Edgar G. Ulmer

Edgar G. Ulmer - The Man Off-Screen

A/USA 2004, 77 min,
Mischief Films, Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp.

Pieced together like a detective story, the film is a dazzling portrait of director Edgar G. Ulmer’s mysterious and moving career, and also a journey through the strange world of B movies.

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Synopsis

“A picture of Ulmer is like a cryptic police sketch“, as Stefan Grissemann writes in his Ulmer biography “Mann im Schatten” (Man on the Sidelines). Separating legends from fact is difficult, but quite a fascinating challenge in making a film portrait. The elements of the ghostly, transitory, and illusionary constitute the thematic and formal leitmotifs of the film.

What part of Ulmer lives on? Where does Ulmer still haunt film history like a ghost? What links cinema illusions with (necessary) illusions about one’s own life?

Ulmer’s character casts many shadows: he has left plenty of tracks, is himself, however, elusive; his past zigzags through time, is full of gaps and contradictions. Nevertheless (or perhaps for this very reason?) his influence on others was enormous, the traces he left behind were striking. Edgar G. Ulmer is a symptom we have yet to interpret and understand fully. He stands for many things: for the prototype of the independent, effective laborer, for rebelling against the mainstream Hollywood system, for the identity crises of modern times, for exile and minorities, for geographical and spiritual nomadism, for tragic failure, for a specter that vacillates between art and trash in film history, for the fact that necessity can spawn inventiveness and illusions can be more real that reality.

Here, as in many of Ulmer’s films, the search for one truth remains futile. Instead the film focuses on the investigations themselves: the sleuth’s approach makes the coexistence of various staged truths possible. One can only do Ulmer filmic justice by presenting and making transparent the manner of “truth production,” by being willing to fictionalize and spin tales of one’s own. Thus it becomes apparent that “truth” is always guided by interests, just as Ulmer constantly appended his own biography with dubious facts in order to achieve respect, worth, or simply existential security.

Director Michael Palm reconstructs the convoluted labyrinthine paths in Ulmer’s biography and filmography, investigates gaps, contradictions, falsehoods, and confusions, and in the way he stages his film he conveys a feeling for the constant restlessness, the constant illusions in Ulmer’s life.

Most of the interviews with the protagonists are in moving cars – in the streets of Hollywood and Berlin – or as rear projection shots. The film’s protagonists do not just have the function of supplying information, but are incorporated in consciously staged scenes, so that what resonates throughout the film is the question as to how their comments relate to reality and truth.

Ulmer himself serves as an “unreliable” off-narrator, often leading us astray or causing us to doubt the things we hear and see. Montage is used to simulate between individual protagonists dialogue that never actually took place, suggesting the fabrication and filmic construction of history and reality without robbing the figures of their relevance, without making due with simple truths. In this sense Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-screen is also playfully loyal to the illusion machine, to the productive illusion of the film – to the strange illusion of cinema. But it is also an analysis of the utterly capitalist world of illusion, Hollywood, a figment that actually “only exists in one’s head” (John Landis) – “a gigantic, blurry rear projection” (Joe Dante) – that both attracted and repulsed Ulmer his whole life.

Film excerpts assume the formal role of the documentary, archive material is given narrative functions. Thus the protagonist of Ulmer’s Detour serves repeatedly as an allegorical Ulmer double, as his alter ego; and the main character from Ulmer’s Beyond The Time Barrier, who stands in the wasteland outside the futuristic city, shares the same fascinated expression that Ulmer might wear as he stands before the gates of the glamor world of Hollywood.

The film’s staging, visual style, and montage convey to the viewer the B-movie’s “attitude of life,” its fast, forceful narrative pace, its roughness and simplicity, its extreme density and directness, but without imitating its style, Ulmer’s style. Thus Edgar G. Ulmer – The Man Off-screen isn’t just a fascinating mythical tale of a truly influential Hollywood maverick, but it also explores the issue of what fascinates us about the barrenness, efficiency, and flexibility of B-movies.

Edgar G. Ulmer

Edgar G. Ulmer (1904–1972) emigrated from Austria in the late twenties and became the King of B-movies in Hollywood with the minor masterpieces “The Black Cat” (1934), “Grine Felder” (1937), “Bluebeard” (1944), “Detour” (1945), “Strange Illusion” (1945), “Ruthless” (1948) or “The Naked Dawn” (1955), to name just a few, which have long since become classics of their genre.

Ulmer was forgotten, rediscovered, and finally ended up a cult figure. All his life he straddled the line between art, solid craftsmanship, and trash, “an Odysseus of cinema, who wasn’t destined to return home, but who, on his long voyage through various genres and film cultures, spanned the entire spectrum: cool modernity alongside lascivious speculation, cheap trash beside classic virtuosity.” (Bert Rebhandl) Ulmer was and still is the nonconformist, non-classifiable filmmaker par excellence.

His hopes of making it into the ranks of the big Hollywood directors during his lifetime wouldn’t come true. Hollywood, that Ulmer laconically called “home,” remained for him for the most part just an object of yearning: for financial security, for artistic recognition. On the other hand he insisted on artistic independence and for this he was willing to work on the fringes of the dream factory, almost always on an extremely low budget, at a breakneck pace. One might say that in every way Ulmer’s life and work took place on the fringes, off-screen.

After he is discovered in the early 60s, mainly by cinephilic critics and directors associated with the Nouvelle Vague, Ulmer is celebrated and revered as a cult director, as auteur. His admirers recognize Ulmer’s talent of being able to bring out the artistic maximum on a minimal budget, his pessimistic, existentialist heroes and stories, his virtuosity with lighting and camera. But it is too late – Ulmer can no longer profit from this rediscovery.

Edgar Ulmer is certainly the most underrated of all American filmmakers. His movies surprise us with their freshness, directness, and inventiveness.

Francois Truffaut