The improvements in the technology, artistry, and distribution of motion pictures coincided with the traumas of modern Germany. It is hardly to be wondered that filmmakers frequently turned their cameras on Germany's social and political problems, that propagandists regularly sought to manipulate them, that entrepreneurs tried to exploit them, and that German thinkers brooded upon the relationship between German society, politics, and the films that represented them all. From these tangled motives a rich discourse on film emerged that paralleled or anticipated discourses in the other film centers of the world.
The Cinema's Third Machine reproduces the diversity of perspectives and the intensity of controversies of early German film within the broad context of German social and political history, from the aesthetic rapture of the first years to the institutionalization of film by the national socialist state. Many texts have been rediscovered and are now presented to modern scholars for the first time. Hake treats all aspects of the medium: production, promotion, education, journalism, aesthetics, and political activism, following throughout the various forms criticism assumed.
Sabine Hake is an associate professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch.