Germans have come to (and left, and returned to) the U.S. for various reasons, including flight from the maw of the Nazi war machinery, and the proverbial lure of Hollywood has long led German directors — such as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, F.W. Murnau, and Werner Herzog, renegade star of the New German Cinema of the 1970s — to put their influential mark on film aesthetics and make Hollywood what it is.
That subject is at the crux of Hollywood Berlin: Exiles and Immigrants, a fascinating series of five films to be screened at UCSB’s state-of-the-art Pollock Theater, with special guests at each screening, starting on Thursday, October 12. Organized by Patrice Petro, professor and the Dick Wolf director of UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Center, along with graduate student Naomi DeCelles, the series traverses more than 50 years of filmmaking, from Murnau’s 1924 silent film The Last Laugh — with former Santa Barbaran Michael Mortilla lending a live piano score — to Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre. The inimitable and longtime Hollywood (well, Los Angeles)–based Herzog is in the house, kicking off the series on October 12.
Also in the mix are Lubitsch’s classic To Be or Not to Be (Oct. 19), satirically taking on the Nazi regime with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in tow, and Lang’s 1936 film, Fury (Nov. 2), with Spencer Tracy, about small-town crime and mob tyranny. “Each of these directors brought a distinct aesthetic and sensibility to Hollywood filmmaking,” Petro noted. “Their fluency in Hollywood conventions, therefore, always retained a strong accent. As immigrants and exiles — and this includes Herzog as well as Lubitsch, Murnau, Lang, and Wilder — they brought the experience of the outsider to an examination of American culture.”