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A Culture Of Light
Cinema And Technology In 1920s Germany
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Book Presentation:
Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany's advance to technological modernity, light - particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light - became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life.In Frances Guerin's compelling history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light - electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights - and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin's interpretations center on use of light in films such as Schatten (1923), Variete (1925), Metropolis (1926), and Der Golem (1920). In these films we see how light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the narrative, and the central thematic concern. This history relieves German films of the responsibility to explain the political and ideological instability of the period, an instability said to be the uncertain foundation of Nazism. In unlocking this dubious link, A Culture of Light redefines the field of German film scholarship.
About the Author:
Frances Guerin is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury.
See the publisher website: University of Minnesota Press
> From the same author:
The Image and the Witness (2007)
Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture
Dir. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas
Subject: Theory
> On a related topic:
The Haunted Screen (2008)
Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt
Afterlives (2016)
Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany
by Steve Choe
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Promise of Cinema (2016)
German Film Theory, 1907–1933
Dir. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer and Michael Cowan
Subject: Theory
The Use and Abuse of Cinema (2015)
German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present
Subject: History of Cinema
The Hygienic Apparatus (2022)
Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder
The Long Century's Long Shadow (2021)
Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern
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