Weimar Slapstick (Hippfest at Home YouTube presentation)

Description

The cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933) has long been both celebrated and studied for its innovative filmmakers (Murnau, Langst, Pabst), iconic performers (Jannings, Dietrich, Lorre) and influential genres and styles, from mountain-films to expressionist nightmares to dizzying visions of modern, metropolitan life. Often subsumed within a broader vision of the Republic caught between extremes of utopia and catastrophe, promise and tragedy, Weimar film culture was nonetheless marked by cosmopolitan curiosities and transnational circulations that belied this polarization and opened up both its films and filmgoers to a whole spectrum of cinematic possibilities. Not least were those offered by the seemingly competing model of cinema represented by Hollywood and with it, wider cultures of so-called Americanism.

In this HippFest at Home presentation, Dr Paul Flaig focuses on one specific aspect of this Americanism, namely, Weimar culture's intense and often imitative interest in American comic modes of mass culture, including eccentric, infectious dance crazes, jazz syncopation, cartoon creatures and, above all, slapstick stars like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy. Departing from both his own recent book and several German and American films featured at HippFest 2026, he will explore a series of extraordinary and often surprising meetings of Hollywood comedy and Weimar culture, including ski-farces starring Leni Riefenstahl, Bertolt Brecht’s never-released, Chaplin-inspired barbershop slapstick short, a Felix the Cat cartoon scored by composer Paul Hindemith, and grotesque dance performances featuring the amazing comediennes Ossi Oswalda, Anny Ondra and Ilse Bois.