Jaimey Fisher

Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was met with widespread critical and commercial success on its release in 1975. The third highest grossing film of the year, it won five major Academy Awards including best director and best actor. Jaimey Fisher's study deconstructs how One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was simultaneously typical and extraordinary for its New Hollywood era. Analyzing the film's controversial adaptation from Ken Kesey's best-selling 1962 novel, he contextualizes it in relation to the relatively uncomplicated adaptations of A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973). Through a close reading of key scenes depicting electroconvulsive (“shock”) therapy and lobotomies, Fisher analyzes the film's critique of the American mental health infrastructure and its influence in instigating a broader rethinking of trauma, mental illness and institutionalization in the 1960s and 1970s within the context of the anti-psychiatry movement. He goes on to examine the racial implications of re-centering the film's narrative around Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), and what this meant for the character of Indigenous patient “Chief” Bromden (Will Sampson Jr.). While the latter was the primary person and perspective through which the novel was narrated, his role was significantly diminished within the film. Finally, outlining the film's high-profile afterlife, Fisher underscores its unique position in US cinema and cultural history.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

The retirement of the distinguished philosopher Jürgen Habermas from his chair at the University of Frankfurt signalled an important caesura in the history of Critical Theory: the transition from the Habermasian project, to different forms of inquiry in the work of the next generation. This change-over happens at a time when it has become clear that Habermas's systematic exploration of communicative rationality has reached the point where both its achievements and its limitations had become evident. The essays collected in this volume address the problems connected with this transition, partly by returning to the insights of the first generation (Adorno and Benjamin), partly by focusing on questions raised by Habermas's work. Whatever the difference in the authors' positions, this collection gains its unity through their common interest in the significance and value of Critical Theory today and in its future as a philosophical project.

Current State and Future Prospects

Critical Theory

Marco Abel

Germany’s most important filmmaking movement in conversation with its peers across the globe.

A Transnational Art Cinema

The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts

A look at how the discussions, debates, and controversies in Germany about youth and reeducation after World War II helped Germans come to terms with their Nazi past, negotiate Allied occupation, and construct postwar German identity.

Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction After the Second World War

Disciplining Germany

Brad Prager

"Fisher and Prager have assembled a significant group of essays by the emerging generation of German cinema experts in the US. The anthology is the first serious attempt to retell the history of the New German Cinema and the `consensus' cinema of the 1900s through the lens of contemporary, post-2000 films in all their diversity. Film scholars, students of the German cinema, and the general reading public will discover here why `Deutsches Kino' is once again in the limelight."---Marc Silberman, chair of the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin, Madison "The Collapse of the Conventional offers a comprehensive introduction to contemporary German cinema and is bound to stimulate new debates about the legacies of New German Cinema and its politics of the aesthetic. A must for everyone interested in German cinema and Contemporary culture."---Sabine Hake, Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin "Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape."---Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds

German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

The Collapse of the Conventional

Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War

Offers a fresh approach to German film studies by tracing key genres -- including horror, the thriller, Heimat films, and war films -- over the course of German cinema history

Genre and Its Deviations

Generic Histories of German Cinema

Barbara Caroline Mennel

The phrase “spatial turns” signals the growing importance of space as an analytical as well as representational category for culture. The volume addresses such emerging modes of inquiry by bringing together, for the first time, essays that engage with spatial turns, spatiality, and the theoretical implications of both in the context of German culture, history, and theory. Migrating from fields like geography, urban studies, and architecture, the new centrality of space has transformed social-science fields as diverse as sociology, philosophy, and psychology. In cultural studies, productive analyses of space increasingly cut across the studies of literature, film, popular culture, and the visual arts.Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of space by such figures as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.The volume is organized in four sections: “Mapping Spaces” addresses cartography in all forms and in its intersection with culture; “Spaces of the Urban” takes up one of the key sites of spatial studies, the city; “Spaces of Encounter” considers how Germany has become a contact zone for multiple ethnicities; and “Visualized Spaces” concerns the theorization of space in film and new media studies.

Jaimey Fisher

Books

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