Postwall German Cinema

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a proliferation of German historical films. These productions have earned prestigious awards and succeeded at box offices both at home and abroad, where they count among the most popular German films of all time. Recently, however, the country's cinematic take on history has seen a significant new development: the radical style, content, and politics of the New German Cinema. With in-depth analyses of the major trends and films, this book represents a comprehensive assessment of the historical film in today's Germany. Challenging previous paradigms, it takes account of a postwall cinema that complexly engages with various historiographical forms and, above all, with film history itself.

German history films that focus on utopianism and political dissent and their effect on German identity since 1989.

The History of German film is diverse and multi-faceted. This volume can only suggest the richness of a film tradition that includes five distinct German governments [Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), s well as a reunited Germany], two national industries (Germany and Austria), and a myriad of styles and production methods. Paradoxically, the political disruptions that have produced these distinct film eras, as well as and the natural inclination of artists to rebel and create new styles, allow for construction of a narrative of German film. Disjuncture generates distinct points of separation, and yet also highlights continuities between the ruptures. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of German Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on directors, actors, films, cinematographers, composers, producers, and major historical events that greatly affected the direction and development of German cinema. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about German cinema.

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

This volume offers the first book-length academic investigation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others (2006). The aim of this edited collection is twofold. On the one hand, it offers new insight into one of the most successful German films of the past two decades, placing The Lives of Others within its wider historical, political, aesthetic and industrial context. On the other, it offers this group of scholars, which includes many of the leading international figures in the field, opportunity to make a series of interventions on the state of contemporary German film and German film studies.

Cinema and Nation considers the ways in which film production and reception are shaped by ideas of national belonging and examines the implications of globalisation for the concept of national cinema.

The state-sponsored Deutsche Film Anstalt (DEFA) was responsible for film production in the former GDR from 1946 until 1992. This volume traces the development of DEFA and East German cinema.

This book examines the significance of the thirty-two Krimi films produced by Rialto Film from 1959 to 1972, canonizing their role in the era of German popular cinema during Krimi’s rise to popularity and inevitable decline and evolution.