{"product_id":"9781501317729","title":"Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eAfterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor(s): Steve Choe\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eWeimar cultural critics and intellectuals have repeatedly linked the dynamic movement of the cinema to discourses of life and animation. Correspondingly, recent film historians and theorists have taken up these discourses to theorize the moving image, both in analog and digital. But, many important issues are overlooked. Combining close readings of individual films with detailed interpretations of philosophical texts, all produced in Weimar Germany immediately following the Great War, \u003ci\u003eAfterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany\u003c\/i\u003e shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChoe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's \u003ci\u003eThe Haunted Castle\u003c\/i\u003e and Arthur Robison's \u003ci\u003eWarning Shadows\u003c\/i\u003e alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's \u003ci\u003eReflections upon War and Death\u003c\/i\u003e and Max Scheler's critique of \u003ci\u003eressentiment\u003c\/i\u003e. It is the experience of war trauma that underpins these correspondences, and Choe foregrounds life and death in the films by highlighting how they allegorize this opposition through the thematics of animation and stasis.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReview(s):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Steve Choe's book makes an important and original contribution to the study of Weimar film in its cultural and intellectual historical contexts. He arranges revealing and stimulating critical encounters between ideas of life and death circulating at the time and a series of films, both canonical and less familiar.” —\u003ci\u003eAndrew J. Webber, Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture, University of Cambridge, UK, and Fellow of Churchill College, UK\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Choe sets about retheorizing early German cinema through an investigation of film as thought and ontology.  Providing a mixture of philosophical, historical, and aesthetic analyses, the author interrogates films such as \u003ci\u003eThe Golem\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDestiny\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Nibelungen \u003c\/i\u003eas engaging in particular modes of philosophical thinking about postwar themes including loss, life, death, and utopia.  To demonstrate this idea, he crosscuts between reflections on films of the period, film as such, and contemporaneous and current thinkers and philosophers like Bergson, Freud, Heidegger, Simmel, Deleuze, and Gunning.  Choe's elucidation of the multiple ways by and through which film can enter into dialogue with philosophical modes of thought is one of the strongest aspects of this unique work … this work will be useful for scholars of early-20th-century thought as well as Weimar cinema and film theory. \u003cb\u003eSumming Up\u003c\/b\u003e: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” —\u003ci\u003eCHOICE\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In this remarkable, trenchantly argued book combining historical rigour with theoretical sophistication, Steve Choe explores Weimar Cinema as a powerful form of thinking and influential cultural agent in post-World War One Germany. Key films from the period by celebrated directors such as Robert Reinert, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Paul Wegener are read in conjunction with contemporary philosophical and literary concepts of life and mortality in order to open fundamental questions of the ethics and ontology of the film medium. In a number of startling engagements with individual films that reach far beyond existing critical templates, \u003ci\u003eAfterlives \u003c\/i\u003eoffers a plethora of fresh insights not only into cinema's deep reverberations within Weimar culture but into cinema as modernity's philosophical machine par excellence. Rarely has a book taught me so many new ways of thinking about objects which seemed so familiar.” —\u003ci\u003eMichael Wedel, Professor of Media History, The Film and Television University “Konrad Wolf” (HFF), Germany\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eISBN:  9781501317729\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ","brand":"Bloomsbury Academic","offers":[{"title":"Paperback \/ softback","offer_id":40621740294350,"sku":"9781501317729","price":46.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0600\/7029\/7806\/products\/getimage_7bddd9f4-cc0b-48e2-b771-2d2c05b72001.jpg?v=1638495546","url":"https:\/\/pickwickbookshop.com\/products\/9781501317729","provider":"Pickwick Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}