Eric Rentschler
Biographic Data
| ID | 996557 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Rentschler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric |
| FAMILY NAME | Rentschler |
| SIGNATURE | RENTSCHLER E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Certain Tendency in German Film Criticism of the Postwall Era
The often bemoaned crisis of West German cinema in the 1980s coincided with a dramatic changing of the nation's film critical guard. The symptomatic impetus that had figured so strongly during the postwar era gave way to the so-called new subjectivism of young critics like Michael Althen, Claudius Seidl, and Andreas Kilb. They looked askance at the formal complexity and political activism of most art house fare and above all found themselves smit…
An Elegy for German Cinema: Dominik Graf's Doomed Loves and Open Wounds
The film essays Verfluchte Liebe deutscher Film (2016) and Offene Wunde deutscher Film (2017), coscripted and codirected by Dominik Graf and Johannes F. Sievert, survey the postwar history of genre cinema in the Federal Republic of Germany and take stock of the present situation. Their diagnosis is grim, for in their assessment the state of the nation's film culture is altogether dire and depleted. Why, they wonder, are German films so unpopular?…
Introduction: New Prospects-After the Berlin School
Cinema and the Legacies of Critical Theory: Roundtable Discussion
These short statements were presented in the roundtable discussion held at the September 2012 Columbia University conference dedicated to Miriam Hansen, “Cinema and the Legacies of Critical Theory.” The discussion was moderated by Eric Rentschler; the panelists included Heide Schlüpmann, Susan Buck-Morss, Anton Kaes, Edward Dimendberg, D. N. Rodowick, and Laura Mulvey
The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm
The first feature film from a vanquished nation, Wolfgang Staudte's Murderers Are among Us (Mörder sind unter uns, 1946), repeatedly equates the physical destruction of German cities with psychic devastation, suggesting how heavily the past weighed on some, though not all, of the nation's survivors. As the rubble on the streets and the destruction in a returned soldier's mind, material damage and mental wreckage, become intertwined, the compensat…
The Fascination of a Fake: The Hitler Diaries
Postwall Prospects: An Introduction
With the end of the cold war, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the spectacle of unification, the consolidation of the European Union and the introduction o ft he E uro, German reality has become dr amatically transformed as has German cinema. More than two decades have passed since New German Cinema's final signs of life. In the meanwhile German films have all but disappeared from American arthouses and distribution circuits. Were it not for t…
Karsten Witte: The Passenger and the Critical Critic
The Passenger For Karsten Witte the passenger was an intrepid figure, person between stations, for whom time and space constitute sites of transit.1 Himself a passenger who shifted with ease and enthusiasm between languages, discourses, and cultures, Karsten Witte relished the experience of the unfamiliar and the foreign. It was indeed central to his own expansive sense of person and place. He liked living in Berlin and knew the surface manifesta…
Too Beautiful to Be True: Lilian Harvey
Lilian Harvey always looked like she had needed to stage a comeback already at start of her career. The prematurely aged face was continually coerced into an iron mask of charm, which in moments of consternation revealed chinks that no makeup could ever hide. The Ufa direction did not want her to be a vamp or a lady; what they had in mind was the sweetest girl in world [das siileste Madel der Welt]. They allowed this face to assume only one expre…
The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife
There's No Place like Home: Luis Trenker's The Prodigal Son (1934)
The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema
West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices
Aufzeichnungen zum Neuen deutschen Film
Pabsts umfunktionierter Paracelsus
Remembering Not to Forget: A Retrospective Reading of Kluge's Brutality in Stone
Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm
A Tbpography of the Mountain Film A combination of auratic landscapes, breathtaking atmospherics, and high-pitched emotions, the mountain film (Bergfilm) is a prominent Weimar genre often spoken of as a precursor of National Socialism. These narratives, claim commentators, glorify submission to inexorable destiny and elemental might, anticipating fascist surrender to irrationalism and brute force. Regressive parables, they play a central role in …
German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations
West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices
Fatal Attractions: "Leni Riefenstahl's "The Blue Light
The effective history of Nazi film begins before 1933 and continues well after 1945. Perhaps no other example illustrates this insight as strikingly as Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht), film premiered in 1932, reprised in 1938, re-released in 1952, work spanning three epochs in German film history. The National Verleih press booklet for the latter version heralds it as a standard work in German film history, a film of lasting q…
German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations
West German Film in the Course of Time. Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen
West German Film: In the Course of Time
Terms of Dismemberment: The Body in/and/of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
