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  3. Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual

Until the 1990s, German film studies focused primarily on a limited canon of art-house films and auteur directors, with particular emphasis on two 'golden eras' of filmmaking - Weimar cinema of the 1920s and the New German Cinema of the 1970s and early 80s. Since German unification, scholars have begun to question the assumptions according to which German cinema had previously been defined, particularly those concerning auteurism and 'the national,' the divide between popular and art cinema, and the place of cinema among other media. As a consequence, recent scholarship has sharpened our awareness of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of German cinema and visual culture, focusing in turn on early cinema, Nazi entertainment film and culture, Hollywood exile, the colonial and postcolonial elements of German feature films, queer cinema, German-Turkish filmmakers, the legacy of DEFA, and other aspects of German visual culture. Screen Cultures pursues these important new lines of inquiry, addressing pluralistic notions of German filmmaking and visual culture in order to meet the needs of today’s college curriculums in both German Studies departments and in Film and Media Studies programs. Interdisciplinary in scope, the series brings into dialog different approaches to the moving image and visual culture - ranging from historical and cultural studies to formal and theoretical explorations, from local perspectives to global ones. The series editors seek both monographs and well-focused collected volumes on topics of strong interest to German film and/or visual studies.

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20 results in Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual

Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism
  • Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics
  • Edited by Claudia Breger, Olivia Landry
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    12 March 2024
  • Posits a new, aesthetically and politically radical, transnational German cinema - 'transnational' also in the sense of concerns with migration, the movement of capital across borders, and globalization.

Film History for the Anthropocene
  • The Ecological Archive of German Cinema
  • Seth Peabody
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 February 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2023
  • By exploring German film history with the tools of the Environmental Humanities, this book offers a case study of the power of film within processes of environmental transformation.

Screening War
  • Perspectives on German Suffering
  • Edited by Paul Cooke, Marc Silberman
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 February 2023
    Print publication:
    30 July 2010
  • Re-examines German cinema's representation of the Germans as victims during the Second World War and its aftermath.

The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film

DEFA after East Germany
  • Edited by Brigitta Wagner
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    22 February 2023
    Print publication:
    01 December 2014
  • Paints a complex portrait of East German film art and representation through examining eighteen key DEFA films following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Nazi Past in Contemporary German Film
  • Viewing Experiences of Intimacy and Immersion
  • Axel Bangert
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    22 February 2023
    Print publication:
    29 December 2014
  • 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.

Celluloid Revolt
  • German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968
  • Edited by Christina Gerhardt, Marco Abel
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    17 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 April 2019
  • Provides new insights into German-language cinema around 1968 and its relationship to the period's epoch-making cultural and political happenings.

Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928-1936
  • With contributions by Anjeana Hans , Bastian Heinsohn , Brook Henkel , Christian Rogowski , Kalani Michell , Kevin B. Johnson , Margrit Frölich , Owen Lyons , Paul Flaig , Richard W. McCormick and Wilfried Wilms
  • Edited by Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, Valerie Weinstein
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    08 May 2021
    Print publication:
    20 October 2016
  • Hitler's Machtergreifung, or seizure of power, on January 30, 1933, marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich, and German film scholarship has generally accepted this date as the break between Weimar and Nazi-era film as well. This collection of essays interrogates the continuities and discontinuities in German cinema before and after January 1933 and theirrelationship to the various crises of the years 1928 to 1936 in seven areas: politics, the economy, concepts of race and ethnicity, the making of cinema stars, genre cinema, film technologies and aesthetics, and German-international film relations. Focusing both on canonical and lesser-known works, the essays analyze a representative sample of films and genres from the period. This book will be ofinterest to scholars and students of Weimar and Third Reich cinema and of the sociopolitical, economic, racial, artistic, and technological spheres in both late Weimar and the early Third Reich, as well as to film scholars in general.

    Contributors: Paul Flaig, Margrit Frölich, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Bastian Heinsohn, Brook Henkel, Kevin B. Johnson, Owen Lyons, Richard W. McCormick, Kalani Michell, Mihaela Petrescu, Christian Rogowski, Valerie Weinstein, Wilfried Wilms.

