Reference Sources for German Cinema
Directory of World Cinema - Germany
From bleak Expressionist works to the edgy political cinema of the New German Cinema and the feel-good Heimat films of the postwar era, Directory of World Cinema: Germany aims to offer a wider
ISBN: 9781283754682Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Books on the City in Film
The Cinematic City by
The Cinematic City offers an innovative and thought-provoking insight into cityscape and screenscape and their inter-connection. Illustrated throughout with movie stills, a diverse selection of films (from 'Bladerunner' to 'Little Caesar'), genres, cities and historical periods are examined by leading names in the field. The key dimensions of film and urban theory are introduced before detailed analysis of the various cinematic forms which relate most significantly to the city. From early cinema and documentary film, to film noir, 'New Wave' and 'postmodern cinema', the contributors provide a wealth of empirical material and illustration whilst drawing on the theoretical insights of contemporary feminism, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan, and others. The Cinematic City shows how the city has been undeniably shaped by the cinematic form, and how cinema owes much of its nature to the historical development of urban space. Engaging with current theoretical debates, this is a book that is set to change the way in which we think about both the nature of the city and film. Contributors: Giuliana Bruno, Iain Chambers, Marcus Doel, David Clarke, Anthony Easthope, Elisabeth Mahoney, Will Straw, Stephen Ward, John Gold, James Hay, Rob Lapsley, Frank Krutnik
ISBN: 9780203973363Publication Date: 2005-08-19
Cities and Cinema by
Films about cities abound. They provide fantasies for those who recognize their city and those for whom the city is a faraway dream or nightmare. How does cinema rework city planners' hopes and city dwellers' fears of modern urbanism? Can an analysis of city films answer some of the questions posed in urban studies? What kinds of vision for the future and images of the past do city films offer? What are the changes that city films have undergone? Cities and Cinema puts urban theory and cinema studies in dialogue. The book's first section analyzes three important genres of city films that follow in historical sequence, each associated with a particular city, moving from the city film of the Weimar Republic to the film noir associated with Los Angeles and the image of Paris in the cinema of the French New Wave. The second section discusses socio-historical themes of urban studies, beginning with the relationship of film industries and individual cities, continuing with the portrayal of war torn and divided cities, and ending with the cinematic expression of utopia and dystopia in urban science fiction. The last section negotiates the question of identity and place in a global world, moving from the portrayal of ghettos and barrios to the city as a setting for gay and lesbian desire, to end with the representation of the global city in transnational cinematic practices. The book suggests that modernity links urbanism and cinema. It accounts for the significant changes that city film has undergone through processes of globalization, during which the city has developed from an icon in national cinema to a privileged site for transnational cinematic practices. It is a key text for students and researchers of film studies, urban studies and cultural studies.
ISBN: 9780203015605Publication Date: 2008-03-19
Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography by
Berlin has been the focal scene of some of the most dramatic and formative events of the twentieth century. Through periods of decadence, fascism, war, partition and reunification, it has seen both extraordinary constraint and creativity. Andrew Webber explores the cultural topography of Berlin and considers the city as key capital of the twentieth century, reflecting its history, its traumas and its achievements. He shows how its spaces and buildings participate in the drama by analysing how they are represented in literature and film. Taking his methodology from Walter Benjamin, Webber presents bold readings of works synonymous with Berlin, with authors from Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka to Christa Wolf, and directors from Walther Ruttmann to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. Across this range of material, twentieth-century Berlin is seen to be as ambivalent as it is fascinating.
ISBN: 9780521895729Publication Date: 2008-09-25
Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin by
As sites of continual change and transformation, cities are fundamentally forgetful places. Yet at the same time, urban areas are also homes to museums and archives that collect and exhibit the past-a key cultural, political, and economic activity. This book looks at that paradox through the example of Berlin to see how the city has responded to challenges to memory created by rapid changes in politics, economics, society, and the built environment, ultimately arguing that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in the contemporary city.
ISBN: 9089648534Publication Date: 2016-06-13
Berlin Replayed: Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era by
Scarred by the Second World War, divided during the Cold War, and turned into a massive construction site in the early postwall years, Berlin has dramatically reinvented itself in the new millennium. Film has served a neglected but important function in this transformation. In Berlin Replayed, Brigitta B. Wagner shows how old and new films set in Berlin created a collective urban nostalgia for the city's best, most inclusive, and most conciliatory pasts in the face of its renewed purpose as the all-German capital. Exploring films such as Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, and Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin!, the book establishes that these films don't merely feature the city but actively construct how viewers come to know different Berlins of the past and present. To illustrate how film has repeatedly remade the image of the city, Berlin Replayed focuses on four key periods: the golden 1920s, when the city was a major filmmaking center; the prewall 1950s, when Berlin had two ideologically opposed film industries; the politically transformative late 1980s and early 1990s; and the hyped start of the twenty-first century. By showing how films have helped revive memories of the "good" Berlin and, by extension, the "good" Germany, Berlin Replayed reveals the underappreciated but powerful role film has played in the process of unifying Germany's historical experience and bridging its physical and political divisions.
