Description
Book SynopsisThis book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.
Trade Review"It is [a] synthesis of cultural and textual analysis that gives
German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism its heft, never reducing the films in its scope to purely personal creations of their makers nor as automated cultural products, but as ambiguous texts and commercial objects that are always revealing, whether deliberately or inadvertently, evidence of a perpetually shifting social and economic landscape. [...] Baer takes a complex intersection of politics and culture and renders a convincing and comprehensive history."
- Adam Cook,
EuropeNow, special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image (2021)
"This book theorizes neoliberalism beyond a reductive sole emphasis on economics. Instead, it convincingly demonstrates the gendering of neoliberalism through the reading of key films illuminating German cinema with robust, sophisticated, and in-depth scholarship."
- Barbara Mennel, Rothman Chair and Professor of German Studies and Film Studies, University of Florida
"This book provides an original and bold way to rethink German film history since the 1980s. Baer’s comparative close readings, which pair films often not thought of in the same context, are provocative and eye-opening, challenging traditional wisdom and producing fresh insights where observers may have thought that all has been said. This is revisionist film history at its best."
- Gerd Gemünden, Sherman Fairchild Professor of the Humanities, Dartmouth College
"As such, this book represents an extraordinary achievement. It is written in a lucid, compelling prose that vivifies the stakes underpinning the films discussed and brings coherence to complex entanglements of economics, politics, and aesthetics, while also demonstrating that no analysis is complete without a consideration of gender. The volume not only helps us rethink German cinema; it also raises the bar for
how we approach the work of thinking and writing about it."
- Angelica Fenner,
The German Quarterly, Summer 2022
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction. Making Neoliberalism Visible
Chapter 1. German Cinema and the Neoliberal Turn: The End of the National-Cultural Film Project
Chapter 2. Producing German Cinema for the World: Global Blockbusters from Location Germany
Chapter 3. From Everyday Life to the Crisis Ordinary: Films of Ordinary Life and the Resonance of DEFA
Chapter 4. Future Feminism: Political Filmmaking and the Resonance of the West German Feminist Film Movement
Chapter 5. The Failing Family: Changing Constellations of Gender, Intimacy, and Genre
Chapter 6. Refiguring National Cinema in Films about Labour, Money, and Debt
Conclusion. German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism
Bibliography
Index
