Description
Book SynopsisAn analysis of the complicated relationship between two cinemas - Hollywood's and Nazi Germany's - in this theoretically and politically incisive study. The text examines the split course of German popular film from the early 1930s until the mid 1950s.
Trade Review"Lutz Koepnick's The Dark Mirror provides one of the finest, most compelling and suggestive accounts to date of the multiple locations of German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Charting the shifting relationships between institutional contexts and individual acts of reception, Koepnick persuasively shows how the German cinema and its filmmakers-both in exile and in Nazi Germany-contributed to a fragile, stratified, indeed, "nonsynchronous" public sphere."-Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History "Lutz Koepnick's brilliant study debunks the received wisdom concerning Nazi German and Hollywood film of the 1930s and 40s. Using detailed analyses of 8 films, with special focus on sound and music, he insists upon the disjointed contexts and uneven relationships of American and German filmmaking. Historically nuanced and theoretically savvy, this remarkable book offers something for everyone: Americanists, Germanists, historians, students of cinema sound and music, those interested in debates between art and popular forms, and European and Hollywood production."-Caryl Flinn, author of Strains of Utopia
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Dark Mirror PART 1: HOLLYWOOD in BERLIN, 1933--1939 Chapter 1 Sounds of Silence: Nazi Cinema and the Quest for a National Culture Industry Chapter 2 Incorporating the Underground: Curtis Bernhardt's The Tunnel Chapter 3 Engendering Mass Culture: Zarah Leander and the Economy of Desire Chapter 4 Siegfried Rides Again: Nazi Westerns and Modernity PART 2: BERLIN in HOLLYWOOD, 1939--1955 Chapter 5 Wagner at Warner's: German Sounds and Hollywood Studio Visions Chapter 6 Berlin Noir: Robert Siodmak's Hollywood Chapter 7 Pianos, Priests, and Popular Culture: Sirk, Lang, and the Legacy of American Populism Chapter 8 Isolde Resurrected: Curtis Bernhardt's Interrupted Melody Epilogue: "Talking about Germany" Notes Index