ISBN: 9781452945248Publication Date: 2015-12-17
Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real by
The city and the cinema have become inextricably intertwined over the last century, with the identities of places becoming bound up in their cinematic portrayals. We have seen the landmarks of New York, London and Tokyo turn into iconic symbols of wealth, power, status, style and culture, and for the majority of people the images and sounds of movies form the only experience they will ever have of distant cities. Cinematic Urbanism presents an urban history of modernity and postmodernity through the lens of cinema. AlSayyad traces the dissolution of the boundary between real and reel through time and space via a series of films that represent different modernities. They include: Cinema Paradiso It's a Wonderful Life Metropolis Brazil Blade Runner Annie Hall Taxi Driver Do the Right Thing My Beautiful Laundrette The Truman Show. Alsayyad argues that our understanding of the city cannot be viewed independently of cinematic experience. Films do not only capture the depiction of a society; they influence the way we construct images of the world and, as a result, how we operate within it. We are beginning to blur the distinction between what is real in the everyday, and how we imagine the everyday. Cinematic Urbanism explores this dynamic, bringing together insights from urban and film studies to illuminate current architectural debate. .
ISBN: 0415700485Publication Date: 2006-07-26
The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture. by
Anke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur drifted through city streets, inspired and repelled by the surrounding scenes of splendor and squalor. Gleber examines this often elusive figure in the particular contexts of Weimar Germany and the intellectual sphere of Walter Benjamin, with whom the concept of flanerie is often associated. She sketches the European influences that produced the German flaneur and establishes the figure as a pervasive presence in Weimar culture, as well as a profound influence on modern perceptions of public space. The book begins by exploring the theory of literary flanerie and the technological changes--street lighting, public transportation, and the emergence of film--that gave a new status to the activities of seeing and walking in the modern city. Gleber then assesses the place of flanerie in works by Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and other representatives of Weimar literature, arts, and theory. She draws particular attention to the works of Franz Hessel, a Berlin flaneur who argued that flanerie is a "reading" of the city that perceives passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. Gleber also examines connections between flanerie and Weimar film, and discusses female flanerie as a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm. The book is a deeply original and searching reassessment of the complex intersections among modernity, vision, and public space.
ISBN: 0691012229Publication Date: 1998-12-27
Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. by
Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular illustrated magazines, she shows how Weimar Germany had a commercially viable female audience, fascinated with looking at images that called traditional representations of gender into question. Interdisciplinary in her approach, Petro interweaves archival research with recent theoretical debates to offer not merely another view of the Weimar cinema but also another way of looking at Weimar film culture. Women's modernity, she suggests, was not the same as men's modernism, and the image of the city street in film and photojournalism reveals how women responded differently from men to the political, economic, and psychic upheaval of their times.
ISBN: 0691055521Publication Date: 1989-04-21
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture by
Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.
ISBN: 0520204654Publication Date: 1997-02-12
Screening the City by
In this collection of essays, films as diverse as Crash and Annie Hall are examined in terms of the relationship between cinema and the changing urban experience in Europe and the United States since the early twentieth century.
ISBN: 1859846904Publication Date: 2003-03-17
Selected Online Resources for German Cinema
- Deutschsprachige Videos, Radio, Podcasts und Fernsehen im WebOnline videos, radios, podcasts, and TV in German from the University of Michigan
- Kinofenster.deThe online portal aims to support and promote the school and extracurricular film work of educators and parents, but also of cinema operators and film distributors.
