The Hygienic Apparatus

“This study brilliantly unpacks the imbrications between early German cinema and a pervasive concern with hygiene, understood as a set of ideas and techniques for managing the interactions between bodies and environments. Dobryden shows how hygienic thinking impacted not only filmic representations and the development of distinct genres, but also the understanding of cinema more broadly: its spaces of production and reception, its technological development, and its power to bolster or disrupt the disciplinary regimes of industrial capitalism.” —Michael Cowan, author of Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film—Advertising—Modernity

“The Hygienic Apparatus beautifully weaves together two aspects of German modernity that are usually considered separately: the simultaneously unfolding trajectories of hygienic discourse and of cinema during the early decades of the twentieth century. It demonstrates on the one hand how nonfiction films on topics as diverse as the design of urban and domestic space, the perils of big city traffic, and sexual and reproductive life helped define a new hygienic imaginary, and on the other hand how feature films forged a counter-hygienic alternative to the powerfully normative schemas that emerged from the modern obsession with efficiency, order and health.” —Andreas Killen, author of Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany

“In this superb reconsideration of Weimar cinema, Paul Dobryden places film at the heart of a struggle for environmental and hygienic control that is at once fascinating and unnervingly timely. Connecting architecture and infrastructure, biopolitics and disability, and both canonical and forgotten figures of early German cinema, The Hygienic Apparatus offers a model of how capacious cultural film histories should be written and important lessons for scholars of German history and the environmental humanities.” —Brian R. Jacobson, author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space