Peripheral Visions : The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema

Ward, Janet (COR); Federle, Courtney (COR); Brodnax, Mary M. (COR); Hake, Sabine (COR); Leblans, Anne (COR)

ISBN 10: 0814329284 / ISBN 13: 9780814329283

Editore: Wayne State University Press, 2001

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Peripheral Visions : The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema
• Editore: Wayne State University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0814329284
• ISBN 13: 9780814329283
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Condizione: As New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

The title of this collection echoes Siegfried Kracauer's statement that the lavish movie palaces of 1920s Germany served to stimulate peripheral vision and thus prevent the audience from being absorbed by the spectacle itself. In consideration of questions concerning spatial transformations in and around Weimar cinema, the eight essays in this volume, though some more explicitly than others, have Kracauer as their interlocutor. The first major critic of classic German cinema, Kracauer is patron of the optics that seeks insight on the periphery, inviting the analysis of those other spaces that are implicated, if not present, in the films themselves. The films treated in this volume include such Expressionist mainstays as Lang's ""Metropolis"" and Murnau's ""Nosferatu"" as well as generally less familar works such as Ruttman's ""Berlin, Symphony of a City"", Jessner's ""Backstairs"", Berger's ""Day and Night"" and the mountain films of Fanck and Riefenstahl. Among the ""hidden stages"" analyzed are amusement parks, carnivals, department stores, train compartments, city streets, the womb, the theatre, the chamber, basement apartments - and ultimately Neubabelsberg, the gargantuan studio-complex near Berlin where so many of these peripheral spaces came to be simulated. With references that range from set architecture to Christmas celebrations, from the poetry of Rilke to chamber music, from the introduction of sound to Macy's parades, and from an ""urban unconscious"" to a ""cinematic sublime"", ""Peripheral Visions"" is a collection that should be of interest to students and scholars of film and German cultural studies.

L'autore

Kenneth S. Calhoon is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon and author of Fatherland: Novalis, Freud, and the Discipline of Romance (Wayne State University Press, 1992).