You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.
Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never bef...
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema’s emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a “techno-romantic” paradigm that seeks to harness technology – the epitome of modern materialism – as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.
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.
This book explores the role of music and sound in experimental film from the earliest work of pioneers such as Walther Ruttmann to latter-day experiments with new and digital media. Chapters examine issues relating to the avant-garde, abstraction, animation, found footage, queer film, visual music and VJing.
None
The big bang, black holes, space travel and life in other galaxies - this is the stuff of science fiction and the subject of much current speculation and research on the part of astronomers and cosmologists. This book shows how man's chronological needs helped scientific developments.