Any attempt to sketch a topography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's expansive and complex Berlin Alexanderplatz has a vast territory to cover. First of all, one must take into account the film's textual basis, Alfred D6blin's many-voiced urban epic of 1929, as well as PhilJutzi's 1930 rendering of the novel starring Heinrich George, an underworld drama with many documentary shots.' Second, Fassbinder's reception of the novel demands consideration. T…
The Use and Abuse of Memory: New German Film and the Discourse of Bitburg
This paper was delivered as a special presentation at MIT on November 12, 1985. I would like to express my thanks to Inez Hedges of Northeastern University and Michael Geisler of MIT for organizing the lecture and encouraging me to present it in that forum. Also, I would like to acknowledge the productive impetus offered in conversation by Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch. Finally, I want to credit the UCI Committee on Research whose generous Facul…
Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm
A Tbpography of the Mountain Film A combination of auratic landscapes, breathtaking atmospherics, and high-pitched emotions, the mountain film (Bergfilm) is a prominent Weimar genre often spoken of as a precursor of National Socialism. These narratives, claim commentators, glorify submission to inexorable destiny and elemental might, anticipating fascist surrender to irrationalism and brute force. Regressive parables, they play a central role in …
Fatal Attractions: "Leni Riefenstahl's "The Blue Light
The effective history of Nazi film begins before 1933 and continues well after 1945. Perhaps no other example illustrates this insight as strikingly as Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht), film premiered in 1932, reprised in 1938, re-released in 1952, work spanning three epochs in German film history. The National Verleih press booklet for the latter version heralds it as a standard work in German film history, a film of lasting q…
An Elegy for German Cinema: Dominik Graf's Doomed Loves and Open Wounds
The film essays Verfluchte Liebe deutscher Film (2016) and Offene Wunde deutscher Film (2017), coscripted and codirected by Dominik Graf and Johannes F. Sievert, survey the postwar history of genre cinema in the Federal Republic of Germany and take stock of the present situation. Their diagnosis is grim, for in their assessment the state of the nation's film culture is altogether dire and depleted. Why, they wonder, are German films so unpopular?…
Cinema and the Legacies of Critical Theory: Roundtable Discussion
These short statements were presented in the roundtable discussion held at the September 2012 Columbia University conference dedicated to Miriam Hansen, “Cinema and the Legacies of Critical Theory.” The discussion was moderated by Eric Rentschler; the panelists included Heide Schlüpmann, Susan Buck-Morss, Anton Kaes, Edward Dimendberg, D. N. Rodowick, and Laura Mulvey
The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm
The first feature film from a vanquished nation, Wolfgang Staudte's Murderers Are among Us (Mörder sind unter uns, 1946), repeatedly equates the physical destruction of German cities with psychic devastation, suggesting how heavily the past weighed on some, though not all, of the nation's survivors. As the rubble on the streets and the destruction in a returned soldier's mind, material damage and mental wreckage, become intertwined, the compensat…
Postwall Prospects: An Introduction
With the end of the cold war, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the spectacle of unification, the consolidation of the European Union and the introduction o ft he E uro, German reality has become dr amatically transformed as has German cinema. More than two decades have passed since New German Cinema's final signs of life. In the meanwhile German films have all but disappeared from American arthouses and distribution circuits. Were it not for t…
The Use and Abuse of Memory: New German Film and the Discourse of Bitburg
This paper was delivered as a special presentation at MIT on November 12, 1985. I would like to express my thanks to Inez Hedges of Northeastern University and Michael Geisler of MIT for organizing the lecture and encouraging me to present it in that forum. Also, I would like to acknowledge the productive impetus offered in conversation by Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch. Finally, I want to credit the UCI Committee on Research whose generous Facul…
Kluge, Film History, and Eigensinn: A Taking of Stock from the Distance
Enthusiasm, celebration, and continuing fascination on the one side; dissension, crisis, and impasse on the other: a striking nonsynchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) has over the years governed takings of stock of New German Film by American friends and the national cinema's domestic observers. The films may be the same, but the courses in time are not. Recent developments offer further proof of how decidedly dissimilar perceptions of the New Germa…
Illusion und Fiktion: Lessings Beitrag zur poetologischen Diskussion uber das Verhaltnis von Kunst und Wirklichkeit
American Friends and New German Cinema: Patterns of Reception
making of the German Cinema took place to a great extent in the United States. Previously ignored, indeed obscured West German directors gained much from the accolades accorded them by American cineastes; lacking a receptive audience inland, they managed to find one abroad. In the process, much went by the wayside. Junger Deutscher Film, a product of the 1960s ferment, the revolt of a generation disenchanted with its elders' abuse of the cinemati…
How American Is It: The U. S. as Image and Imaginary in German Film
