Dietrich's Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film - Hardcover

Carter, Erica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 085170882X ISBN 13: 9780851708829

Publisher: British Film Institute, 2007

Synopsis

This text looks at the star system under the Third Reich. Following the experiments of Weimar, much of cinema after 1933 became part of a wider Nazi backlash against modernism in all its forms. This study contributes to contemporary debates concerning the historical study of film spectatorship.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Dietrich's Ghosts is the first major English-language study to look at the star system under the Third Reich. Erica Carter argues that after the Weimar period, the German star system was reorganized to foster an antimodernist mode of spectatorship geared to an appreciation of the beautiful and the sublime. Carter discusses the reconfiguring of film production and exhibition around idealist aesthetic principles and offers case studies of three stars. Emil Jannings figures as an exemplar of what Carter terms the volkisch sublime, while Marlene Dietrich emerges as a figure at the crossroads of modernist and idealist conceptions of beauty. A provocative chapter on Zarah Leander in the feature films of the early war years portrays this star as a post-Dietrich emblem of the supposed sublimity of a fascist war. This unprecedented new study reassesses existing paradigms in German film history debates and throws suggestive new light on the icons and popular culture of the Third Reich.

About the Author

Erica Carter is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Warwick and author of How German is She?: Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (1997).

Edition details

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 085170882X
• ISBN 13: 9780851708829
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272