Eric Rentschler

Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm

A Tbpography of the Mountain Film A combination of auratic landscapes, breathtaking atmospherics, and high-pitched emotions, the mountain film (Bergfilm) is a prominent Weimar genre often spoken of as a precursor of National Socialism. These narratives, claim commentators, glorify submission to inexorable destiny and elemental might, anticipating fascist surrender to irrationalism and brute force. Regressive parables, they play a central role in Siegfried Kracauers From Caligari to Hitler: in his teleology, the stunning cloud displays of Avalanche (Stiirme iiber dem Montblanc, 1930)

The Use and Abuse of Memory: New German Film and the Discourse of Bitburg

*This paper was delivered as a special presentation at MIT on November 12, 1985. I would like to express my thanks to Inez Hedges of Northeastern University and Michael Geisler of MIT for organizing the lecture and encouraging me to present it in that forum. Also, I would like to acknowledge the productive impetus offered in conversation by Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch. Finally, I want to credit the UCI Committee on Research whose generous Faculty Research Fellowship provided the material support that enabled me to write this essay during the fall months of 1985.

The Surveillance Camera's Quarry in Hochhäusler's Eine Minute Dunkel

“The World Changes When You Stare Straight at It”1 When a surveillance camera fixes on the world, it transforms what it sees. In Christoph Hochhausler’s Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness, 2011), such a camera breaks down while a murder is in progress and the resulting technical glitch produces a moment of darkness. The film chronicles the quest to understand what has happened—quite literally to fill in the blank.2 The nearly four-and-a-half hours of Dreileben are in fact framed by surveillance camera images. The title of Hochhausler’s contribution, which is the trilogy’s final feature, refers to a missing slice of surveillance camera footage in a film that demonstrates how a camera’s stare at the world does not ensure that one sees (much less apprehends or understands) reality. Eine Minute Dunkel resolves the enigma of the missing shot only to introduce a further moment of darkness. In the film’s last seconds, we glimpse a surveillance camera’s record of a decidedly climactic moment, but the image freezes and, in a formal gesture that ironically reiterates the film’s title, fades into black before we can confirm that what looks to be another act of violence, indeed another murder, has actually transpired. Here again, left with a void, we must fill in the blank. In the following I would like to consider the crucial function of inscribed surveillance cameras in Hochhausler’s film as well as their framing role in the Dreileben project as a whole. Along the way, I will also make some more general observations about the use and meaning of surveillance footage within the endeavors of the socalled Berlin School.

Postwall Prospects: An Introduction

With the end of the cold war, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the spectacle of unification, the consolidation of the European Union and the introduction o ft he E uro, German reality has become dr amatically transformed as has German cinema. More than two decades have passed since New German Cinemas final signs of life. In the meanwhile German films have all but disappeared from American arthouses and distribution circuits. Were it not for the persistent endeavors of the Goethe-Institut and Inter Nationes (agencies operating under increasingly severe budgetary constraints), German films would be nearly invisible in the United States. On only rare occasions in the last ten years have they represented the Federal Republic in competitions at major film festivals. Cineastes have paid little attention to new German productions beyond a modest number of exceptions (most notably: Heimat, Mdnner, Der Himmel iber Berlin, Das schreckliche Midchen, Hitlerjunge Salomon, Lola rennt, and Bella Martha). Film scholars here and a broad h ave become far more wont to focus t heir d iscussions on

The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife

Preface Abbreviations and Special Terms Introduction: The Power of Illusions Part I. Fatal Attractions 1. A Legend for Modern Times: The Blue Light (1932) 2. Emotional Engineering: Hitler Youth Quex (1933) Part II. Foreign Affairs 3. Home Sweet Heimat: The Prodigal Son (1934) 4. Hollywood Made in Germany: Lucky Kids (1936) 5. Astray in the New World: La Habanera (1937) Part III. Specters and Shadows 6. The Elective Other: Jew Suss (1940) 7. The Fuhrers Phantom: Paracelsus (1943) 8. Self-Reflexive Self-Destruction: Munchhausen (1943) Epilogue: The Testament of Dr. Goebbels Appendix A. Films and Events, 1933-1945 Appendix B. Directorial Filmographies Appendix C. American Film and Videotape Sources Notes Bibliography Index

Springtime for Ufa

Klaus Kreimeier, Die Ufa‐Story: Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns, Munich/Vienna: Hanser, 1992. 520 pages.

Kluge, Film History, and Eigensinn: A Taking of Stock from the Distance

Enthusiasm, celebration, and continuing fascination on the one side; dissension, crisis, and impasse on the other: a striking nonsynchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) has over the years governed takings of stock of New German Film by American friends and the national cinemas domestic observers. The films may be the same, but the courses in time are not. Recent developments offer further proof of how decidedly dissimilar perceptions of the New German Film remain on opposite sides of the Atlantic. During the autumn of 1983 in Manhattan, the receptivity of the foreign cinema reached an all-time high. Fassbinders Berlin Alexanderplatz enjoyed a widely publicized com-