Search results for ""author paul cooke""

German film is enjoying enormous levels of success, be success defined in terms of financial returns, popularity with audiences at home and abroad or critical acclaim. On the one hand, the 2000s saw German productions become regular guests at all the major international film festivals, from Sundance to Tokyo, winning awards across the globe. As such, and as reviewers are keen to point out, the German industry appears to be reaching once again the aesthetic heights that brought it the international praise of critics from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. On the other, domestic productions are becoming more popular and, as a result, more commercially viable. Contemporary German Cinema examines the success of recent film production in its wider industrial, cultural and political context, blending broad overviews of recent trends with detailed examinations of key case studies. As a starting point, it explores the German film funding system and the economic place of the German industry within global film production. Subsequent chapters then look at the impact of this system on filmmakers’ aesthetic choices, be it the role of realism in contemporary cinema, or the rediscovery of the Heimatfilm as a popular film genre. This is complemented by discussion of the dominant issues these films explore, from the legacies of Germany’s Nazi past and post-war division, to the nation’s increasingly multicultural make up, the changing age and gender demographic of cinema audiences as well as the nation’s shifting relationship with the United States as both a ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ space.Paul Cooke looks at many of the most successful films of the last two decades, including Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run, Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin!, Hans Weingartner's The Edukators, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarchks The Lives of Others and Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall.

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Germany's national film industry has been undergoing a remarkable resurgence since the beginning of the new millennium. German language films have been receiving Oscar nominations, the likes of "Downfall" and "The Lives of Others" have been winning Oscars, and all the main international festivals, from Berlin to Cannes, have been showcasing these films. German language cinema is again attracting attention at home and abroad and "New Directions in German Cinema" explores its developments since 2000. An international group of specialists on German film, society, culture, and politics together provide a wide-ranging study of this remarkable turn of fortunes. They examine just what German language film now has to offer, from the evolution of the so-called 'heritage films' which now dominate the country's mainstream and which examine Germany's problematic pasts - the Nazi, East German and terrorist legacies - to those which focus on the contemporary social reality of the Berlin Republic.

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Les Mains jointes (1909) was the collection of poetry that launched the long career of Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac (1885-1970). This critical edition provides the first ever overview of the volume’s complex textual history (spanning four decades). Drawing on Mauriac’s unpublished cahiers de jeunesse, Paul Cooke challenges the author’s claim that the majority of the poems in the collection were written while he was still at school. A selection of additional poems published between 1905 and 1923 (some of which have remained hidden for nearly a century) allows the reader to situate Les Mains jointes in relation to Mauriac’s wider verse output. In his Introduction, Cooke both explores the genesis and history of Les Mains jointes and offers some analysis of Mauriac’s style as a poet.

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The first major study of the contemporary German debate over "normalization" and its impact across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses. This volume features sixteen thought-provoking essays by renowned international experts on German society, culture, and politics that, together, provide a comprehensive study of Germany's postunification process of "normalization." Essays ranging across a variety of disciplines including politics, foreign policy, economics, literature, architecture, and film examine how since 1990 the often contested concept of normalization has become crucial to Germany'sself-understanding. Despite the apparent emergence of a "new" Germany, the essays demonstrate that normalization is still in question, and that perennial concerns -- notably the Nazi past and the legacy of the GDR -- remain central to political and cultural discourses and affect the country's efforts to deal with the new challenges of globalization and the instability and polarization it brings. This is the first major study in English or German of the impact of the normalization debate across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses. Contributors: Stephen Brockmann, Jeremy Leaman, Sebastian Harnisch and Kerry Longhurst, Lothar Probst, Simon Ward, Anna Saunders, Annette Seidel Arpaci, Chris Homewood, Andrew Plowman, Helmut Schmitz, Karoline Von Oppen, William Collins Donahue, Kathrin Schödel, Stuart Taberner, Paul Cooke Stuart Taberner isProfessor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society and Paul Cooke is Senior Lecturer in German Studies, both at the University of Leeds.

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Re-examines German cinema's representation of the Germans as victims during the Second World War and its aftermath. The recent "discovery" of German wartime suffering has had a particularly profound impact in German visual culture. Films from Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse (2003) to Oliver Hirschbiegel's Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and the two-part television mini-series Dresden (2006) have shown how ordinary Germans suffered during and after the war. Such films have been presented by critics as treating a topic that had been taboo for German filmmakers. However, the representation of wartime suffering has a long tradition on the German screen. For decades, filmmakers have recontextualized images of Germans as victims to engage shifting social and ideological discourses. By focusing on this process, the present volume explores how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both of the postwar German states and the now-unified nation have attempted to facethe trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world. Contributors: Seán Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sabine Hake, JenniferKapczynski, Manuel Köppen, Rachel Palfreyman, Brad Prager, Johannes von Moltke. Paul Cooke is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and Marc Silberman is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.

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