Constitutive Contingencies: Fritz Lang, Double Vision, and the Place of Rupture

With the notion of the “historical imaginary,” Thomas Elsaesser has suggested a forceful figure of thought to re-conceive of cinema’s place in and contribution to the formation of history and cultural memory. More specifically, the notion has helped to overcome a number of conceptual deadlocks in rethinking the history of German cinema, beset as this national cinema is by questions of continuity and discontinuity, ideological over-determination and political representation, historical trauma, and new beginnings. Thomas Elsaesser takes Weimar cinema, the most celebrated period of German film history in view of its peak artistic achievements but also its most controversial period