The Dark Mirror

German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood

Lutz Koepnick author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:20th Sep '02

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Dark Mirror cover

Lutz Koepnick analyzes the complicated relationship between two cinemas--Hollywood's and Nazi Germany's--in this theoretically and politically incisive study. The Dark Mirror examines the split course of German popular film from the early 1930s until the mid 1950s, showing how Nazi filmmakers appropriated Hollywood conventions and how German film exiles reworked German cultural material in their efforts to find a working base in the Hollywood studio system. Through detailed readings of specific films, Koepnick provides a vivid sense of the give and take between German and American cinema.

"Lutz Koepnick's The Dark Mirror provides one of the finest, most compelling and suggestive accounts to date of the multiple locations of German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Charting the shifting relationships between institutional contexts and individual acts of reception, Koepnick persuasively shows how the German cinema and its filmmakers-both in exile and in Nazi Germany-contributed to a fragile, stratified, indeed, "nonsynchronous" public sphere."-Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History "Lutz Koepnick's brilliant study debunks the received wisdom concerning Nazi German and Hollywood film of the 1930s and 40s. Using detailed analyses of 8 films, with special focus on sound and music, he insists upon the disjointed contexts and uneven relationships of American and German filmmaking. Historically nuanced and theoretically savvy, this remarkable book offers something for everyone: Americanists, Germanists, historians, students of cinema sound and music, those interested in debates between art and popular forms, and European and Hollywood production."-Caryl Flinn, author of Strains of Utopia

ISBN: 9780520233119

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 544g

334 pages