Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Toward Generic Histories—Film Genre, Genre Theory, and German Film Studies
- 1 Parallel Modernities: From Haunted Screen to Universal Horror
- 2 The Essay Film and Its German Variations
- 3 The Limits of Futurity: German Science-Fiction Film over the Course of Time
- 4 The Situation Is Hopeless, but Not Desperate: UFA's Early Sound Film Musicals
- 5 Resisting the War (Film): Wicki's “Masterpiece” Die Brücke and Its Generic Transformations
- 6 Ironizing Identity: The German Crime Genre and the Edgar Wallace Production Trend of the 1960s
- 7 From Siodmak to Schlingensief: The Return of History as Horror
- 8 Producing Adaptations: Bernd Eichinger, Christiane F., and German Film History
- 9 Exceptional Thrills: Genrification, Dr. Mabuse, and Das Experiment
- 10 The Heimat Film in the Twenty-First Century: Negotiating the New German Cinema to Return to Papas Kino
- 11 The Romantic Comedy and Its Other: Representations of Romance in German Cinema since 1990
- 12 Yearning for Genre: The Films of Dominik Graf
- Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
1 - Parallel Modernities: From Haunted Screen to Universal Horror
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Toward Generic Histories—Film Genre, Genre Theory, and German Film Studies
- 1 Parallel Modernities: From Haunted Screen to Universal Horror
- 2 The Essay Film and Its German Variations
- 3 The Limits of Futurity: German Science-Fiction Film over the Course of Time
- 4 The Situation Is Hopeless, but Not Desperate: UFA's Early Sound Film Musicals
- 5 Resisting the War (Film): Wicki's “Masterpiece” Die Brücke and Its Generic Transformations
- 6 Ironizing Identity: The German Crime Genre and the Edgar Wallace Production Trend of the 1960s
- 7 From Siodmak to Schlingensief: The Return of History as Horror
- 8 Producing Adaptations: Bernd Eichinger, Christiane F., and German Film History
- 9 Exceptional Thrills: Genrification, Dr. Mabuse, and Das Experiment
- 10 The Heimat Film in the Twenty-First Century: Negotiating the New German Cinema to Return to Papas Kino
- 11 The Romantic Comedy and Its Other: Representations of Romance in German Cinema since 1990
- 12 Yearning for Genre: The Films of Dominik Graf
- Bibliography
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
For an exile habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally.
—Edward Said[My father was] a European intellectual who had based most of his thinking on the great minds of the German language, only to find that it led to a stupid monster of an Austrian painter named Hitler. For the rest of his life he tried to understand how civilization could end up in barbarism.
—Arianné Ulmer CipesEdgar G. Ulmer and German Horror Legacies
In an extensive interview with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in 1970, Edgar G. Ulmer made references to two German sources that gave shape to his famous horror film The Black Cat, which he directed for Universal in 1934: “Junior [Laemmle] gave me free rein to write a horror picture in the style we had started in Europe with Caligari,” only to add a few moments later that the film “was very much out of my Bauhaus period.” This puzzling double reference to two very different and aesthetically even incompatible sources holds an important clue to what Ulmer wanted to achieve with his first film produced by a major studio. Most obviously, this can be read as a typical Ulmerian gesture to establish cultural capital.
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- Information
- Generic Histories of German CinemaGenre and its Deviations, pp. 27 - 48Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013