Moving picture puzzles: Training urban perception in the Weimar 'rebus films'

Abstract

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. 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. 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. 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. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved.