Read Online From Caligari to Hitler A Psychological History of the German Film Princeton Classics Siegfried Kracauer Leonardo Quaresima 9780691191348 Books

Product details Series Princeton Classics (Book 43) Paperback 432 pages Publisher Princeton University Press; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0691191344

From Caligari to Hitler A Psychological History of the German Film Princeton Classics Siegfried Kracauer Leonardo Quaresima 9780691191348 Books Reviews

• Master piece book. If it describes how the Weimar Republic degenerates to Hitler regime following the law; this book gains again importance nowadays. With the raise of demagogic leaders as we can witness today, the review of this consequential period of the XX century is more important than ever.
• A book that indeed is interesting and gives a clear view of the film industry in the Third Reich. As always there are minor subjective remarks but on the whole most reliable.
• Fascinating read
• Having owned the previous edition of this flawed classic, written by Siegfried Kracauer, the brilliant Weimar era critic, during his American exile in World War II, I hesitated to buy this new edition. Now I am glad I did. The Italian film scholar Leonardo Quaresima is one of the major authorities on Weimar era cinema, but unfortunately little of his work has been translated into English. His "Introduction to the 2004 edition" is more than that--it is a major essay on Kracauer as a film critic, indispensable for anyone with more than a casual interest in the period. Abundantly footnoted, it offers a sober critical assessment of CALIGARI TO HITLER, discussing its gestation, its sources, its relationship to Kracauer's earlier film criticism, and its methodological premises, indebted to fellow German Jewish exile Erwin Panofsky's iconology.
• I saw the film of this book on Netflicks and bought it for my step-son who teaches. I found the film and the book very interesting and so will people who like the subject of films.
• I can't speak to how this book must have read upon publication, but, at this great remove, it's conclusions (and comments on the German character) strike me as facile and wide of the mark. I thought the book did a good job when it focused on the workmanlike task of just cataloging films from the silent era when Weimar was a cinema powerhouse equal to Hollywood today, and of course I have no complaints about the photographs. But the author's remote pedantic tone and dry rendering of this material left me underwhelmed. And no, scholarly writing doesn't have to have the hermeunetic,arid quality of this work, so that apologia won't wash, either.
  
  Not recommended.
• While I'm unsure whether or not I truly buy into Kracauer's premise for this book, I found it quite helpful for my English class in that it gave me a basis for literary interpretations of film analysis.
• This book provided the historical and theoretical frameworks for students and theater goers, it is an important addition to my bookshelf