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Performing the Modern German

Performance and Identity in Contemporary German Cinema

by Matthias Uecker (Author)
©2013 Monographs VIII, 322 Pages
Series: New Studies in European Cinema, Volume 10

Summary

Since the late 1990s, German cinema has gone through a period of astonishing productivity and success that has made it the focus of scholarly analysis once more. What can contemporary German cinema tell us about current German society and its problems? What are the distinguishing features of filmmaking in Germany today?
This book analyses the representation of individual and collective behaviour in post-unification German cinema. It looks at performances of gender, ethnicity and nationality in a wide range of contemporary German films. Using Performance Theory as a framework, the book discusses how modern German identities are presented as conformist, liberating or subversive responses to external challenges.
Theoretical considerations regarding the efficacy of performance and the dialectical relationship between transgression, resistance and normalization form the background for an analysis that investigates contemporary German films in terms of their function within the restructuring of post-unification German society.

Details

Pages
VIII, 322
Publication Year
2013
ISBN (PDF)
9783035304749
ISBN (Softcover)
9783034309721
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0353-0474-9
Language
English
Publication date
2013 (July)
Keywords
success behaviour gender ethnicity nationality
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2013. VIII, 322 pp., 1 table

Biographical notes

Matthias Uecker (Author)

Matthias Uecker is Professor of German at the University of Nottingham. He has published books on documentary writing in the Weimar Republic (Wirklichkeit und Literatur, 2007), Alexander Kluge’s television productions (Anti-Fernsehen?, 2000) and cultural politics in the Ruhr area during the Weimar Republic (Zwischen Industrieprovinz und Großstadthoffnung, 1994), as well as numerous articles on German literature and cinema.

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Title: Performing the Modern German