- Filmlink.de: Online-Informationsressourcen der Film- und FernsehwissenschaftAnnotated listings of links to online catalogs, databases, glossaries, film studies websites, and general information on film and television (from German Film Links @ ACRL's ESS Site)
Books on German Cinema
A Companion to German Cinema by
A Companion to German Cinema offers a wide-ranging collection of essays demonstrating state-of-play scholarship on German cinema at a time during which cinema studies as well as German cinema have once again begun to flourish. Offers a careful combination of theoretical rigor, conceptual accessibility, and intellectual inclusiveness Includes essays by well-known writers as well as up-and-coming scholars who take innovative critical approaches to both time-honored and emergent areas in the field, especially regarding race, gender, sexuality, and (trans)nationalism Distinctive for its contemporary relevance, reorienting the field to the global twenty-first century Fills critical gaps in the extant scholarship, opening the field onto new terrains of critical engagement
ISBN: 9781405194365Publication Date: 2012-02-13
The German Cinema Book by
This comprehensively revised, updated and significantly extended edition introduces German film history from its beginnings to the present day, covering key periods and movements including early and silent cinema, Weimar cinema, Nazi cinema, the New German Cinema, the Berlin School, the cinema of migration, and moving images in the digital era. Contributions by leading international scholars are grouped into sections that focus on genre; stars; authorship; film production, distribution and exhibition; theory and politics, including women's and queer cinema; and transnational connections. Spotlight articles within each section offer key case studies, including of individual films that illuminate larger histories (Heimat, Downfall, The Lives of Others, The Edge of Heaven and many more); stars from Ossi Oswalda and Hans Albers, to Hanna Schygulla and Nina Hoss; directors including F.W. Murnau, Walter Ruttmann, Wim Wenders and Helke Sander; and film theorists including Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balázs. The volume provides a methodological template for the study of a national cinema in a transnational horizon.
ISBN: 9781844575312Publication Date: 2020-02-20
The BFI Companion to German Cinema by
The BFI Companion to German Cinema is a concise and authoritative source of reference. Over two hundred entries on film actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, critics, film industry, film movements and festivals covers the entire spectrum of German-speaking cinema from the 1890s to the popular comedies of the 1990s. In-depth articles consider the artistic peaks of Weimer cinema, the émigré directors, film politics, and the star system of Nazi cinema, women and film, the New German Cinema and the revival of genre cinema since.
Entries evaluate such notables as Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, Erich Pommer, Conrad Veidt, Wim Wenders and R.W. Fassbinder, as well as popular genres (the "Heimat" film, literary adaptations, musicals) alongside the major studios (UFA and DEFA) and international personalities such as Klaus Kinski, Wolfgang Petersen, and Michael Ballhaus.
Leading international scholar Thomas Elsaesser also contributes an introductory essay on developments in post-unification German cinema, placing it in the context of its recent history and of general relations between Hollywood and European cinema.
ISBN: 0851707505Publication Date: 2000-05-01
From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film by
A landmark, now classic, study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic, From Caligari to Hitler was first published by Princeton University Press in 1947. Siegfried Kracauer--a prominent German film critic and member of Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's intellectual circle--broke new ground in exploring the connections between film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer's pioneering book, which examines German history from 1921 to 1933 in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel, has never gone out of print. Now, over half a century after its first appearance, this beautifully designed and entirely new edition reintroduces Kracauer for the twenty-first century. Film scholar Leonardo Quaresima places Kracauer in context in a critical introduction, and updates the book further with a new bibliography, index, and list of inaccuracies that crept into the first edition. This volume is a must-have for the film historian, film theorist, or cinema enthusiast. In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer made a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as a popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. In films of the 1920s, he traced recurring visual and narrative tropes that expressed, he argued, a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule. The book has become an undisputed classic of film historiography, laying the foundations for the serious study of film. Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Benjamin's suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote From Caligari to Hitler while working as a "special assistant" to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, From Caligari to Hitler remains Kracauer's best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997.
ISBN: 0691115184Publication Date: 2004-04-18
German National Cinema by
German National Cinema is the first comprehensive history of German film from its origins to the present. In this new edition, Sabine Hake discusses film-making in economic, political, social, and cultural terms, and considers the contribution of Germany's most popular films to changing definitions of genre, authorship, and film form. The book traces the central role of cinema in the nation's turbulent history from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Berlin Republic, with special attention paid to the competing demands of film as art, entertainment, and propaganda. Hake also explores the centrality of genre films and the star system to the development of a filmic imaginary. This fully revised and updated new edition will be required reading for everyone interested in German film and the history of modern Germany.
ISBN: 9781136020469Publication Date: 2013-01-11
Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany by
https://utk.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01UTN_KNOXVILLE/bcmt7h/alma998723630102311
ISBN: 0801423449Publication Date: 1990-03-27
Gender and German Cinema - Volume I by
Volume I - Gender and Representation in New German CinemaVolume II - German Film History / German History on FilmInternational film has received some of its most original impulses from German film makers however the works by women directors in German speaking countries have been largely ignored in spite of the important social, political and historical issues they have raised. This is the first work to consider the broad spectrum of German cinema through the category of gender. These volumes will be standard handbooks in film studies for many years to come.
