Techno-romanticism: Special Effects in German Fantastic Films of the Silent Era PDF Download
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Author: Katharina Loew
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124868561
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Based extensively on primary sources, this study undertakes a reevaluation of the interpretative categories by which German silent cinema has been described. Revealing the correlations between the technical achievements evident in the films of this period and the dominant aesthetic philosophy among filmmakers and theorists, this study presents a re-reading of the prominent fantastic films Der Student von Prag (Deutsche Bioscop, 1913, dir. Stellan Rye), Nosferatu (Prana Film, 1921, dir. F.W. Murnau) and Faust (Ufa, 1925/1926, dir. F.W. Murnau). German silent cinema was the site of a radical redefinition of the problematic relationship between art and technology. This fundamental shift in the cultural perception was the result of a "techno-romantic" ideology that eventually rendered possible technology's integration into the aesthetic discourse. Because they made perceptible the interrelations between modern technology and Romantic ideas, special effects played a key role in corroborating the techno-romantic outlook. Techno-romanticism served as the conceptual framework in which the parameters of aesthetic modernity were negotiated. Special effects allowed cinema to become the site where the gulf between technology and art was actually bridged.
Author: Katharina Loew
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124868561
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Get Book Here
Book Description
Based extensively on primary sources, this study undertakes a reevaluation of the interpretative categories by which German silent cinema has been described. Revealing the correlations between the technical achievements evident in the films of this period and the dominant aesthetic philosophy among filmmakers and theorists, this study presents a re-reading of the prominent fantastic films Der Student von Prag (Deutsche Bioscop, 1913, dir. Stellan Rye), Nosferatu (Prana Film, 1921, dir. F.W. Murnau) and Faust (Ufa, 1925/1926, dir. F.W. Murnau). German silent cinema was the site of a radical redefinition of the problematic relationship between art and technology. This fundamental shift in the cultural perception was the result of a "techno-romantic" ideology that eventually rendered possible technology's integration into the aesthetic discourse. Because they made perceptible the interrelations between modern technology and Romantic ideas, special effects played a key role in corroborating the techno-romantic outlook. Techno-romanticism served as the conceptual framework in which the parameters of aesthetic modernity were negotiated. Special effects allowed cinema to become the site where the gulf between technology and art was actually bridged.
Author: Anton Kaes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520962435
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 701
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Book Description
Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of “theory” not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity’s most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, The Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.
Author: Sarah Keller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543301
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
The advent of new screening practices and viewing habits in the twenty-first century has spurred a public debate over what it means to be a “cinephile.” In Anxious Cinephilia, Sarah Keller places these competing visions in historical and theoretical perspective, tracing how the love of movies intertwines with anxieties over the content and impermanence of cinematic images. Keller reframes the history of cinephilia from the earliest days of film through the French New Wave and into the streaming era, arguing that love and fear have shaped the cinematic experience from its earliest days. This anxious love for the cinema marks both institutional practices and personal experiences, from the curation of the moviegoing experience to the creation of community and identity through film festivals to posting on social media. Through a detailed analysis of films and film history, Keller examines how changes in cinema practice and spectatorship create anxiety even as they inspire nostalgia. Anxious Cinephilia offers a new theoretical approach to the relationship between spectator and cinema and reimagines the concept of cinephilia to embrace its diverse forms and its uncertain future.
Author: Paul Grainge
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748628940
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 616
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Book Description
An introduction to film history, this anthology covers the history of film from 1895. It is arranged chronologically, and each chapter contains an introduction on the key developments within the period. Various types of film history are undertaken to enable students to become familiar with different types of film historical research.
Author: Katharina Loew
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048551714
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.
Author: Michael Minden
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571131461
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Providing a broad range of materials and resources for the study of Fritz Lang's classic film Metropolist (1972), this volume includes both standard critical essays and contributions appearing for the first time.
Author: Siegfried Kracauer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691191344
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines German society from 1921 to 1933, in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He explores the connections among film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer makes a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. With a critical introduction by Leonardo Quaresima which provides context for Kracauer’s scholarship and his contributions to film studies, this Princeton Classics edition makes an influential work available to new generations of cinema enthusiasts.
Author: Jeffrey S. Librett
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804739313
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 444
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking work, the author effects the first extended rhetorical-philosophical reading of the historically problematic relationship between Jews and Germans, based on an analysis of texts from the Enlightenment through Modernism by Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The theoretical underpinning of the work lies in the authors rereading, in terms of contemporary rhetorical theory, of the medieval tradition known as figural representation, which defines the Jewish-Christian relation as that between the dead, prefigural letter and the living, fulfilled spirit. After arguing that the German Enlightenment ultimately plays out the historical phantasm of a necessary Judaization of Protestant rationality, the author shows that German Early Romanticism consists fundamentally in the attempt to solve the aporias raised by this impossible confrontation between Protestant spirit and Jewish letter. In readings of Dorothea SchlegelMendelssohns daughterand her husband Friedrich Schlegel, the author provides a new interpretation of the Neo-Catholic turn of later German Romanticism. Further, he situates the proleptic end and reversal of the project of Jewish emancipation in the two extreme versions of late-nineteenth-century anti-Judaism, those of Marx and Wagner, here viewed as binary concretizations of a specifically post-Romantic paganized Protestantism. Finally, the author argues that twentieth-century Modernism as represented by Nietzsche and Freud renews, if in a multiply ironic displacement, the secret Judaizing tendencies of the Enlightenment. Fascism and Communism both denigrate this Modernism, which affirms the letter of language as quasi-synonymous with the force of temporalityor anticipatory repetitionthat disrupts all claims to the full presence of spirit. The book ends with a note on recent debates about Holocaust memory.
Author: Robert C. Reimer
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 158510857X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
German Culture through Film: An Introduction to German Cinema is an English-language text that serves equally well in courses on modern German film, in courses on general film studies, in courses that incorporate film as a way to study culture, and as an engaging resource for scholars, students, and devotees of cinema and film history. In its second edition, German Culture through Film expands on the first edition, providing additional chapters with context for understanding the era in which the featured films were produced. Thirty-three notable German films are arranged in seven chronological chapters, spanning key moments in German film history, from the silent era to the present. Each chapter begins with an introduction that focuses on the history and culture surrounding films of the relevant period. Sections within chapters are each devoted to one particular film, providing film credits, a summary of the story, background information, an evaluation, questions and activities to encourage diverse interpretations, a list of related films, and bibliographical information on the films discussed.
Author: Patricia Aufderheide
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199720398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to tell the truths worth telling. Beginning with an overview of the central issues of documentary filmmaking--its definitions and purposes, its forms and founders--Aufderheide focuses on several of its key subgenres, including public affairs films, government propaganda (particularly the works produced during World War II), historical documentaries, and nature films. Her thematic approach allows readers to enter the subject matter through the kinds of films that first attracted them to documentaries, and it permits her to make connections between eras, as well as revealing the ongoing nature of documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. Interwoven throughout are discussions of the ethical and practical considerations that arise with every aspect of documentary production. A particularly useful feature of the book is an appended list of "100 great documentaries" that anyone with a serious interest in the genre should see. Drawing on the author's four decades of experience as a film scholar and critic, this book is the perfect introduction not just for teachers and students but also for all thoughtful filmgoers and for those who aspire to make documentaries themselves. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
