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Order online and receive a 25% discount $85.00 Hardcover, 314 pp. ISBN13: 978-1-55458-225-9 Release Date: |
Book Description
During the last decade, contemporary German and Austrian cinema has grappled with new social and economic realities. The “cinema of consensus,” a term coined to describe the popular and commercially oriented filmmaking of the 1990s, has given way to a more heterogeneous and critical cinema culture. Making the greatest artistic impact since the 1970s, contemporary cinema is responding to questions of globalization and the effects of societal and economic change on the individual.
This book explores this trend by investigating different thematic and aesthetic strategies and alternative methods of film production and distribution. Functioning both as a product and as an agent of globalizing processes, this new cinema mediates and influences important political and social debates. The contributors illuminate these processes through their analyses of cinema’s intervention in discourses on such concepts as “national cinema,” the effects of globalization on social mobility, and the emergence of a “global culture.” The essays illustrate the variety and inventiveness of contemporary Austrian and German filmmaking and highlight the complicated interdependencies between global developments and local specificities. They confirm a broader trend toward a more complex, critical, and formally diverse cinematic scene.
This book offers insights into the strategies employed by German and Austrian filmmakers to position themselves between the commercial pressures of the film industry and the desire to mediate or even attempt to affect social change. It will be of interest to scholars in film studies, cultural studies, and European studies.
About Gabriele Mueller, and James M. Skidmore
Gabriele Mueller is an associate professor of German Studies and affiliated with the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University, Toronto. Her research focuses mainly on German cultural studies and German film studies. She has published essays on various aspects of post-unification German film, in particular on cinematic contributions to cultural memory discourses.
James M. Skidmore teaches German literature, film, and cultural studies at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses mainly on the intersections of politics, history, and societal development in narrative literature and film. He is the author of The Trauma of Defeat: Ricarda Huch’s Historiography during the Weimar Republic (2005), as well as articles on German and Canadian literature and film.
Reviews
“German-language cinema has always been more diverse than film historians admit. The contributions in this volume challenge us to recognize this heterogeneity in recent, post-millennial films from Germany and Austria. Close readings elaborate how filmmakers respond to the tensions that arise as the national and European social landscape changes, with implications for film aesthetics, funding, production, distribution, and reception. At the same time these crisply written chapters redefine the emerging cinema landscape within transnational market dynamics and capital flow. I recommend this volume to readers seeking to understand the multiplicity and hybridity of the post-1990s ‘consensus’ cinema.”
— Marc Silberman, University of Wisconsin, editor of The German Wall: Fallout in Europe (2011)
Related interest
By the same editor
German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss, Mathias Schulze, editor, James M. Skidmore, editor,, David G. John, editor,, Grit Liebscher, editor, and Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, editor