The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style / Edition 1

by Caryl Flinn

Overview

When New German cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter explored issues of identity—national, political, personal, and sexual—music and film style played crucial roles. Most studies of the celebrated film movement, however, have sidestepped the role of music, a curious oversight given its importance to German culture and nation formation. Caryl Flinn’s study reverses this trend, identifying styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. Flinn concentrates on those styles that urge listeners to interact with difference—including that embodied in Germany’s difficult history—rather than to "master" or "get past" it.

Flinn breaks new ground by considering contemporary reception frameworks of the New German Cinema, a generation after its end. She discusses transnational, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the sexual, ethnic, national, and historical diversity of audiences. Through detailed case studies, she shows how music helps filmgoers engage with a range of historical subjects and experiences. Each chapter of The New German Cinema examines a particular stylistic strategy, assessing music’s role in each. The study also examines queer strategies like kitsch and camp and explores the movement’s charged construction of human bodies on which issues of ruination, survival, memory, and pleasure are played out.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520238237
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/19/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Caryl Flinn is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Strains of Utopia: Nostalgia, Gender, and Hollywood Film Music (1992) and coeditor of Music and Cinema (2001).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Strategies of Remembrance"

PART 1. HISTORICAL PREDECESSORS: MELODRAMA AND MODERNISM
1. Mourning, Melancholia, and "New German Melodrama"
2. Modernism's Aftershocks: Peer Raben's Film Music for Fassbinder

PART 2. MUSIC AND THE MATERIALS OF HISTORY: ALEXANDER KLUGE
3. Kluge's Assault on History: Trauma, Testimony, and Difference in The Patriot
4. Undoing Act 5: History, Bodies, and Operatic Remains: Kluge's The Power of Emotion

PART 3. QUEERING HISTORY THROUGH CAMP AND KITSCH
5. Restaging History with Fantasy: Body, Camp, and Sound in the Films of Treut, Ottinger, and von Praunheim
6. Introjecting Kitsch: Werner Schroeter, Music, and Alterity

Coda: Working the Pieces
Notes
Index