ISBN: 0854969470Publication Date: 1993-09-07
The Queer German Cinema by
Since the Weimar era, German cinema has played a leading role in the innovation of gay and lesbian cinema, with the tantalizing sexual illegibility and gender instability of German films of the 1920s anticipating the queer sensibilities of the 1990s. From such cross-dressing Weimar comedies as Viktor und Victoria to the transgender fantasies of Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, and Hans Scheirl, this filmic tradition explores the unconventional erotic, its directors inventing a visual language that goes beyond the trivialization and sensationalism of mainstream representations of gays and lesbians. This cinema crosses the boundaries between such classifications as male and female, gay and bisexual, normal and pathological, insisting that such transgressions cannot be entirely tamed, regulated, or closeted. Previous scholarship, reading this national cinema as sociopolitical commentary, has tended to ignore what falls outside a realist, hetero-normative paradigm. In this book, the author aims to rectify this neglect by rewriting German cinematic history queerly. She reexamines the Nazi movie star Zarah Leander via her gay fandom, showing how this actress haunts the drag performance of femininity in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She argues not only for the persuasiveness of the gay underground in the New German Cinema but also for cinema's pivotal role in German gay liberation. Other topics include the queering of nationality in the films of Monika Treut and Rosa von Praunheim, the fetishistic medium of experimental filmmaking in the works of Michael Brynntrup and Matthias Müller, and the androgynous appeal of "dyke noir animation." In conclusion, The Queer German Cinema juxtaposes the voices of several German filmmakers as they reflect on their art in terms of a counter-politics.
ISBN: 0804737487Publication Date: 2000-06-01
Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany by
The Holocaust is considered a singularly atrocious event in human history, and many people have studied its causes. Yet few questions have been asked about the ways in which West Germans have "forgotten," unlearned, or reconstructed the racial beliefs at the core of the Nazi state in order to build a democratic society. This study looks at ethnic drag (Ethnomaskerade) as one particular kind of performance that reveals how postwar Germans lived, disavowed, and contested "Germanness" in its complex racial, national, and sexual dimensions. Using engaging case studies, Ethnic Drag traces the classical and travestied traditions of Jewish impersonation from the eighteenth century onward to construct a pre-history of postwar ethnic drag. It examines how, shortly after World War II, mass culture and popular practices facilitated the repression and refashioning of Nazi racial precepts. During a time when American occupation authorities insisted on remembrance and redress for the Holocaust, the Wild West emerged as a displaced theater of the racial imagination, where the roles of victim, avenger, and perpetrator of genocide were reassigned. Ethnic Drag is an accessible and sophisticated, critical and entertaining book that examines the phenomenon of cultural masquerade in order to examine racial feeling, thought, and behavior in postwar German culture. Contributing to considerations of drag in postcolonial, feminist, and queer scholarships, this book will be of interest to people in German studies, theater performance, ethnic studies, and women's/queer studies. Katrin Sieg is Associate Professor, Department of German and Center for German and European Studies, Georgetown University.
ISBN: 9780472112821Publication Date: 2002-08-20
Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture by
This fascinating exploration of a work that was the epitome of German literary modernism illuminates in chilling detail the death of the Weimar Republic's left-leaning culture of innovation and experimentation. Peter Jelavich examines Alfred D#65533;blin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a novel that questioned the autonomy and coherence of the human personality in the modern metropolis, and traces the radical discrepancies that came with its adaptation into a radio play (1930) and a film (1931). Jelavich explains these discrepancies by examining not only the varying demands of genre and technology but also the political and economic contexts of the media--in particular, the censorship practices in German radio and film. His analysis culminates in a richly textured discussion of the complex factors that led to the demise of Weimar culture, as Nazi intimidation and the economic strains of the Depression induced producers to depoliticize their works. Jelavich's book becomes a cautionary tale about how fear of outspoken right-wing politicians can curtail and eliminate the arts as a critical counterforce to politics--all in the name of entertainment.
ISBN: 0520243633Publication Date: 2006-01-09
New German Cinema: A HistoryISBN: 0333301137
Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject by
Pioneering study exploring a major filmmaker's creative vision of Germany's troubled national identity.
ISBN: 9048503507Publication Date: 2014-12-15
Finding books and other materials
UT Libraries One Search
To find books on a particular topic in One Search, try using words from the following subject headings. Once you're in a catalog record, you can click on other relevant subject heading links to display other items in that category
- Motion pictures -- Germany
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- Oxford BibliographiesThese annotated bibliographies can guide you to scholarly books on your topic. Explore German Cinema and The City in Film
Finding Articles
Databases for finding scholarly articles on the broader topic of cinema studies are listed on the Cinema Studies Research Guide.
- FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals DatabaseResources for film history, theory, and criticism from The International Federation of Film Archives. Citations and select full-text of academic and popular film journals as well as holdings information of silent-era film archives.
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