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Screening Transcendence
Film Under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933-1938
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Book Presentation:
During the 1930s, Austrian film production companies developed a process to navigate the competing demands of audiences in Nazi Germany and those found in broader Western markets. In Screening Transcendence, film historian Robert Dassanowsky explores how Austrian filmmakers during the Austrofascist period (1933–1938) developed two overlapping industries: "Aryanized" films for distribution in Germany, its largest market, and "Emigrantenfilm," which employed émigré and Jewish talent that appealed to international audiences.
Through detailed archival research in both Vienna and the United States, Dassanowsky reveals what was culturally, socially, and politically at stake in these two simultaneous and overlapping film industries. Influenced by French auteurism, admired by Italian cinephiles, and ardently remade by Hollywood, these period Austrian films demonstrate a distinctive regional style mixed with transnational influences.
Combining brilliant close readings of individual films with thoroughly informed historical and cultural observations, Dassanowsky presents the story of a nation and an industry mired in politics, power, and intrigue on the brink of Nazi occupation.
About the Author:
Robert Dassanowsky is Professor of German/Austrian Studies and Film at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is author of Austrian Cinema: A History, and editor of World Film Locations: Vienna, and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metafilm. He is also an independent film producer.
Press Reviews:
"Highly recommended."
-Choice
" Screening Transcendence is so rich and informative that a short review can barely do justice to this important and interesting monograph. There is no doubt that this is a book that everyone interested in Austria during the 1930s should read.
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-Journal of Austrian Studies
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Screening Transcendence undoubtedly constitutes a major contribution to the study of Austrian Cinema.....This little known episode in film history which Dassanowsky has uncovered ... tells of the unfolding drama of the Austrians' attempt to work with Hollywood studios in an effort to escape German pressure. He attributes the failure of an Austrian-Hollywood partnership to the American industry's commercial interests and its fear of offending German markets, as well as the strong German influence in Hollywood. Screening Transcendence does a great service by introducing this era to English-reading audiences... utterly fascinating....
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-Contemporary Austrian Studies
"[Screening Transcendence] tracks popular film production...classifies its genres, and then shows how each was edited/adapted to conform to shifting political winds, especially in that small window when "Austria" was an independent democracy, before the Anschluss formally joined them to Germany. The result is a detailed, compelling picture of a culture industry trying to survive under the growing threat and then implementation of Nazi fascism."
-Katherine Arens, author of Vienna's Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity Beyond the Nation-State
"
[Screening Transcendence] tracks popular film production...classifies its genres, and then shows how each was edited/adapted to conform to shifting political winds, especially in that small window when 'Austria' was an independent democracy, before the Anschluss formally joined them to Germany. The result is a detailed, compelling picture of a culture industry trying to survive under the growing threat and then implementation of Nazi fascism.
"
-Katherine Arens, author of Vienna's Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity Beyond the Nation-State
"Dassanowsky's carefully researched book provides an excellent account of Austrian film from those years and also forms, thanks to the inclusion of titles and production details of films from the era, a good basis for further research."
-FILMBLATT
"The author is at home in both the European and the American cultural worlds, and he utilizes this to best advantage in his book. Anyone seeking an expert presentation of the particular influence Austrian film culture has had on Hollywood is well served by this meticulous and richly detailed work."
-German Studies Review
"Robert Dassanowsky's Screening Transcendence provides the most comprehensive English-language examination to date of the complex and often neglected top of cinema under the Austrofascist regime of 1933 to 1938." -Monatshefte
See the publisher website: Indiana University Press
> From the same author:
> On a related topic:
Visions of Vienna (2018)
Narrating the City in 1920s and 1930s Cinema
Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema (2013)
Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity
Film Societies in Germany and Austria 1910-1933 (2023)
Tracing the Social Life of Cinema
Sensitive Subjects (2020)
The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema
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