Recent Trends in German Film Studies

Since the launch of the hugely influential Cinegraph project in the early 1980s, both German film and German film studies have changed practically beyond all recognition. Cinegraph was conceived at a time when the German industry was beginning to lose its international reputation for producing innovative Autorenfilme, indeed when the role of the cinema itself as a medium of film exhibition seemed to be in terminal decline. This was coupled with a general lack of public interest in anything other than the most canonical of films from the early decades of production, a lack of interest that was allowing film stock simply to decay on archival shelves. Three decades later, while worries about the sustainability of cinema as a medium continue to resurface sporadically, German films are once again receiving plaudits on the international stage and much important preservation work has begun. During this period, the Cinegraph's Hamburgisches Centrum für Filmforschung has made a significant contribution to scholarship, particularly with regard to the discovery and preservation of early films as well as the promotion of research into lesser-known industry figures. It is hard to believe, for example, that the producer and director Joe May was once almost forgotten. In so doing, it has also been instrumental in broadening the types of film deemed worth of study, from the popular fare produced by the likes of May, which was largely ignored in the 1970s and 1980s in the face of the New German Cinema's Autoren model, to other more neglected forms of visual culture such as animation, the advertising film, or video installations. Moreover, Cinegraph has long been concerned with film as a transnational cultural medium, a key emphasis of contemporary film studies, exploring the ways in which German cinema has from its very beginnings existed within an international cultural, economic, and political nexus. Building on and developing the work undertaken by Cinegraph as well as numerous other scholars in Germany, the UK, and the US who have shaped the field, we find current scholarship moving well beyond Weimar Expressionism and the New German Cinema...