This volume of fresh essays by leading scholars develops a new approach to expressionist film. For nearly half a century Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen have shaped the understanding of the cinema of this period. However, fifty years on, there is a growing awareness that a new account is overdue. This attempt to rewrite the story of expressionist cinema begins with a fundamentally new interpretation of Dr. Caligari, and together with fresh views of other expressionist classics, offers new perspectives on important alternative film styles and genres that emerged in films by such eminent directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, Karl Grune, F. W. Murnau, and E. A. Dupont. In pursuing such variety, the book strives for a picture of the cinema in the early years of Weimar that in thematic as well as stylistic terms reflects the vibrant, multifaceted cultural and political developments of the period. The book is a joint venture of the Centre for European Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Film Studies at the University of Mainz, and the German Film Museum in Frankfurt.
Dietrich Scheunemann was professor of German at the University of Edinburgh and has written and edited several books on German literature and on film and media.
Reviews
With a nod to the pioneering work of Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, [the book] proposes to overcome the reductive tendencies of their scholarship with a historiography that emphasizes complex and asynchronous historical developments.... GERMAN QUARTERLY
Details
First Published: 12 Jun 2003
13 Digit ISBN: 9781571130686
Pages: 318
Size: 9 x 6
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: Camden House
Series:
Studies in German Literature Linguistics and CultureSubject:
Film Performing Arts & MediaBIC Class: AN
Details updated on 02 Sep 2010
Contents
- 1 Activating the Differences: Expressionist Film and Early Weimar Cinema
- 2 Weimar Cinema, Mobile Selves, and Anxious Males: Kracauer and Eisner Revisited
- 3 Revolution, Power, and Desire in Ernst Lubitsch's Madame Dubarry
- 4 "Bringing in the Ghostly to Life": Fritz Lang and his Early Dr. Mabuse Films
- 5 Murnau--a Conservative Filmmaker? On Film History as Intellectual History
- 6 The Double, the Décor,and the Framing Device: Once more on Robert Wiene's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- 7 Film as Graphic Art: On Karl Heinz Martin's From Morn to Midnight
- 8 Episodic Patchwork: The Bric-à-Brac Principle in Paul Leni's Waxworks
- 9 Entrapment and Escape: Readings of the City in Karl Grune's The Street and G. W. Pabst's The Joyless Street
- 10 Fragmenting the Space: On E. A. Dupont's Varieté
- 11 On Murnau's Faust: A Generic Gesamtkunstwerk?
- 12 "Painting in Time" and "Visual Music": On German Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s
- 13 Ruttmann, Rhythm, and "Reality": A Response to Kracauer's Interpretation of Berlin. Symphony of a Great City
