Download or read book Film Front Weimar written by Bernadette Kester and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was Germany's experience of World War I depicted in film during the following years? Drawing on analysis of the films of the Weimar era--documentaries and feature films addressing the war's causes, life at the front, war at sea, and the home front--Bernadette Kester sketches out the historical context, including reviews and censors' reports, in which these films were made and viewed, and offers much insight into how Germans collectively perceived World War I during its aftermath and beyond.
Download or read book Cinematography in the Weimar Republic written by Paul Matthew St. Pierre and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In film history, director-cinematographer collaborations were on a labor spectrum, with the model of the contracted camera operator in the silent era and that of the cinematographer in the sound era. But in Weimar era German filmmaking, 1919-33, a short period of intense artistic activity and political and economic instability, these models existed side by side due to the emergence of camera operators as independent visual artists and collaborators with directors. Berlin in the 1920s was the chief site of the interdisciplinary avant-garde of the Modernist movement in the visual, literary, architectural, design, typographical, sartorial, and performance arts in Europe. The Weimar Revolution that arose in the aftermath of the November 1918 Armistice and that established the Weimar Republic informed and agitated all of the art movements, such as Expressionism, Dada, the Bauhaus, Minimalism, Objectivism, Verism, and Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”). Among the avant-garde forms of these new stylistically and culturally negotiated arts, the cinema was foremost and since its inception had been a radical experimental practice in new visual technologies that proved instrumental in changing how human beings perceived movement, structure, perspective, light exposure, temporal duration, continuity, spatial orientation, human postural, facial, vocal, and gestural displays, and their own spectatorship, as well as conventions of storytelling like narrative, setting, theme, character, and structure. Whereas most of the arts mobilized into schools, movements, institutions, and other structures, cinema, a collaborative art, tended to organize around its ensembles of practitioners. Historically, the silent film era, 1895-1927, is associated with auteurs, the precursors of François Truffaut and other filmmakers in the 1960s: actuality filmmakers and pioneers like R. W. Paul and Fred and Joe Evans in England, Auguste and Luis Lumière and Georges Méliès in France, and Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton in America, who, by managing all the compositional, executional, and editorial facets of film production—scripting, directing, acting, photographing, set, costume, and lighting design, editing, and marketing—imposed their personal vision or authorship on the film. The dichotomy of the auteur and the production ensemble established a production hierarchy in most filmmaking. In formative German silent film, however, this hierarchy was less rank or class driven, because collaborative partnerships took precedence over single authorship. Whereas in silent film production in most countries the terms filmmaker and director were synonymous, in German silent film the plural term filmemacherin connoted both directors and cinematographers, along with the rest of the filmmaking crew. Thus, German silent filmmakers’ principle contribution to the new medium and art of film was less the representational iconographies of Expressionist, New Objective, and Naturalist styles than the executional practice of co-authorship and co-production, in distinctive cinematographer-director partnerships such as those of cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl and director Ernst Lubitsch; Fritz Arno Wagner with F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, and G. W. Pabst; Rudolf Maté with Carl Theodor Dreyer; Guido Seeber with Lang and Pabst; and Carl Hoffmann with Lang and Murnau.
Download or read book Weimar Cinema written by Noah William Isenberg and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive companion to Weimar cinema, chapters address the technological advancements of each film, their production and place within the larger history of German cinema, the style of the director, the actors and the rise of the German star, and the critical reception of the film.
Download or read book Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic written by Bruce Murray and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Weimar Republic of Germany, covering the post-World War I period of civil and governmental strife, witnessed a great struggle among a variety of ideologies, a struggle for which the arts provided one important arena. Leftist individuals and organizations critiqued mainstream art production and attempted to counter what they perceived as its conservative-to-reactionary influence on public opinion. In this groundbreaking study, Bruce Murray focuses on the leftist counter-current in Weimar cinema, offering an alternative critical approach to the traditional one of close readings of the classical films. Beginning with a brief review of pre-Weimar cinema (1896-1918), he analyzes the film activity of the Social Democratic Party, the German Communists, and independent leftists in the Weimar era. Leftist filmmakers, journalists, and commentators, who in many cases contributed significantly to marginal leftist as well as mainstream cinema, have, until now, received little scholarly attention. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and personal interviews, Murray shows how the plurality of aesthetic models represented in the work of individuals who participated in leftist experiments with cinema in the 1920S collapsed as Germany underwent the transition from parliamentary democracy to fascist dictatorship. He suggests that leftists shared responsibility for that collapse and asserts the value of such insights for those who contemplate alternatives to institutional forms of cinematic discourse today.
Download or read book Silencing Cinema written by D. Biltereyst and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oppression by censorship affects the film industry far more frequently than any other mass media. Including essays by leading film historians, the book offers groundbreaking historical research on film censorship in major film production countries and explore such innovative themes as film censorship and authorship, religion, and colonialism.
Download or read book From Caligari to Hitler written by Siegfried Kracauer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines German society from 1921 to 1933, in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He explores the connections among film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer makes a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. With a critical introduction by Leonardo Quaresima which provides context for Kracauer’s scholarship and his contributions to film studies, this Princeton Classics edition makes an influential work available to new generations of cinema enthusiasts.
