The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style - Hardcover

Flinn, Caryl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520228952 ISBN 13: 9780520228955

Publisher: University of California Press, 2003

Synopsis

When New German cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter explored issues of identity national, political, personal, and sexual music and film style played crucial roles. Most studies of the celebrated film movement, however, have sidestepped the role of music, a curious oversight given its importance to German culture and nation formation. Caryl Flinn’s study reverses this trend, identifying styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. Flinn concentrates on those styles that urge listeners to interact with difference including that embodied in Germany’s difficult history rather than to "master" or "get past" it.

Flinn breaks new ground by considering contemporary reception frameworks of the New German Cinema, a generation after its end. She discusses transnational, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the sexual, ethnic, national, and historical diversity of audiences. Through detailed case studies, she shows how music helps filmgoers engage with a range of historical subjects and experiences. Each chapter of The New German Cinema examines a particular stylistic strategy, assessing music’s role in each. The study also examines queer strategies like kitsch and camp and explores the movement’s charged construction of human bodies on which issues of ruination, survival, memory, and pleasure are played out.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"An original, intelligent, and insightful book. Over the past twenty years, the New German Cinema has been the topic of some of our most sophisticated studies of memory, history, and political identity. Flinn extends, deepens, and expands on this work to offer necessary insights about music, cinema, and national identity in postwar Germany. With wit, rigor, and an engaging prose style, Flinn exposes the New German Cinema in its ability to dramatize a commitment to historical memory that is not sentimental, romanticized, or fueled by nationalist fervor. This is a remarkably innovative, transformative, and important work."—Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism & Film History

"Using the musical soundtrack as her 'Auftakt,' Caryl Flinn revisits melodrama and melancholia, camp and kitsch, and memory and shock in the works of such filmmakers as Fassbinder, Kluge, Ottinger, Treut, and Schroeter. The resulting intellectual counterpoint is dazzling. In the wake of this articulate analysis, the New German Cinema will never be the same again. In these 'leaden times' of ours, Flinn reminds us of the hope that an alternative aesthetics has to offer."—Alice Kuzniar, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, author of The Queer German Cinema

About the Author

Caryl Flinn is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Strains of Utopia: Nostalgia, Gender, and Hollywood Film Music (1992) and coeditor of Music and Cinema (2001).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0520228952
• ISBN 13: 9780520228955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 331