Expressionism and Film, originally published in German in 1926, is not only a classic of film history, but also an important work from the early phase of modern media history. Written with analytical brilliance and historical vision by a well-known contemporary of the expressionist movement, it captures Expressionism at the time of its impending conclusion-as an intersection of world view, resoluteness of form, and medial transition. Though one of the most frequently-cited works of Weimar culture, Kurtz's groundbreaking work, which is on a par with Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen, has never been published in English. Its relevance and historical contexts are analyzed in a concise afterword by the Swiss scholars Christian Kiening and Ulrich Johannes Beil.
"For English readers interested in silent German cinema, there are many discoveries to be made here."
UCLA Film & Television Archive
"Rudolf Kurtz's Expressionismus und Film (1926) [...] is to my mind one of the key texts, illustrating the reception of German Expressionism as an art movement in the cinema in Germany. Not only does Lotte Eisner quote extensively in her The Haunted Screen from this work, virtually all other writers in German about this period, too, have found it necessary to reference Kurtz. This translation of K
Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film and Television Archive
"Expressionismus und Film is a key text, the only book written on German Expressionist cinema during the era. Because Kurtz had access to filmmakers and to artists and critics in other fields, the volumeis something of a primary document itself rather than simply a monograph by a scholar or journalist. Of the German books on cinema written during the silent period, this is the one most obviously c
Kristin Thompson, Honorary Fellow, Department of Communication Arts at the University of W
