Calhoon, Kenneth S. The Long Century’s Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern. U of Toronto P, 2021.

Abstract

Kenneth S. Calhoon’s The Long Century’s Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern is an ambitious study that explores connections among Weimar films (that is, films made in Germany between the wars, particularly Expressionist films), Romantic literature and painting, and modern art. As a scholar of nineteenth-century literature and culture, I appreciated the book’s insistence on the relevance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works to twentieth-century film; however, I found several aspects of the book to be frustrating.