The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present

ISBN-13: 9780231073639 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 464 str.

Eric Rentschler

Opis

Eric Rentschler's new book, The Use and Abuse of Cinema, takes readers on a series of enthralling excursions through the fraught history of German cinema, from the Weimar and Nazi eras to the postwar and postwall epochs and into the new millennium. These journeys afford rich panoramas and nuanced close-ups from a nation's production of fantasies and spectacles, traversing the different ways in which the film medium has figured in Germany, both as a site of creative and critical enterprise and as a locus of destructive and regressive endeavor. Each of the chapters provides a stirring minidrama; the cast includes prominent critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim; postwar directors like Wolfgang Staudte, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Alexander Kluge; representatives of the so-called Berlin School; and exponents of mountain epics, early sound musicals, rubble films, and recent heritage features. A film history that is both original and unconventional, Rentschler's colorful tapestry weaves together figures, motifs, and stories in exciting, unexpected, and even novelistic ways.

Recenzje

"Written in highly readable, elegant prose, Rentschler's volume is an authoritative study of the history of German film from the 1920s to the present by one of the foremost scholars in the field. This is the work of an expert at the peak of his craft." Gerd Gemünden, author of Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951

O autorze

Eric Rentschler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Chair of Film and Visual Studies Program at Harvard University