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Continental Strangers
German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951
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Book Presentation:
Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), William Dieterle's The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948), and Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.
About the Author:
Gerd Gemünden is the Sherman Fairchild Professor in the Humanities at Dartmouth College.
Press Reviews:
Deftly, Gerd Gemünden combines perceptive close readings of select films with sharp archival investigation to show how some key movies of classical Hollywood came-in often fraught manner-to engage with the evils of fascism. By understanding cinema as a complex negotiation over political meanings, from production to final results onscreen, this volume represents a major contribution to the literature on the Hollywood emigrés and their cultural work. Dana Polan, New York University
Continental Strangers is a necessary and most compelling pendant to Thomas Doherty's Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939. Indeed, these two recent releases provide an impressive ensemble. Doherty depicts how American film studios reacted to Nazi terror in both direct and less overt ways. Gemünden fills out the picture in a series of intriguing case studies devoted to filmmakers who fled Hitler and settled in Southern California. Sensitive to the variety of ways in which German film artists experienced emigration and exile, Gemünden's book remains admirably attentive to the historical determinations and textual shapes of Hollywood's anti-Nazi features. Eric Rentschler, Harvard University
A lucid and comprehensive account of German filmmakers in American exile, this book also offers a poetics of displacement and alienation. It adds another chapter to the story about Hitler and Hollywood and contributes to a deeper historical understanding of political cinema at a moment of crisis. Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley
A welcome and well-researched survey. Cineaste
Gemünden's work... makes a valuable contribution to film history... Journal of American History
...a richly contextualized and nuanced reading of exile cinema... American Historcial Review
A most important book. Clayton Dillard, Slant Magazine
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same author:
Culture in the Anteroom (2012)
The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer
Dir. Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke
Subject: Theory
Framed Visions (1998)
Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination
Subject: Sociology
The Cinema of Wim Wenders (1997)
Image, Narrative and the Postmodern Condition
Dir. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden
Subject: Director > Wim Wenders
> On a related topic:
City of Darkness, City of Light (2003)
Emigre Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939
Subject: History of Cinema
Destination London (2012)
German-Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950
Dir. Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
The Lost Jungle (2017)
Cliffhanger Action and Hollywood Serials of the 1930s and 1940s
by Guy Barefoot
Subject: History of Cinema
The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking (2012)
Out from Hollywood's Shadow, 1929-1939
Subject: History of Cinema
Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950 (2001)
Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists
by Gerald Horne
Subject: History of Cinema
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