There were virtually no women film directors in germany until the 1970s. today there are proportionally more than in any other film-making country6, and their work has been extremely influential. Directors like Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Ulrike Ottinger and Helke Sander have made a huge contribution to feminist film culture, but until now critical consideration of New German Cinema in Britain and the United States has focused almost exclusively on male directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. In Women and the New German Cinema Julia Knight examines how restrictive social, economic and institutional conditions have compounded the neglect of the new women directors. Rejecting the traditional auteur approach, she explores the principal characteristics of women’s film-making in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular the role of the women’s movement, the concern with the notion of a ‘feminine aesthetic’, women’s entry into the mainstream, and the emergence of a so-called post-feminist cinema. This timely and comprehensive study will be essential reading for everyone concerned with contemporary cinema and feminism.

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.

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.

A dynamic, event-centered exploration of the hundred-year history of German-language film. This dynamic, event-centered anthology offers a new understanding of the hundred-year history of German-language film, from the earliest days of the Kintopp to contemporary productions like The Lives of Others. Eachof the more than eighty essays takes a key date as its starting point and explores its significance for German film history, pursuing its relationship with its social, political, and aesthetic moment. While the essays offer ampletemporal and topical spread, this book emphasizes the juxtaposition of famous and unknown stories, granting attention to a wide range of cinematic events. Brief section introductions provide a larger historical and film-historicalframework that illuminates the essays within it, offering both scholars and the general reader a setting for the individual texts and figures under investigation. Cross-references to other essays in the book are included at the close of each entry, encouraging readers not only to pursue familiar trajectories in the development of German film, but also to trace particular figures and motifs across genres and historical periods. Together, the contributionsoffer a new view of the multiple, intersecting narratives that make up German-language cinema. The constellation that is thus established challenges unidirectional narratives of German film history and charts new ways of thinkingabout film historiography more broadly. Jennifer Kapczynski is Associate Professor of German at Washington University, St. Louis, and Michael Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.

The aim of this study of contemporary German cinema is to set the significant films and film-makers in their proper context. The author explains the nature of the German film industry, the cultural inheritance of its film-makers, and the social and political climate within which they work.

The history of postwar German cinema has most often been told as a story of failure, a failure paradoxically epitomized by the remarkable popularity of film throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the analysis of 10 representative films, Hester Baer reassesses this period, looking in particular at how the attempt to 'dismantle the dream factory' of Nazi entertainment cinema resulted in a new cinematic language which developed as a result of the changing audience demographic. In an era when female viewers comprised 70 per cent of cinema audiences a 'women's cinema' emerged, which sought to appeal to female spectators through its genres, star choices, stories and formal conventions. In addition to analyzing the formal language and narrative content of these films, Baer uses a wide array of other sources to reconstruct the original context of their reception, including promotional and publicity materials, film programs, censorship documents, reviews and spreads in fan magazines. This book presents a new take on an essential period, which saw the rebirth of German cinema after its thorough delegitimization under the Nazi regime.

"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.

Comprising a discussion of 'Alice in the Cities', 'The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant', 'Heimat' and 'The American Friend', Julia Knight's study examines the American dominance of German film, the framework of European art cinema and how German cinema engages with contemporary German reality.

This broad-ranging collection, the first of its kind, gathers essays on the representation of women in recent German cinema, as well as recent interviews with German women filmmakers.

Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular culture in the twentieth century. In tracing Jewish filmmakers’ contemplations of “Heimat”—a provincial German landscape associated with belonging and authenticity—it analyzes their distinctive contribution to the German identity discourse between 1918 and 1968. In its emphasis on rootedness and homogeneity Heimat seemed to challenge the validity and significance of Jewish emancipation. Several acculturation-seeking Jewish artists and intellectuals, however, endeavored to conceive a notion of Heimat that would rather substantiate their belonging. This book considers Jewish filmmakers’ contribution to this endeavor. It shows how they devised the landscapes of the German “Homeland” as Jews, namely, as acculturated, “outsiders within.” Through appropriation of generic Heimat imagery, the films discussed in the book integrate criticism of national chauvinism into German mainstream culture from World War One to the Cold War. Consequently, these Jewish filmmakers anticipated the anti-Heimat film of the ensuing decades, and functioned as an uncredited inspiration for the critical New German Cinema.