The many faces of Weimar cinema
Subtitle: rediscovering Germany's filmic legacy
By: edited by Christian Rogowski.
Contributors: Rogowski, Christian, 1956-
Series: Screen cultures
Publisher: Camden House
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Rochester, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 354
ISBN-13: 9781571134295
Subjects: Motion pictures -- Germany -- History -- 20th century
Description: Traditionally, Weimar cinema has been equated with the work of a handful of auteurist filmmakers and a limited number of canonical films. Often a single, limited phenomenon, "expressionist film," has been taken as synonymous with the cinema of the entire period. But in recent decades, such reductive assessments have been challenged by developments in film theory and archival research that highlight the tremendous richness and diversity of Weimar cinema. This widening of focus has brought attention to issues such as film as commodity; questions of technology and genre; transnational collaborations and national identity; effects of changes in socioeconomics and gender roles on film spectatorship; and connections between film and other arts and media. Such shifts have been accompanied by archival research that has made a cornucopia of new information available, now augmented by the increased availability of films from the period on DVD. This wealth of new source material calls for a re-evaluation of Weimar cinema that considers the legacies of lesser-known directors and producers, popular genres, experiments of the artistic avant-garde, and nonfiction films, all of which are aspects attended to by the essays in this volume. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: images and imaginaries / Christian Rogowski; title: Richard Oswald and the social hygiene film: promoting public health or pornography? / Jill Suzanne Smith; title: Unsettling nerves: investigating war trauma in Robert Reinert's Nerven (1919) / Barbara Hales; title: Humanity unleashed: anti-Bolshevism as popular culture in early Weimar cinema / Philipp Stiasny; title: Desire versus despotism: the politics of Sumurun (1920), Ernst Lubitsch's "Oriental" fantasy / Richard W. McCormick; title: Romeo with sidelocks: Jewish-Gentile romance in E. A. Dupont's Das alte Gesetz (1923) and other early Weimar assimilation films / Cynthia Walk; title: "These Hands Are Not My Hands": war trauma and masculinity in crisis in Robert Wiene's Orlacs Hande (1924) / Anjeana Hans; title: The star system in Weimar cinema / Joseph Garncarz; title: Schaulust: sexuality and trauma in Conrad Veidt's masculine masquerades / Elizabeth Otto; title: The musical promise of abstract film / Joel Westerdale; title: The international project of national(ist) film: Franz Osten in India / Veronika Fuechtner; title: The body in time: Wilhelm Prager's Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1926) / Theodore F. Rippey; title: Henrik Galeen's Alraune (1927): The Vamp and The Root of Horror / Valerie Weinstein; title: The dialectic of (sexual) enlightenment: Wilhelm Dieterle's Geschlecht in Fesseln (1928) / Christian Rogowski; title: Babel's business on Ufa's multiple language film versions, 1929-1933 / Chris Wahl; title: "A new era of peace and understanding": the integration of sound film into German popular cinema, 1929-1932 / Ofer Ashkenazi; title: Landscapes of death: sound, space, and commemoration in G. W. Pabst's Westfront 1918 (1930) / Jaimey Fisher; title: Undermining Babel: Victor Trivas's Niemandsland (1931) / Nancy P. Nenno; title: Unmasking Brigitte Helm and Marlene Dietrich: the vamp in German romantic comedies (1930-1933) / Mihaela Petrescu.