Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema

Olivia Landry is Assistant Professor of German at Lehigh University.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: A Cinema Against Stasis1. Media, Death, and Liveness2. Theatricality Bleeds, the Presence of Dance3. Between Movement and Affect: The Body's Shared Point of Sense4. Accelerating Performance: From Car Travel to Car Crash5. Nina Hoss's Performance of the Fugitive Body; or, What to Do with MovementConclusion: Performance on the MoveFilmographyBibliographyIndex

"A new take on the cinema of the Berlin School that argues successfully against the rubric of 'slow cinema' as applicable to this school."—Brigitte Peucker, author of The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film"[This work] opens up new perspectives on how contemporary cinema employs movement and sensation to produce a new mode of embodied spectatorship."—Roger F. Cook, editor (with Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager) of Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema"If you think you know what Berlin School cinema is, Olivia Landry's scholarship brings an important critical turn to the canon of films. Beyond her theoretically informed and clearly written discussions of the Berlin School, Landry deftly weaves film, performance, and affect studies, making whole cloth for future scholarship."—Randall Halle, author of The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities"Landry's book should be of great interest to both scholars of German film history and those who are invested in thinking of moving images from a theoretically rigorous perspective as primarily material forces (rather than signs to be interpreted) that can effect change in viewers' apperceptions and thus intervene in the world."—GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW"The book is a rich and welcome addition to the surge of scholarly interest in the Berlin School (and spends refreshingly little time on questions of its label). Landry not only challenges dominant approaches to Berlin School aesthetics, but also moves beyond frames of national cinema and/or neoliberalism to focus on productive collisions of theory and film. . . . Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema is an essential reading for understanding the aesthetics and spectatorship of this contemporary film movement and its resonances across global art cinema. Theoretically capacious and incisive, Landry's book is a vital contribution to thinking the (mobile) body onscreen and its turn to performance studies illuminates compelling new directions for film theory."—Hannah Pavek, Studies in European Cinema"Landry's often breathless and exhilarating prose gives form to the motion and vitality she finds in these contemporary films. The book's style makes it a pleasure to read."—Hester Baer, Monatshefte