Post-Wall German Cinema and National History


Book Description

German history films that focus on utopianism and political dissent and their effect on German identity since 1989. Since unification, a radical shift has taken place in Germans' view of their country's immediate past, with 1989 replacing 1945 as the primary caesura. The cold-war division, the failed socialist state, the '68 student movement, and the Red Army Faction -- historical flashpoints involving political oppression, civil disobedience, and the longing for utopian solutions to social injustice -- have come to be seen as decisive moments in a collective history that unites East and West even as it divides them. Telling stories about a shared past, establishing foundational myths, and finding commonalities of experience are pivotal steps in the construction of national identity. Such nation-building is always incomplete, but the cinema provides an important forum in which notions of German history and national identity can be consumed, negotiated, and contested. This book looks at history films made since 1989, exploring how utopianism and political dissent have shaped German identity. It studies the genre - including popular successes, critical successes, and perceived failures - as a set of texts and a discursive network, gauging which conventions and storylines are resilient. At issue is the overriding question: to what extent do these films contribute to a narrative that legitimizes the German nation-state? Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien is Professor of Germanand The Courtney and Steven Ross Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College.




Re-Imagining DEFA


Book Description

By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”




A New History of German Cinema


Book Description

A dynamic, event-centered exploration of the hundred-year history of German-language film. This dynamic, event-centered anthology offers a new understanding of the hundred-year history of German-language film, from the earliest days of the Kintopp to contemporary productions like The Lives of Others. Eachof the more than eighty essays takes a key date as its starting point and explores its significance for German film history, pursuing its relationship with its social, political, and aesthetic moment. While the essays offer ampletemporal and topical spread, this book emphasizes the juxtaposition of famous and unknown stories, granting attention to a wide range of cinematic events. Brief section introductions provide a larger historical and film-historicalframework that illuminates the essays within it, offering both scholars and the general reader a setting for the individual texts and figures under investigation. Cross-references to other essays in the book are included at the close of each entry, encouraging readers not only to pursue familiar trajectories in the development of German film, but also to trace particular figures and motifs across genres and historical periods. Together, the contributionsoffer a new view of the multiple, intersecting narratives that make up German-language cinema. The constellation that is thus established challenges unidirectional narratives of German film history and charts new ways of thinkingabout film historiography more broadly. Jennifer Kapczynski is Associate Professor of German at Washington University, St. Louis, and Michael Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.




A Companion to German Cinema


Book Description

A Companion to German Cinema A Companion to German Cinema regards the shifting terrain of German filmmaking and film studies against their larger social contexts with twenty-two newly commissioned essays by well-established and younger scholars in the field. While several of these focus on classic topics such as Weimar cinema, Fifties cinema, New German Cinema and its legacy, and Holocaust film, the collection is distinguished by its focus on new developments and the innovative light they may shed on earlier practices. A Companion to German Cinema includes essays on Berlin Film, Neue Heimat Film, New Comedy, post-Wall documentaries, the post-Wende RAF genre, and Rabenmutter imagery, as well as on the persistently overlooked and under-theorized Indianerfilme, post-AIDS documentaries, sexploitation films, and new multicultural and transnational films produced in Germany under the auspices of the European Union. Organized into three “movements” representing the significance of these developments for their aesthetic theorization, A Companion to German Cinema challenges its readers to address critical gaps in the field with the aim of opening it further onto new terrains of intellectual engagement.




Historical Dictionary of German Cinema


Book Description

The History of German film is diverse and multi-faceted. This volume can only suggest the richness of a film tradition that includes five distinct German governments [Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), s well as a reunited Germany], two national industries (Germany and Austria), and a myriad of styles and production methods. Paradoxically, the political disruptions that have produced these distinct film eras, as well as and the natural inclination of artists to rebel and create new styles, allow for construction of a narrative of German film. Disjuncture generates distinct points of separation, and yet also highlights continuities between the ruptures. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of German Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on directors, actors, films, cinematographers, composers, producers, and major historical events that greatly affected the direction and development of German cinema. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about German cinema.




Virtual Walls?


Book Description

A reassessment of the journey Germans in East and West have taken during the past two and a half decades: even today, an open-ended, unfinished journey.




Sensitive Subjects


Book Description

Both politically and aesthetically, the contemporary German and Austrian film landscape is a far cry from the early days of the medium, when critics like Siegfried Kracauer produced foundational works of film theory amid the tumult of the early twentieth century. Yet, as Leila Mukhida demonstrates in this innovative study, the writings of figures like Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in fact remain an undervalued tool for understanding political cinema today. Through illuminating explorations of Michael Haneke, Valeska Grisebach, Andreas Dresen, and other filmmakers of the post-reunification era, Mukhida develops an analysis centered on film aesthetics and experience, showing how medium-specific devices like lighting, sound, and mise-en-scène can help to cultivate political sensitivity in spectators.




Walled Life


Book Description

Going beyond a discussion of political architecture, Walled Life investigates the mediation of material and imagined border walls through cinema and art practices. The book reads political walls as more than physical obstruction, instead treating the wall as an affective screen, capable of negotiating the messy feelings, personal conflicts, and haunting legacies that make up “walled life” as an evolving signpost in the current global border regime. By exploring the wall as an emotional and visceral presence, the book shows that if we read political walls as forms of affective media, they become legible not simply as shields, impositions, or monuments, but as projective surfaces that negotiate the interaction of psychological barriers with political structures through cinema, art, and, of course, the wall itself. Drawing on the Berlin Wall, the West Bank Separation barrier, and the U.S.-Mexico border, Walled Life discovers each wall through the films and artworks it has inspired, examining a wide array of graffiti, murals, art installations, movies, photography, and paintings. Remediating the silent barriers, we erect between, and often within ourselves, these interventions tell us about the political fantasies and traumatic histories that undergird the politics of walls as they rework the affective settings of political boundaries.




Hollywood Behind the Wall


Book Description

This book is a representative history of East German film culture from 1946 to the present, examining both DEFA's celebrated classics and the most acclaimed post-unification feature films by East German directors. As Berghahn shows, East German cinema occupies an ambivalent position between German national cinema on the one hand and East European and Soviet cinema on the other. It includes a wide-ranging exploration of post-unification cinema from East Germany, including cult films such as Sun Alley and Goodbye, Lenin! and provides contextualized readings of twenty significant films, referencing one hundred and ninety East German films in total, along with numerous West German and East European classics.




The Collapse of the Conventional


Book Description

"Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape."---Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds --Book Jacket.