A Companion to German Cinema

A Companion to German Cinema regards the shifting terrain of German filmmaking and film studies against their larger social contexts with twenty–two newly commissioned essays by well–established and younger scholars in the field. While several of these focus on classic topics such as Weimar cinema, Fifties cinema, New German Cinema and its legacy, and Holocaust film, the collection is distinguished by its focus on new developments and the innovative light they may shed on earlier practices. A Companion to German Cinema includes essays on Berlin Film, Neue Heimat Film, New Comedy, post–Wall documentaries, the post– Wende RAF genre, and Rabenmutter imagery, as well as on the persistently overlooked and under–theorized Indianerfilme , post–AIDS documentaries, sexploitation films, and new multicultural and transnational films produced in Germany under the auspices of the European Union. Organized into three “movements” representing the significance of these developments for their aesthetic theorization, A Companion to German Cinema challenges its readers to address critical gaps in the field with the aim of opening it further onto new terrains of intellectual engagement.

Notes on Editors and Contributors vii Acknowledgments xii Abbreviations xiii Introduction Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch 1 First Movement: Destabilization 23 1 Have Dialectic, Will Travel: The GDR Indianerfilme as Critique and Radical Imaginary 27 Dennis Broe 2 Coming Out into Socialism: Heiner Carow’s Third Way 55 David Brandon Dennis 3 German Identity, Myth, and Documentary Film 82 Julia Knight 4 Post–Reunification Cinema: Horror, Nostalgia, Redemption 110 Anthony Enns 5 “Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies”: The Berlin School 134 David Clarke 6 Projecting Heimat : On the Regional and the Urban in Recent Cinema 155 Jennifer Ruth Hosek 7 No Happily Ever After: Disembodying Gender, Destabilizing Nation in Angelina Maccarone’s Unveiled 175 Gayatri Devi Second Movement: Dislocation 193 8 Views across the Rhine: Border Poetics in Straub–Huillet’s Machorka–Muff (1962) and Lothringen! (1994) 197 Claudia Pummer 9 Contested Spaces: Kamal Aljafari’s Transnational Palestinian Films 218 Peter Limbrick 10 Fatih Akýn’s Homecomings 249 Savas Arslan 11 Lessons in Liberation: Fassbinder’s Whity at the Crossroads of Hollywood Melodrama and Blaxploitation 260 Priscilla Layne 12 Sexploitation Film from West Germany 287 Harald Steinwender and Alexander Zahlten 13 A Documentarist at the Limits of Queer: The Films of Jochen Hick 318 Robert M. Gillett 14 Models of Masculinity in Postwar Germany: The Sissi Films and the West German Wiederbewaffnungsdebatte 341 Nadja Krämer 15 Crossdressing, Remakes, and National Stereotypes: The Germany–Hollywood Connection 379 Silke Arnold–de Simine Third Movement: Disidentification 405 16 The Aesthetics of Ethnic Cleansing: A Historiographic and Filmic Analysis of Andres Veiel’s Balagan 409 Domenica Vilhotti 17 Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse : “Feminist Re–Visions” of a Historical Controversy 429 Sally Winkle 18 The Baader Oedipus Complex 462 Vojin Saša Vukadinovic´ 19 Dislocations: Videograms of a Revolution and the Search for Images 483 Frances Guerin 20 Germany Welcomes Back Its Jews: Go for Zucker! and the Women in German Debate ( aka Wiggie–leaks: A Polemical Analysis) 507 Terri Ginsberg 21 Screening the German Social Divide: Aelrun Goette’s Die Kinder sind tot 526 David James Prickett 22 A Negative Utopia: Michael Haneke’s Fragmentary Cinema 553 Tara Forrest Index 573

Terri Ginsberg is a director and public programmer at the International Council for Middle East Studies in Washington, D.C. She has taught film, media, and cultural studies at New York University, Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, Ithaca College, and Brooklyn College. She is author of Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology (2007), and co–editor (with Kirsten Moana Thompson) of Perspectives on German Cinema (1996) and of several other volumes on global cinema and Middle Eastern film studies. Andrea Mensch is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at North Carolina State University, and has also taught film and literature courses in London and at the NCSU Prague Institute. She was associate editor as well as book reviews editor for Jouvert: A Journal of Post–colonial Studies .

“ Any academic library that has students that might get the merest whiff of cinema as part of their curriculum should ensure this work is available to them.”  ( Reference Reviews , 1 December 2012) "[T]he carefully constructed essays in [this volume] contribute to elevating this reference book so much more than its component parts could have achieved – much like German cinema itself. It is a volume that contributes significantly to reference works on German cinema, European cinema, and cinematic history. Any academic library that has students that might get the merest whiff of cinema as part of their curriculum should ensure this work is available to them." – Matt Borg, Sheffield Hallam University, Reference Reviews