Jaimey Fisher - Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and Its Deviations

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, 3. Mar. 2011. By way of comparison, the James Bond franchise has averaged $69 million per film, while the Resident Evil franchise has earned an average of $50 million per film.

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See, for example, Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-productions in the 1960s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); Christine Haase, When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America, 19852005 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007); Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, eds., Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003); and Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification, and the New Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White with Meta Mazaj, Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011), 443.

Rick Altman, Film/Genre (1999, repr., London: BFI, 2002). Henceforth cited as F/G ; Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (1999, repr., New York: Routledge, 2000).

Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 21. See Judith Hess Wright, Genre Films and the Status Quo, in Film Genre Reader III , ed. Barry Keith Grant (1974, repr., Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 4250.

Mark Jancovich, Horror: The Film Reader (London: Routledge 2002), 11.

Theodor Adorno, Transparencies on Film. New German Critiqu e 24/25 (1981): 199205; and Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).

Neale, Genre and Hollywood ,

Discussed in Miriam Hansen, Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere? New German Critique 29 (Spring 1983): 14784.

See Langford, Film Genre , 910, and Neale, Genre and Hollywood , 10.

For an overview of the concept of auteurism/authorship, see the section in Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies , ed. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson, 4 vols. (London: Routledge), especially vol. 2, part 4.

Neale, Genre and Hollywood ,

Ian Garwood, The Autorenfilm in Contemporary German Cinema, in The German Cinema Book , ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Gktrk (London: bfi, 2002), 20210.

Jim Kitses, Horizons West (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), 26.

John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 11.

Langford, Film Genre , 10.

Colin McArthur, Underworld USA (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), 23.

Edward Buscombe, The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema, Screen 2, no. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1970): 3045. Reprinted in Grant, Film Genre Reader III , 1226.

Even some of the earliest iconographic criticism foregrounded this kind of intertextual familiarity; see Lawrence Alloway, On the Iconography of the Movies, Movie 7 (1963): 45. Discussed in Neale, Genre and Hollywood , 14.

Langford, Film Genre , 2.

Jim Kitses, Horizons West , 11. Reproduced, for instance, in Neale, Genre and Hollywood , 134.

Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 187.

Bruce Kawin, The Mummys Pool, in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film , ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984), 320.

Robin Wood, The American Nightmare: Horror in the 1970s, in Jancovich, Horror: The Film Reader , 28.

Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance ,

Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance ,

Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 13.

Schatz, Hollywood Genres , 27.

Schatz, Hollywood Genres , 20.

Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance ,

See Andrew Tudors chapter, Genre, in Tudor, Theories of Film ; also in Grant, Film Genre Reader III , 5.

Tudor, Genre, 3.

See Janet Staiger, Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History, in Grant, Film Genre Reader III , 185201.

John G. Cawelti, Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Film, in Grant, Film Genre Reader III , 24361.

Cawelti, Chinatown, 25456.

Charles OBrien, Film Noir in France: Before the Liberation, iris 21 (Spring 1996): 720; and James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also F/G , 6061.

Naremore, More than Night , 11.

Neale, Genre and Hollywood , 3940.

Neale, Genre and Hollywood ,

Neale, Genre and Hollywood ,

Langford, Film Genre , 11.

See Tino Balio, History of American Cinema , vol. 5, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner, 1993), 17980.

Edgar G. Ulmer, Interview with Peter Bogdanovich, in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 57576.

To be sure, such claims of having been associated with the movements that made Germany famous in the early 1920s were a survival strategy for migrs and meant as passe-partout to Hollywoods studio doors, but particularly Ulmer pushed the limits. Elsewhere in the same interview Ulmer makes the completely unsubstantiated claim that he designed the sets for Caligari , and the long list of films in which he says he was involved includes virtually everything done by Murnau as well as Langs Die Nibelungen and Metropolis . It was claims like these that had Lotte Eisner call Ulmer the greatest liar in the history of cinema. Quoted in Deborah Lazaroff Alpi, Robert Siodmak (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 20.

On Poelzigs contribution to film architecture, see Claudia Dillmann, Die Wirkung der Architektur ist eine magische: Hans Poelzig und der Film, in Hans Poelzig: Bauten fr den Film (Frankfurt: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1997), 2075.

American observers concurred. See, for example, the widely discussed essay by J. B. Matthews and R. E. Shallcross, Must America Go Fascist? Harpers Magazine , Jun. 1934, 115; or a symposium titled Will Fascism Come to America? in The Modern Monthly of September 1934. One year later Sinclair Lewiss bestselling novel, It Cant Happen Here , was published, which answers the question of whether America might become fascist in the affirmative.

Stefan Grissemann, Mann im Schatten (Vienna: Paul Zsonlay, 2003), 139.

Even though Ulmer arrived in Hollywood long before Hitlers rise to power, Goebbelss anti-Semitic restructuring of the German film industry and the subsequent Nuremberg laws made it impossible for Jews like Ulmer to return to Germany, turning many erstwhile migrs into exiles.

Anton Kaes, ed. ,Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhltnis von Literatur und Film, 19091929 (Munich: DTV, 1978).

On Lugosis career, see Arthur Lenning, The Count: The Life and Films of Bela Dracula Lugosi (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1974). Ulmer claims to have known Lugosi since the time he was Minister of Culture in the communist government of Bela Kuhn in Hungary. Quoted in Bernard Eisenschitz and Jean-Claude Romer, Entretien avec Edgar G. Ulmer, Midi-Minuit Fantastique 13 (1965): 4.

As William K. Everson writes, even some of Universals B Westerns of these years [the second half of the 1920s] had a Germanic look to them. Everson,