A historical overview of German film from the silent era to the present, presenting close readings of 14 films from five major historical periods of German cinema. Each chapter analyzes a single film, discussing filmmakers' personal styles, genre, and modes of narration, and looks at the wider contexts of film production and reception including political issues and social change. Films include a Nazi propaganda musical, Ernst Lubitsch's Passion, and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. Includes film credits for each film, bandw photos, and extensive notes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Contributors explore these films' transnational circuits of production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as how the films were made and received, thereby inviting us to reexamine the roots of what New German Cinema was and imagine what it might yet become.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars of German and global cinema.

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.

By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”

Critics rarely associate popular film with German cinema, despite the international success of such films as Das Boot (1981), The Never-Ending Story (1984), Run, Lola, Run (1998), and recent German comedies, all representing a rich body of work outside the parameters of high culture. This very success compels the authors of Light Motives to take an unprecedented look at German popular film across the historical spectrum and to challenge the tendency among critics to divvy up German film, like Germans themselves, into the Good and the Bad. Together the essays reexamine popular film production along with larger cultural, historical, and political meanings suggested by the term "popular." Most critical accounts have focused on the golden era of Weimar film and the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 70s leaving much of popular film by the wayside. This volume attributes the division to such sources as Frankfurt School dictates, Goethe Haus film offerings, and state-funded film production during the 1970s, which promoted high-culture art films to broadcast the success of West German democratization. The essays challenge the traditional shape of German film history, while offering in-depth analyses of films that have until now been beyond the pale of critical attention. What emerges is a "Never-Ending Story" of oft-repeated obsessions, overlapping generic forms, omnipresent or subtle nods to Hollywood, and myriad political concerns irreducible to a unified message or aesthetic form-all bearing witness to the vibrancy of German culture.

Introduction -- CONFIGURATIONS OF STEREOTYPES AND IDENTITIES: NEW METHODOLOGIES. Daniela Berghahn: My big fat Turkish wedding: from culture clash to romcom -- David Gramling: The oblivion of influence: mythical realism in Feo Alada's When we leave -- Marco Abel: The minor cinema of Thomas Arslan: a prolegomenon -- MULTIPLE SCREENS AND PLATFORMS: FROM DOCUMENTARY AND TELEVISION TO INSTALLATION ART. Angelica Fenner: Roots and routes of the diasporic documentarian: a psychogeography of Fatih Akin's We forgot to go back -- Ingeborg Majer-O'Sickey: Gendered kicks: Buket Alakus's and Aysun Bademsoy's soccer films -- Nilgan Bayraktar: Location and mobility in Kutlu Ataman's site-specific video installation Kuba -- Brent Peterson: Turkish for beginners: teaching cosmopolitanism to Germans -- Brad Prager: "Only the wounded honor fights": Zili Alada's rage and the drama of the Turkish German perpetrator -- INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS: STARS, THEATERS, AND RECEPTION. Randall Halle: The German Turkish spectator and Turkish language film programming: Karli Kino, maximum distribution, and the interzone cinema -- Berna Gueneli: Mehmet Kurtulu and Birol Ünel: Sexualized masculinities, normalized ethnicities -- Karolin Machtans: The perception and marketing of Fatih Akin in the German press -- Ayìa Tunì Cox: Hyphenated identities: the reception of Turkish-German cinema in the Turkish daily press -- THE CINEMA OF FATIH AKIN: AUTHORSHIP, IDENTITY, AND BEYOND. Mine Eren: Cosmopolitan filmmaking: Fatih Akin's In July and Head-on -- Roger Hillman and Vivien Silvey: Remixing Hamburg: transnationalism in Fatih Akin's Soul kitchen -- Deniz Gukturk: World cinema goes digital: looking at Europe from the other shore.

"The informal movement that critics like to call the Berlin School, " as director Christoph Hochhäusler puts it, is a loose affiliation of filmmakers who emerged around the time the Berlin Wall fell. The founding figures--Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, and Angela Schanelec--and their younger colleagues are not bound by a manifesto or by any singular aesthetic. Nonetheless, their observant portrayals of characters in flux offer a compelling cinematic expression of the search for new identities in a time of societal change. The films of the Berlin School have resonated profoundly since the mid-1990s, making it one of the most influential auteur movements to emerge from Europe in the new millennium.

The eight essays in this volume consider questions concerning spatial transformations in and around Weimar cinema. They analyse the periphery - the other spaces that are implicated, if not present, in the films themselves.

This study of New German cinema identifies different styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. It concentrates on how listeners are urged to interact with difference - including Germany's difficult past - rather than try to 'master' or 'get past' it.