[Film and Culture Series 01] • The Use and Abuse of Cinema

Explores the screen fantasies and spectacles that derive from Germany’s fraught modern experience

Eric Rentschler explores the screen fantasies and spectacles that derive from Germany’s fraught modern experience and follows the traces of these sights and sounds to the postmillenial present. Each chapter contains a stirring minidrama, discussing prominent critics and theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim; key New German directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge; films from the so-called Berlin School, particularly those of Christoph Hochhäusler, Thomas Arslan, and Christian Petzold; and seminal genres such as the mountain film, the early sound musical, the postwar rubble film, and recent heritage cinema. Rentschler balances history and theory throughout his close readings.

Eric Rentschler's new book, The Use and Abuse of Cinema , takes readers on a series of enthralling excursions through the fraught history of German cinema, from the Weimar and Nazi eras to the postwar and postwall epochs and into the new millennium. These journeys afford rich panoramas and nuanced close-ups from a nation's production of fantasies and spectacles, traversing the different ways in which the film medium has figured in Germany, both as a site of creative and critical enterprise and as a locus of destructive and regressive endeavor. Each of the chapters provides a stirring minidrama; the cast includes prominent critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim; postwar directors like Wolfgang Staudte, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Alexander Kluge; representatives of the so-called Berlin School; and exponents of mountain epics, early sound musicals, rubble films, and recent heritage features. A film history that is both original and unconventional, Rentschler's colorful tapestry weaves together figures, motifs, and stories in exciting, unexpected, and even novelistic ways.--Martin Brady "Modern Language Review"