This volume will be of great interest to scholars of German and global cinema.

Contributors explore these films' transnational circuits of production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as how the films were made and received, thereby inviting us to reexamine the roots of what New German Cinema was and imagine what it might yet become.

The simultaneous international success in the 1970s of such filmmakers as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders led critics to talk of a 'New German Cinema'. Thomas Elsaesser's book is the most comprehensive and illuminating study yet produced about this major movement in world cinema.

In this original study, Scharf investigates issues of national identity in films of the New German Cinema. Using a cultural studies analysis, Scharf argues that the conflict between this generation of critical filmmakers and their ‘German-ness’ translate into feature films that construct, and are pervaded by, a sense of "homelessness" at home. As the first cultural studies investigation of this cinematic movement, the book challenges existing film studies accounts by analyzing the New German Cinema within its social, temporal, and spatial contexts. Furthermore, with its broad concerns for the West German production context, the New German Cinema’s reception both nationally and internationally, as well as issues of representation, narration, and ‘Othering,’ Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema offers an interdisciplinary contribution to the ongoing debate on national cinema.

This study of New German cinema identifies different styles of historical remembrance in which music participates.

By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”