Product Description: Cultural productions in the Third Reich often served explicit propaganda functions of legitimating racism and glorifying war and militarism. Likewise, the proliferation of domestic and romance films in Nazi Germany also represented an ideological stance...read more

Product Description: Heide Schlüpmann's classic study of early German cinema was published in German as Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des Frühen deutschen Kinos in 1990. For the first time in English, this translation makes available her feminist examination of German cinema and Germany in the sociopolitical context of Wilhelmine society...read more

Product Description: This volume tells the story of the cinema of Germany in 24 essays, each concerning an individual film, in a fresh and concise way. It describes a 'national' film industry which successfully met the demand of a 'national' audience from the 1910s to the 1960s...read more

Product Description: In the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, Germans found themselves receiving instruction from their American occupiers. It was not a conventional education. In their effort to transform German national identity and convert a Nazi past into a democratic future, the Americans deployed what they perceived as the most powerful and convincing weapon-movies...read more

Product Description: Hitler and the Nazis saturated their country with many types of propaganda to convince the German citizenry that the Nazi ideology was the only ideology. One type of propaganda that the Nazis relied on heavily was cinematic. This work focuses on Nazi propaganda feature films and feature-length documentaries made in Germany between 1933 and 1945 and released to the public...read more

Sabine Hake presents the second edition of her comprehensive account of German cinema from its origins to the present. From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Run Lola Run, Hake examines a range of films in relation to the social, political, economic and technological events surrounding them. The second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include: an expansion of the final chapter on Post-unification cinema; references to recent film releases (through 2006) such as Downfall, Goodbye Lenin, and The Edukators; Analysis of German-Turkish cinema, gay and lesbian cinema, new documentary styles (Berlin School), and the question of postnational or transnational cinema. Covering a wide range of genres, Hake assesses the work of directors and stars alike, exploring the competing definitions of German cinema as art cinema, quality entertainment, political propaganda and rival of Hollywood.  

Product Description: The Cosmopolitan Screen investigates the extent to which German filmmakers throughout the last sixty years have engaged with the ever more fluid trade of images, meanings, and identities in a globalizing world. The volume traces German cinema’s negotiation of the global as a multilayered story in which the hopes and the fears about the prospect of a more cosmopolitan culture often go hand in hand...read more

German Cinema is an ideal overview of contemporary German film for researchers and students in both Film Studies and German Studies. Initially belittled by some critics for its alleged low-brow commercialism, German film culture since unification nevertheless demonstrates both a high degree of diversity and a willingness to engage with key issues facing the newly formed Berlin Republic. This book offers a broad survey of trends in German cinema since unification and highlights German film's interventions in contemporary social, political and historical debates including questions of nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality. The work of young directors is discussed alongside that of older filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema.>

Product Description: Hitler's regime not only terrorized its citizens; it also seduced them, offering stability, a traditional value system, a sense of belonging, and hope of a better standard of living. Nazi cinema was part of this seduction, expressing positive social fantasies and promoting the enchantment of reality, so that one would want to share in the dream at any price...read more

This is the first comprehensive account of Germany's most enduring film genre, the Heimatfilm, which has offered idyllic variations on the idea that "there is no place like home" since cinema's early days. Charting the development of this popular genre over the course of a century in a work informed by film studies, cultural history, and social theory, Johannes von Moltke focuses in particular on its heyday in the 1950s, a period that has been little studied. Questions of what it could possibly mean to call the German nation "home" after the catastrophes of World War II are anxiously present in these films, and von Moltke uses them as a lens through which to view contemporary discourses on German national identity.

Product Description: Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany's advance to technological modernity, light - particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light - became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life...read more

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German film-goers flocked to see musicals and melodramas during the Nazi era. Although the Nazis seemed to require that every aspect of ordinary life advance the fascist project, even the most popular films depicted characters and desires that deviated from the politically correct ideal. Probing into the contradictory images of womanhood that surfaced in these films, Antje Ascheid shows how Nazi heroines negotiated the gender conflicts that confronted contemporary women.The careers of Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander speak to the Nazis' need to address and contain the woman question, to redirect female subjectivity and desires to self sacrifice for the common good (i.e., national socialism). Hollywood's new women and glamorous dames were out; the German wife and mother were in. The roles and star personas assigned to these actresses, though intended to entertain the public in a politically conformist way, point to the difficulty of yoking popular culture to ideology.

Product Description: Lutz Koepnick analyzes the complicated relationship between two cinemas—Hollywood's and Nazi Germany's—in this theoretically and politically incisive study. The Dark Mirror examines the split course of German popular film from the early 1930s until the mid 1950s, showing how Nazi filmmakers appropriated Hollywood conventions and how German film exiles reworked German cultural material in their efforts to find a working base in the Hollywood studio system...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This collection of essays offers a view of Nazi Germany through an analysis of twenty films. These represent a sampling of the period's directors and reflect the film medium's major genres. For in spite of the control that Goebbels's film industry exercised over all aspects of filmmaking in the Third Reich, the films reveal an individuality that belies subsuming them under any one rubric or containing them within any one theory. Films such as Hitlerjunge Quex, Die groe Liebe, and Auf Wiedersehen Franziska represent the Nazi film industry's efforts to propagandize through entertainment. Others such as Immensee, Kleider machen Leute, and Der Schimmelreiter reveal an attempt to expropriate Germany's rich literary past for the regime. These literary adaptations and films like Glückskinder, La Habanera, and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien today seem void of Nazi ideology if viewed outside the context of Nazism. Yet another film, Der ewige Jude, shocks us with its virulent anti-Semitism and hateful propaganda almost sixty years after its release. All of the films treated, regardless of their fame or notoriety or the level of commitment of their directors to the Nazi cause, played an important role in a cinema that not only represents the dreams and lives of the citizens of the Third Reich, but influenced them as well. Robert C. Reimer is professor of German at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Product Description: Too often dismissed as escapist entertainment or vilified as mass manipulation, popular cinema in the Third Reich was in fact sustained by well-established generic conventions, cultural traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, social practices, and a highly developed star system—not unlike its Hollywood counterpart in the 1930s...read more

Product Description: The beginning of this century has brought with it a host of assumptions about the newness of our technologies, globalized economies, and transnational media practices. Our own time is a period marked by experiences of fragmentation, sensation, and shock...read more