Attraktion Antike

Enchanting images clash with dispassionate economic speculation, visions of mass education yield to constant technological innovations for spellbinding the public, and within a decade a fairground attraction turns into the cinema we all know so well. Ines Steiner's study shows how profoundly this project was embedded in the historicism of the 19th century, which - though it plunged into a crisis years ago - once again dominates the popular imagination. Pastrone's monumental "Cabiria", Griffith's "Judith of Bethulia" and "Intolerance", Ernst Lubitsch's "Das Weib des Pharaoh", but also less well-known productions such as Michael Kertész' "Sklavenkönigin" are anything but mere outpourings of national ideologies. They created images of the Orient as an utterly different culture to the classical culture of the West. The moment they are projected, these images prove to be profoundly ambiguous, but their influence continues to have an effect right up to the most recent debates over East and West, and over dominant and alternative cultures.>