Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (Weimar & Now: German Cultural Criticism): 48 - Hardcover

Isenberg, Noah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520235770 ISBN 13: 9780520235779

Publisher: University of California Press, 2014

Synopsis

Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for Detour, considered by many to be the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of his fellow Austrian and German emigre directors--Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak. Despite early work with Max Reinhardt and F. W. Murnau, his auspicious debut with Siodmak on their celebrated Weimar classic People on Sunday, and the success of films like Detour and Ruthless, Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films that have either been overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating and well-researched account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg provides the little-known details of Ulmer's personal life and a thorough analysis of his wide-ranging, eclectic films--features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the U.S. and abroad. Isenberg shows that Ulmer's unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more famous colleagues. As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmer's fortunes, Isenberg also conveys a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.

About this title

Review:

"A rare coupling of intellectual treatise and entertaining biography that beckons to both the film scholar and the public."--Miguel Rodriguez"KPBS" (01/30/2014)

"A page turner of a biography."--Andrew O'Hehir"New York Times" (06/29/2014)

"An authoritative new biography."--Kenneth Turan"Los Angeles Times" (11/14/2014)

"The story of his [Edgar G. Ulmer's] life is told with remarkable research and insight."-- (01/22/2014)

"The season's must read [for film buffs] . . . Noah Isenberg's long-awaited biography 'Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins.' Ulmer--whose CV includes "People on Sunday," "The Black Cat," "Detour," four Yiddish talkies, a half dozen bargain basement classics and as many indescribable oddities--had a life that was every bit as interesting as his film. The writing is scholarly but, given the material, charged with irony and full of pep."-- (12/20/2013)

"[A] cogent treatment of a singularly unlikely career. Isenberg's writing...allows the monumental eccentricities of Ulmer's underground journey to shine through."-- (03/01/2014)

"Long considered as something of a guilty pleasure among filmmakers, critics, and fans, director Edgar G. Ulmer finally gets the attention and scholarship he deserves in Noah Isenberg's new book."-- (01/28/2014)

"With sober intrepidness, Isenberg tethers down to earth some of the more wild claims made by and about his subject. In recounting the filmmaker¹s amazing career, he moves easily between describing the drama going on behind the scenes and analyzing the provocative work that Ulmer put on screen. . . . This fascinating biography gives us the chance to weigh the many frustrations in Ulmer¹s career against the joy he found in the act of creation."-- (02/02/2014)

"Operating mostly outside of the Hollywood system, Edgar G. Ulmer (the original King of the B¹s) is a fascinating character whose rather notorious mysterious life is somewhere between fact and fiction. All of this is explored and solved . . . in scholar Noah Isenberg¹s brilliant new critical biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins."-- (02/18/2014)

"A most welcome book, which can lay claim to being a definitive study of Edgar G. Ulmer. . . . Isenberg has given us more than an academic study of the filmmaker's eclectic career. He manages to paint a rounded, sympathetic but honest picture of the man whose endless dreams were so often dashed. . . . Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins is scholarly but never dry. It is a valuable reference and a good read."-- (03/11/2014)

About the Author:

Noah Isenberg is Director of Screen Studies and Professor of Culture and Media at the New School, author of Detour, and editor of Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0520235770
• ISBN 13: 9780520235779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 358