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A Foreign Affair
Billy Wilder's American Films
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Book Presentation:
With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.
About the Author:
Gerd Gemünden is Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German Studies, Film Studies, and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998) and editor of volumes on Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, as well as an anthology of critical writings on Marlene Dietrich.
Press Reviews:
"…provides a hugely readable, insightful examination of Billy Wilder’s American films as the product of transnational cultural exchange." · Monatshefte
"Gemünden’s vital decoding of Wilder’s translation of himself into the American vernacular offers stimulating new material and perspectives that will no doubt shape Wilder scholarship to come." · Austrian Studies Newsletter
"Billy Wilder is hard to trump, because everything one writes about him is only half as entertaining as his great sense of humor. Gerd Gemünden, however, achieves a small miracle: his A Foreign Affair is a highly readable yet serious critical study that reveals Wilder, the alleged cynic, as the moralist he really was." · Volker Schlöndorff
See the publisher website: Berghahn Books
See the complete filmography of Billy Wilder on the website: IMDB ...
> From the same author:
Culture in the Anteroom (2012)
The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer
Dir. Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke
Subject: Theory
Framed Visions (1998)
Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination
Subject: Sociology
The Cinema of Wim Wenders (1997)
Image, Narrative and the Postmodern Condition
Dir. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden
Subject: Director > Wim Wenders
> On a related topic:
City of Darkness, City of Light (2003)
Emigre Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939
Subject: History of Cinema
Double Solitaire (2024)
The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder
Subject: Director > Billy Wilder
Magic Time (2023)
The Films and Scripts of Billy Wilder
by J. R. Jordan and Austin Pendleton
Subject: Director > Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder on Assignment (2021)
Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna
Dir. Noah Isenberg, Billy Wilder and Billy Wilder
Subject: Director > Billy Wilder
It's the Pictures That Got Small (2014)
Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood's Golden Age
Dir. Anthony Slide
Subject: Director > Billy Wilder
Some Like It Wilder (2010)
The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder
Subject: Director > Billy Wilder
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