Recollecting Lotte Eisner: Cinema, Exile, and the Archive

By Naomi DeCelles

"A crucial intervention into at least three fields: Weimar cinema studies, feminist and queer theory, and film history. Naomi DeCelles carefully and critically explores Lotte Eisner's best and least known work, situating it in history and reclaiming it for our own time."—Patrice Petro, editor of Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s

"With both its balanced approach to relevant biographical details and its masterly critical analysis of Lotte Eisner’s writings, this is an excellent, comprehensive, and original study of her contributions to film history and film criticism."—Mila Ganeva, author of Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold War

Recollecting Lotte Eisner provides the first in-depth examination of the remarkable transnational career of film journalist, archivist, and historian Lotte Eisner (1896–1983). From her early years as a film critic in interwar Berlin to her escape from prison in occupied France and from her role as chief curator at the Cinémathèque française to that as the mythic "collective conscience" of New German Cinema, Eisner was a prolific writer and lecturer and a pivotal voice in early film and media studies. Situated at the juncture of feminist media historiography and disciplinary intellectual history, this groundbreaking book is based on extensive multilingual archival research and the excavation of a rich corpus of previously overlooked materials. Introducing samples of Eisner's writing in translation, this volume makes some of the most important contributions of a foundational scholar in the field of film studies accessible for the first time to an English-language readership. 

Paperback
238 pages
University of California Press, 2022
6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
ISBN 9780520388130
Film History, Media Studies