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Babylon Berlin: Pastiching Weimar cinema

  • Sara F. Hall EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 24, 2019

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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Published Online: 2019-08-24
Published in Print: 2019-09-25

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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