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From Black to Schwarz explores the long and varied history of the exchanges between African America and Germany with a particular focus on cultural interplay. Covering a wide range of media of expression - music, performance, film, scholarship, literature, visual arts, reviews - the essays collected in this volume trace and analyze a cultural interaction, collaboration and mutual transformation that began in the eighteenth century, literally boomed during the Harlem Renaissance/Weimar Republic, could not even be liquidated by the Third Reich's `Degenerate Art' campaigns, and, with new media available to further exchanges, is still increasingly empowering and inspiring participants on both sides of the Atlantic.
This anthology unites scholars from varied backgrounds with the notion that the theories and artistic productions of Bertolt Brecht are key missing links in bridging diverse discourses in social philosophy, theatre, consciousness studies, and aesthetics. It offers readers interdisciplinary perspectives that create unique dialogues between Brecht and important thinkers such as Althusser, Anders, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Godard, Marx, and Plato. While exploring salient topics such as consciousness, courage, ethics, political aesthetics, and representations of race and the body, it penetrates the philosophical Brecht seeing in him the never-ending dialectic—the idea, the theory, the narrative, the character that is never foreclosed. This book is an essential read for all those interested in Brecht as a socio-cultural theorist and for theatre practitioners. Contributors: Kevin S. Amidon, José María Durán, Felix J. Fuch, Philip Glahn, Jim Grilli, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Norman Roessler, Jeremy Spencer, Anthony Squiers, Peter Zazzali.
More than 30 years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, its cinema continues to attract scholarly attention. Documenting Socialism moves beyond the traditionally analyzed "feature film production" and places East Germany's documentary cinema at the center of history behind the Iron Curtain. Between questions of gender, race and sexuality and the complexities of diversity under the political and cultural environments of socialism, the specialist contributions in this volume cohere into an introductory milestone on documentary film production in the GDR.
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 authors 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 ...
Offers a fresh approach to German film studies by tracing key genres -- including horror, the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema history
This is a German history of cinema and film from the 1890s to 1945 with a focus on queer masculinity. Using media studies approaches, the study shows how film as a new medium is constituted through performative re-enactments of spectacular elements from the entertainment and knowledge cultures of the 19th century. In it, bodies, desires and identities are constantly remodelled through the formation of difference. Therefore, male queerness here does not mean the representation of male homosexuality. Rather, it is the dynamic result of complex medial processes, affects and (self-)knowledge on and off the screen. Building on Eve K. Sedgwick's queer-feminist concept of queer performativity, the ...
In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenzi provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous 'German-Jewish symbiosis' before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framework for the understanding of the German 'national' film in the years leading to Hitler's regime.
"This outstanding book has retrieved all the luminous qualities of its subject matter to produce an astonishing revelation of gleaming appearances on splendid display. It is unrivalled by any previous study."—Marcus Bullock, coeditor of Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913-26 "Weimar Surfaces creates provocative new connections between the historical constellations that found a privileged expression in Weimar Berlin and the more contemporary debates on the legacies of modernism and modernity. A compelling study."—Sabine Hake, author of The Cinema's Third Machine "Janet Ward's study of Weimar architecture and design is the most comprehensive and integrated study of the surface of Weimar experience yet written. . . . A first-rate and stimulating book."—Sander L. Gilman, coauthor of Hysteria Beyond Freud
Investigating visual communication and mass culture, print culture and suggestive racial politics, racial aesthetics, racial politics and early German film, racial continuity and German film, and photography, this title offers an evidence of a German society between 1884 and 1919 that produced vibrant and heterogeneous cultures of colonialism.
A legal and cultural history of censorship, youth protection, and national identity in early twentieth-century Germany.