A Companion to German Cinema Terri Ginsberg (International Council for Middle East Studies, New York, USA) 9781405194365

A Companion to German Cinema regards the shifting terrain of German filmmaking and film studies against their larger social contexts with twenty-two newly commissioned essays by well-established and younger scholars in the field. While several of these focus on classic topics such as Weimar cinema, Fifties cinema, New German Cinema and its legacy, and Holocaust film, the collection is distinguished by its focus on new developments and the innovative light they may shed on earlier practices.

A Companion to German Cinema includes essays on Berlin Film, Neue Heimat Film, New Comedy, post-Wall documentaries, the post-Wende RAF genre, and Rabenmutter imagery, as well as on the persistently overlooked and under-theorized Indianerfilme, post-AIDS documentaries, sexploitation films, and new multicultural and transnational films produced in Germany under the auspices of the European Union. Organized into three "movements" representing the significance of these developments for their aesthetic theorization, A Companion to German Cinema challenges its readers to address critical gaps in the field with the aim of opening it further onto new terrains of intellectual engagement.

Terri Ginsberg is a director and public programmer at the International Council for Middle East Studies in Washington, DC. She has taught film, media, and cultural studies at New York University, Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, Ithaca College, and Brooklyn College. She is author of Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology (2007), and co-editor (with Kirsten Moana Thompson) of Perspectives on German Cinema (1996) and of several other volumes on global cinema and Middle Eastern film studies.

Andrea Mensch is a senior lecturer in the English Department at North Carolina State University and has also taught film and literature courses in London and at the NCSU Prague Institute. She was associate editor as well as book reviews editor for Jouvert: A Journal of Post-colonial Studies.

"Any academic library that has students that might get the merest whiff of cinema as part of their curriculum should ensure this work is available to them." (Reference Reviews, 1 December 2012)

"[T]he carefully constructed essays in [this volume] contribute to elevating this reference book so much more than its component parts could have achieved - much like German cinema itself. It is a volume that contributes significantly to reference works on German cinema, European cinema, and cinematic history. Any academic library that has students that might get the merest whiff of cinema as part of their curriculum should ensure this work is available to them."