Johann August Sutter in a transatlantic key: The interart of Blaise Cendrars, James Cruze and Luis Trenker

In this case study of transatlantic intermediality, I discuss the literary/screen pairing formed by Blaise Cendrar’s source novel Sutter’s Gold (English, 1926) and two film adaptations – James Cruze’s Sutter’s Gold (Universal Pictures) and Luis Trenker’s Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The Kaiser of California, Tobis-Rota, Berlin), both from 1936. While the term “source” here indicates a shared historical personage and storyline, it is not to be understood as leading primarily to a study of fidelity or adapted text. What we have instead is an intercultural constellation exemplifying the porousness of the re-mediation process itself, whether dealing with Cendrars’s novel about the Gold Rush of 1848, film versions of it, interpreting the role of California’s famous pioneer, editing for the box office, or ideologically manipulating mythic memes of El Dorado for political purposes. All of this is inextricably tied up with the spectators, their standpoint, and the socio-historical mediations of the moment.