Issue #0

The dark mirror

German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood

Plot

"Lutz Koepnick's The Dark Mirror provides one of the finest, most compelling and suggestive accounts to date of the multiple locations of German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. Charting the shifting relationships between institutional contexts and individual acts of reception, Koepnick persuasively shows how the German cinema and its filmmakers—both in exile and in Nazi Germany—contributed to a fragile, stratified, indeed, "nonsynchronous" public sphere."—Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History "Lutz Koepnick's brilliant study debunks the received wisdom concerning Nazi German and Hollywood film of the 1930s and 40s. Using detailed analyses of 8 films, with special focus on sound and music, he insists upon the disjointed contexts and uneven relationships of American and German filmmaking. Historically nuanced and theoretically savvy, this remarkable book offers something for everyone: Americanists, Germanists, historians, students of cinema sound and music, those interested in debates between art and popular forms, and European and Hollywood production."—Caryl Flinn, author of Strains of Utopia