Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This work brings together film specialists from Europe and the United States to explore German film history from the late 19th to the early 21st century. It re-evaluates traditional areas of interest in German cinema (such as Weimar cinema, Nazi propaganda, and New German Cinema), and looks at neglected aspects, including early cinema, the cinema of the GDR, popular genre traditions, questions of national cinema and identity, and German film's transnational connections to Hollywood, as well as to exile and migrant cinemas. It places particular emphasis on genres and stars in the wider context of state and industry at home and abroad. The collection comprises five thematic sections: popular cinema; stars; institutional and cultural frameworks; cultural politics; and transnational connections.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• Section 1 Popular Cinema (Introduction
• 1.1
• 1.2
• 1.3
• 1.4
• Section 2 Stars (Introduction
• 2.1
• 2.2
• 2.3
• 2.4
• 2.5
• Section 3 Institutions and Cultural Contexts (Introduction
• 3.1
• 3.2
• 3.3
• 3.4
• 3.5
• Section 4 Cultural Politics (Introduction
• 4.1
• 4.2
• 4.3
• 4.4
• 4.5
• Section 5 Transnational Connections (Introduction
• 5.1
• 5.2
• 5.3
• Bibliography

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This sophisticated and important collection of 23 essays is "academic" in the best sense. First, each critic builds on solid ideas, not gossip, so that the ideas contribute to a thoughtfulness of areas of German history, culture, politics, and identity. Second, most of the contributors build on preceding scholarship, advancing, extending, reinterpreting, and updating. Essays on Marlene Dietrich, Heinz Ruhmann, Paul Richter, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and "German stars of the 1990s" are lumped under "Stars," and not one idea wanders away from the concept of Germanness, often Nazi Germanness. The same is true of the essays in "Popular Cinema," which treats four genres: "Heimat" (homeland), comedy, crime, and "queer." One category, "Cultural Politics," covers the Third Reich, women filmmakers, "autorenfilm" directors (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders). All help define "new German" film. "Institutions and Cultural Contexts" (five essays) addresses exhibition, early cinema, Ufa, DEFA (concerned with "a specifically East German identity"), and legal problems (censorship, funding). The last category, "Transnational Connections," covers Lubitsch, Lang, Hollywood, Africa, and Turkey. Each essay has its own set of footnotes, usually explaining the critic's indebtedness. An extraordinary (20-page) bibliography (print, online, CD-ROM) and film, video, and DVD sources complete the book. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. P. H. Stacy emeritus, University of Hartford