The New German Cinema Music, History, and the Matter of Style [Paperback]

When New German cinema directors like R. W. Fassbinder, Ulrike Ottinger, and Werner Schroeter explored issues of identitynational, political, personal, and sexualmusic and film style played crucial roles. Most studies of the celebrated film movement, however, have sidestepped the role of music, a curious oversight given its importance to German culture and nation formation. Caryl Flinns study reverses this trend, identifying styles of historical remembrance in which music participates. Flinn concentrates on those styles that urge listeners to interact with differenceincluding that embodied in Germanys difficult historyrather than to master or get past it.

Flinn breaks new ground by considering contemporary reception frameworks of the New German Cinema, a generation after its end. She discusses transnational, cultural, and historical contexts as well as the sexual, ethnic, national, and historical diversity of audiences. Through detailed case studies, she shows how music helps filmgoers engage with a range of historical subjects and experiences. Each chapter ofThe New German Cinemaexamines a particular stylistic strategy, assessing musics role in each. The study also examines queer strategies like kitsch and camp and explores the movements charged construction of human bodies on which issues of ruination, survival, memory, and pleasure are played out.

Caryl Flinnis Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author ofStrains of Utopia: Nostalgia, Gender, and Hollywood Film Music(1992) and coeditor ofMusic and Cinema(2001).

An original, intelligent, and insightful book. Over the past twenty years, the New German Cinema has been the topic of some of our most sophisticated studies of memory, history, and political identity. Flinn extends, deepens, and expands on this work to offer necessary insights about music, cinema, and national identity in postwar Germanl3"