Light Motives

"Overall, Light Motives is among the books that mark a turning-point in the reception of German cinema abroad, a reception in which, somewhat paradoxically, highly idiosyncratic filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog were often taken as representative of German cinema. Halle's and McCarthy's Light Motives corrects this imbalance. It provides critical discussion of an aspect of German culture that used to be of interest to a small community of experts on German culture, and as it expands this community, it invites a broader audience interested in popular film to join the discussion."—College Literature

"Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective is one those books whose evocative and aptly chosen title describes precisely, creatively, and succinctly the subject matter that it treats. With more than 400 pages, this is a substantial collection that delivers what it promises. The introduction is learned but lucid and clear. The editors, who contributed essays as well, set the tone for a book that offers depth of scholarship while still remaining of interest to the non-specialist. This is entirely fitting for a volume that abandons preconceived notions of what constitutes a significant film and assesses the previously ignored."—Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies

"Abandon any preconceived notion that popular cinema is escapist, unpolitical, naive, kitschy, big-budget, propagandistic, or for the uneducated! Forget equating German cinema with Teutonic demonism or morose self-introspection! This superb collection sweeps away tiresome cliches with path-breaking, sophisticated analyses of films from 1919 to the present, including contributions on the much neglected cinema of the 1950s and 1960s."—Alice Kuzniar, University of North Carolina

"Light Motives makes an important contribution to the reassessment of German cinema from the perspective of popular genres, visual pleasures, and mass cultural practices. Informed by cultural studies, individual readings move beyond the old divisions among art cinema, escapist entertainment, and film propaganda and present us with a very different national cinema and, by extension, film history. Very stimulating!"—Sabine Hake, Author of Popular Cinema of the Third Reich and German National Cinema