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The Use and Abuse of Cinema
German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present
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Book Presentation:
Eric Rentschler's new book, The Use and Abuse of Cinema, takes readers on a series of enthralling excursions through the fraught history of German cinema, from the Weimar and Nazi eras to the postwar and postwall epochs and into the new millennium. These journeys afford rich panoramas and nuanced close-ups from a nation's production of fantasies and spectacles, traversing the different ways in which the film medium has figured in Germany, both as a site of creative and critical enterprise and as a locus of destructive and regressive endeavor. Each of the chapters provides a stirring minidrama; the cast includes prominent critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim; postwar directors like Wolfgang Staudte, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Alexander Kluge; representatives of the so-called Berlin School; and exponents of mountain epics, early sound musicals, rubble films, and recent heritage features. A film history that is both original and unconventional, Rentschler's colorful tapestry weaves together figures, motifs, and stories in exciting, unexpected, and even novelistic ways.
About the Author:
Eric Rentschler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the chair of the Film and Visual Studies Program at Harvard University.
Press Reviews:
Rentschler's command of individual filmmakers' oeuvres, from the unjustly forgotten and overlooked to the internationally recognized and celebrated auteurs, and of historical periods from the silents to the evolving present is as impressive as his ability to 'drill down' analytically and uncover significant details, motifs, or patterns. Throughout this book, he carefully historicizes its materials, finding an excellent balance between history, theory, and close analysis across a broad range of films. Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan
Written in highly readable, elegant prose, Rentschler's volume is an authoritative study of the history of German film from the 1920s to the present day by one of the foremost scholars in the field. This is the work of an expert at the peak of his craft. Gerd Gemünden, author of Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951
[The Use and Abuse of Cinema] offers inspired juxtapositions and an authoritative range of knowledge, and is also a very good read. Martin Brady, Modern Language Review
The Use and Abuse of Cinema showcases the scope of Rentschler's work and provides a tantalizing introduction to his sensitive, far-reaching approach to film history.... More broadly, the book argues for the importance of Germany as a case study for the ability of film as a medium to reflect, influence, and even shape the course of history. Lisa Wells Jacobson, Film Quarterly
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same author:
> On a related topic:
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German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror
by Paul Coates, William Rothman and Dudley Andrew
The Hygienic Apparatus (2022)
Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder
City of Darkness, City of Light (2003)
Emigre Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939
Subject: History of Cinema
Weimar Cinema and After (2000)
Germany's Historical Imaginary
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