LEADER 03901ctm a2200397Ia 4500001 136053 005 20240621203826.0 008 080116s2005 xx bm 000 0 eng d 028 52 3199855 |bUMI 035 (OCoLC)ocn191871744 035 136053 049 LHMA 040 LHM |beng |erda |cLHM 090 PN1995.9.S29 |bF75 2005 100 1 Fritsch, Claudia M. 245 10 Framing the dark side of the nation : |bvisions of the serial killer in German film culture 1946-1951 / |cby Claudia M. Fritsch. 264 0 |c2005. 300 viii, 322 pages 336 text |btxt |2rdacontent 337 unmediated |bn |2rdamedia 338 volume |bnc |2rdacarrier 502 Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005. 504 Includes bibliographical references (pages 306-320). 520 Within the problematic context of German identity reconfiguration after 1945, the study concentrates on feature films produced and released in Germany during the immediate postwar period whose narrative feature the figure of the killer and address aspects of seriality. As a visualization of deeper anxieties and a symbol of alterity within a cultural community, the theme of murder in postwar German film participates in the discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the coming to terms with the Nazi past, and serves as a strategy of displacement in the process of negotiating German identity after Hitler and the Holocaust. The thematic linking of seriality and murder, which, in its most explicit form, establishes an analogy between serial killer and Nazi perpetrator, is examined for its compliance with, and subversive potential against, the increasingly reactionary landscape of the time.Aiming at a dense, cross-disciplinary contextualization, the study analyses each film text's discursive negotiations based on a wide range of visual and textual archival material. This retrospective deciphering process tracing the signifying practices of the immediate postwar period intersects with the detailed decoding of the films' visual characteristics and formal elements. Following Tom Gunning and Roland Barthes, among others, this study focuses on the multi-layered "moreness" of the visual sign and traces the presence of the image as an independent communicator causing potentially disruptive visual deviations from a film's dominant storyline.The complex overlay of prevailing configurations and disruptive fissures that informed the postwar public debate materialize in similarly ambivalent form in Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us, Hans Deppe's Green Is the Heath and Peter Lorre's The Lost One. Venturing into dangerous terrain by integrating elements of murder and seriality, the films chosen for this study contain, almost by necessity, disruptive after-images that function as negative imprints of the Nazi past. While the narrative surface, in accordance with the postwar strategy of national exculpation, casts the perpetrator ultimately as the victim of the Nazi regime, the darker visual elements of all three films carry disruptive diegetic implications and expose a deeper level of complicity and crime. 530 Electronic version(s) |bavailable internally at USHMM. 533 Photocopy. |bAnn Arbor, Mich. : |cUMI Dissertation Services, |d2007. |e22 cm. 590 Dissertations and Theses 591 Record updated by Marcive processing 21 June 2024 650 0 Serial murderers in motion pictures. 650 0 Motion pictures |zGermany |xHistory |y20th century. 655 7 Academic theses. |2lcgft 856 41 |uhttp://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1051243801&sid=71&Fmt=6&clientId=54617&RQT=309&VName=PQD |zElectronic version from ProQuest 956 41 |u http://dc.ushmm.org/library/bib136053/3199855.pdf |z Hosted by USHMM. 852 0 |bstacks |hPN1995.9.S29 |iF75 2005 852 |bwww 852 0 |bebook