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Fritz Lang's 'M' (1931) is an undisputed classic of world cinema. Lang considered it his most lasting work. Peter Lorre's extraordinary performance as the childlike misfit Hans Beckert was one of the most striking of film debuts, and it made him an international star. Lang's vision of a city gripped with fear, haunted by surveillance and total mobillization, is still remarkably powerful today. And 'M' resonates too in the serial-killer genre which is so prominent in contemporary cinema. 'M' speaks to us as a timeless classic, but also as a Weimar film that has too often been isolated from its political and cultural context. In this groundbreaking book, Anton Kaes reconnects 'M''s much-studied formal brilliance to its significance as an event in 1931 Germany, recapturing the film's extraordinary social and symbolic energy. Interweaving close reading with cultural history, Kaes reconstitutes 'M' as a crucial modernist artwork. In addition he analyzes Joseph Losey's 1951 film noir remake and, in an appendix, publishes for the first time 'M''s missing scene.
'Shell Shock Cinema' shows how classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I & the trauma of Germany's humiliating defeat. Anton Kaes argues that even films which do not depict war reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock.
Examines changing attitudes among Germans as evident in films of the modern German era, leading away from guilt and atonement and seeking national identity.
Reproduces (translated into English) contemporary documents or writings with an introduction to each section.
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.
Publisher description
'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.
Noted film scholars analyze some of the most challenging films of the 20th century
German memory, judicial interrogation, and historical reconstruction : writing perpetrator history from postwar testimony / Christopher R. Browning -- Historical emplotment and the problem of truth / Hayden White -- On emplotment : two kinds of ruin / Perry Anderson -- History, counterhistory, and narrative / Amos Funkenstein -- Just one witness / Carlo Ginzburg -- Of plots, witnesses, and judgments / Martin Jay -- Representing the Holocaust : reflections on the historians' debate / Dominick LaCapra -- Historical understanding and counterrationality : the Judenrat as epistemological vantage / Dan Diner -- History beyond the pleasure principle : some thoughts on the representation of trauma /...
Conveys the dreams and disappointments of German artists, architects, and intellectuals from World War I through the social and economic chaos of the Weimar Republic.