Casting Weimar: Selection, Surplus, and the Film Actor

This presentation tracks modern discourses of human selection as they converged in discussions of film acting in Weimar Germany. In the early years of narrative cinema and beyond, the question of how to select actors for films—the question of casting, in other words—preoccupied filmmakers, actors, critics, and audiences. I trace this question to features of capitalist modernity that made selection a persistent and widespread concern during the Weimar period, and examine how film casting intersected with scientific management and eugenics, emerging disciplines that purported to provide rational criteria for sorting people in employment and marriage. I then turn to texts by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, who offer critical purchase on discourses of selection by foregrounding the category of surplus population and the politics of stardom.

Paul Dobryden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, and the author of The Hygienic Apparatus: Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder (Northwestern University Press, 2022).

Sponsored by German (GNS+) and CGES.