Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria ed. by Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore (review)

Spurred on by the global economic collapse and the ongoing financial crisis in Europe, German Film Studies has witnessed a resurgence of interest in political and socioeconomic approaches to cinema in recent years. Scholars have responded both to the changed economic context of film production and spectatorship in an era of unregulated global markets and to the increasing focus of contemporary German films on the new social realities that result from these changes in studies such as Randall Halle's German Film After Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana 2008) [editor's note: see review in Monatshefte 102:3, Fall 2010, 384-399] and Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager's The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Detroit 2010) [editor's note: see review in Monatshefte 104:2, Summer 2012, 308-309].

Mueller and Skidmore's volume participates in the important project begun in those works of reassessing the place of the political in contemporary German cinema. A common reference point for all of these publications is Eric Rentschler's influential description of German films from the 1980s and 1990s as a "cinema of consensus." A central impetus of Cinema and Social Change is to show that in the new millennium this cinema of consensus "has given way to a more complex, formally more diverse, and thematically more critical cinematic scene" (3).

Like Halle's and Fisher and Prager's volumes, Cinema and Social Change focuses on two key areas in articulating a vision of contemporary German cinema as both a product and agent of globalization. Its fifteen contributions rethink the category of the national, along with issues of hybridity, identity, and cultural specificity, in the age of transnationalism; they also investigate possibilities for experimental aesthetics, unconventional styles, utopian thinking, and subversive critique in an era characterized by the commercial drive of global capital. Spanning the volume's consideration of both nation and aesthetics is its emphasis on the way contemporary cinema screens history, including the Nazi past, GDR history, and the legacy of both 1968 and domestic terrorism. The grouping of chapters into rubrics, including "Challenging Viewing Habits," "Reassessing and Consuming History," and "Questioning Collective Identities," helps to focus attention on thematic continuities across the volume's contributions, as does the excellent introduction by Mueller and Skidmore.

While the editors highlight issues of production, distribution, and reception in their introduction, emphasizing both the increased significance of producers and distributors for market-driven cinema and the transnational reception context of films today, these very relevant issues are for the most part disappointingly absent in the volume's subsequent contributions. Instead, most chapters present close readings of individual films or oeuvres that emphasize thematic elements, social contexts, and formal language. Few of the contributions break new ground in terms of theoretical approaches to contemporary cinema. However, a major strength of the volume is its attention to significant filmmakers who have been under-researched in English-language scholarship, including Yilmaz Arslan, Angelina Maccarone, Ruth Mader, Anja Salamonowitz, Christoph Schlingensief, Michael Schorr, and Yüksel Yavuz. The engaging and accessible writing and the inclusion of ample color images make the volume especially appealing; a paperback version would lend itself to course adoption.

Two of the volume's best contributions bring together close readings of lesser-known films with interventions into theoretical debates that go to the heart of the question of social change in contemporary cinema. Morgan Koerner's discussion of Schlingensief's Freakstars 3000 (2003) investigates the film's parody of able-bodied media formats, particularly the reality television casting show. Koerner argues that Schlingensief's film offers an alternative space of representation in contrast to mainstream television, an expanded media image of disability, and a provocative aesthetic challenge to able-bodied spectators. Koerner's excellent contribution is one of only a handful of interventions...