    Barbara Hales is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. MihaelaPetrescu is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Valerie Weinstein is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

Forgotten Dreams
  • Revisiting Romanticism in the Cinema of Werner Herzog
  • Laurie Ruth Johnson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    07 May 2021
    Print publication:
    01 February 2016
  • Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but his films have never been read in the context of German cultural history. And while there is a surfeit of film reviews,interviews, and scholarly articles on Herzog and his work, there are very few books devoted to his films, and none addressing his entire career to date. Until now.
    Forgotten Dreams offersnot only an analytical study of Herzog's films but also a new reading of Romanticism's impact beyond the nineteenth century. It argues that his films re-envision and help us better understand a critical stream in Romanticism, and places the films in conversation with other filmmakers, authors, and philosophers in order to illuminate that critical stream. The result is a lively reconnection with Romantic themes and convictions that have been partly forgotten in the midst of Germany's postwar rejection of much of Romantic thought, yet are still operative in German culture today. The film analyses will interest scholars of film, German Studies, and Romanticism as well as a broader public interested in Herzog's films and contemporary German cultural debates. The book will also appeal to thoseinterested in the ongoing renegotiation - by Western and other cultures - of relationships between reason and passion, civilization and wild nature, knowledge and belief.

    Laurie Ruth Johnson is Associate Professor of German, Comparative and World Literature, and Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Films of Konrad Wolf
  • Archive of the Revolution
  • Larson Powell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    06 October 2020
    Print publication:
    16 March 2020
  • This is the first book in any language on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925–1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context.

Moving Images on the Margins
  • Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany
  • Seth Howes
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 March 2020
    Print publication:
    15 October 2019
  • 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.

Austria Made in Hollywood
  • Jacqueline Vansant
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    04 April 2019
    Print publication:
    22 February 2019
  • 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.

Montage as Perceptual Experience
  • Berlin Alexanderplatz from Döblin to Fassbinder
  • Mario Slugan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 August 2018
    Print publication:
    31 October 2017
  • Alfred Döblin'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 Döblin'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 juxtaposition of meaning 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 of both 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 Postdoctoral Associate Fellow at the Department of Film and Television Studies and the Department of German Studies, University of Warwick.

Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin
  • From Nazism to the Cold War
  • Mila Ganeva
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    28 July 2018
    Print publication:
    01 August 2018
  • 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 as The Murderers Are among Us, Street Acquaintances, and Destinies of Women as well as neglected works such as The Heaven 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 and between film and fashion. With its focus on costumes within the context of the films' production, distribution, and reception, this book opens 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.

Gender and Sexuality in East German Film
  • Intimacy and Alienation
  • Edited by Kyle Frackman, Faye Stewart
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    16 May 2018
    Print publication:
    31 May 2018
  • The cinema of the German Democratic Republic, that is, the cinema of its state-run studio DEFA, portrayed gender and sexuality in complex and contradictory ways. In doing so, it reflected the contradictions in GDR society in respect to such questions. This is the first scholarly collection in English or German to fully address the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of DEFA across genres (from shorts and feature films to educational videos, television productions, and documentaries) and in light of social, political, and cultural contexts. It is also unique in its investigation of previously unresearched subjects, including films and directors that have received little scholarly attention and nonconformist representations of gender and sexual embodiments, identifications, and practices. The volume presents the work of leading scholars on the GDR and allows students and scholars to examine East German film with respect to the acceptance, rejection, or nuanced negotiation of ideas of proper male and female behavior espoused by the country's brand of socialism. Contributors: Muriel Cormican, Jennifer L. Creech, Heidi Denzel de Tirado, Kyle Frackman, Sebastian Heiduschke, Sonja E. Klocke, John Lessard, Larson Powell, Victoria I. Rizo Lenshyn, Reinhild Steingröver, Faye Stewart, Evan Torner, Henning Wrage. Kyle Frackman is Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Faye Stewart is Associate Professor of German at Georgia State University.

