Abstract
Centered on Richard Dyer’s model of pastiche, this essay posits that the German television series Babylon Berlin engages in a unique and timely practice of cultural reproduction shaped by a specific combination of historical subject matter and the present media-historical moment. Through digital effects, narrational layering, and multivalent location choices, Babylon Berlin pastiches Weimar cinema, and self-consciously invites comparisons between the so-called golden age of German cinema and the present. It activates cinephilic recall, establishes an intermedial dialogue between analog and digital forms, and affectively engenders a historically oriented conversation about the fragility of modern democracy in the Brexit/Trump era. The cultural work of pastiche it performs warrants the series’ inclusion in the conversation around the European remake.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Special Issue: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Editorial
- Editorial: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Articles
- Local flavors and regional markers: The Low Countries and their commercially driven and proximity-focused film remake practice
- Manufacturing proximity through film remakes: Remake rights representatives and the case of local-language comedy remakes
- Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema
- Remaking Winnetou, reconfiguring German fantasies of Indianer and the Wild West in the Post-Reunification Era
- Instead of the real thing: Six ways to talk about what Hollywood does to European films
- Book Reviews
- Meir, C. (2019). Mass producing European cinema: Studiocanal and its works. New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 272 pp.
- Evens, T., & Donders, K. (2018). Platform power and policy in transforming television markets. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 304 pp.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Special Issue: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Editorial
- Editorial: Current trends in remaking European screen cultures
- Articles
- Local flavors and regional markers: The Low Countries and their commercially driven and proximity-focused film remake practice
- Manufacturing proximity through film remakes: Remake rights representatives and the case of local-language comedy remakes
- Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema
- Remaking Winnetou, reconfiguring German fantasies of Indianer and the Wild West in the Post-Reunification Era
- Instead of the real thing: Six ways to talk about what Hollywood does to European films
- Book Reviews
- Meir, C. (2019). Mass producing European cinema: Studiocanal and its works. New York, London: Bloomsbury Academic. 272 pp.
- Evens, T., & Donders, K. (2018). Platform power and policy in transforming television markets. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 304 pp.