German Cinema Since Unification, edited by David Clarke. London: Continuum, 2006

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Marco Abel teaches film theory and history as an Assistant Professor in the department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has published essays on cinema, contemporary American literature, and post-structural theory in journals such as PMLA, Senses of Cinema, Angelaki, and Modern Fiction Studies. He is the author of Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

Notes

1. “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation, Routledge, New York, 2000: 260–277.

2. Sight & Sound 16.12 (December 2006): 26–31.

3. See Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 33.4 (November 1997) and New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002).

4. “R.A.F.” stands for Red Army Fraction, the left-wing terrorist group that nearly caused the West German democracy to collapse in the 1970s. I also wish that more attention had been paid to the work of Dominik Graf—one of the few contemporary German directors who could be described as a reliant genre filmmaker and whose work, frequently made for TV, represents perhaps the most challenging and thought-provoking foil for the Berlin School aesthetic (if there is such a thing), as has recently been evidenced by a fascinatingly heated email dialogue between him and his two “Berlin School” interlocutors, Christian Petzold and Christoph Hochhäusler, which was held in lieu of Graf's actual participation in a day-long plenary discussion on the “New Berlin School” sponsored by the dffb.