Expressionist film

Description

"This volume deals with one of the seminal chapters in the early history of cinema. Along with the classical Hollywood style of filmmaking and the montage style of the Russian revolutionary cinema, expressionist film represents one of the three pillars of the formation of film culture in its early decades. Yet, expressionist film was just one of the rich variety of film forms created in the years of the Weimar Republic. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other expressionist films were accompanied by the historical spectacles and costume dramas of Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang's crime serials, the monumental films of Joe May, the naturalist Kammerspielfilme, and the street and vaudeville explorations of Karl Grune and E. A. Dupont. In addition, beginning in 1921, avant-gardist films emerged in the context of the dadaist rather than the expressionist art movement. Together, the great variety of film forms and experiments makes the early years of Weimar one of the cinema history's most energetic and productive periods." "For half a century the reception of these films has been intricately linked with two books, Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen. It is largely to Kracauer and Eisner's credit that the films of this period have remained so alive in the cultural memory. However, fifty years on there is a growing awareness that the particular lines of inquiry pursued by Kracauer and Eisner have left us with a highly ambiguous and contradictory picture of the cinema of Wiemar, and that a fresh assessment of the film culture of these years is overdue.". "In pursuing the variety of approaches, trends, and stylistic experiments in the cinema of the early years of Weimar, Expressionist Film - New Perspectives strives for a picture of the cinema of this period that reflects in thematic as well as stylistic terms the vibrant and multifaceted cultural and political developments of the time. The book is a joint venture of the Center for European Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Film Studies at the University of Mainz, and the German Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main."--BOOK JACKET.

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