New essays examining the differences and commonalities between late Weimar-era and early Nazi-era German cinema against a backdrop of the crises of that time. Hitler's Machtergreifung, or seizure of power, on January 30, 1933, marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third Reich, and German film scholarship has generally accepted this date as the break between Weimar and Nazi-era film as well. This collection of essays interrogates the continuities and discontinuities in German cinema before and after January 1933 and their relationship to the various crises of the years 1928 to 1936in seven areas: politics, the economy, concepts of race and ethnicity, the making of cinema stars, genre cinema, film technologies and aesthetics, and German-international film relations. Focusing both on canonical and lesser-known works, the essays analyze a representative sample of films and genres from the period. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Weimar and Third Reich cinema and of the sociopolitical, economic, racial, artistic, and technological spheres in both late Weimar and the early Third Reich, as well as to film scholars in general. Contributors: Paul Flaig, Margrit Froelich, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Bastian Heinsohn, Brook Henkel,Kevin B. Johnson, Owen Lyons, Richard W. McCormick, Kalani Michell, Mihaela Petrescu, Christian Rogowski, Valerie Weinstein, Wilfried Wilms. Barbara Hales is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Mihaela Petrescu is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Valerie Weinstein is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and German Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

A view of a long-neglected classic of Weimar cinema - now restored and widely available - as both a gripping narrative of infidelity and jealousy and a film inherently about film. Artur Robison's Warning Shadows - in German simply Schatten, shadows - premiered in 1923 to critical acclaim. This story of a fateful dinner party at which a flirtatious wife, her jealous husband, and their guests are entertained by a traveling illusionist who deals in shadow play and hypnosis was extolled by one critic as superior to Wegener's Golem, Lubitsch's Passion, even Murnau's Nosferatu and Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Yet where those films became mainstays of film history, Warning Shadows was long unknown: only recently, with the release of a restored version on DVD, has it begun to get its due. One of the few silent movies to eschew intertitles, it was an attempt to create a "pure film," drawing on the qualities of cinema that made it not an heir to literature or theater but a unique and autonomous art form. Staging a story of desire, adultery, and violence, Robison's film also engaged with discourses at the heart of Weimar culture, from changing gender norms to hysteria and hypnosis to the construction of spectatorship. Seen this way, Warning Shadows is both a gripping narrative of infidelity and jealousy and a film inherently about film.

New essays re-evaluating Weimar cinema from a broadened, up-to-date perspective. Traditionally, Weimar cinema has been equated with the work of a handful of auteurist filmmakers and a limited number of canonical films. Often a single, limited phenomenon, "expressionist film," has been taken as synonymous with the cinema of the entire period. But in recent decades, such reductive assessments have been challenged by developments in film theory and archival research that highlight the tremendous richness and diversity of Weimar cinema. This widening of focus has brought attention to issues such as film as commodity; questions of technology and genre; transnational collaborations and national identity; effects of changes in socioeconomics and gender roles onfilm spectatorship; and connections between film and other arts and media. Such shifts have been accompanied by archival research that has made a cornucopia of new information available, now augmented by the increased availability of films from the period on DVD. This wealth of new source material calls for a re-evaluation of Weimar cinema that considers the legacies of lesser-known directors and producers, popular genres, experiments of the artistic avant-garde, and nonfiction films, all of which are aspects attended to by the essays in this volume. Contributors: Ofer Ashkenazi, Jaimey Fisher, Veronika Fuechtner, Joseph Garncarz, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans, Richard W.McCormick, Nancy P. Nenno, Elizabeth Otto, Mihaela Petrescu, Theodore F. Rippey, Christian Rogowski, Jill Smith, Philipp Stiasny, Chris Wahl, Cynthia Walk, Valerie Weinstein, Joel Westerdale. Christian Rogowski is Professor of German at Amherst College.

The Weimar period in Germany was a time of radical change, when the traditions and social hierarchies of Imperial Germany crumbled, and a young, deeply conflicted republic emerged. Modernity brought changes that reached deep into the most personal aspects of life, including a loosening of gender roles that opened up new freedoms and opportunities to women. The screen vamps, garconnes, and New Women in this movie-hungry society came to embody the new image of womanhood: sexually liberated, independent, and - at least to some - deeply threatening. In Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic, author Anjeana K. Hans examines largely forgotten films of Weimar cinema through the lens of their historical moment, contemporary concerns and critiques, and modern film theory to give a nuanced understanding of their significance and their complex interplay between gender, subjectivity, and cinema. Hans focuses on so-called uncanny films in which terror lies just under the surface and the emancipated female body becomes the embodiment of a threat repressed. In six chapters she provides a detailed analysis of each film and traces how filmmakers simultaneously celebrate and punish the transgressive women that populate them. Films discussed include The Eyes of the Mummy (Die Augen der Mumie Ma, Ernst Lubitsch, 1918), Uncanny Tales (Unheimliche Geschichten, Richard Oswald, 1919), Warning Shadows (Schatten: Eine nachtliche Halluzination, Artur Robison, 1923), The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hande, Robert Wiene, 1924), A Daughter of Destiny (Alraune, Henrik Galeen,1928), and Daughter of Evil (Alraune, Richard Oswald, 1930). An introduction contextualizes Weimar cinema within its unique and volatile social setting. Hans demonstrates that Weimar Germany's conflicting emotions, hopes, and fears played out in that most modern of media, the cinema. Scholars of film and German history will appreciate the intriguing study of Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic.