The New
German Cinema: Music, History, and the
Matter of Style
by Caryl
Flinn
The University of California Press, Berkeley,
2004
331 pp., illus. 35 b/w. Trade, $65.00;
paper $19.95
ISBN: 0-520-22895-2; 0-520-238230.
Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg
andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com
One of the most interesting things about
The New German Cinema is that Caryl
Flinn’s unrelenting focus on music
and style in the German cinema of the
mid-sixties to the 1980’s produces
an analysis of a body of films that makes
a significant departure from traditional
literary forms of exegesis. Flinn does
not describe the plots of the films in
detail or spend time analysing character,
nor has she produced a history or a survey.
Flinn analyses music and style to understand
what they reveal about German history.
Her subject centers on how history is
represented in film by bodies, props,
costume, and music. Her attention is focused
on what is seen and heard——how
styles of representation such as kitsch,
camp, and fantasy communicate.
Of course, this approach is often called
textual analysis, and Flinn herself refers
to films as texts. Yet it seems to me
that Flinn has gone beyond what one would
typically expect of this type of analysis.
Her methodology highlights the physical
characteristics of the films and remains
closer to visual and aural perception
than most other textual analyses of film.
To refer to films as texts in this context
is something of a misnomer. Flinn shows
that a text about film can be produced
without reducing film to a text.
In some ways, it is not surprising that
a focus on style and music should produce
this different perspective. Style and
music are neglected areas of film study,
and there is often a tacit assumption
that they are not central to the construction
of filmic meaning but rather "add-ons"
that can be dispensed with or changed
without radically affecting the meaning
and experience of the whole film. Flinn
confronts these assumptions head-on and
shows how style and music are central
to the whole experience of a film.
