Bøker i Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual-serien

New essays re-evaluating Weimar cinema from a broadened, up-to-date perspective.

Considers over sixty Hollywood films set in Austria, examining the film industry, the influence of domestic factors on images of a foreign country, and the persistence of clichés.Maria von Trapp, watching the final scene of The Sound of Music for the first time as "her" family escaped into Switzerland, exclaimed, "Don't they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!" Hadshe thought about the beginning of the film, which transports viewers to "Salzburg, Austria in the last Golden Days of the Thirties," when the country was in fact suffering from extreme political and social unrest, she might haveasked, "Don't they know history either?" In The Sound of Music as well as in Hollywood's many other "Austria" films, the projections on the screen resemble reflections in a funhouse mirror. Elements of a "real" place with a"real" history inhabited by "real" people can be found in the fractured distortions, which have both drawn from and contributed to the general public's perceptions of the country and its citizens.Austria Made in Hollywood focuses on films set in an identifiable Austria, examining them through the lenses of the historical contexts on both sides of the Atlantic and the prism of the ever-changing domestic film industry. The study chronicles theprotean screen images of Austria and Austrians that set them apart both from European projections of Austria and from Hollywood incarnations of other European nations and nationals. It explores explicit and implicit cultural commentaries on domestic and foreign issues inserted in the Austrian stories while considering the many, sometimes conflicting forces that shaped the films.

Shows how cinematic treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of postwar German women.This book steers attention toward two key aspects of German culture - film and fashion - that shared similar trajectories and multiple connections, looking at them not only in the immediate postwar years but as far back as 1939. They formed spectacular sites of the postwar recovery processes in both East and West Germany. Viewed against the background of the abundant fashion discourses in the Berlin-based press, the films discussed include classics such asThe Murderers Are among Us, Street Acquaintance, and Destinies of Women as well as neglected works such as And the Heavens above Us, Martina, Modell Bianka, and Ingrid. These films' treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of the women who made up a large majority of the postwar public. Costume - in films produced both by DEFA and by West German studios - is a productive site to explore the intersections between realism and escapism. With its focus on costumes within the context of the films' production, distribution, and reception, this bookopens up wider discussions about the role of the costume designer, the ways film costumes can be read as intertexts, and the impact on audiences' behaviors and looks. The book reveals multiple connections between film and fashion,both across the temporal dividing line of 1945 and the Cold War split between East and West. Mila Ganeva is Professor of German at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Provides new insights into German-language cinema around 1968 and its relationship to the period's epoch-making cultural and political happenings.The epoch-making revolutionary period universally known in Germany as '68 can be argued to have predated that year and to have extended well into the 1970s. It continues to affect German and Austrian society and culture to this day. Yet while scholars have written extensively about 1968 and the cinema of other countries, relatively little sustained scholarly attention has thus far been paid to 1968 and West German, East German, and Austrian cinemas. Now, five decades later, Celluloid Revolt sets out to redress that situation, generating new insights into what constituted German-language cinema around 1968 and beyond. Contributors engage a range of cinemas, spanning experimental and avant-garde cinema, installations and exhibits; short films, animated films, and crime films; collectively produced cinemas, feminist films, and Arbeiterfilme (workers' films); as well as their relationship to cinemas of other countries, such as French cinema verite and US direct cinema. Contributors: Marco Abel, Tilman Baumgartel, Madeleine Bernstorff, Timothy Scott Brown, Michael Dobstadt, Sean Eedy, Thomas Elsaesser, IanFleishman, Christina Gerhardt, Lisa Haegele, Randall Halle, Priscilla Layne, Ervin Malakaj, Kalani Michell, Evelyn Preuss, Patricia Anne Simpson, Fabian Tietke, Andrew Stefan Weiner. Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The first book to treat both Doblin's novel and the film adaptations of it, which it does while also articulating theories of literary and film montage.Alfred Doblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and its film adaptations by Jutzi and Fassbinder are canonical works of literature and cinema, and yet there is no monograph that treats all three. This omission is even more striking since Doblin's novel is seen as the most famous example of literary appropriation of film montage aesthetics. Mario Slugan addresses this glaring oversight by considering montage in experiential, historic, stylistic, and narratological terms. Starting from the novel argument that montage is best understood as a perceptual experience rather than as a juxtaposition of meaning, Slugan proposes that it was the perceived experiential similarity with Dada photomontage and Soviet montage films rather than any semantic contrast that made contemporary critics identify Berlin Alexanderplatz as the first novel to appropriate film montage. It was the perceived relative absence of montage in the filmings of the novel, moreover, that significantly contributed to their contemporary dismissals as failed adaptations. Slugan argues that both Jutzi's and Fassbinder's films nevertheless present innovative types ofboth visual and sound montage. These, in turn, allow for the articulation of medium-specific traits of film montage as opposed to those of literary montage, including the organization of time and space, the use of ready-made material, and the relation of montage to the figure of the narrator. Mario Slugan is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Ghent University.

