In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

In Fatih Akın's Cinema and the New Sound of Europe, Berna Gueneli explores the transnational works of acclaimed Turkish-German filmmaker and auteur Fatih Akın. The first minority director in Germany to receive numerous national and international awards, Akın makes films that are informed by Europe's past, provide cinematic imaginations about its present and future, and engage with public discourses on minorities and migration in Europe through his treatment and representation of a diverse, multiethnic, and multilingual European citizenry. Through detailed analyses of some of Akın's key works—In July, Head-On, and The Edge of Heaven, among others—Gueneli identifies Akın's unique stylistic use of multivalent sonic and visual components and multinational characters. She argues that the soundscapes of Akın's films—including music and multiple languages, dialects, and accents—create an "aesthetic of heterogeneity" that envisions an expanded and integrated Europe and highlights the political nature of Akın's decisions regarding casting, settings, and audio. At a time when belonging and identity in Europe is complicated by questions of race, ethnicity, religion, and citizenship, Gueneli demonstrates how Akın's aesthetics intersect with politics to reshape notions of Europe, European cinema, and cinematic history.

This book offers a post-representational approach to a range of fiction and non-fiction films that deal with labour migration from Turkey to Germany. Engaging with materialist philosophies of process, it offers analyses of films by Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Aysun Bademsoy, Seyhan Derin, Harun Farocki, Yüksel Yavuz and Feo Aladag. Shifting the focus from the longstanding concerns of integration, identity and cultural conflict, Gozde Naiboglu shows that these films offer new expressions of lived experience under late capitalism through themes of work, social reproduction, unemployment and insecure work, exhaustion and precarity, thereby calling for a rethinking of the established ideas of class, community and identity.

This comprehensively revised, updated and significantly extended edition introduces German film history from its beginnings to the present day, covering key periods and movements including early and silent cinema, Weimar cinema, Nazi cinema, the New German Cinema, the Berlin School, the cinema of migration, and moving images in the digital era. Contributions by leading international scholars are grouped into sections that focus on genre; stars; authorship; film production, distribution and exhibition; theory and politics, including women's and queer cinema; and transnational connections. Spotlight articles within each section offer key case studies, including of individual films that illuminate larger histories (Heimat, Downfall, The Lives of Others, The Edge of Heaven and many more); stars from Ossi Oswalda and Hans Albers, to Hanna Schygulla and Nina Hoss; directors including F.W. Murnau, Walter Ruttmann, Wim Wenders and Helke Sander; and film theorists including Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balázs. The volume provides a methodological template for the study of a national cinema in a transnational horizon.

This is the first edited volume dedicated to the study of East Asian-German cinema. Its coverage ranges from 1919 to the present, a period which has witnessed an unprecedented degree of global entanglement between Germany and East Asia. In analyzing this hybrid cinema, this volume employs a transnational approach, which highlights the nations’ cinematic encounters and entanglements. It reveals both German perceptions of East Asia and East Asian perceptions of Germany, through analysis of works by both German directors and East Asian/East Asian-German directors. It is hoped that this volume will not only accelerate cross-cultural exchange, but also provide a wider perspective that helps film scholars to see the broader contexts in which these films are produced. It introduces multiple compelling topics, not just immigration, multiculturalism, and exile, but also Japonisme, children’s literature, musical modernity, media hybridity, gender representation, urban space, Cold War divisions, and national identity. It addresses several genres—feature films, essay films, and documentary films. Lastly, by embracing three East Asian cinemas in one volume, this volume serves as an excellent introduction for German cinema students and scholars. It will appeal to international and interdisciplinary audiences, as its contributors represent multiple disciplines and four world regions.

The History of German film is diverse and multi-faceted. This volume can only suggest the richness of a film tradition that includes five distinct German governments [Wilhelmine Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), s well as a reunited Germany], two national industries (Germany and Austria), and a myriad of styles and production methods. Paradoxically, the political disruptions that have produced these distinct film eras, as well as and the natural inclination of artists to rebel and create new styles, allow for construction of a narrative of German film. Disjuncture generates distinct points of separation, and yet also highlights continuities between the ruptures. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of German Cinema contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on directors, actors, films, cinematographers, composers, producers, and major historical events that greatly affected the direction and development of German cinema. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about German cinema.

Turkish German comedy culture and the lived realities of Turkish Muslims in Germany Comedy entertainment is a powerful arena for serious public engagement with questions of German national identity and Turkish German migration. The German majority society and its largest labour migrant community have been asking for decades what it means to be German and what it means for Turkish Germans, Muslims of the second and third generations, to call Germany their home. Benjamin Nickl examines through the social pragmatics of humour the dynamics that underpin these questions in the still-evolving popular culture space of German mainstream humour in the 21st century. The first book-length study on the topic to combine close readings of film, television, literary and online comedy, and transnational culture studies, Turkish German Muslims and Comedy Entertainment presents the argument that Turkish German humour has moved from margin to mainstream by intervening in cultural incompatibility and Islamophobia discourse. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).