German film in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods is regarded as marked by a strong sense of
cultural conservatism and the aspiration to be recognized as an art form. This book takes an
alternative approach to the history of German cinema from the emergence of the early feature
film to the transition to sound by focusing on the poetics of popular genres such as the
disaster film melodrama the musical and the war film exploring their cultural reverberations
and modes of audience address. Based on the assumption that popular cinema contributed
immensely to the breakthrough of a modern audiovisual culture of the senses in Germany between
1910 and 1930 Pictorial Affects Senses of Rupture offers close readings of a number of rarely
analyzed films including one of the first cinematic adaptations of the Titanic disaster from
1912 and the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front from 1930. Restoring the films'
horizons of historicity by locating them at crucial points of intersection between social
cultural technological and aesthetic discourses this book argues for the prominent role
popular German cinema's own forms of discursivity have played within the historical formation
of modernity.