Women in Weimar Fashion
  • Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918–1933
  • Mila Ganeva
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 July 2008
  • In the Weimar Republic, fashion was not only manipulated by the various mass media - film, magazines, advertising, photography, and popular literature - but also emerged as a powerful medium for women's self-expression. Female writers and journalists, including Helen Grund, Irmgard Keun, Vicki Baum, Elsa Maria Bug, and numerous others engaged in a challenging, self-reflective commentary on current styles. By regularly publishing on these topics in the illustrated press and popular literature, they transformed traditional genres and carved out significant public space for themselves. This book re-evaluates paradigmatic concepts of German modernism such as the 'flâneur,' the 'Feuilleton,' and 'Neue Sachlichkeit' in the light of primary material unearthed in archival research: fashion vignettes, essays, short stories, travelogues, novels, films, documentaries, newsreels, and photographs. Unlike other studies of Weimar culture that have ignored the crucial role of fashion, the book proposes a new genealogy of women's modernity by focusing on the discourse and practice of Weimar fashion, in which the women were transformed from objects of male voyeurism into subjects with complex, ambivalent, and constantly shifting experiences of metropolitan modernity. Mila Ganeva is Associate Professor of German at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema
  • Rediscovering Germany's Filmic Legacy
  • With contributions by Ofer Ashkenazi , John F. Fetzer , Veronika Fuechtner , Joseph Garncarz , Anjeana Hans , Richard W. McCormick , Nancy P. Nenno , Elizabeth Otto , Jill Suzanne Smith , Philipp Stiasny , Chris Wahl , Cynthia Walk and Joel Westerdale
  • Edited by Christian Rogowski
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    29 April 2017
    Print publication:
    15 June 2010
  • 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 fora 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.

    Contributors: Ofer Ashkenazi, Jaimey Fisher, Veronika Fuechtner, Joseph Garncarz, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Richard W. McCormick, Nancy P.Nenno, Elizabeth Otto, Mihaela Petrescu, Theodore F. Rippey, Christian Rogowski, Jill Smith, Philipp Stiasny, Chris Wahl, Cynthia Walk, Valerie Weinstein, Joel Westerdale.

    Christian Rogowski is Professor of German at Amherst College.

Last Features
  • East German Cinema's Lost Generation
  • Reinhild Steingröver
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    03 February 2014
  • Last Features is the story of forgotten films made during the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and German unification. With leftover GDR funds and under chaotic conditions, a group of mainly younger East German filmmakers produced approximately thirty stylistically diverse films that -- until recently -- few people ever saw. Lost in the political upheaval of the Wende, most of the films disappeared until the 2009 Wendeflicks festival in Los Angeles [co-curated by the author in conjunction with the DEFA film library] brought them back for an international audience. Now available on DVD, the films provide unique insights into the late GDR and German unification from the perspective of East German filmmakers, many of whom had few opportunities before or after the wall to realize their scripts. Topics include the generational struggle in the DEFA studio, the formation of the independent production group : "DaDaeR", East German youth culture in the 1970s, women directors at DEFA, the relationship between the artist and the state, and the protests of 1989. The book focuses in particular on the story of the creation of "DaDaeR" in 1989, which fulfilled a longstanding request by the last generation of DEFA directors for freer production conditions in the studio. Each of the six chapters focuses on specific films from the last year of DEFA and contextualizes the analysis of these last features" with a comprehensive discussion of the directors' overall oeuvre, of the historical changes in the studio and the country, and of the lasting importance of these films today. Last Features is the result of a decade of archival research and interviews with the directors, writers, and editors of the films in question. Reinhild Steingröver is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School
  • Marco Abel
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    01 November 2013
  • The group of contemporary German directors collectively known as the "Berlin School" constitutes the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the New German Cinema of the 1970s, not least because its films mark the emergence of a new film language in German cinema. The filmmakers belonging to the Berlin School, including Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maren Ade, and Valeska Grisebach, are reminiscent in their auteurism of the directors of the New German 'Autorenkino' and of French 'cinéma des auteurs' of the 1960s. This volume is the first book-length study in any language of the Berlin School. Its central thesis -- that the movement should be regarded as a "counter-cinema" -- is built around the unusual style of realism employed in the films of this movement, a realism that presents audiences with images of a Germany that does not yet exist. Abel concludes that it is precisely how these films' images and sounds work that renders them political. They are political not because they are message-driven films but because they are made politically, thus performing a "redistribution of the sensible" -- a direct artistic intervention in the way politics partitions ways of doing and making, saying and seeing. Marco Abel is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Generic Histories of German Cinema
  • Genre and its Deviations
  • Edited by Jaimey Fisher
  • With contributions by Marco Abel , Nora M. Alter , Antje Ascheid , Hester Baer , Steve Choe , Paul Cooke , Gerd Gemünden , Sascha Gerhards , Lutz Koepnick , Eric Rentschler and Kris Vander Lugt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    01 October 2013
  • Over 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 and society. 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 scholarly interest 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 - a form 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 Gemünden, 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.