Spring 2018  |  GER 5630 Section 001: Topics in German Cinema -- Emigre Cinema: From Hitler to Hollywood (67503)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/16/2018 - 05/04/2018
Wed 05:00PM - 09:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Folwell Hall 107
Enrollment Status:
Open (8 of 20 seats filled)
Course Catalog Description:
Topics chosen may focus on specific directors, genres, film production or reception, and/or other formal, theoretical, historical, or political issues. prereq: 3xxx film course or instr consent
Class Notes:
Class time includes film showing. http://classinfo.umn.edu/?mccor001+GER5630+Spring2018
Class Description:
This course investigates films made by some of the most famous film artists who were born in Germany or Austria(-Hungary) and who came to Hollywood in the years before World War II, including these six film directors: Michael Curtiz (Mihaly Kertesz, 1886-1962), Fritz Lang (1890-1976), Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947), Josef von Sternberg
(1894-1969), Robert Siodmak (1900-1973), and Billy Wilder (1906-2002), as well as these three actors: Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992), and Peter Lorre (1904-1964).

Lorre, Lang, Siodmak, and Wilder emigrated to the U.S. after 1933 to escape the Nazi regime both because they were Jewish or part-Jewish and because they had political differences with the Nazi regime. Veidt and Dietrich were not Jewish but they rejected the Nazis on political (and other) grounds. Lubitsch and Curtiz came to Hollywood already in the 1920s, but as Jews, it would have been dangerous - and ultimately fatal - to return to Germany or Austria after the mid-1930s. Lubitsch, who left Germany for Hollywood in 1922 when he was the most successful film director in Germany, was especially hated by Hitler and the Nazis. Sternberg is unique in this group, because, although born in Austria to Jewish parents, he emigrated with them to America as a boy, and he learned his art as a filmmaker in America; he only directed one - very famous - film in Germany: The Blue Angel (1930), starring Marlene Dietrich, whom he brought back to America.

The German cinema's loss was the American cinema's gain: in Hollywood, these film actors played roles in films that have become American classics. The film directors fused modernist styles and techniques of the German cinema like Expressionism and New Objectivity with American elements to help create new, hybrid entities such as the American genre we now call "film noir." The émigrés also made comedies and melodramas that were influenced by artistic styles from Europe and the political concerns these directors brought with them. In addition they directed overtly political, anti-fascist films in Hollywood for the war effort against the Nazis in the 1940s. The legacy of their work in Hollywood lives on not just in contemporary American cinema but in the postwar European cinema, where filmmakers were strongly influenced by this trans-Atlantic legacy of hybrid genres, styles, and politics.

The German films we watch will all have English subtitles or inter-titles.
Who Should Take This Class?:
Graduates students and advanced undergraduates who have taken a film class before. This class may be used by GSD majors to write a capstone paper.
Workload:
ca. 30-50 Pages Reading Per Week
14-20 pages formal writing (two papers); grad students may opt for one longer research paper
1-2 presentations
15 Moodle response: informal writing, ca. 1 page per film
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/67503/1183
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
11 October 2017

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