New essays re-evaluating Weimar cinema from a broadened, up-to-date
perspective.
Traditionally, Weimar cinema has been equated with the work of a handful
of auteurist filmmakers and a limited number of canonical films. Often a
single, limited phenomenon, "expressionist film," has been taken as
synonymous with the cinema of the entire period. But in recent decades,
such reductive assessments have been challenged by developments in film
theory and archival research that highlight the tremendous richness and
diversity of Weimar cinema. This widening of focus has brought attention
to issues such as film as commodity; questions of technology and genre;
transnational collaborations and national identity; effects of changes
in socioeconomics and gender roles onfilm spectatorship; and connections
between film and other arts and media. Such shifts have been accompanied
by archival research that has made a cornucopia of new information
available, now augmented by the increased availability of films from the
period on DVD. This wealth of new source material calls for a
re-evaluation of Weimar cinema that considers the legacies of
lesser-known directors and producers, popular genres, experiments of the
artistic avant-garde, and nonfiction films, all of which are aspects
attended to by the essays in this volume.
Contributors: Ofer Ashkenazi, Jaimey Fisher, Veronika Fuechtner, Joseph
Garncarz, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Richard W.McCormick, Nancy P.
Nenno, Elizabeth Otto, Mihaela Petrescu, Theodore F. Rippey, Christian
Rogowski, Jill Smith, Philipp Stiasny, Chris Wahl, Cynthia Walk, Valerie
Weinstein, Joel Westerdale.
Christian Rogowski is Professor of German at Amherst College.
