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Author: Katharina Loew Publisher: Amsterdam University Press ISBN: 9048551714 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.
Author: Katharina Loew Publisher: Amsterdam University Press ISBN: 9048551714 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a "techno-romantic" paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.
Author: Katharina Loew Publisher: ISBN: 9781124868561 Category : Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
Based extensively on primary sources, this study undertakes a reevaluation of the interpretative categories by which German silent cinema has been described. Revealing the correlations between the technical achievements evident in the films of this period and the dominant aesthetic philosophy among filmmakers and theorists, this study presents a re-reading of the prominent fantastic films Der Student von Prag (Deutsche Bioscop, 1913, dir. Stellan Rye), Nosferatu (Prana Film, 1921, dir. F.W. Murnau) and Faust (Ufa, 1925/1926, dir. F.W. Murnau). German silent cinema was the site of a radical redefinition of the problematic relationship between art and technology. This fundamental shift in the cultural perception was the result of a "techno-romantic" ideology that eventually rendered possible technology's integration into the aesthetic discourse. Because they made perceptible the interrelations between modern technology and Romantic ideas, special effects played a key role in corroborating the techno-romantic outlook. Techno-romanticism served as the conceptual framework in which the parameters of aesthetic modernity were negotiated. Special effects allowed cinema to become the site where the gulf between technology and art was actually bridged.
Author: Samuel Frederick Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1640141294 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 111
Book Description
A penetrating new reading of Murnau's classic silent film that shows its transitional status, both historically and stylistically, while emphasizing its innovative camerawork and the ethical stakes of its story. An undisputed masterpiece of silent cinema, F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) stars the larger-than-life Emil Jannings as a proud hotel porter who is demoted to lowly washroom attendant. One worker's misfortune becomes a tragic turning point in a social drama as much about the struggling Weimar Republic, which had just overcome several years of social, political, and economic instability, as about its working-class citizens. At once clinging to the symbols of the old order while helplessly thrust into an unforgiving modern world, Jannings's fallen porter embodies the contradictions of this transitional moment for the young democracy. Samuel Frederick shows us that Murnau's film is similarly transitional: born at the crossroads between the Expressionist style of the early 1920s and the emerging aesthetics of New Objectivity, it is both soberly realistic and oneirically distorted. With only one intertitle, The Last Laugh's flow of images is complemented by cinematographer Karl Freund's innovative mobile camera, which, "unchained" from the tripod, swims effortlessly through the film's different urban spaces. Here, inanimate objects become charged with potency and architecture is animated, conveying both allure and danger. Frederick's incisive analysis of the film foregrounds the visual dynamism of its technological and aesthetic experimentation while also pursuing the ethical implications of its central figure's downfall.
Author: Jean-Louis Comolli Publisher: Film Theory in Media History ISBN: 9789089645548 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
Jean-Louis Comolli's six-part essay Technique and Ideologyhad a revolutionary effect on film theory and history when it first appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1971. In 2009, Comolli revisited his earlier text, arguing that the present age, marked by the total dominance of media-filtered spectacle over image production, makes the need for an 'emancipated, critical spectator' more pressing than ever. In this volume, Daniel Fairfax presents annotated translations of these two texts to provide an overview of Comolli's activity as both a theorist and a filmmaker.
Author: Bahareh Rashidi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The proliferation of the doppelgänger theme in so many films of Wilhemine and Weimar Germany raises the question of its historical significance, in particular during Germany's "crisis of classical modernity". While previous studies have addressed the double from a narrative perspective, focusing on its psychological significations as divided self, this thesis instead considers the theme from a structural and historical perspective: how, as a technical reproduction of the human body that is ontologically double, at once real and unreal, it serves as a site for reflection on the visual experience of modernity and on the medium of cinema. The thesis begins by considering the relationship between the theme of the double, born circa 1800, and the burgeoning visual regimes of modernity. Important aspects of this relationship are the abstraction of representation from stable referents in the aftermath of Kantian thought, the empirical study of the observing subject, and the development of new technologies of recording and projection. Nineteenth-century technologies of optical illusion, such as the phantasmagoria and lifelike automata, as well as the itinerant showmen who displayed them, gave rise to doubles of the human body with uncanny effects of ontological uncertainty. These not only influenced the doppelgänger stories of German Romanticism and after, but also were ancestors of cinema's doubles and their showmen. This study considers the "cinematic" themes of a set of stories and films of the double, including repeatedly performed scenarios of exhibition and voyeurism, visual pleasure and anxiety, foregroundings of the narration, and allusions to the history of cinema and media technologies. The central chapters of the thesis offer readings of five classics of German film: The Student of Prague (1913), The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), Waxworks (1924), and Metropolis (1926). Addressing the double as a reflexive theme of optical uncertainty, these readings focus on how moments of optical distress are depicted and how film language is used to construct a cinematic uncanny: an ontological problem arising from the ambivalent character of visual experience that affects the narrative and film form, characters and spectator alike. This perspective sheds light on the historical significance of the double theme, revealing its close relationship with the problematic status of vision and the observing subject in modernity, and with a special case of modern visual experience, the technological medium of cinema.
Author: Michael Minden Publisher: Camden House ISBN: 9781571131461 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
Providing a broad range of materials and resources for the study of Fritz Lang's classic film Metropolist (1972), this volume includes both standard critical essays and contributions appearing for the first time.
Author: David Annwn Jones Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3031386434 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
This book is the first study of the vampires in silent cinema, presenting a detailed academic yet accessible discussion of the films themselves and their sources. For the very first time, The Fire Elemental from the Wharton brothers’ The Mysteries of Myra (1916) is identified as cinema’s original vampire, his appearance initiating a rich and variegated period of film production that is currently missing from studies of horror cinema. Exciting and ground-breaking, Vampires on the Silent Screen also discusses Drakula Halála / Dracula’s death (1920), the first ever filmic female vampire in Erich Kober’s Lilith and Ly (1919), and the Dracula lookalike, Count Merlin in Alexander Korda’s Magic (1917) as well as many other productions. A socio-cultural framework with critical highlighting of eco-horror theory is used throughout to draw these unique discoveries together. This project is a must read for any horror enthusiasts out there.
Author: Nicholas Baer Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520398831 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Historical Turns reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Nicholas Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history. Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.
Author: Sarah Keller Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231543301 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 202
Book Description
The advent of new screening practices and viewing habits in the twenty-first century has spurred a public debate over what it means to be a “cinephile.” In Anxious Cinephilia, Sarah Keller places these competing visions in historical and theoretical perspective, tracing how the love of movies intertwines with anxieties over the content and impermanence of cinematic images. Keller reframes the history of cinephilia from the earliest days of film through the French New Wave and into the streaming era, arguing that love and fear have shaped the cinematic experience from its earliest days. This anxious love for the cinema marks both institutional practices and personal experiences, from the curation of the moviegoing experience to the creation of community and identity through film festivals to posting on social media. Through a detailed analysis of films and film history, Keller examines how changes in cinema practice and spectatorship create anxiety even as they inspire nostalgia. Anxious Cinephilia offers a new theoretical approach to the relationship between spectator and cinema and reimagines the concept of cinephilia to embrace its diverse forms and its uncertain future.