und von Michael Töteberg zum Agieren der Deutschen Bank beim Versuch der Wiederaufstellung einer vertikal integrierten Ufa 1956–1962 fügt sich nicht so ohne weiteres in die Erzählung einer ,,Ufa international“, die Begrenzung auf den Zeitraum bis 1945 – wie sie wiederum das Symposium der Kinemathek vorgenommen hat – hätte dem Band vielleicht ein bisschen mehr Schärfe gegeben. Auch in den anderen sieben Blöcken wird die Fokussierung auf das Internationale an mancher Stelle aufgeweicht, scheinen Themen hin und wieder eher mit Mühe in dieses Korsett gezwungen, so zum Beispiel im Falle der beiden Beiträge von Jürgen Kasten zur wirtschaftlichen Dauerkrise der Ufa und vor allem zu ihren Auftragsproduktionen. Es hätte dem Band daher gutgetan, in einem vorangestellten Einführungskapitel konzeptionell zu klären, wie ,,Internationalität“ hier eigentlich verstanden werden soll. Dies nicht unbedingt, weil der Begriff heute in der filmwissenschaftlichen Literatur oft durch den Begriff der Transnationalität ersetzt wird (auch hier: ohne immer genau zu klären, was diese Begriffsverschiebung genau bedeutet), sondern um exemplarisch aufzufächern, auf welchen Analyseebenen die Internationalität eines deutschen Filmkonzerns gemessen, beschrieben, bewertet werden kann und wie diese Ebenen zusammenhängen. Nicht zuletzt müsste eine vorgeschaltete Historisierung des Begriffs aufzeigen, in welcher gesellschaftspolitischen Gemengelage Internationalität nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, zu Beginn der Nazizeit oder im Zweiten Weltkrieg jeweils zu verstehen ist. Auch die Entscheidung, nicht mehr Beiträge zu akquirieren, die Internationalität auf einer ästhetischen Ebene zu greifen suchen, wie beispielsweise die hervorragenden Texte von Michael Wedel und Tatjana Tschagina, ist zu bedauern, schlummert hier doch großes Potential. Genauso im Verfolgen einzelner Filme auf ihrer Reise durch die gesamte Welt (statt der Betrachtung bestimmter Absatzmärkte). Eine diesbezüglich sehr schöne Idee der Herausgeber ist die Illustration der Kapitel mit Filmplakaten und -anzeigen aus einer Vielzahl von Ländern, die in mühsamer Detailarbeit recherchiert worden sind. Wenn man dies exemplarisch für einen Film durchexerzieren und die jeweiligen Aufführungsund Rezeptionskontexte erschließen würde, ergäbe das ganz sicher ein sehr aufschlussreiches Bild. Bei aller berechtigter Kritik und allen hehren Wünschen soll aber die Feststellung nicht fehlen, dass dieses eher für ein bereits vorgebildetes Fachpublikum gedachte Buch sich insgesamt sehr gut liest und von den jüngsten Buchpublikationen zur Ufa thematisch letztlich am umfangreichsten und gleichzeitig am interessantesten zugeschnitten ist. Die Geschichte der Ufa ist noch immer nicht ausgeforscht und fertig erzählt, aber der vorliegende Band gibt viele Anregungen, welche Stränge weiterzuverfolgen sich lohnen könnte.

The Age of Insight , Eric Kandel's masterful account of the advances of neuropsychology over the last 150 years, starts with the nineteenth-century medical-scientific ethos that geminated the University of Vienna. On its journey it refers back frequently, almost exclusively, to Viennese modernist artists, because their painted images, especially those of the expressionists, resisted conventional realism and continue to this day to serve as perceptual intermediaries to realities that cannot be seen: emotions, character, even the processes of the brain itself. This article begins by further historicizing modernist medical research in Central Europe in regard to another visual medium, film, and then turns to the work of early thinkers who posited a similar relationship between moving images and insight. They, too, often called on anti-realist art to clarify their sense of filmic realism over and against what they considered to be pre-fabricated cinema. This discourse recurs throughout the twentieth century and comes to leave traces in non-conventional filmmaking like that of the contemporary Berlin School. These theories and practices offer useful complements to The Age of Insight 's history of art and science; however, they also issue important challenges to the "common sense" conclusion that some of Kandel's readers might reach regarding cognitive hardwiring as an unambiguous model for our approach to representation and to the world. If "the image of the world that is contained within the word gives rise to a seamless, meaningful system," as Béla Balázs put it critically, then the object might be to dust off the old figure-ground image to consider what our cognitive apparatus naturally shuts off from view. This essay concludes by considering an often overlooked, material marker of a perceptual transition point, one that has accompanied film from the fin-de-siècle on down, in order to foster a more ambiguous approach to the question of how the limits of visual systems relate to the invisible realms beneath the surface of things, both in ourselves and in the world around us.

