German cinema is best known for its art cinema and its long line of outstanding individual directors. The double spotlight on these two subjects has only deepened the obscurity surrounding the popular cinema. A Second Life performs a kind of archaeology on a period largely overlooked: the first two decades of German cinema. This collection of essays by established authors refocuses the terms of a debate that will develop in the years to come concerning the historical and cultural significance of popular cinema in Wilhelmine Germany.

Advertising has played a central role in shaping the history of modern media. While often identified with American consumerism and the rise of the ‘Information Society,’ motion picture advertising has been part of European visual culture since the late nineteenth century. With the global spread of ad agencies, moving image advertisements became a privileged cultural form to make people experience the qualities and uses of branded commodities, to articulate visions of a ‘good life,’ and to incite social relationships. Abandoning a conventional delineation of fields by medium, country, or period, this book suggests a lateral view. It charts the audiovisual ...

Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer and television producer. This book—the first of its kind in English—comprises a wide selection of texts, including articles and stories by Kluge, television transcripts, critical essays by renowned international scholars, and interviews with Kluge himself. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of film, television, and literary studies, as well as those interested in exploring the intersections ...

The production, distribution, and perception of moving images are undergoing a radical transformation. Ever-faster computers, digital technology, and microelectronic are joining forces to produce advanced audiovision—the media vanishing point of the 20th century. Very little will remain unchanged. The classic institutions for the mediation of film—cinema and television—are revealed to be no more than interludes in the broader history of the audiovisual media. This book interprets these changes not simply as a cultural loss but also as a challenge: the new audiovisions have to be confronted squarely to make strategic intervention possible. Audiovisions provides a historical underpinning for this active ...

Ingmar Bergman is worldwide known as a film and stage director. Yet no-one has attempted to compare his stage and screen activities. In Between Stage and Screen, Egil Törnqvist examines formal and thematical correspondences and differences between a number of Bergman’s stage, screen, and radio productions. In the prologue Bergman’s spiritual and aesthetic heritage and his position in the twentieth century media landscape is outlined. In the epilogue the question is answered to what extent one can speak of Bergman’s directorial ‘method’ irrespective of the chosen medium.

New technological media such as film, photography and computers have altered the way we perceive possible relations between stillness and motion in the visual arts. Traditionally, cinema theory saw cinema and especially the ‘illusion of motion’ as part of the ideological swindle of the basic cinematic apparatus. This collection of essays by acclaimed international scholars including Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark B.N. Hansen, George Baker, Ina Blom and Christa Blümlinger, starts out from a different premise to analyse stillness and motion as part of a larger ecology of images and media. They argue that the strategic uses of stillness and ...

Annette Michelson’s contribution to art and film criticism over the last three decades is unparalleled. This volume honors Michelson’s unique legacy with original essays by some of the many scolars that have been influenced by her work. Some continue her efforts to develop theoretical frameworks for understanding modernist art, while others practice her form of interdisciplinary crtiticism in relation to avant-garde and modernist art works and artists. Still others investigate and evaluate Michelson’s work itself. All in some way pay homage to het extraordinary contribution and demonstrate its continued centrality to the field of art and film criticism.

What have Lumière in common with Wachowski? More than one hundred years separate these two pairs of brothers who astonished, quite similarly, the film spectator of their respective time with special effects of movement: a train rushing into the audience and a bullet flying in slow motion. Do they belong to the same family of “cinema of attractions”? Twenty years ago, Tom Gunning introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to define the essence of the earliest films made between 1895 and 1906. His term scored an immediate success, even outside the field of early cinema. The present anthology questions the ...

This anthology explores new periods, practices and definitions of what it means to love the cinema. The essays demonstrate that beyond individualist immersion in film, typical of the cinephilia as it was popular from the 1950s to the 1970s, a new type of cinephilia has emerged since the 1980s, practiced by a new generation of equally devoted, but quite differently networked cinephilies. They obsess over the nuances of a Douglas Sirk or Ingmar Bergman film; they revel in books such as François Truffaut’s Hitchcock; they happily subscribe to the Sundance Channel—they are the rare breed known as cinephiles. Though much ...

This title is the first ever book-length study of the cinematic representation of Paris in the films of German emigré filmmakers, who found there a first refuge from Hitler. In coming to Paris—the privileged site in terms of production, exhibition as well as the cinematic imaginary of French film culture—these experienced film professionals encountered also a darker side: hostility toward Germans, anti-Semitism, as well as boycotts from French industry personnel, afraid of losing their jobs to foreigners. The book juxtaposes the cinematic portrayal of Paris in the films of Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Max Ophüls, Anatol Litvak and ...

In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe’s national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of “world cinema” and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different ...

Whether it involves remaking an old Hollywood movie, projecting a quiet 16mm film, or constructing a bombastic multi-screen environment, cinema now takes place not just in the movie theatre and the home, but also in the art gallery and the museum. The author of this engaging study takes stock of this development, offering an in-depth inquiry into its genesis, its defining features, and the ramifications it has for art and cinema alike. Through the lens of contemporary art history, she examines cinema studies’ great disciplinary obsession—namely, what cinema was, is, and will become in a digital future.