This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.

Hester Baer is Associate Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language. She currently serves as co-editor of the journal Feminist German Studies.

This book theorizes neoliberalism beyond a reductive sole emphasis on economics. Instead, it convincingly demonstrates the gendering of neoliberalism through the reading of key films illuminating German cinema with robust, sophisticated, and in-depth scholarship.
--Barbara Mennel, Rothman Chair and Professor of German Studies and Film Studies, University of Florida

This book provides an original and bold way to rethink German film history since the 1980s. Baer’s comparative close readings, which pair films often not thought of in the same context, are provocative and eye-opening, challenging traditional wisdom and producing fresh insights where observers may have thought that all has been said. This is revisionist film history at its best.

--Gerd Gemünden, Sherman Fairchild Professor of the Humanities, Dartmouth College

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Making Neoliberalism Visible

Chapter 1. German Cinema and the Neoliberal Turn: The End of the National-Cultural Film Project

Chapter 2. Producing German Cinema for the World: Global Blockbusters from Location Germany

Chapter 3. From Everyday Life to the Crisis Ordinary: Films of Ordinary Life and the Resonance of DEFA

Chapter 4. Future Feminism: Political Filmmaking and the Resonance of the West German Feminist Film Movement

Chapter 5. The Failing Family: Changing Constellations of Gender, Intimacy, and Genre

Chapter 6. Refiguring National Cinema in Films about Labour, Money, and Debt

Conclusion. German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism

Bibliography

Index