Publisher:
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J
Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular illustrated magazines,...
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Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt / Zentrale
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Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular illustrated magazines, she shows how Weimar Germany had a commercially viable female audience, fascinated with looking at images that called traditional representations of gender into question. Interdisciplinary in her approach, Petro interweaves archival research with recent theoretical debates to offer not merely another view of the Weimar cinema but also another way of looking at Weimar film culture. Women's modernity, she suggests, was not the same as men's modernism, and the image of the city street in film and photojournalism reveals how women responded differently from men to the political, economic, and psychic upheaval of their times
Cover page -- Half-title page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Dedication page -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One: On the Subject of Weimar Film History -- Mass Culture, Modernism, and the Male Spectator in Weimar Film Histories -- Women in Weimar: Theorizing the Female Spectator -- Melodrama and Expressionism: The Conventions of Pathos -- Chapter Two: Perceptions of Difference -- Perception, Mass Culture, and Distraction: Martin Heidegger -- Perception, Mass Culture, and Distraction: Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer
Men's Modernism versus Women's Modernity: Weimar Women at Work and at the Movies -- Chapter Three: Weimar Photojournalism and the Female Reader -- Institutional and Textual Politics: Photojournalism and Film in Weimar -- Modes of Representation in the Illustrated Press -- Gender, Looking, and the Address to Female Readers: Die Dame and the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung -- Chapter Four: Weimar Cinema and the Female Spectator -- Gender, Looking, and Identification in the Weimar Cinema: Male and Female Spectatorship -- Dirnentragodie: Sexual Mobility, Social Mobility, and Melodramas of the Street
Hintertreppe: Modes of Looking and Female Spectator Identification -- Zuflucht: Male Identity and Female Visual Pleasure -- Die freudlose Gasse: Censorship and the Female Spectator -- Afterword: Feminism and Film History-Joyless Streets Circa 1988 -- Bibliography -- Index
