Weimar Cinema Research Articles

Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary (review)

Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historical Imaginary (review)

Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich

Introduction - modernity writ German - state of the art as art of the Nazi state reflections of the Weimar cinema in the Nazi propaganda films SA-Mann Brand, Hitlerjunge Quex and Hans Westmar Luis Trenker - a rebel in the Third Reich? the director and the diva - th efilm musicals of Detlef Sierck and Zarah Leander fear of flying - education to manhood in Nazi film comedies far away, so close - Carl Froelich's Heimat a cinematic constructioon of Nazi anti-Semitism - the documentary Der ewige Jude escaping home - Leni Riefenstahl's visual poetry in Tiefland literary Nazis? - adapting 19th-century German novellas for the screen the spectacle of war in Die grosse Liebe turning inward - an analysis of Helmut Kautner's Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska, Romanze in Moll, Unter den Brucken working for the man, whoever that might be - the vocation of Wolfgang Liebeneiner.

Weimar cinema and after: Germany's historical imaginary

1. Haunted Screens, Caligari's Cabinets and a German Studio-System 2. In the Realm of the Look: Lang, Lubitsch, Murnau and Pabst 3. Transparent Duplicities: Comedy, Opera, Operetta 4. After Weimar: Avantgarde and Modernisation, Emigration and Film Noir

Rape and War, Gender and Nation, Victims and Victimizers: Helke Sander's BeFreier und Befreite

Richard W. McCormick teaches German film and culture at the University of Minnesota. He has published on German feminist cinema, postwar German cinema, and Weimar cinema and is the author of Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (1991) and Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions (coedited with Sandra Frieden, Vibeke R. Petersen, and Laurie Melissa Vogelsang, 1993).

Caught in the Act: Visualizing a Crime-Free Capital

A survey of Weimar cinema calls to mind several films that demonstrate a concern with weakened leadership and severed communal ties through the representation of public efforts to apprehend the deviant individual in the shadows of the city. This essay looks behind the scenes at the conditions under which the creators of these films crafted their tales of urban crime and detection, addressing a significant interplay between aesthetic production and actual criminal justice initiatives. Alongside and along with police education and legitimation projects, Weimar visual cultures criminal and legal narratives took part in a larger exploration of the status of the modern urban subject as participant in and product of culture and the law.

Dangerous dames: women and representation in the Weimar street film and film noir

Dangerous dames: women and representation in the Weimar street film and film noir

THE ATTACK ON "JEWISH HOLLYWOOD": A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF MODERN AMERICAN ANTI-SEMITISM

As United States became a magnet for mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, imprecation was born: New York is not America. A continent away, with advent of movies a few decades later, coda was added: Neither is Hollywood. In tandem with entry of emancipated Jews into mainstream of modernity, traditional antiSemitic images ofJews as economic parasites and moral polluters were complemented by a new image of Jews as corrupters of popular culture. First, in nineteenth century, new popular journalism was anointed as what Sander Gilman calls the secret language of Jews. Then, in twentieth century, cinema supplanted newspaper in popular imagination as magical source of Jews' insidious power over culture. The Nazi purge of Weimar film industry, deemed corrupted by Jewish-Syrian influence; Stalin's persecution of Yiddish filmmakers, pilloried for the bourgeois cosmopoli-

FROM IRON AGE MYTH TO IDEALIZED NATIONAL LANDSCAPE: HUMAN-NATURE RELATIONSHIPS AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM IN FRITZ LANG'S DIE NIBELUNGEN

