New essays by leading scholars giving a new picture of the variety of German expressionist cinema. This volume of fresh essays by leading scholars develops a new approach to expressionist film. For nearly half a century Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen have shapedthe understanding of the cinema of this period. However, fifty years on, there is a growing awareness that a new account is overdue. This attempt to rewrite the story of expressionist cinema begins with a fundamentally new interpretation of Dr. Caligari, and together with fresh views of other expressionist classics, offers new perspectives on important alternative film styles and genres that emerged in films by such eminent directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, Karl Grune, F. W. Murnau, and E. A. Dupont. In pursuing such variety, the book strives for a picture of the cinema in the early years of Weimar that in thematic as well as stylistic terms reflects the vibrant, multifaceted cultural and political developments of the period. The book is a joint venture of the Centre for European Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Film Studies at the University of Mainz, and the German Film Museum in Frankfurt. The late Dietrich Scheunemann was Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh and wrote and edited several books on German literature and on film and media.

Essays offering new approaches to the debate on orality and literacy, taking in recent developments in modern electronic media. This collection of essays, the outcome of an international research project by the University of Freiburg, the German Film Museum in Frankfurt, and an interdisciplinary research group for Media Studies at the University of Edinburgh, contributes new insights and analytical categories to the ongoing debate on orality and literacy, extending it to the realm of modern electronic media. Taking up ideas developed by such important critics as Benjamin, Parry, Lord, Ong, McLuhan, and the Russian Formalist Eikhenbaum, the essays suggest a new integrated approach to the study of presentational forms and media of communication from all ages of civilisation.