Offers a fresh approach to German film studies by tracing key genres -- including horror, the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema historyOver the last few decades, the field of film studies has seen a rise in approaches oriented toward genre: studies that look at thematic, narrative, and stylistic similarities between films, contextualizing them within culture andsociety. Although there now exists a large body of genre-based scholarship on international film, German film studies has largely ignored the importance of genre. Even as the last several years have witnessed increasing scholarlyinterest in popular cinema from Germany, very few works have substantively engaged with genre theory. Generic Histories offers a fresh approach, tracing a series of key genres -- including horror, science fiction,the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema history. It also addresses detective films, comedies, policiers, and romances that deliberately localize global genres within Germany - aform of transnationalism frequently neglected. This focus on genre and history encourages rethinking of the traditional opposition (and hierarchy) between art and popular cinema that has informed German film studies. In these ways, the volume foregrounds genre theory's potential for rethinking film history as well as cultural history more broadly. Contributors: Marco Abel, Nora M. Alter, Antje Ascheid, Hester Baer, Steve Choe, Paul Cooke, Jaimey Fisher, Gerd Gemunden, Sascha Gerhards, Lutz Koepnick, Eric Rentschler, Kris Vander Lugt. Jaimey Fisher is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Technocultural Studies, and Director of Cinema and Technocultural Studies, at the University of California, Davis.

New essays examining the differences and commonalities between late Weimar-era and early Nazi-era German cinema against a backdrop of the crises of that time.

New essays providing innovative ways of understanding the altered position of media in Germany and beyond.

New view of the crucial role of fashion discourse and practice in Weimar Germany and its significance for women.

From intimate portrayals of ordinary Germans and Nazi leaders to immersive spectacles of war and defeat, this study argues that, since 1990, German film has focused on portraying the Nazi past from within.

A dynamic, event-centered exploration of the hundred-year history of German-language film.

Drawing on archival research and interviews with directors, writers, and editors, Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of German unification.

Collection of essays exploring the controversies surrounding images of the Holocaust.

New essays exploring the surging field of experimental film in today's Germany and Austria.

This is the first book in English on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925-1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context.

Documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking-a form that thrived despite having been officially banned-in East German socialism's final years.

Offers not only an analytical study of the films of Herzog, perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but also a new reading of Romanticism's impact beyond the nineteenth century and in the present.

Considers over sixty Hollywood films set in Austria, examining the film industry, the influence of domestic factors on images of a foreign country, and the persistence of cliches.

The first scholarly collection in English or German to fully address the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of DEFA across genres and in social, political, and cultural context.

Shows how cinematic treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of postwar German women.

The first book-length study in any language of the "Berlin School," the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the 1970s.

A volume of essays marking out a new, historically and culturally specific model for contemplating autobiographical non-fiction film and video.

Paints a complex portrait of East German film art and representation through examining eighteen key DEFA films following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Collection of essays exploring the controversies surrounding images of the Holocaust.