Boekpublicaties Michael Wedel << terug

- Kolportage, Kitsch und Können: Das Kino des Richard Eichberg CineGraph Babelsberg, Berlin, 2007
- Rudolf Kurtz, Essayist und kritiker. R. Aurich, W. Jacobsen en M. Wedel (eds.) München, 2007
- Die Herr der Ringe-Trilogie. L. Mikos, S. Eichner, E. Prommer en M. Wedel. Konstanz: UVK. 2007
- Der deutsche Musikfilm : Archäologie eines Genres 1914-1945 München, edition text + kritik, 2007
- Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne.
M. Wedel, M. Hagener, J. N. Schmidt (eds.). Berlin: Bertz, 2004
- Kino der Kaiserzeit: Zwischen Tradition und Moderne.
T. Elsaesser en M. Wedel, München: edition text + kritik, 2002

2007
- Kolportage, Kitsch und Können: Das Kino des Richard Eichberg

Over a period of three decades, producer and director Richard Eichberg (1888-1952) was one of the leading figures of popular German cinema. The generic versatility of his oeuvre was remarkable, including sensational melodramas, crime thrillers, historical epics, exotic adventure films, comedies and musicals. Eichberg discovered stars such as Lee Parry, Lilian Harvey or La Jana, his films featured many screen and stage celebrities like Paul Wegener, Willy Fritsch, Anna May Wong, Hans Albers and Heinrich George. Films like Monna Vanna (1922), Die keusche Susanne (1926), Song (1928), Der Greifer (1930) or Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal (1937), shot not only in Germany, but also in France, Austria, Great Britain and India, set international standards for successful film entertainment.

- Rudolf Kurtz, Essayist und kritiker. Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen & Michael Wedel (eds.). München, 2007.
In the 1910s and 1920s, film theorist, journalist and writer Rudolf Kurtz (1884-1960) was one of the most fascinating literary figures to critically reflect on the development of the German cinema. An early advocate of literary expressionism, Kurtz began his career in film in 1913 as Dramaturg and script-writer for Ernst Lubitsch, Paul Leni and Max Mack. His earliest literary and essayistic writings on film from this period offer a unique insight into the world of popular filmmaking. Later writings deal with problems of film censorship, the relationship between literature and film, as well as questions of film policy. Kurtz, who became one of the directors of Ufa in 1920 and was editor-in-chief of the leading trade journal Lichtbild-Bühne in 1928/29, was also the author of the seminal study of cinematic expressionism, Expressionismus und Film, published in 1926.

- Die Herr der Ringe-Trilogie: Attraktion und Faszination eines populärkulturellen Phänomens.
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings -Trilogy has been seen and celebrated by an international audience world-wide. This book takes the huge popularity of New Line’s blockbuster franchise as a case study to reconsider the social impact and cultural dimension of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Its individual chapters offer in-depth analyses of the films’ theatrical versions, their production context and marketing strategies; their relationship to Tolkien’s novel, the DVD versions and the LOTR-video games; as well as their critical reception in Germany. The core of the book is formed by the presentation of the results of an extensive audience survey conducted in Germany in 2003. In the context of this survey, regular cinemagoers and LOTR-fans reflect upon their experience of the films and their fascination with Tolkien’s world in all its various remediations. A closing chapter, relating the results of this survey to the findings of the International Lord of the Rings Research Project, places the reception of the blockbuster franchise in Germany into a wider trans-national context.

- Der deutsche Musikfilm: Archäologie eines Genres 1914-1945.
In Germany, as in other countries, the film musical has arguably been the one genre most popular with historical cinema audiences. With its unique combination of well-known story material, popular stars and hit melodies, its various sub-genres – from the ‘silent’ film operetta to the sound film operetta and the revue film of the 1930s and 1940s – have reached a mass audience for whom its specific style and entertainment value to a large extent determined the cinema-going experience before the end of World War II. Seen from the perspective of its cultural impact, the film musical constituted a central pillar of the German film industry, against which one can measure broader technical and aesthetic developments as well as significant political breaks and ideological re-appropriations. On more than one level, then, the musical genre offers itself as a case study for writing a cultural history of the German cinema, which is undertaken here for the first time in a comprehensive manner.

2004 - Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film in der Kultur der Moderne.
Perhaps no other medium has had an impact on the culture of modernity comparable to that of the cinema. Art form and industrial product, a means of communi-cation and an instrument for political propaganda, mirror into the self and window onto the external world – historically and aesthetically, film is situated at the crosscurrents of modernization in art, politics and society. But the prism of film not only helps to focus more clearly significant developments in the culture of the modern. As part of the force field of modernity, film and the cinema can be thought in new constellations. The contributions to this volume explore the spaces that have been opened up by the cinematic and for the cinematic – from the museum and the art gallery to the theatre and the multiplex. The authors sketch-out a terrain across the fine line between dream-like film experience and the traumatic impact of sound and image; they follow the traces of history in film and question the medium’s future in an age of globalization.

2002 - Kino der Kaiserzeit: Zwischen Tradition und Modern
T. Elsaesser & M. Wedel , München: edition text + kritik, 2002.
Cinema in Imperial Germany – one of the most fascinating periods in German film history is being rediscovered. The richly illustrated volume includes essays by internationally renowned film scholars offering a comprehensive overview of popular genres, portrays of leading star-actors and directors as well as in-depth case studies of individual films. "This book consists of essays, many of them outstanding, by individuals knowledgeable in Wilhelmine cinema. They vary in theme and approach. Some are sketches of individual actors and actresses of the period while others are in-depth analyses of films. There is a tendency to overlap in some essays, however this is a plus since they never cover the same ground. Thus the reader is afforded a different perspective on some films.