International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s

by Tim Bergfelder

Overview

West German cinema of the 1960s is frequently associated with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, collectively known by the 1970s as the "New German Cinema." Yet for domestic and international audiences at the time, German cinema primarily meant popular genres such as exotic adventure films, Gothic crime thrillers, westerns, and sex films, which were dismissed by German filmmakers and critics of the 1970s as "Daddy's Cinema."

International Adventures provides the first comprehensive account of these genres, and charts the history of the West German film industry and its main protagonists from the immediate post—war years to its boom period in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing film genres in the context of industrial practices, literary traditions, biographical trajectories, and wider cultural and social developments, this book uncovers a forgotten period of German filmmaking that merits reassessment.

International Adventures firmly locates its case studies within the wider dynamic of European cinema. In its study of West German cinema's links and co—operations with other countries including Britain, France, and Italy, the book addresses what is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of 1960s popular film genres: the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571815392
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	09/01/2005
Series:	Film Europa , #2
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Tim Bergfelder is Head of Film Studies at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on German and European cinema, and is co—editor of The German Cinema Book (2002) and The Titanic in Myth and Memory (2004).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Introduction

PART I: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Chapter 2. From Rubble to Prosperity: Reconstruction of a National Film Industry
Chapter 3. From National to European Cinema
Chapter 4. The Distribution Sector
Chapter 5. Film, Television, and Internationalisation

PART II: CASE—STUDIES

Chapter 6. Artur Brauner’s CCC: Remigration, Popular Genres, and International Aspirations
Chapter 7. Imagining England: the West German Edgar Wallace Series
Chapter 8. From Soho to Silverlake: the Karl May Westerns
Chapter 9. Beyond Respectability: B—Film Production in the 1960s
Chapter 10. Conclusion: the End of an Era?

Appendix: Filmography of 1960s Genre Cycles

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Tim Bergfelder has written an excellent and in many aspects exemplary book, which leaves, also without daring theses, a lasting impression. Bergfelder invites the reader to reflect on film—historical categories and methods and to re—examine a subject that turns out not to be all that familiar."  ·  Filmblatt

“Drawing a picture of the German cinema of the 1960s as a blatantly commercial and truly internationally minded culture industry, Bergfelder’s elegantly written and convincingly argued book not only provides an overdue counterweight to the conventionally narrow focus on the Young or ‘New German Cinema’ as one of the best—known pedigrees of European art cinema to emerge in the 1960s… a book that cannot be praised enough for opening up entirely new horizons in the study of German and European cinema.”  ·  Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

"…the entire book is original, provocative, and informative, and Bergfelder’s argument is powerful."  ·  Choice

From the Publisher