Light Motives : German Popular Film in Perspective

by HALLE RANDALL (ED)

• ISBN13: 9780814330449
• ISBN10: 0814330444
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr

Summary

Light Motives undertakes a long-overdue critical reassessment of German popular cinema, challenging the traditional view of German film history and offering new ways to think about popular cinema in general. 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 editors 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 att

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
From Ernst Lubitsch to Joe May: Challenging Kracauer's Demonology with Weimar Popular Film	1	(23)
Christian Rogowski
Regulating Hidden Pleasures and ``Modern'' Identities: Imagined Female Spectators, Early German Popular Cinema, and The Oyster Princess (1919)	24	(17)
Janet McCabe
The Carnival of Humiliation: Sex, Spectacle, and Self-Reflexivity in E. A. Dupont's Variety (1925)	41	(20)
Richard W. McCormick
``Postcards from the Edge'': Education to Tourism in the German Mountain Film	61	(24)
Nancy P. Nenno
From ``Mr. M'' to ``Mr Murder'': Peter Lorre and the Actor in Exile	85	(23)
Gerd Gemunden
The Heroine of Fascist Virtue? Kristina Soderbaum in Veit Harlan's The Sacrifice (1943)	108	(22)
Antje Ascheid
Placing Green Is the Heath (1951): Spatial Politics and Emergent West German Identity	130	(18)
Alasdair King
Sexual Reorientations: Homosexuality versus the Postwar German Man in Veit Harlan's Different from You and Me (§ 175) (1957)	148	(23)
Alison Guenther-Pal
Negotiating the Popular and the Avant Garde: The Failure of Herbert Vesely's The Bread of Those Early Years (1962)	171	(26)
Hester Baer
Exotic Thrills and Bedroom Manuals: West German B-Film Production in the 1960s	197	(23)
Tim Bergfelder
The Politics of the Popular: Trace of the Stones (1966/89) and the Discourse on Stardom in the GDR Cinema	220	(17)
Stefan Soldovieri
Beleaguered under the Sea: Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (1981) as a German Hollywood Film	237	(22)
Brad Prager
Crime and the Cynical Solution: Black Comedy, Critique, and the Spirit of Self-Concern in Recent German Film	259	(22)
John E. Davidson
Unification Horror: Queer Desire and Uncanny Visions	281	(23)
Randall Halle
Picture-Perfect War: An Analysis of Joseph Vilsmaier's Stalingrad (1993)	304	(22)
Robert C. Reimer
Fantasizing Integration and Escape in the Post-Unification Road Movie	326	(23)
Elizabeth Mittman
``Honor Your German Masters'': History, Memory, and National Identity in Joseph Vilsmaier's Comedian Harmonists (1997)	349	(27)
Lutz Koepnick
Angst Takes a Holiday in Doris Dorrie's Am I Beautiful? (1998)	376	(19)
Margaret McCarthy
You Can Run, but You Can't Hide: Transcultural Filmmaking in Run Lola Run (1998)	395	(22)
Christine Haase
Contributors	417	(4)
Index	421	(10)
Index of Films	431