Wilhelm Prager | Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit—Ein Film über moderne Körperkultur (Ways to Strength and Beauty) / 1925

body beautiful

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wilhelm Prager, Nicholas Kaufmann, and Ernst Krieger (screenplay), Wilhelm Prager (director) Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit—Ein Film über moderne Körperkultur (Ways to Strength and Beauty) / 1925

 

Based on writing by physician Nicholas Kaufmann and incorporating the current physical culture writings popular in the day, this German film presents numerous examples of methods to develop the body in relationship the natural world through exercise, dance, sports, bathing, and other individual and group activities. Looking often to the Greco-Roman past, Prager’s film often moves close to the territory of Adolf Brand and his Wandervogel Movement, a German youth movement encouraging both young boys and girls to join in groups tutored by strong individual adults engaged in scouting-like hiking, camping, and other activities.

      Near the end of this film, in fact, we witness several scenes of young boys involved in just such groups which the narrator once more equates with the ancient Roman scenes portrayed early on this film of young, nearly-naked males engaged in athletic activities. In Brand’s case, in particular, these groups often bordered on or actually spilled over into male and female pederasty, headed as they were by strong male and female leaders. Brand would later openly argue for man-boy relationships based on those of Greek and Roman history such as those of Achilles and Hannibal.

 

   Prager doesn’t go that far, and in fact this film has no outwardly LGBTQ connection except that it clearly has bought into the Weimar attitudes towards nudity and the growing sexualization of youth. In one early sequence, for example, a man exercises the bodies of nude newborns as if they were mere plastic dolls.

 

     The film begins almost as a domestic drama as an overweight Berlin father attempts to dress himself, hardly able to fit into this own suit, to visit a lecture on physical culture. At the meeting he is joined by several other overweight, bodily challenged, and underdeveloped Berlin citizens, representative of a city that has forgotten its ties with nature. The film shows men working in factories, women dressing in tight corsets, and various other images of individuals who obviously need to take participate in the activities that this film promotes.

        The film is divided into six parts titled “The Ancient Greeks and the New Era,” “physical training for the sake of health: hygienic gymnastics,” “rhythmic gymnastics,” “the dance,” “sport,” and “fresh air, sun, and water.”

 

       Throughout the film presents clips of famous athletes, artists, dancers, and native performers and other notables including Dussia Bereska (of the Rudolf von Laban Dance School, Hamburg), Rudolf Bode, Kitty Cauer, Jack Dempsey, David Lloyd George, Jenny Hasselquist, Gerhart Hauptmann, Niddy Impekoven, Baku Ishii (石井漠, Bac Ishii), Konami Ishii, Tamara Karsavina, Rudolf von Laban and his dance group, Eva Liebenberg, Hans Luber, Bess Mensendieck, Loren Murchison, Benito Mussolini, Leni Riefenstahl, Babe Ruth, Carolina de la Riva, Hertha von Walther, Johnny Weissmuller, Mary Wigman and her dance group to name but a few.

       The sports and dance sections, in particular, are often fascinating just for their footage of famous dancers and sports players, female and male. But, overall, in its idolatry of the human body this work must be seen as an ideological forerunner of the National Socialist body cult, particularly in its later pitches for mass group sports activities, marches, and gatherings that point to Riefenstahl’s later representation of the Berlin Olympics and, of course, her documentaries of Nazi gatherings.

       Particularly in the early segments of Roman sports activities and in its later recreation of a Roman bath profusely representing female nudity, but also in several of the dance performances Ways to Strength and Beauty so fetishizes the body that it becomes highly homoerotic for both gay men and lesbians. And if nothing else, the attitude this cinematic work has toward the body’s expression of sexuality is far ahead of its time.

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).