AbstractFrom the Iron Age to the modern period, authors have repeatedly restructured the ecomythology of the Siegfried saga. Fritz Lang's Weimar film production (released in 1924-1925) of Die Nibelungen presents an ascendant humanist Siegfried, who dominates over nature in his dragon slaying. Lang removes the strong family relationships typical of earlier versions, and portrays Siegfried as a son of the German landscape rather than of an aristocratic, human lineage. Unlike The Saga of the Volsungs, which casts the dwarf Andvari as a shape-shifting fish, and thereby indistinguishable from productive, living nature, both Richard Wagner and Lang create dwarves who live in subterranean or inorganic habitats, and use environmental ideals to convey anti-Semitic images, including negative contrasts between Jewish stereotypes and healthy or organic nature. Lang's Siegfried is a technocrat, who, rather than receiving a magic sword from mystic sources, begins the film by fashioning his own. Admired by Adolf Hitler, Die Nibelungen idealizes the material and the organic in a way that allows the modern ''hero'' to romanticize himself and, without the aid of deities, to become superhuman.

Woman and Typewriter: Gender, Technology, and Work in Late Weimar Film

Among the new technologies of the industrial age, the typewriter both provided women with access to the labor force and became identified as a gender-specific machine used almost exclusively by women. This essay examines the iconography of the female office worker at the typewriter in two Weimar entertainment films, Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (Poor as a Church Mouse, 1930) and Die Privatsekretärin (The Private Secretary, 1931), in order to assess how this woman is negotiated as a spectacle and role model for female spectators. Technology, the ethos of work, and consumer culture are the central terms of this negotiation. Although these films highlight the professional success of women at work, they also reinforce traditional gender expectations, such as sex segregation and the return of young females to the domestic sphere of marriage and family life. By contextualizing these films within the Depression years, this paper argues that their conventional conclusions should also be understood as expressing male anxieties over the ongoing economic crisis and competition from working women. (AF)

Beyond Caligari: the films of Robert Wiene

While the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became an international film classic, its director, Robert Wiene, was disparaged and even forgotten. Wiene's oeuvre, however, exhibits a surprising versatility and quality, featuring Raskolnikov, an expressionist adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, INRI, a monumental Bible epic, Orlac's Hands, a psychological thriller, and Der Rosenkavalier, an ambitious opera film. His last film, Ultimatum(1938), is a vehement warning of approaching war, which remains relevant today. With painstaking research of the major European film archives, the author's detailed portrait reveals a career far more differentiated than hitherto acknowledged. Caligar/i - though rated the second most important film in German film history in a recent critic's and scholar's poll - was a landmark rather than a culmination in a career that successfully oscillated between artistic and commercial interests. As the field of film studies rediscovers film history and the value of historical context for the analysis of individual films, monographs on filmmakers are increasingly valuable to scholars and students of both film history and cultural studies. Through the provocative and prolific career of Robert Wiene, a wider, more dynamic view of fantasy production in the Weimar Republic is revealed, enabling the reader to better appreciate the complex shapes of Weimar cinema, its inimitable blend of modernism and mass culture, of avant-garde enterprie, and generic production.

Negotiating Modernity in Weimar Film Theory

Sabine Hake _The Cinema\'s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany 1907-1933_ Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993 ISBN 0-8032-2365-X (hbk.) xvii + 353 pp.

Auden and Isherwood: the Berlin years

List of Plates Acknowledgements Preface to the Paperback Edition Prologue: Looking for Berlin Two Young Englishmen Berlin: Places Berlin: Faces The Other Camera: Aspects of Weimar Cinema Writing about Berlin Epilogue: Goodbye to Berlin Bibliography Index

Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany

The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture. The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange. In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

Looking for the German Revolution in Weimar Films

“O Gott, o Gott—ist das Revolution?” a wide-eyed Frau Dreissiger asks her husband, her pearl necklaces rising and falling with her heaving bosom, as chants of the angry crowd of weavers penetrate the sequestered drawing room. In this scene in Friedrich Zelnik's 1927 film Die Weber, Frau Dreissiger's question is far less naive than the impatient look of her nervous husband suggests. It resounds, rather, with the fears and expectations of Germans of the 1920s, convinced they were living in an era of revolutionary transformation, yet besieged by a cacophony of arguments as to whether or how an actual German revolution would come about. Historians of the Weimar era have posed comparable questions about which upheavals and ideas constituted a German revolution. Spurred by debates over whether an authoritarian GermanSonderwegbypassed a bourgeois revolution, invigorated since unification by new perspectives on German democratization, and enriched by new approaches, they have considered an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena. The resulting studies have revealed myriad interactions between political ideologies, social groupings, economic practices, and external pressures.

