Gerd Gemunden Boeken

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), Bertold Brecht and Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinneman’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.

The first in-depth analysis of Maren Ade's acclaimed contemporary classic, a generational tug-of-war about the meaning of life, work, and death.Maren Ade's tragicomedy Toni Erdmann, a 2016 Cannes sensation and Oscar nominee, is an internationally acclaimed classic of recent German cinema. By turns hilarious, cringeworthy, and heart-wrenching, the film revolves around Winfried, a retired music teacher and prankster trying to rebuild a relationship with his daughter Ines, a high-powered business consultant based in Bucharest. At its center, this unpredictable scenario pits one type of performance - Ines's efforts to meet the unyielding expectations of the new economy - against another - Winfried's anarchic role-play meant to disrupt the standardization of life. This book, the first in-depth analysis of the film, explores the many layers of this generational tug-of-war about the meaning of life, work, and death. Employing Ade's trademark minimalist style, the film deftly comments on the precarity of life; the gendering of labor in the new economy; the re-definition of feminism by the children of the generation of 1968; and reconfigured East-West relations in post-Wall Europe. Lastly, in light of Ade's artisanal mode of filmmaking, in which she regularly assumes the role of writer, director, and producer, Toni Erdmann becomes a highly self-reflexive comment on the neoliberal dictates of global art cinema.