Dismantling the Dream Factory : : Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language / / Hester Baer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Baer, Hester,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Film Europa ; 9
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (318 p.)

The history of postwar German cinema has most often been told as a story of failure, a failure paradoxically epitomized by the remarkable popularity of film throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the analysis of 10 representative films, Hester Baer reassesses this period, looking in particular at how the attempt to ‘dismantle the dream factory’ of Nazi entertainment cinema resulted in a new cinematic language which developed as a result of the changing audience demographic. In an era when female viewers comprised 70 per cent of cinema audiences a ‘women’s cinema’ emerged, which sought to appeal to female spectators through its genres, star choices, stories and formal conventions. In addition to analyzing the formal language and narrative content of these films, Baer uses a wide array of other sources to reconstruct the original context of their reception, including promotional and publicity materials, film programs, censorship documents, reviews and spreads in fan magazines. This book presents a new take on an essential period, which saw the rebirth of German cinema after its thorough delegitimization under the Nazi regime.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender and Spectatorship in Postwar German Cinema -- Part I. Relegitimating Cinema: Female Spectators and the Problem of Representation -- 1 How Do You Solve a Problem Like Susanne?: The Female Gaze in Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) -- 2 When Fantasy Meets Reality: Authorship and Stardom in Rudolf Jugert’s Film Without a Title (1948) -- 3 Gendered Visions of the German Past: Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Love ’47 (1949) as Woman’s Film -- 4 Unsolved Mysteries: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Helmut Käutner’s Epilogue (1950) -- Part II. Art on Film: Representing Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema -- 5 “Through Her Eyes”: Regendering Representation in Willi Forst’s The Sinner (1951) -- 6 Looking at Heimat: Visual Pleasure and Cinematic Realism in Alfons Stummer’s The Forester of the Silver Wood (1955) -- 7 Degenerate Art?: Problems of Gender and Sexuality in Veit Harlan’s Different From You and Me (§175) (1957) -- Part III. Towards the New Wave: Gender and the Critique of Popular Cinema -- 8 Pleasurable Negotiations: Spectatorship and Genre in Helmut Käutner’s “Anti-Tearjerker” Engagement in Zurich (1957) -- 9 Sound and Spectacle in the Wirtschaftswunder: The Critical Strategies of Rolf Thiele’s The Girl Rosemarie (1958) -- 10 Gender and the New Wave: Herbert Vesely’s The Bread of Those Early Years (1962) as Transitional Film -- Epilogue. Adapting the 1950s: The Afterlife of Postwar Cinema in Post-Unification Popular Culture -- Bibliography -- Index