Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria

Gabriele Mueller, James M. Skidmore (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

314 Seiten

2026
Wilfrid Laurier University Press (Verlag)
978-1-55458-560-1 (ISBN)

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During the last decade, contemporary German and Austrian cinema has grappled with new social and economic realities. The “cinema of consensus,” a term coined to describe the popular and commercially oriented filmmaking of the 1990s, has given way to a more heterogeneous and critical cinema culture. Making the greatest artistic impact since the 1970s, contemporary cinema is responding to questions of globalization and the effects of societal and economic change on the individual.
This book explores this trend by investigating different thematic and aesthetic strategies and alternative methods of film production and distribution. Functioning both as a product and as an agent of globalizing processes, this new cinema mediates and influences important political and social debates. The contributors illuminate these processes through their analyses of cinema’s intervention in discourses on such concepts as “national cinema,” the effects of globalization on social mobility, and the emergence of a “global culture.” The essays illustrate the variety and inventiveness of contemporary Austrian and German filmmaking and highlight the complicated interdependencies between global developments and local specificities. They confirm a broader trend toward a more complex, critical, and formally diverse cinematic scene.
This book offers insights into the strategies employed by German and Austrian filmmakers to position themselves between the commercial pressures of the film industry and the desire to mediate or even attempt to affect social change. It will be of interest to scholars in film studies, cultural studies, and European studies.

Gabriele Mueller is an associate professor of German Studies and affiliated with the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University, Toronto. Her research focuses mainly on German cultural studies and German film studies. She has published essays on various aspects of post-unification German film, in particular on cinematic contributions to cultural memory discourses. James M. Skidmore teaches German literature, film, and cultural studies at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses mainly on the intersections of politics, history, and societal development in narrative literature and film. He is the author of The Trauma of Defeat: Ricarda Huch’s Historiography during the Weimar Republic (2005), as well as articles on German and Canadian literature and film.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Gabriele Mueller & James M. Skidmore: Cinema of Dissent? Confronting Social, Economic, and Political Change in German-Language Cinema
Challenging Viewing Habits
2. Marco Abel: The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School
3 Sophie Boyer: The Triumph of Hyperreality: A Baudrillardian Reading of Michael Haneke’s Cinematic Oeuvre
4. Morgan Koerner: Subversions of the Medical Gaze: Disability and Media Parody in Christoph Schlingensief’s Freakstars 3000
Reassessing and Consuming History
5. Roger Cook: Literary Discourse and Cinematic Narrative: Scripting Affect in Das Leben der Anderen
6. Alasdair King: Heimat 3: Edgar Reitz’s Time Machine
7. Joanne Leal: Troubled Parents, Angry Children: The Difficult Legacy of 1968 in Contemporary German-Language Film
8. Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien: Creative Chaos as Political Strategy in Recent German-Language Cinema
9. Florentine Strzelczyk: “Looking for an Old Man with a Black Moustache”: Hitler, Humour, Fake, and Forgery in Schtonk!
10. Peter Gölz: Haha Hitler! Coming to Terms with Dani Levy
Questioning Collective Identities
11. Myriam Léger: German Fascination for Jews in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude
12. Jakub Kazecki: Border, Bridge, or Barrier? Images of German–Polish Borderlands in German Cinema of the 2000s
13. Michael Zimmermann: The Transnational Deutschkei in Yilmaz Arslan’s Brudermord
14. Alice Kuzniar: Diasporic Queers: Reading for the Intersections of Alterities in Recent German Cinema
An Insider’s View
15. Barbara Pichler: The Construction of Reality: Aspects of Austrian Cinema between Fiction and Documentary
Filmography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	20.11.2017
Zusatzinfo	5 Illustrations, colour - 1 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	Waterloo, Ontario
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-55458-560-0 / 1554585600
ISBN-13	978-1-55458-560-1 / 9781554585601
Zustand	Neuware