Hartmut Bitomsky shows how suffering, in both its catastrophic and quotidian modes, can be made to disappear from view by mobilizing images. Films manifest what he calls an "Arbeit am Verzicht" (literally "work on doing without") that inheres in modern political, economic, and cultural structures. From Nazi Kulturfilme through the development of the Autobahn and automotive industry in the FRG, the relationship between different forms of human labor and the machines that tend to make that labor vanish is especially at stake in "Arbeit am Verzicht," which reaches an apex in the representational and destructive power of the American B-52. This essay explores "disappearing" in the aesthetic that Bitomsky investigates and produces.

This chapter contains sections titled: Forethoughts The Measures Taken Again and Again Bells from the American Deep Bodies at Auction-How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck? The Situating of American- Huie's Sermon The Whiteness of the Whale- God's Angry Man Afterthought Notes Works Cited

Martin scorsese's big-budget, 3-d extravaganzahugo, which opens with images of Paris as a huge timekeeping mechanism, undertakes a dual rescue mission. It reclaims Georges Méliès's early cinematic fantasies from the violence of time and progress and saves a young, industrious boy from the violence of a society that has no room for children who fend for themselves outside a family. In doing so,Hugoassures the viewer that the technological wonder of future filmmaking is rooted in a romanticized image of a thoroughly bourgeois past. The movie's threats are embedded in a mise-en-scène full of iconic imagery of modern industry made fantastic. The giant clocks and gears located above and in the walls of Paris's largest train station, which are voluntarily tended by a lone child laborer, evoke neither wonder nor laughter as much as a sense of menace in connection with the young protagonist scurrying around in them. While Scorsese's film situates the origins of movies in fin-de-siècle Paris asthemodern industrial city, it also takes pains to make Méliès's products seem like dreams, cultivated in a greenhouse of industrial activity to become larger-than-life projections obscuring modern industry. Tater I will consider the consequences of the film's arc taking this precocious lad from the world dominated by fanciful dangers into a home: for the moment it will suffice to remember that Hugo evokes work as the source from which humans and an automaton derive their purpose and that the film means this to be self-evident to the audience. At the same time it sets in motion a narrative that aims to remove the protagonist from the world dominated by signs of modern industrial work and from the labor that seems such a distressing burden on him at the film's outset. This essay explores that apparent contradiction in the broader history of cinema.

Zum Selbstverständnis und Stolz der philologischen Wissenschaften gehörte es traditionell, ihren Wissensschatz und ihr methodisches Repertoire von Zeit zu Zeit, und man rechnete da großzügig in Jahrzehnten, in Form repräsentativer, systematisch oder auch historisch aufgebauter Werke, in "Grundrissen" oder "Handbüchern" darzubieten.Wer etwa in den sechziger Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts in der Bundesrepublik Germanistik studierte, musste zunächst den "Aufriß" (d.

The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture. The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange. In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.

