An edition of Hollywood in Berlin (1994)

Hollywood in Berlin

American cinema and Weimar Germany

  • 0 Ratings
  • 0 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

My Reading Lists:

Create a new list

Check-In

×Close
Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
Today

  • 0 Ratings
  • 0 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

Buy this book

Last edited by MARC Bot
December 10, 2009 | History
An edition of Hollywood in Berlin (1994)

Hollywood in Berlin

American cinema and Weimar Germany

  • 0 Ratings
  • 0 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood's most famous film star, went almost unnoticed when he visited Berlin in 1921. Three years later, Jackie Coogan was mobbed by Berlin fans. Within two years after that, audiences were protesting with howls and angry whistling against the American motion pictures that dominated Berlin's leading theaters. Yet before the decade was over they were lining up to hear Al Jolson sing in their first experience of sound film.

These roller-coaster reactions are engagingly documented by Thomas Saunders as he explores an outstanding example of one of this century's most important cultural developments: global Americanization through the motion picture. The setting is Berlin, the cultural heart of Central Europe and home of the only film industry after World War I to rival Hollywood's.

The invasion by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. It fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the spectre of wholesale Americanization, while facilitating unprecedented levels of cultural and economic exchange.

.

American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes in Weimar Germany but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. In Hollywood in Berlin, Saunders examines the significance of Hollywood's presence in Germany through an analysis of the imported films and the commercial, social, and artistic discourses which they generated.

He explores the phases of audience and critical appreciation of Hollywood - from avid curiosity and enthusiasm through growing disenchantment and saturation - as they relate to the ever-expanding front of the American film invasion.

His fascinating discussion of Erich von Stroheim's Greed, which opened in Germany in 1926, shows how closely the violent reaction to the film on the part of critics and moviegoers alike paralleled the swelling fear of Amerikanismus and its perceived challenge to traditional German values.

By correlating Hollywood's changing contribution to Weimar culture with the multiple contexts in which the films and their values were received, Hollywood in Berlin illuminates a vital moment of cultural encounter in the twentieth century. In addition, it successfully restores to the study of Weimar cinema its long-neglected international context and historicizes the ongoing struggle to safeguard the specificity of national cinemas from domination by Hollywood.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
332

Buy this book

Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Hollywood in Berlin
Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany
1994, University of California Press
in English
Cover of: Hollywood in Berlin
Hollywood in Berlin: American cinema and Weimar Germany
1994, University of California Press
in English

Add another edition?

Book Details


Edition Notes

A digital reproduction is available from E-Editions, a collaboration of the University of California Press and the California Digital Library's eScholarship program.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 315-325) and index.
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral).

Published in
Berkeley
Series
Weimar and now ;, 6

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
791.43/0943
Library of Congress
PN1993.5.G3 S34 1994, PN1993.5.G3S34 1994, PN1993.5.G3 S34 1994eb

The Physical Object

Pagination
x, 332 p. :
Number of pages
332

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL1427082M
Internet Archive
hollywoodinberli00saun
ISBN 10
0520083547
LCCN
93038196
OCLC/WorldCat
44960123, 29223301
Library Thing
1521271
Goodreads
306813

Community Reviews (0)

Feedback?
No community reviews have been submitted for this work.

Lists

This work does not appear on any lists.

History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
July 25, 2024 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
January 7, 2023 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
July 31, 2020 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
December 4, 2010 Edited by Open Library Bot Added subjects from MARC records.
April 28, 2010 Edited by Open Library Bot Linked existing covers to the work.