German Ways of War

The Affective Geographies and Generic Transformations of German War Films

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by Jaimey Fisher

Type

Essays

Subject

Genre > War films

Keywords

war, historical films, war films

Publishing date

2022

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Collection

War Culture

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 250 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ¾ inches (16 x 25 cm)

ISBN

978-1-9788291-7-6

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Book Presentation:
German Ways of War deploys theories of space, mobility, and affect to investigate how war films realize their political projects. Analyzing films across the decades, from the 1910s to 2000s, German Ways of War addresses an important lacuna in media studies: while scholars have tended to focus on the similarities between cinematic looking and weaponized targeting -- between shooting a camera and discharging a gun – this book argues that war films negotiate spaces throughout that frame their violence in ways more revealing than their battle scenes. Beyond that well-known intersection of visuality and violence, German Ways of War explores how the genre frames violence within spatio-affective operations. The production of novel spaces and evocation of new affects transform war films, including the genre’s manipulation of mobility, landscape, territory, scales, and topological networks. Such effects amount to what author Jaimey Fisher terms the films’ “affective geographies” that interweave narrative-generated affects, spatial depictions, and political processes.

About the Author:
JAIMEY FISHER is a professor of German and cinema and digital media at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Treme, Christian Petzold and Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War.

Press Reviews:
"German Ways of War is an engaging text that charts out a captivating genre history that extends far beyond its immediate scope of German War films. The book is written as a fascinating account to how warfare changed in the twentieth century. . . The project is meticulously researched and provides invaluable political, historical, and legal documentation regarding war and peace policies in Germany."
— Nora M. Alter

"This original study of exemplary German features probes essential dimensions of war cinema that have received little scholarly attention, its geopolitical determinations, spatial imaginaries, and affective geographies. A major contribution to film history and media studies, German Ways of War offers a comprehensive analysis of the numerous countenances and different functions this generic possibility has assumed in exemplary German productions from World War I to the postmillennial era."
— Eric Rentschler

"German Ways of War is an engaging text that charts out a captivating genre history that extends far beyond its immediate scope of German War films. The book is written as a fascinating account to how warfare changed in the twentieth century. . . The project is meticulously researched and provides invaluable political, historical, and legal documentation regarding war and peace policies in Germany."
— Nora M. Alter

"This original study of exemplary German features probes essential dimensions of war cinema that have received little scholarly attention, its geopolitical determinations, spatial imaginaries, and affective geographies. A major contribution to film history and media studies, German Ways of War offers a comprehensive analysis of the numerous countenances and different functions this generic possibility has assumed in exemplary German productions from World War I to the postmillennial era."
— Eric Rentschler

See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press