New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch

Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and Film and Media Studies Emerita at Yale University. Her books on cinema include Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts; The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film; and Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. She is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Ido Lewit is a teaching fellow at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. He is the co-editor of Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image.

• Acknowledgements Introduction - Brigitte Peucker and Ido Lewit Part I. Identity and History 1. Jewishness in Lubitsch’s Milieu Films: The Pride of the Firm and Shoe Palace Pinkus - Rick McCormick 2. The Mirror and the Mother-In-Law: Bourgeois Jewish Femininity in The Pride of the Firm, The Blouse King, and When I Was Dead - Valerie Weinstein 3. Lubitsch Revisits the Schmatta Trade: The Shop Around the Corner - Jan-Christopher Horak 4. To Be or Not to Be: Revising History in Light of Migrant Interactions - Claire Demoulin Part II. Theatricality and Performance 5. ‘Done!’: Kurt Richter’s Perspectival Set Design in Lubitsch’s German Films - Janelle Blankenship 6. Lubitsch’s May McAvoy Trilogy: Threesomes, Triangles, Allegories - Charles Musser 7. Theatrical Yet Deeply Cinematic: Situating Lubitsch’s Musicals Within the Early Sound Era - Michael Slowik 8. Miriam Hopkins Learns to Wink - Maria DiBattista Part III. Objects and Spaces 9. Regulating the Gaze and the Voice for a Cinema in Transition: Lubitsch’s The Merry Jail and So This Is Paris - Ido Lewit 10. In and Out of Bed - Joe McElhaney 11. Ninotchka: Pleasure and Politics Objectified - Susan Felleman and Catherine Walworth Part IV. Elusive Style 12. That Uncertain Feeling and the Symptoms of Married Life - Noa Merkin 13. Ernst Lubitsch: Censored and Censoring - William Paul 14. Chaplin/Lubitsch/Chaplin: Influence and Counter-Influence - Donna Kornhaber 15. Films in Which Nothing Very Much Happens: Unstable Knowledge in Lubitsch’s Late Silent Work - Scott Bukatman Complete Bibliography Contributors Index

"New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch invites us not only to read the films anew with its authors, but also to explore for ourselves what lies hidden behind Greta Garbo’s hats, Miriam Hopkins’s winks, and all the many doors between Budapest and Paris.[...] It serves as a cross-sectional overview of the possibilities for engaging with Lubitsch: illuminating for newcomers, refreshing for experts, and appealing to both to approach Lubitsch anew."— Joris Coerdt, rezens.tfm , issue 1, 2025 [translated from German]"