Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism - Hardcover

by Nicholas Baer (Author)

Historical Turns reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema--The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis--Nicholas Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history. Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.

Back Jacket

What medium can bring us closer to Ranke's past 'as it actually happened' than film? So what medium is better suited to comment on 'the crisis of historicism'? In this remarkable book, Nicholas Baer exploits to the full the coincidence of the birth of film with the loss of trust in historiography as a discipline after World War I. He does so in a wonderful analysis of the interaction between both while focusing on its historical as well as its systematic aspects.--Frank Ankersmit, author of Sublime Historical Experience

"While focusing on film theory in the context of German historicism, this book covers far more than that, demonstrating that films and their theorization are a form of philosophizing. They are an integral part of intellectual history, the temporality of which they problematize. This is a new direction for film studies in our own time of crisis."--Susan Buck-Morss, author of Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

"Weaving together incisive analyses of philosophical/theoretical treatises and critical films of the Weimar period, Historical Turns offers a potent challenge to contemporary film philosophy and the 'historical turn' of film studies in the 1970s. Baer presents a compelling argument that Weimar film vividly engages the crisis of historicism that characterized German thought of the early twentieth century."--Mary Ann Doane, author of Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema

"Philosophical debates over history and time may seem marginal to the discipline of philosophy today, but as Baer demonstrates in his lucid and intellectually compelling new study, the medium of film once served as a forum for exploring such themes. Following the model set forth long ago by the great pioneer of film studies Siegfried Kracauer, Baer shows how classics of Weimar cinema, from Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Lang's Metropolis, became sites of serious theoretical inquiry into the very meaning of history and time."--Peter E. Gordon, author of Adorno and Existence

"Film and media studies often divides into practices of history and theory, but this ambitious work reminds us that there is a theory of history and a history of theory. In a series of highly original reconsiderations of classics from the silent Weimar cinema, ranging from Caligari and Metropolis to Richter's abstract film Rhythm 21, Baer demonstrates how cinema staged its own encounter with issues of history in the modern era. His epilogue asks us to consider the way these films offer distant mirrors of our contemporary rethinking of history and media in the Anthropocene."--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity

"Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, this is a remarkable achievement, destined to play a critical role in rethinking questions of history and historiography in cinema and media studies while simultaneously expanding the field of film philosophy."--Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History

"The scholarship is beyond excellent. It is hard to think of a scholar of Baer's generation (or others) who is more adept at creating capacious frames of reference around any item that comes in for discussion: films and individual sequences are consistently embedded in their proper film-historical horizons; philosophical discourses are similarly embedded in long arcs of Western European thought; and the project of film-philosophy as a whole is clearly situated at every turn in relation to developments in film and media studies as a field and to the arts more generally."--Johannes von Moltke, author of The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America

Author Biography

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is coeditor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933; Unwatchable; and Technics: Media in the Digital Age.