Isadora Campregher Paiva | How Film Canons are Made: The Construction of “Weimar Cinema”

Isadora Campregher Paiva |  How Film Canons are Made: The Construction of “Weimar Cinema” | University of Amsterdam | 1st supervisor/promotor: Julia Noordegraaf, Universiteit van Amsterdam | 2nd supervisor: Malte Hagener, Phillips-Universität Marburg | February 2025 – March 2029 i.campregherpaiva[at]uva.nl

This project uses Weimar Cinema as a case study to develop a model of the film canonization process. Drawing on Historical Institutionalism, literary canon studies, New Cinema History and digital film historiography, I argue that canonization is a path dependent process made up of a series of “filters” from production, to marketing, distribution, critical and scholarly reception and preservation. I posit that the current dominant understanding of canon formation overestimates scholarly influence and underestimates the importance of distribution networks (synchronic and diachronic) and central heritage institutions. Weimar Cinema offers a paradigmatic example: the dominant narrative (e.g. Elsaesser, 2009) is that it was the post-war construction of scholars (Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner) who, in an attempt to teleologically explain the rise of Nazism, focused on “dark” works unrepresentative of Weimar film production. Challenging this narrative, I contend that the basis for what is now the Weimar canon had already been established in the 1920s and 1930s, based on the films that were strategically exported and marketed as “German masterworks”, fêted by critics and central film societies, and later preserved by film archives. While scholarly interventions and historical changes in perception (such as Germany’s post-war image) contributed to the elevation of certain films over others, these developments acted over an already significantly reduced universe of films. Using a combination of textual analysis and descriptive statistics, I will demonstrate how mixed methods can be used to critically engage with previously established discourses and shine a light on the history of canonization.