A Companion to German Cinema Wiley Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas Series

A Companion to German Cinema regards the shifting terrain of German filmmaking and film studies against their larger social contexts with twenty-two newly commissioned essays by well-established and younger scholars in the field. While several of these focus on classic topics such as Weimar cinema, Fifties cinema, New German Cinema and its legacy, and Holocaust film, the collection is distinguished by its focus on new developments and the innovative light they may shed on earlier practices.

A Companion to German Cinema includes essays on Berlin Film, Neue Heimat Film, New Comedy, post-Wall documentaries, the post-Wende RAF genre, and Rabenmutter imagery, as well as on the persistently overlooked and under-theorized Indianerfilme, post-AIDS documentaries, sexploitation films, and new multicultural and transnational films produced in Germany under the auspices of the European Union. Organized into three ?movements? representing the significance of these developments for their aesthetic theorization, A Companion to German Cinema challenges its readers to address critical gaps in the field with the aim of opening it further onto new terrains of intellectual engagement.

Notes on Editors and Contributors vii

Acknowledgments xii

Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1
Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch

First Movement: Destabilization 23

1 Have Dialectic, Will Travel: The GDR Indianerfilme as Critique and Radical Imaginary 27
Dennis Broe

2 Coming Out into Socialism: Heiner Carow’s Third Way 55
David Brandon Dennis

3 German Identity, Myth, and Documentary Film 82
Julia Knight

4 Post-Reunification Cinema: Horror, Nostalgia, Redemption 110
Anthony Enns

5 “Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies”: The Berlin School 134
David Clarke

6 Projecting Heimat: On the Regional and the Urban in Recent Cinema 155
Jennifer Ruth Hosek

7 No Happily Ever After: Disembodying Gender, Destabilizing Nation in Angelina Maccarone’s Unveiled 175
Gayatri Devi

Second Movement: Dislocation 193

8 Views across the Rhine: Border Poetics in Straub–Huillet’s Machorka-Muff (1962) and Lothringen! (1994) 197
Claudia Pummer

9 Contested Spaces: Kamal Aljafari’s Transnational Palestinian Films 218
Peter Limbrick

10 Fatih Akın’s Homecomings 249
Savaş Arslan

11 Lessons in Liberation: Fassbinder’s Whity at the Crossroads of Hollywood Melodrama and Blaxploitation 260
Priscilla Layne

12 Sexploitation Film from West Germany 287
Harald Steinwender and Alexander Zahlten

13 A Documentarist at the Limits of Queer: The Films of Jochen Hick 318
Robert M. Gillett

14 Models of Masculinity in Postwar Germany: The Sissi Films and the West German Wiederbewaffnungsdebatte 341
Nadja Krämer

15 Crossdressing, Remakes, and National Stereotypes: The Germany–Hollywood Connection 379
Silke Arnold-de Simine

Third Movement: Disidentification 405

16 The Aesthetics of Ethnic Cleansing: A Historiographic and Filmic Analysis of Andres Veiel’s Balagan 409
Domenica Vilhotti

17 Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse: “Feminist Re-Visions” of a Historical Controversy 429
Sally Winkle

18 The Baader Oedipus Complex 462
Vojin Saša Vukadinović

19 Dislocations: Videograms of a Revolution and the Search for Images 483
Frances Guerin

20 Germany Welcomes Back Its Jews: Go for Zucker! and the Women in German Debate (aka Wiggie-leaks: A Polemical Analysis) 507
Terri Ginsberg

21 Screening the German Social Divide: Aelrun Goette’s Die Kinder sind tot 526
David James Prickett

22 A Negative Utopia: Michael Haneke’s Fragmentary Cinema 553
Tara Forrest

Index 573

Terri Ginsberg is a director and public programmer at the International Council for Middle East Studies in Washington, DC. She has taught film, media, and cultural studies at New York University, Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, Ithaca College, and Brooklyn College. She is author of Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology (2007), and co-editor (with Kirsten Moana Thompson) of Perspectives on German Cinema (1996) and of several other volumes on global cinema and Middle Eastern film studies.

Andrea Mensch is a senior lecturer in the English Department at North Carolina State University and has also taught film and literature courses in London and at the NCSU Prague Institute. She was associate editor as well as book reviews editor for Jouvert: A Journal of Post-colonial Studies.