A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany / Edition 3

by Frances Guerin

Overview

Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany's advance to technological modernity, light - particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light - became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life.In Frances Guerin's compelling history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light - electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights - and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin's interpretations center on use of light in films such as Schatten (1923), Variete (1925), Metropolis (1926), and Der Golem (1920). In these films we see how light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the narrative, and the central thematic concern. This history relieves German films of the responsibility to explain the political and ideological instability of the period, an instability said to be the uncertain foundation of Nazism. In unlocking this dubious link, A Culture of Light redefines the field of German film scholarship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816642861
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	04/05/2005
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Frances Guerin is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Electrification of Life, Cinema, and Art 2. Bringing Cinema to Life through Light: German Film to World War I 3. Legends of Light and Shadow: The Mythical Past in Algol and Schatten 4. The Spell of Light: Cinema as Modern Magic in Faust, Der Golem, Siegfried, and Metropolis 5. Reformulations of Space through Light in Die Strasse, Jenseits der Strasse, and Am Rande der Welt 6. Dazzled by the Profusion of Lights: Technological Entertainment in Variete and Sylvester Conclusion Notes Index