Reviewed by: East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature John E. Davidson Arlene A. Teraoka. East, West, and Others: The Third World in Postwar German Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996. 250 pp. Arlene A. Teraoka’s East, West, and Others examines the attempts of leftist or left-liberal writers “to envision a non-hegemonic mode of encounter with non-German others” in their literature after 1945. Teraoka contends that the issue is not whether these authors tend toward Eurocentrism, for they must necessarily do so given the social, political, and cultural position from which they write; rather, the interesting and instructive concern is with “how and why they speak” in the manner they do. The project of East, West, and Others, then, seeks to move beyond the images and content of these works to examine the strategic use (deliberate and/or symptomatic) of “the Third World” to meet cultural and political demands. Teraoka approaches this project through close, skillful readings of texts by (primarily) canonical authors, paying particular attention to the way that progress and enlightenment are aligned with European [End Page 467] traditions to which the “other” must aspire. She argues convincingly (if a bit predictably) that Anna Seghers shows no awareness of the problems in representing European tradition as the key to emancipation for inhabitants of Latin America. Concentrating primarily on The Light on the Gallows (1961), the last work of Seghers’s first “Caribbean Trilogy,” this study uncovers a mind-body opposition in which “natives” only become fully human and revolutionary as they take on enlightened ideals and shed the chains of a body-centered existence. Importantly, it is not the orthodoxy of Seghers’s communism that traps her in the strategies of domination she hopes to contest, but rather an adherence to Enlightenment traditions as the corrective to the Nazi’s murderous reign of bureaucratized irrationalism that sent her into exile. A similar snare entraps Peter Weiss, who attempts to come to grips with National-Socialist rule, the war, and, most especially, the Holocaust by turning to the Third World. Teraoka reserves particularly harsh criticism for Weiss’s project, which she claims both universalizes the Holocaust (robbing it of the specificity needed for real critical engagement) and fails to interrogate the radicality of “choosing” marginality as a political strategy in the wake of the Holocaust. The use of documentary drama in Weiss’s “global theater,” (specifically The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey [1967] and Vietnam Discourse [1968]) develops a parallel between (European) Enlightenment and (Third-World) revolution that in essence allows Western intellectuals to have their rebellious cake and eat it, too, quite comfortably. In the work of GDR dramatists set in Latin America, Teraoka finds the role of such “paradigmatic intellectuals” tied directly to their role in advancing European hegemony. One of the more surprising (and well-supported) claims in Teraoka’s book is that, regardless of being written by “career intellectuals” (Claus Hammel and Peter Hacks) or authors more openly critical of the East-German state (Volker Braun and Heiner Müller), these Latin American texts maintain that Europe cannot provide an (intellectual) avant garde for the Third-World revolution, not even from the Socialist tradition. Ultimately these “Solidarity Plays” have much more to do with a commentary about Europe (Western and Eastern) than with Latin America, a commentary softening the critic’s stance on the firmly Eurocentric instrumentalization of the “other” in these works. [End Page 468] Teraoka’s sympathies clearly reside with those authors who eschew a firm position on either side of the Us/Them divide: Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. While using the Third World as means of criticizing contemporary Europe, neither of these authors hold that they can get outside of their own European identity by doing so. Thanks to his “sovereign irony,” Enzensberger wields a double-edged sword: for example, his critique of the Western (neo-) colonial and imperial project goes hand in hand with his critique of Cuba, and he never forgets the difference between himself as a “European and the rice farmers of the Third World.” In Enzensberger’s work, poets become deceivers in the European tradition, but...

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, that is, overcoming or coming to terms with the is very much in the public mind again, if one can judge by recent television and media offerings. At present, Germany's public sphere is putting forth considerable effort to uncover and come to terms with the past of the GDR. There is a wide range of documentary approaches applied to this material – from straightforward historical reconstruction and journalistic recounting of representative cases to (auto)biographical explorations and Alltagsgeschichte (stories of everyday life), in some instances carried out over the course of years. Feature films that explore the East German past are also being made. It seems that valuable lessons about using cultural texts to give a voice to a past where silence once reigned have been taken to heart in the reunited Germany, lessons from which most other countries would benefit as well. But despite the obvious benefits of uncovering this past for individuals and for the community, the present process may not be all positive. It also buries parts of the past and present. Indeed, many observers of post-Wall German film would reject the notion that coming to terms with the past is on the cultural agenda at all. Their view is justified if the concept of coming to terms is applied only to the legacy of National Socialism, most specifically, to the programme of terror and extermination carried out against Europe's Jewish population. While the present attempts at Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in no way result from desires for a revision of that past, their cumulative effect contributes to a general tendency that contains a hidden revisionism. In short, the present cultural coming to terms with the past – like all moments of opposition embedded in cultural institutions – embodies a dialectical process, the conservative side of which tends to be obscured by normative social and institutional pressures. The traditional mechanisms for coming to terms with the past are disappearing from the cinema, except when being applied to the former GDR. Certainly there are problems involved in expecting that German film, and Germans in general, must confront certain issues, and these expectations can appear particularly self-righteous when stated by observers from North America,