This comprehensive guide is an ideal reference work for film specialists and enthusiasts. First published in 1984 but continuously updated ever since, CineGraph is the most authoritative and comprehensive encyclopedia on German-speaking cinema in the German language. This condensed and substantially revised English-language edition makes this important resource available to students and researchers for the first time outside its German context. It offers a representative historical overview through bio-filmographical entries on the main protagonists, from the beginnings to the present day. Included are directors and actors, writers and cameramen, composers and production designers, film theorists and critics, producers and distributors, inventors and manufacturers. An appendix includes short introductory essays on specific periods and movements, such as Early Film, Weimar, Nazi Cinema, DEFA, New German Cinema, and German film since unification, as well as on cinematic developments in Austria and Switzerland. Sections that crossreference names around specific professional groups and themes will prove equally invaluable to researchers.

Re-examines German cinema's representation of the Germans as victims during the Second World War and its aftermath.

The impact of the Cold War on German male identities can be seen in the nation’s cinematic search for a masculine paradigm that rejected the fate-centered value system of its National- Socialist past while also recognizing that German males once again had become victims of fate and fatalism, but now within the value system of the Soviet and American hegemonies that determined the fate of Cold War Germany and Central Europe. This monograph is the first to demonstrate that this Cold War cinematic search sought out a meaningful masculine paradigm through film adaptations of late-Victorian and Edwardian male writers who likewise sought a means of self-determination within a hegemonic structure that often left few opportunities for personal agency. In contrast to the scholarly practice of exploring categories of modern masculinity such as Victorian imperialist manliness or German Cold-War male identity as distinct from each other, this monograph offers an important, comparative corrective that brings forward an extremely influential century-long trajectory of threatened masculinity. For German Cold-War masculinity, lessons were to be learned from history—namely, from late-Victorian and Edwardian models of manliness. Cold War Germans, like the Victorians before them, had to confront the unknowns of a new world without fear or hesitation. In a Cold-War mentality where nuclear technology and geographic distance had trumped face-to-face confrontation between East and West, Cold-War German masculinity sought alternatives to the insanity of mutual nuclear destruction by choosing not just to confront threats, but to resolve threats directly through personal agency and self-determination.

The national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany were two of the most vital sites of filmmaking in the Eastern Bloc, and over the course of two decades, they contributed to and were shaped by such significant developments as Sovietization, de-Stalinization, and the conservative retrenchment of the late 1950s. This volume comprehensively explores the postwar film cultures of both nations, using a “stereoscopic” approach that traces their similarities and divergences to form a richly contextualized portrait. Ranging from features to children’s cinema to film festivals, the studies gathered here provide new insights into the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of Cold War cultural production.

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.

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

This is the first publication to bring together comparative research on the international expansion of Third Reich cinema. This volume investigates various attempts to infiltrate - economically, politically and culturally - the film industries of 20 countries and regions either occupied by, friendly with or neutral towards Nazi Germany.

Existing critical traditions fail to fully account for the impact of Austrian director, and 2009 Cannes Palm d'Or winner, Michael Haneke's films, situated as they are between intellectual projects and popular entertainments. In this first English-language introduction to, and critical analysis of, his work, each of Haneke's eight feature films are considered in detail. Particular attention is given to what the author terms Michael Haneke's 'ethical cinema' and the unique impact of these films upon their audiences. Drawing on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Stanley Cavell, Catherine Wheatley, introduces a new way of marrying film and moral philosophy, which explicitly examines the ethics of the film viewing experience. Haneke's films offer the viewer great freedom whilst simultaneously imposing a considerable burden of responsibility. How Haneke achieves this break with more conventional spectatorship models, and what its far-reaching implications are for film theory in general, constitute the principal subject of this book.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a proliferation of German historical films. These productions have earned prestigious awards and succeeded at box offices both at home and abroad, where they count among the most popular German films of all time. Recently, however, the country’s cinematic take on history has seen a significant new development: the radical style, content, and politics of the New German Cinema. With in-depth analyses of the major trends and films, this book represents a comprehensive assessment of the historical film in today’s Germany. Challenging previous paradigms, it takes account of a postwall cinema that complexly engages with various historiographical forms and, above all, with film history itself.

Despite the massive influx of Hollywood movies and films from other European countries after World War II, Austrian film continued to be hugely popular with Austrian and German audiences. By examining the decisive role that popular cinema played in the turbulent post-war era, this book provides unique insights into the reconstruction of a disrupted society. Through detailed analysis of the stylistic patterns, narratives and major themes of four popular genres of the time, costume film, Heimatfilm, tourist film and comedy, the book explains how popular cinema helped to shape national identity, smoothed conflicted gender relations and relieved the Austrians from the burden of the Nazi past through celebrating the harmonious, charming, musical Austrian man.