Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951

by Gerd Gemünden

Overview

Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), William Dieterle's The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948), and Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231536523
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/21/2014
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Gerd Gemünden is the Sherman Fairchild Professor in the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Parallel Modernities
1. A History of Horror
2. Tales of Urgency and Authenticity
Part II: Hitler in Hollywood
3. Performing Resistance, Resisting Performance
4. History as Propaganda and Parable
Part III: You Can't Go Home Again
5. Out of the Past
6. The Failure of Atonement
Epilogue
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Johannes von Moltke

Gemünden excels as a close reader, using each chapter's featured film as a springboard for discussions of a rich set of social and professional networks, aesthetic developments, and historical trajectories. This indispensable panorama of exile cinema profoundly enriches our understanding of a crucial period of Hollywood filmmaking and its transnational resonances.

Noah Isenberg

Gemünden offers a composite portrait of German exile cinema rendered in richly evocative case studies--each presented in exquisite detail and with probing insight--as a means of telling the larger, complex, multi-faceted story.

Editorial Reviews

Deftly, Gerd Gemünden combines perceptive close readings of select films with sharp archival investigation to show how some key movies of classical Hollywood came-in often fraught manner-to engage with the evils of fascism. By understanding cinema as a complex negotiation over political meanings, from production to final results onscreen, this volume represents a major contribution to the literature on the Hollywood emigrés and their cultural work.— Dana Polan, New York University

Continental Strangers is a necessary and most compelling pendant to Thomas Doherty's Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939. Indeed, these two recent releases provide an impressive ensemble. Doherty depicts how American film studios reacted to Nazi terror in both direct and less overt ways. Gemünden fills out the picture in a series of intriguing case studies devoted to filmmakers who fled Hitler and settled in Southern California. Sensitive to the variety of ways in which German film artists experienced emigration and exile, Gemünden's book remains admirably attentive to the historical determinations and textual shapes of Hollywood's anti-Nazi features.— Eric Rentschler, Harvard University

A lucid and comprehensive account of German filmmakers in American exile, this book also offers a poetics of displacement and alienation. It adds another chapter to the story about Hitler and Hollywood and contributes to a deeper historical understanding of political cinema at a moment of crisis.— Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley

A welcome and well-researched survey.— Cineaste

Gemünden's work... makes a valuable contribution to film history...— Journal of American History

...a richly contextualized and nuanced reading of exile cinema...— American Historcial Review

A most important book.— Clayton Dillard Slant Magazine

From the Publisher