Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and its Deviations

摘要

The volume edited by Jaimey Fisher is a very welcome contribution to a new type of work emerging in German film studies. This work moves the emphasis away from up-to-now-dominant approaches focusing on auteurist cinema and conventional historical periods and towards German popular cinema. Moreover, according to Fisher, 'even those works that consider popular films, generally neglect the substantial scholarship on the history and theory of film genres, something that the present volume aims to remedy' (3). After outlining a brief history of theories of film genre starting with post-war scholarship, Fisher offers an outline of the methodology that informs most of the contributions in the volume. Following the work of recent genre theorists, most notably Rick Airman's ([1999] 2002) highly influential Film/Genre, essays in this volume approach genre as discursive historical formations negotiated through interactions within the texts-audiences-institution triad rather than as pre-existing categories with pre-defined traits a given film simply instantiates. The application of this methodology is perhaps best exemplified in Fisher's and Sascha Gerhards' contributions. Whereas Fisher elucidates the status of a seldom-discussed (anti-)war film Die Briicke (Bernhard Wicki, 1959) with recourse to the socio-economic climate of the 1950, the situation in the German film industry of the time, contemporary criticism and textual analysis of the film, Gerhards tackles the same texts-audiences-institution triad to contextualize Edgar Wallace adaptations of the 1960s within the history of German crime genre.