Download or read book Shell Shock Cinema written by Anton Kaes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-24 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How war trauma haunted the films of Weimar Germany Shell Shock Cinema explores how the classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I and the the devastating effects of the nation's defeat. In this exciting new book, Anton Kaes argues that masterworks such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, The Nibelungen, and Metropolis, even though they do not depict battle scenes or soldiers in combat, engaged the war and registered its tragic aftermath. These films reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock, reeling from a devastating defeat that it never officially acknowledged, let alone accepted. Kaes uses the term "shell shock"—coined during World War I to describe soldiers suffering from nervous breakdowns—as a metaphor for the psychological wounds that found expression in Weimar cinema. Directors like Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang portrayed paranoia, panic, and fear of invasion in films peopled with serial killers, mad scientists, and troubled young men. Combining original close textual analysis with extensive archival research, Kaes shows how this post-traumatic cinema of shell shock transformed extreme psychological states into visual expression; how it pushed the limits of cinematic representation with its fragmented story lines, distorted perspectives, and stark lighting; and how it helped create a modernist film language that anticipated film noir and remains incredibly influential today. A compelling contribution to the cultural history of trauma, Shell Shock Cinema exposes how German film gave expression to the loss and acute grief that lay behind Weimar's sleek façade.
Download or read book The Promise of Cinema written by Anton Kaes and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 701 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of “theory” not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity’s most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, The Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.
Download or read book Entertaining the Third Reich written by Linda Schulte-Sasse and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Nazi cinema
Download or read book Generic Histories of German Cinema written by Jaimey Fisher and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a fresh approach to German film studies by tracing key genres -- including horror, the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema history
Download or read book The BFI Companion to German Cinema written by Thomas Elsaesser and published by British Film Institute. This book was released on 1999 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Over two hundred entries on film actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, critics, film industry, film movements and festivals cover the entire spectrum of German-speaking cinema from the 1890s to the popular comedies of the 1990s. In-depth articles consider the artistic peaks of Weimer cinema, the emigre directors, film politics, and the star system of Nazi cinema, women and film, the New German Cinema and the revival of genre cinema since. Entries evaluate such notables as Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, Erich Pommer, Conrad Veidt, Wim Wenders and R.W. Fassbinder, as well as popular genres (the "Heimat" film, literary adaptations, musicals) alongside the major studios (UFA and DEFA) and international personalities such as Klaus Kinski, Wolfgang Petersen, and Michael Ballhaus. Leading international scholar Thomas Elsaesser also contributes an introductory essay on developments in post-unification German cinema, placing it in the context of its recent history and of general relations between Hollywood and European cinema."--Publisher description.
Download or read book The Cinema s Third Machine written by Sabine Hake and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The improvements in the technology, artistry, and distribution of motion pictures coincided with the traumas of modern Germany. It is hardly to be wondered that filmmakers frequently turned their cameras on Germany's social and political problems that propagandists regularly sought to manipulate them, that entrepreneurs tried to exploit them, and that German thinkers brooded upon the relationship between German society, politics, and the films that represented them all. From these tangled motives a rich discourse on film emerged that paralleled or anticipated discourses in the other film centers of the world. The Cinema's Third Machine reproduces the diversity of perspectives and the intensity of controversies of early German film within the broad context of German social and political history, from the aesthetic rapture of the first years to the institutionalization of film by the national socialist state. Many texts have been rediscovered and are now presented to modern scholars for the first time. Hake treats all aspects of the medium: production, promotion, education, journalism, aesthetics, and political activism, following throughout the various forms criticism assumed.
Download or read book The Mass Ornament written by Siegfried Kracauer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary writings continue to shed light not only on Kracauer's later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.
Download or read book A Culture Of Light written by Frances Guerin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking exploration of German expressionist cinema and technology.
Download or read book The Haunted Screen written by Lotte H. Eisner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book on expressionism in German motion pictures.
Download or read book The Films of G W Pabst written by Eric Rentschler and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, emirgration, a sojourn in Holywood, a fateful return to Germany and an unsuccessful postwar attempt to regain a once considerable reputation. This collection of essays presents the first truly comprehensive image of a problematic firmmaker whose life and oeuvre compellingly 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.
Download or read book Karl Freund written by Gavin Schmitt and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-02-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Freund is the most important film pioneer you've never heard of. From the silent film era to the rise of the American sitcom, Freund was there at every turn. Countless camera techniques can be traced back to his "unchained camera." His lighting setup for filming I Love Lucy live remains standard to this day. He was the man behind the lens for many influential and award-winning films, from Metropolis to The Good Earth to Key Largo. This biography is the first book-length look at one of the world's greatest cameramen. It details the events of his early life, his entrance into the world of film, his work in both Germany and America, and his legacy, while also putting his life and films into the historical context of the 20th century. The author gives particular attention to Freund's role in the early horror films Der Golem, Dracula, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mummy, and Mad Love.
