ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter explores German cinema, German hybrid cinema, and the organization of this volume in three sections. The first and second sections attempt to situate this volume within current English-language scholarship on German film. The first section focuses on two roughly defined “camps” of film scholars. The first addresses German cinema primarily from within a German national context. They tend to emphasize German peculiarity, favor Weimar and New German Cinema, and are ambivalent about German cinema’s transnational turn. The latter studies German cinema in its Western context (i.e., in conversation with Europe and Hollywood). They believe that the Western context is more relevant to Europeans, although they do accept a global turn in principle. The second section explores some of the key characteristics of transnational cinema as well as the two subfields of German hybrid cinema—Turkish German cinema and East Asian-German cinema. A brief sampling of recent scholarship on Turkish German cinema will be followed by a survey of recent scholarship on East Asian-German cinema. The third section explains the organization of this book and introduces the key arguments of the following 12 chapters in this volume. They examine a wide range of topics by looking at feature films, essay films, TV dramas, and documentary films.
