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Werner Herzog is renowned for pushing the boundaries of conventional cinema, especially those between the fictional and the factual, the fantastic and the real. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth is the first study in twenty years devoted entirely to an analysis of Herzog's work. It explores the director's continuing search for what he has described as 'ecstatic truth,' drawing on over thirty-five films, from the epics Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) to innovative documentaries like Fata Morgana (1971), Lessons of Darkness (1992), and Grizzly Man (2005). Special attention is paid to Herzog's signature style of cinematic composition, his "romantic" influences, and his fascination with madmen, colonialism, and war.
This volume examines the politics of history and memory in Germany today. From different perspectives, the collected essays analyze the topic of German suffering, from expulsion, bombings, and rape during World War II - as well as the Holocaust. Themes include the generational shift in memory; German, Jewish, and Austrian identity; and Czech-German and Polish-German reconciliation processes.
A Companion to Werner Herzog showcases over two dozen original scholarly essays examining nearly five decades of filmmaking by one of the most acclaimed and innovative figures in world cinema. First collection in twenty years dedicated to examining Herzog’s expansive career Features essays by international scholars and Herzog specialists Addresses a broad spectrum of the director’s films, from his earliest works such as Signs of Life and Fata Morgana to such recent films as The Bad Lieutenant and Encounters at the End of the World Offers creative, innovative approaches guided by film history, art history, and philosophy Includes a comprehensive filmography that also features a list of the director’s acting appearances and opera productions Explores the director’s engagement with music and the arts, his self-stylization as a global filmmaker, his Bavarian origins, and even his love-hate relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski
Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was met with both critical and commercial success upon its release in 1978. However, it was also highly controversial and came to be seen as a powerful statement on the human cost of America's longest war and as a colonialist glorification of anti-Asian violence. Brad Prager's study of the film considers its significance as a war movie and contextualizes its critical reception. Drawing on an archive of contemporaneous materials, as well as an in-depth analysis of the film's lighting, mise-en-scène, multiple cameras and shifting depths of field, Prager examines how the film simultaneously presents itself as a work of cinematic realism, while problematically b...
After the Fact studies the terrain of Holocaust documentaries subsequent to the turn of the twenty-first century. Until now most studies have centered primarily on canonical films such as Shoah and Night and Fog, but over the course of the last ten years filmmaking practices have altered dramatically. Changing techniques, diminishing communities of survivors, and the public's response to familiar, even iconic imagery, have all challenged filmmakers to radically revise and newly envision how they depict the Holocaust. Innovative styles have emerged, including groundbreaking techniques of incorporating archival footage, survivor testimony, and reenactment. Carrying wider implications for the fields of Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Visual Studies, this book closely analyzes ten contemporary and internationally produced films, most of which have hardly been touched upon in the critical literature or elsewhere.
Authentic Fakes explores the religious dimensions of American popular culture in unexpected places: baseball, the Human Genome Project, Coca-Cola, rock 'n' roll, the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, the charisma of Jim Jones, Tupperware, and the free market, to name a few. Chidester travels through the cultural landscape and discovers the role that fakery—in the guise of frauds, charlatans, inventions, and simulations—plays in creating religious experience. His book is at once an incisive analysis of the relationship between religion and popular culture and a celebration of the myriad ways in which invention can stimulate the religious imagination. Moving beyond American borders, Chidester con...
Offers not only a close reading but also a film-historical contextualization of Phoenix, constituting the most significant and thorough study of Petzold's film to date. Christian Petzold's Phoenix (2014), a masterpiece from one of Germany's leading contemporary filmmakers, portrays a death-camp survivor's return to occupied Berlin just after the war has come to an end. Nelly, played by German film star Nina Hoss, returns badly wounded, her face covered in bandages, hoping that her German husband will still love her. Johnny fails to recognize her and instead offers her a role in an intricate criminal scheme. Petzold's film, which he scripted together with his frequent collaborator Harun Faroc...
The biennial Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Film (SCFLLF), supported by a generous grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Florida and the administrative support of the USF Department of World Languages, convened for the 21st time on February 21-22, 2014. The conference, which has been held in various locations throughout Florida since 1983, featured 60 speakers from the US and abroad who shared their research on various topics related to literature, film, culture, language learning, and linguistics. The conference did not feature a specific theme in order to encourage the sharing of a wide array of topics, interests, investigations...
Collection of essays exploring the controversies surrounding images of the Holocaust