Is “life [really] too short to watch a German movie”? - Taking a tour of the history of German film, this course attempts to refute the famous saying by the renowned German-Jewish theater and film actor and director Fritz Kortner. Starting with the silent era, we will explore the vivid cinematic and cultural life in pre- and post-WW1 Germany and the ensuing period marked by an enormous exodus of talent, forced by the Nazis. After a short glance at Nazi propaganda movies and their counterpart, “inner immigration” cinematic art, the course will look at post-war cinema, the advent of TV-culture, the “New German Cinema” from the sixties onwards, and we will discuss the strange fact that, in spite of Germany’s image as being humor-averse, it is mostly comedies that have been financially successful at the box office and beyond. Theoretical approaches to reading film as text and art will deepen our inquiry and help situate German film in the context of an international film culture/ market.

Required texts:
- Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, ISBN 3-518-06852-0
- Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, Geschichte des deutschen Films. Stuttgart, Weimar: J. B. Metzler. ISBN 3-476-01952-7.
- Hans Helmut Prinzler, Chronik des deutschen Films. J.B. Metzler Stuttgart – Weimar. ISBN 3-476-01290-5