Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany

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Weimar 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, Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany shows how these films teach viewers about living and dying within a modern, mass mediated context. Choe places relatively underanalyzed films such as F. W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle and Arthur Robison's Warning Shadows alongside Martin Heidegger's early seminars on phenomenology, Sigmund Freud's Reflections upon War and Death and Max Scheler's critique of ressentiment. 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.

Reviews

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. * Andrew J. Webber, Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture, University of Cambridge, UK, and Fellow of Churchill College, UK *
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, Afterlives offers a plethora of fresh insights not only into cinemas deep reverberations within Weimar culture but into cinema as modernitys philosophical machine par excellence. Rarely has a book taught me so many new ways of thinking about objects which seemed so familiar. * Michael Wedel, Professor of Media History, The Film and Television University Konrad Wolf (HFF), Germany *
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 The Golem, Destiny, and The Nibelungen as 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. Choes 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. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. -- J. O. Wipplinger, North Carolina State University * CHOICE *
Choes insistence on the centrality of ethics to our understanding of film ontology is compelling. the informed engagement with discourses about temporality, movement, and mortality both within the Weimar republic and in current critical works makes the book an excellent choice for graduate classes in film and philosophy. Choes approach to film as philosophy nuances and complicates the work that has come before it and is a valuable contribution to Weimar film scholarship. * The German Quarterly *

Author Bio

Steve Choe is Associate Professor of CInema at San Francisco State University, USA.