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  • When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America, 1985–2005
  • Randall Halle
When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America, 1985–2005. By Christine Haase. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2007. 225 pages. $75.00.

When Heimat Meets Hollywood is an impressive study, offering many unique insights and covering original ground. It takes as its central point of investigation the relationship between the film cultures of Germany and the US, approaching this relationship as multifaceted and mutual. Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of [End Page 147] the study is precisely the development of an analysis in which the role of Hollywood is not one of simple cultural imperialism. It reveals a varied and dynamic response to Hollywood's hegemony. To develop this perspective the study first undertakes a history of German-American film relations after which it comes to focus on four directors: Wolfgang Petersen, Roland Emmerich, Percy Adlon, and Tom Tykwer. These four directors can be understood as offering four paradigms of filmmaking that can be extended further. With this work Christine Haase has made an important intervention in the critical assessment of contemporary German film production and as such the book engages with the secondary literature, expressing just and appropriate critiques of senior scholars.

The introduction offers a useful survey of current research in German film studies as well as a brief introduction to the conditions of film production in twenty-first century Germany. This material establishes a clear connection to the first chapter, a survey of German and American film relations starting in 1895 following all the epochs of film from the years of early cinema to the turn of the century. This chapter draws on Sabine Hake's foundational study German National Cinema but extends it through Haase's expanded considerations of international relations.

The chapters on the individual directors offer much-needed overviews of their work. Wolfgang Petersen is interrogated for his status as a "blockbuster auteur," a director who upholds "not only the commercial but the 'cultural' end" of filmmaking (64). The chapter offers an overview of his work from his film school debut to his breakthrough film Das Boot (1981) to his most recent blockbusters, especially Airforce One (1995). The third chapter focuses on Petersen's colleague in Hollywood, Roland Emmerich. Emmerich is, however, represented in this study as a German director who contributes to "cinema's globalized commodification" (101). Haase argues that he excludes national peculiarity as a means of achieving a "globally decipherable" film language (129). The celebration of the US in his films is not a celebration of US social reality, but of universal progressive values for which the US has been a stand-in. Here, too, Haase provides a useful overview of all works that does not fail to offer a critique of Emmerich's violence and heteronormativity. The third director, Percy Adlon, features in Haase's discussion as an independent filmmaker who produces German-American hybrids. The study finds in Adlon's work a vision of America from a German perspective, and an art cinema that draws on Hollywood's popular tropes. Finally, Tom Tykwer engages Hollywood in a critical manner. Haase sees in Tykwer a postmodern director who offers a counterposition to Fredric Jameson's negative assessment of postmodernism; Tykwer is able to "articulate ideologically critical positions by engaging in postmodern discourses" (163). Haase argues that Tykwer's films offer more than national allegory in that they create a third space. As do all the chapters, this one provides an overview offset with closer readings of specific works.

In the discussion of the book Haase relies frequently on the terms "transnational," "global," and "international." She acknowledges that "transnational" has experienced a rapid expansion in cultural and film studies. Yet I would want to offer a critical note here: Scholars draw on it too frequently without any clear investigation of the difference between trans- and international relations. The two terms are often taken as synonyms and while Haase for her part suggests that "transnational" is a subset of "international," the elision of difference between the two appears here. Scholarship is precisely at a point where careful distinctions between the categories [End Page 148] of...

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