1 – was released, advertisements reported on Seeber's progress in recording footage from around the world and boasted about the limitless possibilities of virtual travel afforded by the films.
#Virtual city dwellers crossword series#
In the months before the first film in the series – Rebus-Film Nr. 6 Indeed, this assortment of non-narrative attractions made up a good part of these films' appeal. In constructing such an ‘interactive’ format, moreover, the rebus films also borrowed heavily from early attractions cinema not unlike the film lecturer of previous decades, the rebus films' animated presenter, Mr Rebus, addresses the audience directly as he shows them ‘views’ of various people, places, things and events. Rather, in the manner of other educational shorts such as Franz Koebner's series 1000 Schritte Charleston/ 1000 Steps of the Charleston, a series of filmic dance lessons shown in German theatres in 1926, the rebus films employed a stimulus-and-response format to solicit prescribed activities (namely puzzle-solving) from spectators. 4 Of course, this ‘interactive’ format, while participational to a certain extent, clearly differed from later varieties by its lack of a two-way interface: unlike input devices such as joysticks or keypads, the puzzle cards filled out by spectators of the rebus films did not affect what happened on the screen.
On one level, one might be tempted to read these filmic puzzles as the precursor to more recent interactive screen media upon buying their tickets, spectators received puzzle cards which they filled out based on visual clues screened before the feature film and could check against the ‘solutions’ segment shown a week later (figure 1). 3 In this essay, I shall focus on one such neglected model of alternative spectatorship from the Weimar era: namely the short-lived genre of the Rebus-Film, a series of short animated crossword puzzles by German director Paul Leni, scriptwriter Hans Brennert and cinematographer Guido Seeber, which ran in German theatres as a prelude to the main feature between 19. 2 Much recent work has thus involved an archaeology of those other models for interaction with moving images and the persistence of a more ‘mobilized gaze’, whether in alternative spaces such as the museum and the planetarium or within the space of the cinema itself. 1 As Tom Gunning long ago pointed out, however, while the dominance of narrative film and continuity editing might have marginalized other modes of spectatorship after 1910, it did not eliminate them. Looking over the history of cinema from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, recent research has increasingly highlighted the similarities between the sense of possibility characterizing cinema's early decades and our own digital era, in which the proliferation of interactive media and variable screen formats has loosened the once dominant paradigm of the passive spectator immobilized in the illusory realm of Plato's cave. In this, they not only look back to the cinema of attractions, but also to the ‘crosscut’ aesthetics of the crossword puzzle itself, which had emerged in 1913 to form the object of a craze in New York and, more recently, Berlin. Unlike the traditional rebus puzzles, moreover, these films do not demand an overcoming of the heterogeneous visual sphere for a hidden syntactical or narrative coherence, but rather revel in the chance crossing of the visual phenomena displayed on the screen.
Although the series’ title seems to embed these films within a cryptic puzzle tradition exemplified by nineteenth-century print rebuses, they in fact represent a very different sort of play: one based not on absorption in difficult riddles, but rather on the rapid identification of things, people and places in movement. This essay examines the largely forgotten phenomenon of the ‘rebus film’ – a series of eight interactive filmed crossword puzzles that were shown in Germany from 1925 to 1927, in which spectators filled out puzzle cards based on clues shown on the screen – as a mode of virtual training for life in the ‘Americanist’ culture of the Weimar Republic.
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