Kluge, Film History, and Eigensinn: A Taking of Stock from the Distance
Enthusiasm, celebration, and continuing fascination on the one side; dissension, crisis, and impasse on the other: a striking nonsynchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) has over the years governed takings of stock of New German Film by American friends and the national cinema's domestic observers. The films may be the same, but the courses in time are not. Recent developments offer further proof of how decidedly dissimilar perceptions of the New Germa…
West German Film: In the Course of Time
Terms of Dismemberment: The Body in/and/of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
Any attempt to sketch a topography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's expansive and complex Berlin Alexanderplatz has a vast territory to cover. First of all, one must take into account the film's textual basis, Alfred D6blin's many-voiced urban epic of 1929, as well as PhilJutzi's 1930 rendering of the novel starring Heinrich George, an underworld drama with many documentary shots.' Second, Fassbinder's reception of the novel demands consideration. T…
The Use and Abuse of Memory: New German Film and the Discourse of Bitburg
This paper was delivered as a special presentation at MIT on November 12, 1985. I would like to express my thanks to Inez Hedges of Northeastern University and Michael Geisler of MIT for organizing the lecture and encouraging me to present it in that forum. Also, I would like to acknowledge the productive impetus offered in conversation by Miriam Hansen and Gertrud Koch. Finally, I want to credit the UCI Committee on Research whose generous Facul…
West German Film in the Course of Time. Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen
German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations
German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations
West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices
Fatal Attractions: "Leni Riefenstahl's "The Blue Light
The effective history of Nazi film begins before 1933 and continues well after 1945. Perhaps no other example illustrates this insight as strikingly as Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht), film premiered in 1932, reprised in 1938, re-released in 1952, work spanning three epochs in German film history. The National Verleih press booklet for the latter version heralds it as a standard work in German film history, a film of lasting q…
Remembering Not to Forget: A Retrospective Reading of Kluge's Brutality in Stone
Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm
A Tbpography of the Mountain Film A combination of auratic landscapes, breathtaking atmospherics, and high-pitched emotions, the mountain film (Bergfilm) is a prominent Weimar genre often spoken of as a precursor of National Socialism. These narratives, claim commentators, glorify submission to inexorable destiny and elemental might, anticipating fascist surrender to irrationalism and brute force. Regressive parables, they play a central role in …
West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices
Aufzeichnungen zum Neuen deutschen Film
Pabsts umfunktionierter Paracelsus
The Films of G. W. Pabst: An Extraterritorial Cinema
There's No Place like Home: Luis Trenker's The Prodigal Son (1934)
The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife
Karsten Witte: The Passenger and the Critical Critic
The Passenger For Karsten Witte the passenger was an intrepid figure, person between stations, for whom time and space constitute sites of transit.1 Himself a passenger who shifted with ease and enthusiasm between languages, discourses, and cultures, Karsten Witte relished the experience of the unfamiliar and the foreign. It was indeed central to his own expansive sense of person and place. He liked living in Berlin and knew the surface manifesta…
Too Beautiful to Be True: Lilian Harvey
Lilian Harvey always looked like she had needed to stage a comeback already at start of her career. The prematurely aged face was continually coerced into an iron mask of charm, which in moments of consternation revealed chinks that no makeup could ever hide. The Ufa direction did not want her to be a vamp or a lady; what they had in mind was the sweetest girl in world [das siileste Madel der Welt]. They allowed this face to assume only one expre…
Postwall Prospects: An Introduction
With the end of the cold war, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the spectacle of unification, the consolidation of the European Union and the introduction o ft he E uro, German reality has become dr amatically transformed as has German cinema. More than two decades have passed since New German Cinema's final signs of life. In the meanwhile German films have all but disappeared from American arthouses and distribution circuits. Were it not for t…
The Fascination of a Fake: The Hitler Diaries
The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm
The first feature film from a vanquished nation, Wolfgang Staudte's Murderers Are among Us (Mörder sind unter uns, 1946), repeatedly equates the physical destruction of German cities with psychic devastation, suggesting how heavily the past weighed on some, though not all, of the nation's survivors. As the rubble on the streets and the destruction in a returned soldier's mind, material damage and mental wreckage, become intertwined, the compensat…
Art (22 works) · European history and politics (19 works) · German History and Society (18 works) · History (17 works) · German (13 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (10 works) · Art history (8 works) · German Literature and Culture Studies (7 works)