Tim Bergfelder

This open access book investigates film studios in Britain, France, Germany and Italy between the 1930s and 1960s. During this time, studios faces unprecedented challenges including wartime disruptions, post-war fragmentation, movement of labour and the introduction of new technologies. While the study of film studios has been dominated by the centralized Hollywood ‘studio system’, the authors present new research about the often very different histories of Europe’s film studios, comparing their geographic locations, architectures and infrastructural development. They explore a number of well-known studios including Pinewood, Joinville, Babelsberg and Cinecittà, as well as lesser-known production sites such as Manchester, Victorine, post-war West German studios and Tirrenia as diverse creative and economic infrastructures. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources, photographs, films, aerial maps and visualizations, the book charts how artistic practices responded to transnational flows in film studio expertise, as studios constituted formative, materially based ‘spaces of the imagination’ that produced some of cinema’s most influential films. How studios worked in the past as dynamic, creative working environments that were profoundly influenced by their locations, architectures and personnel, is foregrounded as the authors produce new understandings of how the collaborative and material environments of studio spaces and technologies shaped film production and cultures. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

West German cinema of the 1960s is frequently associated with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, collectively known by the 1970s as the "New German Cinema." Yet for domestic and international audiences at the time, German cinema primarily meant popular genres such as exotic adventure films, Gothic crime thrillers, westerns, and sex films, which were dismissed by German filmmakers and critics of the 1970s as "Daddy's Cinema." International Adventures provides the first comprehensive account of these genres, and charts the history of the West German film industry and its main protagonists from the immediate post-war years to its boom period in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing film genres in the context of industrial practices, literary traditions, biographical trajectories, and wider cultural and social developments, this book uncovers a forgotten period of German filmmaking that merits reassessment. International Adventures firmly locates its case studies within the wider dynamic of European cinema. In its study of West German cinema's links and co-operations with other countries including Britain, France, and Italy, the book addresses what is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of 1960s popular film genres: the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production.

Since its maiden voyage and sinking in April 1912, Titanic has become a monumental icon of the 20th century and has inspired a wealth of interpretations across literature, art and media. This book offers a comprehensive discussion of the diverse representations of the connections and differences in the way generations of artists and audiences have approached and used the tragedy. In the final section is an in-depth study of James Cameron's blockbuster film "Titanic".

West German cinema of the 1960s is frequently associated with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, collectively known by the 1970s as the "New German Cinema." Yet for domestic and international audiences at the time, German cinema primarily meant popular genres such as exotic adventure films, Gothic crime thrillers, westerns, and sex films, which were dismissed by German filmmakers and critics of the 1970s as "Daddy's Cinema." International Adventures provides the first comprehensive account of these genres, and charts the history of the West German film industry and its main protagonists from the immediate post-war years to its boom period in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing film genres in the context of industrial practices, literary traditions, biographical trajectories, and wider cultural and social developments, this book uncovers a forgotten period of German filmmaking that merits reassessment. International Adventures firmly locates its case studies within the wider dynamic of European cinema. In its study of West German cinema's links and co-operations with other countries including Britain, France, and Italy, the book addresses what is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of 1960s popular film genres: the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production.