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International Adventures
German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s
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Book Presentation:
West German cinema of the 1960s is frequently associated with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, collectively known by the 1970s as the "New German Cinema." Yet for domestic and international audiences at the time, German cinema primarily meant popular genres such as exotic adventure films, Gothic crime thrillers, westerns, and sex films, which were dismissed by German filmmakers and critics of the 1970s as "Daddy's Cinema."
International Adventures provides the first comprehensive account of these genres, and charts the history of the West German film industry and its main protagonists from the immediate post-war years to its boom period in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing film genres in the context of industrial practices, literary traditions, biographical trajectories, and wider cultural and social developments, this book uncovers a forgotten period of German filmmaking that merits reassessment.
International Adventures firmly locates its case studies within the wider dynamic of European cinema. In its study of West German cinema's links and co-operations with other countries including Britain, France, and Italy, the book addresses what is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of 1960s popular film genres: the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production.
About the Author:
Tim Bergfelder is Head of Film Studies at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on German and European cinema, and is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (2002) and The Titanic in Myth and Memory (2004).
Press Reviews:
"Tim Bergfelder has written an excellent and in many aspects exemplary book, which leaves, also without daring theses, a lasting impression. Bergfelder invites the reader to reflect on film-historical categories and methods and to re-examine a subject that turns out not to be all that familiar." · Filmblatt
"Drawing a picture of the German cinema of the 1960s as a blatantly commercial and truly internationally minded culture industry, Bergfelder’s elegantly written and convincingly argued book not only provides an overdue counterweight to the conventionally narrow focus on the Young or ‘New German Cinema’ as one of the best-known pedigrees of European art cinema to emerge in the 1960s… a book that cannot be praised enough for opening up entirely new horizons in the study of German and European cinema." · Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"…the entire book is original, provocative, and informative, and Bergfelder’s argument is powerful." · Choice
See the publisher website: Berghahn Books
> From the same author:
Stars and Stardom in Brazilian Cinema (2018)
Dir. Tim Bergfelder, Lisa Shaw and João Luiz Vieira
Destination London (2012)
German-Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950
Dir. Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
> On a related topic:
German Film after Germany (2008)
Toward a Transnational Aesthetic
Charting Asian German Film History (2025)
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New German Cinema and Its Global Contexts (2025)
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Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism (2024)
Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics
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Cinematically Transmitted Disease (2024)
Eugenics and Film in Weimar and Nazi Germany
Film Societies in Germany and Austria 1910-1933 (2023)
Tracing the Social Life of Cinema
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