Watching Polyphony: Classical Music in the New German Cinema (original) (raw)
Related papers
Musical Modernism and German Cinema from 1913 to 1933. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan
2017
“Finocchiaro’s study delivers compelling insights into the relationship between Musical Modernism and German silent and early sound cinema. Approaching cinema from the vantage point of its engagement with modernist composers manages to move beyond the boundaries between “high” and “low” art, opening up the wider field of the cultural status of cinema in relation to coexisting art forms at a crucial historical moment.” (Anna K. Windisch, University of Salzburg, Austria. Co-Editor of The Sounds of Silent Films. New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice, 2014)
The Author and his Corpse: German Classical Culture in the Cinema of Occupied Germany
German Life and Letters, 2018
The status of German High Culture and that of German National identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way setting the German National project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke described in 1907 as a Kulturnation.[2] With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946,[3] he sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, now defined by barbarism and folly by the Allied powers occupying it. In examining two films, Georg Klaren’s 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck,[4] and Karl-Heinz Stroux’s 1949 filming of Goethe’s Werther[5], released in the Tri-Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic my paper will cast new light on this dilemma through the popular medium of Cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. I shall examine the choices of Büchner and Goethe as authors for the screen and look at what role they fulfil in a recuperative project of German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation.
The Author and His Corpse: German Classical Culture in the National Cinema of Occupied Germany
German Life and Letters, 2018
The status of German high culture and that of German national identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way, setting the German national project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke, among others, described as a 'Kulturnation'. With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946, Meinecke sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, thereby challenging the Allied occupiers' disparagement of Germany as barbarous and foolish. By examining two films, Georg Klaren's 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and Karl-Heinz Stroux's 1949 filming of Goethe's Werther, produced in the Tri-Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic, this article casts new light on this dilemma of cultural self-definition through the popular medium of cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. The article examines the choices of Büchner and Goethe as authors for the screen and looks at the role they fulfil in a project to recuperate German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation.
Eric Rentschler. The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2019
Books, like films, always mean more than their authors might have intended," opines Eric Rentschler (87), when commenting on one of Klaus Kreimeier's earlier historiographical tomes, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Konzerns from 1992. The remark could equally apply to Rentschler's own eclectic historiography, comprising reprints from journal articles, book chapters, and catalogue contributions first published between 1985 and 2013 and now cohabiting within the same book covers, effectively charting his own coherent take on German fi lm history. The effect is certainly intriguing, revealing the incremental assembly, "Stück für Stück," of a comprehensive vision of this national cinema across the course of one scholar's illustrious career. In this regard, the volume constitutes as much an autobiography of Rentschler's scholarly evolution as it does a historiography of German film, evincing self-reflexivity most especially in the bookended introduction and closing comments. That closing chapter describes two visits to the Berlinale-a festival Rentschler first visited in 1979 and has attended annually between 1985 and today, making a point to note that he has missed it only once during that time span. This fact alone bespeaks an extraordinary commitment to and unabating passion for German cinema, one that has rendered him not only fluent in the canonized highlights of this national cinema but also savvy about the lesser known and underestimated directors and their films-a consideration which solicits a rethinking of inherited tropes and assumptions. Transposing one's scholarly career into a coherent table of contents poses its own challenges, but the current organization works quite effectively, moving in chronological order across key epochal divisions in German film history while also enabling novel ways of identifying both continuities and discontinuities across eras with regard to modes of production, aesthetics, politics, and criticism. In what may very well be a reflexive gesture towards Rentschler's own contribution to the enterprise of film reception, the first section focuses on key German figures in film criticism, beginning with an essay on notable early writers Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim. Rentschler argues that the social and formal divisions all too often drawn between these two theorists dissolves if one reviews their writings as a whole, including overlooked and untranslated texts that reveal that Kracauer also acknowledged the imbrication of aesthetics within the social, and that Arnheim, by turns, possessed a sensitivity to the
1996
As German reunification has increased attention to German history and culture, scholarly output devoted to all phases of the history of German film has escalated rapidly. In this, the first of the PERSPECTIVES volumes to treat national cinema, the editors have collected classic and newly commissioned essays and articles that address a wide range of historical issues, including the politics of gender and sexuality; the Holocaust; feminism; and Nazi propaganda films. These discusssions of dramas and documentaries, filmmakers, and aesthetic ideologies cover all aspects of German cinema, from its silent beginnings to the present day. "Among the recent anthologies on German film, Ginsberg/Thompson's project is by far the most ambitious one, both in size and in scope. In addition to an introduction by the editors, this weighty tome contains forty-three articles/essays, thirty-six of which are reprints. Seven are original contributions. An index has been added: given the size of the anthology, this is an invaluable bonus for the reader...[T]he introduction conveys many valid insights into the present state of German film studies and manages to launch the book on a very promising note...Within these parameters, the individual contributions live up to the editors' promise and offer fresh, often quite original insights...All in all, this is a remarkable anthology: surprisingly cohesive in the face of its diversity of topics/methodologies/strategies and extremely persuasive in arguing the editors' case for a more socially aware, politically 'engaged' re-orientation in German film studies. As a first-class reference work and a showcase of film criticism at its finest, the book deserves a wide readership." -- Gerhard P. Knapp (University of Utah), special issue of SEMINAR on "Recent German Film"