3 results
12 - Film and Television
-
- By Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and German at the University of California, Irvine, Anton Kaes, Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley
- Edited by Christof Mauch, Kiran Klaus Patel, European University Institute, Florence
-
- Book:
- The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century
- Published online:
- 12 October 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 August 2010, pp 194-210
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On September 28, 1993, two of the most respected German and French newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Le Monde, published an unprecedented open letter condemning Hollywood for strangling the European film market and thereby endangeringWestern culture itself. Written byWimWenders and others, and signed by four thousand European film artists and intellectuals, the full-page ad responded to the 1993 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations between the United States and the European Union. GATT sought to foster free trade and thus end subventions and protective tariffs on a wide range of goods and services, including audiovisual media. The American delegates argued that movies are products like peanuts or automobiles and must not be subsidized in the global marketplace. They decried film subsidies and television quotas as unfair protectionism. The Europeans, by contrast, pleaded for the continued protection of their cinema. They countered that movies are not commodities but rather expressions of national identity, history, and tradition. For them, filmmaking in continental Europe was inconceivable without state funding. This clash over two concepts of culture threatened to derail the entire free-trade agreement. In the end, the Americans acquiesced, confident that even a subsidized European cinema would not pose a threat to Hollywood.
The basic claim made by European filmmakers is hard to dispute. Hollywood blockbusters have captured between 70 and 90 percent of the German market for the last three decades. Even prize-winning domestic productions never reach comparable audiences. Although the public attack on Hollywood in 1993 was sharper than usual, it only reinforced the old self-image of Germans as victims of a predatory American entertainment industry – a competition that dates to the 1920s, when a German film critic called Hollywood's influence more pernicious than Prussian militarism because it wins over hearts and minds. (In 1926, almost half of the films shown in Germany were American imports.) Over the years, the German film industry has turned to imitations, co-productions, and noncommercial art films to counter Hollywood's domination. Critics have asked: How could German filmmakers match the modernity of American cinema without abandoning their venerated ideals of high culture? Is film a universal language, as was claimed in its early years, or is it specific to a time and place? Discussions in Germany about cinema have always performed double duty as debates about German culture and national identity.
The kinetic icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as mobile metropolis
- EDWARD DIMENDBERG
-
- Journal:
- Urban History / Volume 33 / Issue 1 / May 2006
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 09 August 2006, pp. 106-125
- Print publication:
- May 2006
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Architectural historian P. Reyner Banham (1922–88) is widely known for his numerous writings on the modern built environment, including the book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). In the BBC television film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (Julian Cooper, 1972), he concretized his earlier insights about the importance of mobility in the Southern California metropolis by employing the proclivity of the cinematic medium to represent movement. While traditional notions of the urban icon commonly understand it as a static monument or landmark, in these two works Banham challenges the suitability of this view to a city as inflected by automobility as Los Angeles and proposes the motorway and the experience of driving as its most characteristic iconic forms.
Transfiguring the Urban Gray: László Moholy-Nagy’s Film Scenario ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’
- Edited by Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey
-
- Book:
- Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 25 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 03 February 2003, pp 109-126
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Few episodes in cinema history appear more secure than the genre of the city symphony that emerged in the 1920s and whose best-known examples remain BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Walther Ruttmann, 1927) and MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (Dziga Vertov, 1929). Encompassing around twenty titles, city symphonies rely heavily upon montage to represent a cross-section of life in the modern metropolis. They typically are set in one or more identifiable metropoles whose population, central thoroughfares, and places of residence, employment, and leisure they depict over the course of a day, a temporal structure that has inflected films noir such as THE NAKED CITY (Jules Dassin, 1948) and countless examples of narrative and experimental cinema. Yet such works resist categorization as documentary, experimental, or narrative film. Their interest resides in the cinematographic preservation of ephemeral urban life no less than an aesthetic structure that itself evokes the rhythms, parallels, and contrasts of metropolitan civilization.
The project of explicating the city symphony – as well as the less chronologically structured city films of the 1920s in relation to the accounts of urban modernity developed by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer – is one to which film analysts over the past two decades have devoted increasing attention. It was Annette Michelson who introduced Simmel's work into cinema studies through her discussion of his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in a 1979 analysis of THE CRAZY RAY (PARIS QUI DORT) (René Clair, 1924). Reading Clair's film simultaneously as exploration of the ‘topography of a great city’ as well as metacinematic reflection upon the potentialities of the nascent film medium, Michelson stresses its representation of ‘temporality, apprehended as movement in space’ and the significance of the temporal organization of the workday as mainspring of the urban capitalist economy.
Yet despite the abundance of scholarship on the city films of the 1920s there remains a key text in its history that largely has been ignored: László Moholy Nagy's unfilmed scenario ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’ (DM). Although known to cinema scholars through his films THE OLD PORT OF MARSEILLES (1929), LIGHT DISPLAY: BLACK, WHITE, GRAY (1930), AND BERLIN STILL LIFE (1931), Moholy-Nagy was a polymath whose virtuosity in the media of painting, photography, design, and pedagogical innovations at the Bauhaus have tended to overshadow his interest in cinema.