Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany

Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular illustrated magazines, she shows how Weimar Germany had a commercially viable female audience, fascinated with looking at images that called traditional representations of gender into question.


Interdisciplinary in her approach, Petro interweaves archival research wit...