Description
Book SynopsisAfter the First World War, the effects of financial crisis could be felt in all corners of the newly formed Weimar Republic. The newly interconnected world economy was barely understood and yet it was increasingly made visible in the films of the time. The complexities of this system were reflected on screen to both the everyday spectator as well as a new class of financial workers who looked to popular depictions of speculation and crisis to make sense of their own place on the shifting ground of modern life. Finance and the World Economy in Weimar Cinema turns to the many underexamined depictions of finance capital that appear in the films of 1920s Germany. The representation of finance capital in these films is essential to our understanding of the culture of the Weimar Republic – particularly in the relation between finance and ideas of gender, nation and modernity. As visual records, these films reveal the stock exchange as a key space of modernity and coincide with the abstraction of finance as a vast labour of representation in its own right. In so doing, they introduce core visual tropes that have become essential to our understanding of finance and capitalism throughout the twentieth century.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1: The Stock Exchange as a Space of Modernity and Labour of Representation
The Stock Exchange as a Space of Modernity
The Stock Exchange as a Labour of Representation
Chapter 2: Dr. Mabuse and His Doubles
Dr. Mabuse the Speculator
Dr. Mabuse and the Weimar Financial Imaginary
Chapter 3: Women and Financial Capital in Weimar Cinema
The New Woman as Speculator
Women as a Medium of Exchange
Chapter 4: Finance, Liquidity and the Crisis of Masculinity in Weimar Cinema
The Threat of Dissolution
Reactionary Modernism and Finance Capital
Chapter 5: The Aggregate Image and the World Economy
Macroeconomic Visions
Epilogue
Fungibility and Authenticity
Appendix
Bibliography
