Book on expressionism in German motion pictures.

Fritz Lang, almost alone among his fellow continental refugees, was able to make outstanding films in both his native Germany and his adopted Hollywood. The director of Metropolis and M and Dr. Mabuse came to America in 1934 and began a long and distinguished career that included such films as You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Ministry of Fear, Rancho Notorious, and The Big Heat. He is a key figure in the history of film noir, bringing to the screen a fatalist's vision of a menacing world of criminals, misfits, and helpless victims, and providing a distinctive visual look to every film he directed. This film-by-film study of Lang's oeuvre by one of the great film historians combines personal insight—Eisner and Lang had a long standing friendship—with deep historical understanding of Lang's roots in German culture and cinema. Both true modernists, Eisner and Lang are perfectly matched, as this book clearly demonstrates.

Covering classic films such as 'The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari' and 'Nosferatu' as well as under-appreciated examples such as 'Asphalt', this volume forms an essential introduction to one of cinema's most historically important movements.

In this comprehensive companion to Weimar cinema, chapters address the technological advancements of each film, their production and place within the larger history of German cinema, the style of the director, the actors and the rise of the German star, and the critical reception of the film.

Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of “theory” not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity’s most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, The Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.

The Long Century’s Long Shadow approaches German Romanticism and Weimar cinema as continuous developments, enlisting both in a narrative of reciprocal illumination. The author investigates different moments and media as connected phenomena, situated at alternate ends of the "long nineteenth century" but joined by their mutual rejection of the neo-classical aesthetic standard of placid and weightless poise in numerous media, including film, painting, sculpture, prose, poetry, and dance. Connecting Weimar filmmaking to Romantic thought and practice, Kenneth S. Calhoon offers a non-technological, aesthetic genealogy of cinema. He focuses on well-known literary and artistic works, including films such as Nosferatu, Metropolis, Frankenstein, and Fantasia; the writings of Conrad, Kafka, Goethe, and Novalis; and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, one of the leading artists of German Romanticism. With an eye to the modernism of which Weimar filmmaking was a part, The Long Century’s Long Shadow employs the Romantic landscape in poetry and painting as a mirror in which to regard cinema.