This Month's Magical History Tour: Theater and Film

The relationship between film and theater oscillates between proximity and distance, inspiration and emancipation. In spite of all thoughts of competition, the need for aesthetic and formal independence and the vehement refusal of particular artistic traditions – all aspects which characterized the relationship between film and theater at the beginning of the 20th century – the theatre offers a pool of subjects, models and forms as comprehensive as it is complex, via which the older medium repeatedly inscribes itself within film history. Approaching this relationship from the other way round, film also plays no small part in the "myth of theater" and has opened up long-concealed theatrical spaces and dynamics to the (theater) audience. We have collected several examples of the diverse connections between theater and film in this month's Magical History Tour, which span various different film historical periods, genres and styles. They draw on the wide-ranging potential of theater within cinema – theater as a source of inspiration or a microcosm, bringing together life and the stage and fiction and reality, blurring boundaries whilst also sometimes seeming to mirror the very world itself.