THE PROVINCIAL GLOBALISM OF WEIMAR CINEMA: POLA NEGRI, FRANZISKA GAAL AND THE FOREIGN ACCENT IN GERMAN SILENT AND SOUND FILM

ABSTRACT The German film industry during the Weimar era was a melting pot of actors, producers, writers, composers, technical staff and film directors from many different countries and cultures, whose presence emphasised the film industry's cosmopolitanism and international appeal. To reach international audiences, German production companies drew on a number of strategies. This article focuses on one of these strategies by considering two stars of Weimar cinema who were, each in their own way, explicitly positioned as non‐German: Polish‐born Pola Negri and Hungarian‐born Franziska Gaal. We want to consider how these actors’ films ‘spoke with an accent’, how their careers exemplify the ways in which film — even silent film — might in fact articulate the difference connoted by accent. What does it mean that the industry employed so many stars who were simultaneously international, in that they were not German and were clearly marked as not German, and ‘provincial’, in that they embodied and articulated qualities connoting an origin outside of the ‘cosmopolitan’ setting that Berlin might be represented as? Does this problematise the very notion of Weimar film as being either national or international, either cosmopolitan or provincial?