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The burgeoning field of trauma and cinema is an exciting development within contemporary trauma studies. The author of this book describes the complex relationship between cinema and the trauma of defeat in war. An asymmetric and non-binary comparison of two test cases, post-World War II New German Cinema and post-Vietnam War American cinema, illuminates the indirect and intriguing ways these societies have dealt with the enormous psycho-cultural difficulty of acknowledging their defeat and understanding its manifold meanings. This book draws on psychoanalysis, masculinity studies, and corporeal feminism to explore the bodily experience of defeat. It examines themes and representations of body and sexuality to create a theoretical framework that reveals anew the link between defeated masculinity and nationalism. Building on an original analysis of such varied films as The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, The Tin Drum, and Paris Texas, the author suggests new criteria that highlight the characteristics of post-traumatic cinema.
Modern Germany, with its ruptures from late unification in 1871 through to the formation of two opposing German states, provides a case study for an analysis of the issue of representations of identity in Germany since the war.
As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked by a growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the reactionary ruling powers of Restoration Germany but also the incipient nationalist ideology that would have...
Berlin School Glossary is the first major publication to mark the increasing international importance of a group of contemporary German and Austrian filmmakers initially known by the name the Berlin School: Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Christoph Hochhäusler, Jessica Hausner and others. The study elaborates on the innovative strategies and formal techniques that distinguish these films, specifically questions of movement, space, spectatorship, representation, desire, location and narrative. Abandoning the usual format of essay-length analyses of individual films and directors, the volume is organized as an actual glossary with entries such as bad sex, cars, the cut, endings, familiar places, forests, ghosts, hotels, interiority, landscapes, siblings, surveillance, swimming pools and wind. This unique format combined with an informative introduction will be essential to scholars and fans of the German New Wave.
"Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape."---Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds --Book Jacket.
Explains why the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.
"Lutz Koepnick's The Dark Mirror provides one of the finest, most compelling and suggestive accounts to date of the multiple locations of German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Charting the shifting relationships between institutional contexts and individual acts of reception, Koepnick persuasively shows how the German cinema and its filmmakers—both in exile and in Nazi Germany—contributed to a fragile, stratified, indeed, "nonsynchronous" public sphere."—Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History "Lutz Koepnick's brilliant study debunks the received wisdom concerning Nazi German and Hollywood film of the 1930s and 40s. Using detailed analyses of 8 films, with special focus on sound and music, he insists upon the disjointed contexts and uneven relationships of American and German filmmaking. Historically nuanced and theoretically savvy, this remarkable book offers something for everyone: Americanists, Germanists, historians, students of cinema sound and music, those interested in debates between art and popular forms, and European and Hollywood production."—Caryl Flinn, author of Strains of Utopia
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
Powerlines, the exceptional slogans that people remember long after the campaign ends, stand out from the barrage of marketing messages consumers face each day. A product, service, company, candidate, or an organization with a powerline outshines the competition every time. Steve Cone, author of Steal These Ideas!, reveals the secrets to contemporary marketing's biggest mystery: how to conjure the phrase that will make a product irresistible and memorable. This book restores the lost art of creating killer slogans to its proper place: front and center in every campaign. Drawing on examples of great and not-so-great lines from marketing, politics, and popular culture, Cone provides an irreverent, intelligent, and insightful primer on a singularly important aspect of brand building. Silver Medal Winner, Advertising/Marketing/PR/Event Planning Category, Axiom Business Book Awards (2009)
Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film merges feminist film theory and cultural history in an investigation of "women's films" that span the last two decades of the former East Germany. Jennifer L. Creech explores the ways in which these films functioned as an alternative public sphere where official ideologies of socialist progress and utopian collectivism could be resisted. Emerging after the infamous cultural freeze of 1965, these women's films reveal a shift from overt political critique to a covert politics located in the intimate, problem-rich experiences of everyday life under socialism. Through an analysis of films that focus on what were perceived as "women's concerns"—marital problems, motherhood, emancipation, and residual patriarchy—Creech argues that the female protagonist served as a crystallization of socialist contradictions. By framing their politics in terms of women's concerns, these films used women's desire and agency to contest the more general problems of social alienation and collectivism, and to re-imagine the possibilities of self-fulfillment under socialism.