CHAOS AND CONTROL IN THE WEIMAR FILM

German Life and LettersVolume 48, Issue 3 p. 311-323 CHAOS AND CONTROL IN THE WEIMAR FILM John Sandford, John SandfordSearch for more papers by this author John Sandford, John SandfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: July 1995 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0483.1995.tb01633.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume48, Issue3July 1995Pages 311-323 RelatedInformation

Private Anxieties/Public Projections: "New Objectivity," Male Subjectivity, and Weimar Cinema

The so-called "New Objectivity" in the arts and culture of the Weimar Republic was characterized by an erosion of the boundary between the "high culture" associated with the bourgeois public sphere and new forms of mass culture directed at other classes in the emerging modern consumer society. Related to this erosion of boundaries were anxieties about the destabilization of traditional models of (national, ethnic, class, gender, sexual) identity. Change seemed especially threatening in its effect on traditional ("natural") gender roles, as can readily be demonstrated in G.W. Pabst's film Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926). Similar anxieties about gender are also crucial to subsequent developments in German culture and society. (RWM)

Framing the past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television

This collection of essays was selected from those presented in October 1988 at a conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Concepts of History in German Cinema. The contributors include notable historians, film scholars, and German studies specialists who explore the complex network of social, political, and religious institutions that have influenced the historiography of German cinema and television. Before the turn of the century, Germans began to employ the medium of film to represent the past when they attempted to document their Prussian heritage. Since then, German cinema and television have promoted history as a component of personal, cultural, and national identity by consistently providing prominent treatment of historical subjects. Although it is relatively easy to document changes in the selection and handling of these subjects, it is more difficult to determine precisely which factors have motivated those changes. In attempting to define these factors, the link between German cinema, television, and history has developed around three interrelated issues: (1) the reception of Weimar cinema, which for most film scholars continues to be mediated to one extent or another by Siegfried Kracauer's work; (2) the inscribing of fascism in cinema and television; and (3) the nature of, and potential for, alternatives to mainstream cinema and television.

From "Caligari" to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar Film

Previous articleNext article No AccessFrom "Caligari" to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar FilmRichard W. McCormickRichard W. McCormick Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 18, Number 3Spring, 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494823 Views: 89Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Andreas Blödorn Der blaue Engel, (Jul 2022): 529–538.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05808-9_85Devon Kurtz One of the Boys: The Smug, Patriarchal Undertones of Anders als die Andern (1919), Film Matters 12, no.22 (Sep 2021): 50–58.https://doi.org/10.1386/fm_00154_7Catriona MacLeod Invisible Sculpture, Latent Violence, and Monumental Parody in Mädchen in Uniform, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 55, no.22 (Jan 2019): 128–143.https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.55.2.3William M. Reddy Historical Research on the Self and Emotions, Emotion Review 1, no.44 (Sep 2009): 302–315.https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909338306

The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema

GW Pabst entered film history as a luminary of Weimar cinema, an astute observer of social struggle and psychic process, the espouser of a progressive and engaged film art. He gained international renown as the director of The Joyless Street, Pandora's Box, Westfront 1918 and Kamaradschaft. After 1933, the once-revered auteur would become a voice incessantly modified and modulated by socio-political forces more sovereign than his best intentions, experiencing exile, emigration, a sojourn in Hollywood, a fateful return to Germany and an unsuccessful post-war attempt to regain a once considerable reputation. This collection of essays presents the first truly comprehensive image of a problematic film-maker whose life and oeuvre reflect both the turbulent character of recent German history as well as the fate of artistic producers in the transcultural machinery of the modern world.

Joyless streets: women and melodramatic representation in Weimar, Germany

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.