Thinking Cinema

"Steve Choe's book makes an important and original contribution to the study of Weimar film in its cultural and intellectual historical contexts. He arranges revealing and stimulating critical encounters between ideas of life and death circulating at the time and a series of films, both canonical and less familiar." --Andrew J. Webber, Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture, University of Cambridge, UK, and Fellow of Churchill College, UK

"Choe sets about retheorizing early German cinema through an investigation of film as thought and ontology. Providing a mixture of philosophical, historical, and aesthetic analyses, the author interrogates films such as The Golem, Destiny, and The Nibelungen as engaging in particular modes of philosophical thinking about postwar themes including loss, life, death, and utopia. To demonstrate this idea, he crosscuts between reflections on films of the period, film as such, and contemporaneous and current thinkers and philosophers like Bergson, Freud, Heidegger, Simmel, Deleuze, and Gunning. Choe's elucidation of the multiple ways by and through which film can enter into dialogue with philosophical modes of thought is one of the strongest aspects of this unique work ... this work will be useful for scholars of early-20th-century thought as well as Weimar cinema and film theory. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." --CHOICE

"In this remarkable, trenchantly argued book combining historical rigour with theoretical sophistication, Steve Choe explores Weimar Cinema as a powerful form of thinking and influential cultural agent in post-World War One Germany. Key films from the period by celebrated directors such as Robert Reinert, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Paul Wegener are read in conjunction with contemporary philosophical and literary concepts of life and mortality in order to open fundamental questions of the ethics and ontology of the film medium. In a number of startling engagements with individual films that reach far beyond existing critical templates, Afterlives offers a plethora of fresh insights not only into cinema's deep reverberations within Weimar culture but into cinema as modernity's philosophical machine par excellence. Rarely has a book taught me so many new ways of thinking about objects which seemed so familiar." --Michael Wedel, Professor of Media History, The Film and Television University "Konrad Wolf" (HFF), Germany