors who may be allowed to love more than one man at a time\u201d (165).<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Something he details in his biography: \u201cCurtiz directed more acclaimed movies in different styles and genres than any other film director. He directed over 170 feature films; a staggering output that outstrips the legendary John Ford and exceeds the combined careers of George Cukor, Victor Fleming and Howard Hawks. Nominated five times by the Motion Picture Academy as Best Director and winning for\u00a0Casablanca, Curtiz helmed rousing adventures, westerns, musicals, spectacles, drama, comedies, horror, war, crime, mystery and film noir. His career shaped the earliest days of silent cinema in Europe as he acted, produced and directed scores of films in Budapest, Vienna and France before coming to Warner Brothers in 1926.\u201d<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/h4>\n

Dassanovsky, Robert. \u201cHome\/Sick: Locating Billy Wilder\u2019s Cinematic Austria in The Apartment<\/em>, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes<\/em>, and Fedora<\/em>.\u201d Journal of Austrian Studies<\/em> 46.3 (Fall 2013): 1-25.<\/p>\n

Gu\u010danin, Jelena and Sini\u0161a Puktalovi\u0107. \u201cLokalaugenschein in Wien Favoriten: ‘Ausl\u00e4nderm\u00e4\u00dfig funktioniert’s!’\u201ddaStandard.at. 21 October 2013, accessed 21 Oct. 2013.<\/p>\n

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism<\/em>. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana UP, 1986.<\/p>\n

Loacker, Armin. \u201cWerkst\u00e4tten der Seh(n)sucht: Produktionsgeschichte und Produktionsstrukturen des Monumentalfilms in \u00d6sterreich.\u201d Imaginierte Antike: \u00d6sterreichische Monumental-Stummfilme<\/em>. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002. 21-40.<\/p>\n

Loacker, Armin and Ines Steiner, eds. Imaginierte Antike: \u00d6sterreichische Monumental-Stummfilme<\/em>. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002.<\/p>\n

Maderthaner, Wolfgang, and Lutz Musner.\u00a0Die Anarchie der Vorstadt: Das andere Wien um 1900. <\/em>Frankfurt am Main; New York: Campus, 1999.<\/p>\n

Michael Curtiz: The Greatest Director You Never Heard Of<\/em>. Dir. Gary Leva. Leva FilmWorks, 2012.<\/p>\n

Nord, Cristina. \u201cOpulente G\u00f6tzendienste: Michael Kert\u00e9sz\u2019 Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em>.\u201d Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em>, derstandard.at 2002. DVD accompaniment.<\/p>\n

Portuges, Catherine. \u201cCurtiz, Hungarian Cinema, and Hollywood.\u201d Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies. <\/em>Ed. Steven T\u00f6t\u00f6sy de Zepetnik and Louise O. Vasv\u00e1ri. Boston: Purdue University Press, 2011. 161-170.<\/p>\n

Robertson, James C. The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz. <\/em>London: Routledge, 1993.<\/p>\n

Rode, Alan K. \u201cMichael Curtiz: A Man for All Movies.\u201d http:\/\/alankrode.com\/public2\/index.php\/latest-news\/bio\/arthurlyons\/photogal\/vig\/top10\/appearances\/resources\/menu-separator\/work-in-progress-biography-of-michael-curtiz<\/a>, accessed 15 June 2013.<\/p>\n

Wegs, J. Robert.\u00a0Growing Up Working Class: Continuity and Change Among Viennese Youth,\u00a01890\u20131938.<\/em> University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008 (1989).<\/p>\n

Wostry, Nikolaus. \u201cSodom und Gommorha<\/em> oder vom Reiz der K\u00fcrze. Anmerkungen zu einer Rekonstruktion.\u201d Imaginierte Antike: \u00d6sterreichische Monumental-Stummfilme<\/em>. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2002. 163-173.<\/p>\n

Image Notes<\/h4>\n

Clip 1 Sodom und Gomorrha (Images @1922 Sascha-Film).<\/p>\n

Clip 2 Sodom und Gomorrha (Images @1922 Sascha-Film).<\/p>\n

Fig 1 \u201cMary Conway,\u201d Sodom und Gomorrha (Images @1922 Sascha-Film).<\/p>\n

Fig 2 \u201cHarry Lighton,\u201d Sodom und Gomorrha (Images @1922 Sascha-Film).<\/p>\n

Fig 3 \u201cMr. Harbers,\u201d Sodom und Gomorrha (Images @1922 Sascha-Film).<\/p>\n

Fig 4 \u201cFilmstadt\u201d (Photo: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n

Fig 5 \u201cKurpark Oberlaa\u201d (Photo: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n

Fig 6 \u201cFilmpark\u201d Web. July 10, 2013 <http:\/\/maps.google.com<\/a>><\/p>\n

Fig 7 \u201cArtificial pond on the Laaerberg, 1910\u201d (Favoriten Album 1880-1930<\/em>. Eds. Helfried Seemann and Christian Lunzer. Vienna: REMAprint, 1992. n.p.).<\/p>\n

Fig 8 \u201cLaaerberg backyard\u201d (Photo: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n

Fig 9 \u201cView out window\u201d (Photo: S. Ingram)<\/p>\n

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This article is licensed under a\u00a0\u00a0Creative Commons 3.0 License<\/a> although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing\u00a0under the\u00a0Canadian\u00a0Copyright Act.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5-1 | Table of Contents\u00a0| http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.17742\/IMAGE.periph.5-1.7 | Ingram PDF Susan Ingram | York University Filmstadt in the Vorstadt: Locationality in the Filmmaking Practice of Mih\u00e1ly\/ Michael Kert\u00e9sz\/ Curtiz In Vienna in the aftermath of World War I, amidst an economic crisis that resulted in hyperinflation, mass\u00a0unemployment, and political radicalization, silent film epics were produced of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4062,"featured_media":5371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[107,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-perceived-peripherality-and-places-images-5-1","category-article","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Ingram-fig-9.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p707hj-1m0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4062"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5208"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10362,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5208\/revisions\/10362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

The site Kert\u00e9sz chose for the most spectacular sequences in his film also reflects the attention he paid to film\u2019s, and technology\u2019s, emancipatory potential. While previous films made for Sascha Films were shot either in the Prater or a studio in Sievering (Loacker 31), Sodom und Gomorrha<\/em> required an uninhabited area with hills and ponds, upon which huge sets could be built and destroyed without inconveniencing surrounding dwellings. A suitable location was found in what has come to be called the \u201cFilmstadt\u201d [Figure 4] in honour of the films made there in the 1920s. The Filmstadt is part of the Kurpark Oberlaa [Figure 5 and 6], which is located on the Laaerberg in Favoriten, Vienna\u2019s tenth district and one of the most proletarian parts of its Vorstadt<\/em> (the title of the standard work on the subject Die Anarchie der Vorstadt: Das andere Wien um 1900 <\/em>by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner has been translated into English as Unruly Masses. The Other Side of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna<\/em>).[4]<\/a> This other\/ outer part of Vienna has tended to be neglected, especially in Anglophone scholarship, as it is hard to square with, and can only detract from or call into question what has become known as the myth of \u201cVienna 1900,\u201d which is firmly located along the central Ringstrasse that Franz Joseph had built in the mid-nineteenth century around the city\u2019s first district to replace the city\u2019s premodern military defensive glacis, which is where Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s film starts. However, there is only an establishing shot of the centre, after which Kert\u00e9sz takes us to the city\u2019s monumental outskirts, which he transforms first into a pleasure garden and then into a city of literally biblical proportions.<\/p>\n