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CALL FOR PAPERS: ANTHOLOGY ON GERMAN POPULAR FILM
Eds.  Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy

Seeking to redress the gap between cultural studies' legitimation of
popular culture and its frequent absence as object of analysis among
Germanists, this volume will examine the roots, historical forms and
current ascension of German popular cinema.  However inadvertently,
German film studies have reflected a very traditional impulse to
divy up German films, like Germans themselves, into the Good and the
Bad.  The "golden era" of Weimar film and New German Cinema thus
stand apart from embarrassing fascist propaganda, Heimat kitsch,
alpine porn, and the present boom of German comedies. By looking at
German popular film and the larger cultural, historical and
political meanings it generates, this volume will attempt to
reanimate the field of German film studies by examining and/or
challenging the following discrepancies, dichotomies and
constellations:


Metaphors of Death and Rebirth

- the American "killing off" of German film, economically and
ideologically, following WWII, despite evidence that domestic films
outscored American products at the box office

- "rebirth" located at Oberhausen and in New German Cinema, as opposed 
to a flourishing porn industry and Germans' preference for commercial 
films during the same era

- film critic Laurens Straub's proclamation in 1990 about the death of
German cinema, followed by record numbers of German filmgoers in the 
1990s who have resuscitated the economic viability and viewing pleasures 
of German film

Who or what determines the "pulse" of German film?  To what extent has 
an Anglo-American perspective constructed a landscape of artistic bounty 
and commercial wastelands?  Have efforts to examine German identity 
across the familiar historical spectrum - Weimar turbulence, the Third 
Reich and "Zero Hour," Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung and a contemporary 
multicultural Germany - overlooked alternative forms of identification 
and cinematic pleasures among Germans, particularly in an increasingly 
multinational, identity-dissolving, "Euro-Pudding" mode?  How has the 
continued influence of the Frankfurt School endorsed cinematic 
separations between the high and low? What role has the Goethe Institute 
played in promoting German "art house" fare in America?

Hollywood and Origin and "Other"

- Hollywood's "legitimate" influence on German film when filtered 
through the lens of a Fassbinder or Wenders vs. Steven Spielberg as 
inspiration to German filmmakers of the 1990s, current attempts to 
borrow from and improve upon the Hollywood model and reject New German 
Cinema; Weimar's self-conscious scopic and narrative "Sonderweg" in the 
face of Hollywood cinema; the influence of Hollywood on popular film 
under National Socialism

- Franco-American auteur criticism which defines European and American
films relationally in terms of art vs. popular appeal, politics vs.
pleasure; inadvertent support of Hollywood hegemony by defining German
cinema as copy, deviation, subversion of Hollywood film; cultural
essentialisms in defining a national cinema vs. hetereogenity, or the
manner in which gender, sexual and racial identities complicate
identifications along national lines

- Clueless Germans/ Anglo-American know-it-alls: the need for American
academics to "enlighten" Germans first about the merits of New German
Cinema and now about the legitimacy of popular culture

Does popular cinema deflect political considerations, historical trauma, 
and distort or misrepresent German identity, as some critics contend?  
To what extent do filmmakers like Fassbinder, Ottinger, Treut and von 
Praunheim combine politics with pleasurable viewing?  What is gained or 
lost in recent "queer" films such as Der bewegte Mann and Echte Kerle?  
Do German popular films open up contradictory definitions of the popular 
as sell-out, product of power relations, corrupting threat to society, 
site of opposition, play, an authentic register of desires, etc.?

Women and the Popular

- the absence, devaluation, or demonization of women in film histories
which write out the popular: Thea von Harbou as fascist tool vs. Fritz 
Lang as one of Weimar's greatest directors; Leni Riefenstahl: beauty 
freak or still fascist after all these years?; Hildegard Knef as both 
cinematic sinner, real-life pariah and ever-popular talk show guest; 
Katja Rieman as role model; Superweib films in relation to a purportedly 
compromised German feminism of the 1990s; the role of women like Dorris 
Doerrie and Katja von Garnier in the rise of German comedies

We invite analysis of any of the above considerations, particularly via 
close readings of  popular, entertaining and successful German films 
across the historical spectrum: mountain films, Heimat films, Blood and 
Soil films, porno, musicals, comedies, animated films, children's films

Deadline for abstracts: June 1st

Deadline for finished papers: December 1st

Send to:
Randall Halle
Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY  14627
USA
[log in to unmask]

Margaret McCarthy
Department of German and Russian
Davidson College
Davidson, NC  28036
USA
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