Note from the Editors

Welcome to the first major update of our website!

We’ve added numerous book titles and articles from the past five years. Additionally, we are now listing relevant chapters from books that do not explicitly deal with Weimar cinema. While a number of complete articles (and even books) are available online, we refrained from including this information because free online access varies for every library, depending on their policies. Open access titles are marked as such.

Feel free to send us news regarding your publications or announcements that might interest our community of Weimar scholars at weimarcinema@gmail.com.

The Spring Edition planned for March 2023 will feature a number of new essays and additional content. If you would like to be notified about future editions and further updates, please join our mailing list.

CALL FOR PAPERS

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NEW IN THIS EDITION

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Hans Helmut Prinzler’s Chronik des Weimarer Films is an updated chapter from his legendary chronicle of one hundred years of German cinema, published in 1995. See also his website for his reviews of publications about German cinema since 1961.

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Sara Hall’s essay “Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar Cinema,” newly adapted with clips for this website, examines the reworking of filmic tropes from the 1920s in the TV series Babylon Berlin (Season 1-3: 2017-2020; Season 4 begins in October 2022).

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RECENTLY PUBLISHED

OF INTEREST

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ON SET. Filmstadt Berlin is a new app from the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek that allows you to explore film locations and sets of Weimar films with the help of Augmented Reality (AR). Check here. See also the smartphone version in Google Play Store.

Memories of Desire, a 2019 autobiographical film by Victoria Schultz is an example of the international afterlife of German Expressionism. This rarely-seen film was the subject of a recent blog post by the Finnish film critic, Antti Alanen. Commenting on the black and white, sharp-contrast film, he writes: “The mode has affinities with the Kammerspiel films of the Weimar Republic such as Schatten and the whole théâtre intime cycle written by Carl Mayer. These are films of interiority, starkly abstracted with stylized characters, spaces often overwhelmed by large shadows.” See also Schultz’s website.

Phantome der Nacht. 100 Jahre Nosferatu is the title of a new exhibition by the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin (Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg) between December 16, 2022 and April 23, 2023. For more details, check here.

Babylon Berlin Season 4 premiered in Germany on Sky Atlantic on October 14, 2022. No date has been set for the subtitled version on Netflix. While Seasons 1-3 have focused on events in 1929, Season 4 concentrates on 1930/1931. For more details about Season 4, check here(Guardian), here(trailer), here(short episode list), and here(Reddit discussion thread).

Weimar, weiblich: Frauen und Geschlechtervielfalt im Kino der Moderne, 1918-1933 is the title of a new exhibition at the Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt. It is planned for the end of March 2023. More details (in German) here.

Women in German Dissertation Prize 2022: Mary E. Hennessy, Handmaidens of Modernity: Gender, Labor and Media in Weimar Germany. 2021. U of Michigan, PhD dissertation. See Feminist German Studies (Volume 38, Number 2) Fall/Winter 2022, 132.

1923 -- This fateful year is the subject of no fewer than seven books published in 2022 (a year ahead of its centennial). For the political, social, and cultural context of films produced at the time, see the following titles:
Volker Ulrich: Deutschland 1923. Das Jahr am Abgrund. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2022;
Jutta Hoffritz: Totentanz. 1923 und seine Folgen. Hambug: HarperCollins Verlag, 1922;
Peter Süß: 1923. Endstation. Alles einsteigen! Berlin: Berenberg Verlag, 1922;
Peter Longerich: Außer Kontrolle. Deutschland 1923. Wien/Graz: Molden Verlag, 2022;
Peter Reichel: Rettung der Republik? Deutschland im Krisenjahr 1923; Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1922:
Christian Bommarius, Im Rausch des Aufruhrs. Deutschland 1923. Munich: DTV, 2020;
Nikolai Hannig and Detleve Manes, eds. Krise! Wie 1923 die Welt erschütterte. Berlin: Wbg Academic, 2022.
See also a review of the first five titles by Alexander Gallus, Das Weimarer Doppelgesicht, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (November 28, 2022).

Nicolas Cage paid homage to The Cabinet of Caligari, in his 2022 Film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. The homage was depicted in a scene, which did not make the final cut (it was too artsy for the studio), but can be viewed here. The black-and-white scene imitated the silent film's setting and lighting. According to IndieWire (June 2022), Cage said: “I always designed my performances with the cinematic dream of getting back to silent film performance in general, and German Expressionism in particular.”

All Quiet on the Western Front, a filmic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s blockbuster anti-war novel “Im Westen nichts Neues” (1929) by the German director Edward Berger, premieres in a subtitled version on Netflix on October 27, 2022. This film is also Germany’s entry for the 2023 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. See reviews of the German film in USA Today, NPR, and New York Times. The Dossier on the German reception of the 1930 American adaptation is available here.

A new restoration by the Deutsche Kinemathek of Razzia in St. Pauli (Werner Hochbaum 1932) premiered this fall at the 2022 Budapest Classics Film Marathon.

The Haunted Screen is the title of a six-part narrative podcast about Weimar cinema (available through Apple or Google Podcasts and Spotify). The six episodes are written and presented by Travis Mushett, professor of film & media at Fordham University. They run between 60 and 90 minutes each and concentrate on the classic films and directors. They are remarkably well researched and easy to listen to. A brief article about the podcast can be found here. (Thanks to Rick Rentschler for the tip.)

The Pordenone Silent Film Festival is the world’s leading international silent-film festival. Each October, many hundreds of archivists and scholars from around the world meet to see the most recent restorations of silent films. The festival has screened more than than 300 films from the Weimar Republic since it began in 1982. For a complete database of Weimar films shown between 1982 and 2018, click here.

Fritz Lang made a brief audio recording (“Leitworte”) about the universal language of cinema to mark the premiere of Metropolis in January 1927. The recording, transcript, and translation are here

Filmportal.de offers a succinct introduction to Weimar film in English (with valuable links to historical documents in translation). Check here

Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, vol. 2, the authoritative 673- page history of documentary cinema in the Weimar Republic, is now available online. Edited by Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann and Jean-Paul Goergen, it was published by Reclam in 2005. Vol. 1 (Kaiserreich) and vol. 3 (Drittes Reich) are also online. Vol. 4 (nach 1945) is in production.

Zensurkarten -- An extensive collection of German film censorship records is now digitized and available online. (Thanks to Oliver Hanley for sharing this information here).