This exciting collection of unpublished essays on Ernst Lubitsch addresses multiple gaps in scholarly and critical engagement with the director. His understudied early German films shed light on Jewish culture, on the relation of comedy to gender and the influence of theatre on his filmmaking. The popular historical epics brought Lubitsch an invitation to Hollywood in 1922. There, Lubitsch helped develop the film musical and notably contributed to the genre of Hollywood romantic comedy. The well-known scholars—film historians, archivists, and theorists—whose essays appear in this volume expand our knowledge of the set designers, actors, directors and members of the emigré community who contributed to Lubitsch’s vibrant films. An emphasis on the role of material objects opens up a new dimension of critical engagement with the director. Light is shed on neglected films, and the antifascist dimension of his oeuvre brings his political stance clearly to light. As these essays make clear, Lubtisch’s cinema is elusive and deserving of our close attention.

Brigitte Peucker is the Elias Leavenworth Professor of German and Film and Media Studies Emerita at Yale University. Her books on cinema include Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts; The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film; and Aesthetic Spaces: The Place of Art in Film. She is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Ido Lewit is a teaching fellow at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. He is the co-editor of Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image.

Acknowledgements

Introduction - Brigitte Peucker and Ido Lewit

Part I. Identity and History

1. Jewishness in Lubitsch’s Milieu Films: The Pride of the Firm and Shoe Palace Pinkus - Rick McCormick

2. The Mirror and the Mother-In-Law: Bourgeois Jewish Femininity in The Pride of the Firm, The Blouse King, and When I Was Dead - Valerie Weinstein

3. Lubitsch Revisits the Schmatta Trade: The Shop Around the Corner - Jan-Christopher Horak

4. To Be or Not to Be: Revising History in Light of Migrant Interactions - Claire Demoulin

Part II. Theatricality and Performance

5. ‘Done!’: Kurt Richter’s Perspectival Set Design in Lubitsch’s German Films - Janelle Blankenship

6. Lubitsch’s May McAvoy Trilogy: Threesomes, Triangles, Allegories - Charles Musser

7. Theatrical Yet Deeply Cinematic: Situating Lubitsch’s Musicals Within the Early Sound Era - Michael Slowik

8. Miriam Hopkins Learns to Wink - Maria DiBattista

Part III. Objects and Spaces

9. Regulating the Gaze and the Voice for a Cinema in Transition: Lubitsch’s The Merry Jail and So This Is Paris - Ido Lewit

10. In and Out of Bed - Joe McElhaney

11. Ninotchka: Pleasure and Politics Objectified - Susan Felleman and Catherine Walworth

Part IV. Elusive Style

12. That Uncertain Feeling and the Symptoms of Married Life - Noa Merkin

13. Ernst Lubitsch: Censored and Censoring - William Paul

14. Chaplin/Lubitsch/Chaplin: Influence and Counter-Influence - Donna Kornhaber

15. Films in Which Nothing Very Much Happens: Unstable Knowledge in Lubitsch’s Late Silent Work - Scott Bukatman

Complete Bibliography

Contributors

Index