Collapse of the Conventional

Jaimey Fisher is associate professor of German at the University of California–Davis. He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Wayne State University Press, 2007). He is also co-editor (with Peter Uwe Hohendahl) of Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects and (with Barbara Mennel) of Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture.Brad Prager is associate professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. He is also co-editor (with David Bathrick and Michael D. Richardson) of Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory.

The timing of this anthology could not be better. More consistently than previous German film anthologies, this one makes a point of blending cultural, historical, aesthetic, and theoretical approaches and does so in accessible prose. Fisher and Pragers volume is a significant undertaking one that, hopefully, will inspire further explorations of this emerging and diverse body of cinematic work.""- Brigitta Wagner;""This is a substantial book that breaks important new ground, and addresses a wealth of questions in an ambitious way, opening them up for further development. It is the first of its kind in English, and subsequent work on German film post millennium will need to engage with it.""- Larson Powell;""The Collapse of the Conventional offers new insights for film scholars and will doubtless prove an invaluable classroom tool for students studying contemporary German-language film. More generally, it is an infectious read.""- Chris Homewood;""Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape.""- Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds;""The Collapse of the Conventional offers a comprehensive introduction to contemporary German cinema and is bound to stimulate new debates about the legacies of New German Cinema and its politics of the aesthetic. A must for everyone interested in German cinema and contemporary culture.""- Sabine Hake, Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin;""A tightly arranged, academically solid, and quite readable book that should find many readers among students as well as in the interested public.""- Gerd Gemünden;""Fisher and Prager have assembled a significant group of essays by the emerging generation of German cinema experts in the US. The anthology is the first serious attempt to retell the history of the New German Cinema and the 'consensus' cinema of the 1900s through the lens of contemporary, post-2000 films in all their diversity. Film scholars, students of the German cinema, and the general reading public will discover here why 'Deutsches Kino' is once again in the limelight.""- Marc Silberman, chair of the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin, Madison