German cinema of the 1920s is still regarded as one of the golden ages of world cinema. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and The Blue Angel are among the key films defining an age of Germany as a nation uneasy with itself. Directors such as Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst, having apparently announced the horrors of fascism while testifying to the traumas of a defeated nation, cast long shadows over German cinema to this day.Weimar Cinema and After offers a fresh perspective on the arguments which view genres and movements such as films of the fantastic , Nazi Cinema , film noir and New German Cinema as typically German contributions to twentieth century visual culture. Elsaesser questions conventional readings which link these genres to romanticism and expressionism and offers new approaches to analyzing national cinema.
Oh, Thomas Elsaesser.Okay, so the first thing I noticed about how this is written: This guy loves insanely long sentences. He uses the rhetoric a lot, one of his introductory paragraphs consisting of maybe 30 'questions' that one might ask about Weimar Cinema. How annoying. Yes, we are wondering these things, that's why we got the book! However, if you get past all the rhetoric mumbo-jumbo and look at the facts, it is actually a fairly well researched and presented book about expressionist cinema.I do t..
Professor Thomas Elsaesser's text approaches the topic of Weimar cinema from a new and fresh angle. After checking the book out from the university library only to have it recalled every time after only a week, I decided to buy it. I'm so glad I did. Although I need to transcribe the notes from the public copy onto cards, it's a relief to own a seminal piece on Weimar cinema, the area in which I'm writing my doctoral dissertation. Elsaesser's approach is innovative and allows for interpretations that were l..
