Author William Mahan

William Mahan

William Mahan is a Ph.D. candidate in the German Department at the University of California, Davis. His current research is focused on humanity’s relationship to ghosts of the past in German and Austrian literature and film from the turn of the 20th Century to the present day, considering societal changes in government and ideology as well as technological progress. He has recently presented essays on “enviromorphism” in Alfred Döblin’s Wang-lun and world visions in Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan, and has forthcoming articles on Christoph Ransmayr’s Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes in the Journal of Austrian Studies, and on Holocaust trauma representation in Humanities Journal.

Ghosts and their Prices: Surveillance and Image Economies in Christian Petzold’s Cinema

William Mahan

September 2017

Christian Petzold: A Dossier

This essay examines Christian Petzold’s lesser-known, early films of the 90s in their depiction of the German economy’s impact on individuals’ image-perception and then takes up his better-known film Die innere...

Darkness Itself Made Plastic: The Forms and Formlessness of Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse

Criminals Against Decoration: Modernism as a Heist

The New-Ark: trying to disavow anti-blackness

Claustrophobia and Intimacy in Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Her Smell

What’s in a Cone? Barbara Loden’s Wanda Between Weakness and Resilience

Come and See The Painted Bird: A Filmmaker’s Plea

Thresholds of Work and Non-Work in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s People on Sunday

Lakes in Lower Manhattan: The 4th Annual Tribeca Film Festival

Dreaming of the Mountains: The 9th Dharamshala International Film Festival

Ghost Cities: The 58th Viennale

Queer and Australian Features at the 2020 Adelaide Film Festival

Korean Cinema’s Self-Portrait: The 25th Busan International Film Festival

Live Through This: The 2020 Adelaide Film Festival

“Sense of Place”: The 33rd Tokyo International Film Festival

Chasing the Runaways: Foreign Film Production and Film Studio Development in Australia 1988-2002 by Nick Herd

Revising a Concept: Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, by Jonathan Walley

When Everything Seemed Possible: London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde by David Curtis

“Memories Are Made of This”: Juliane Lorenz and Lothar Schirmer’s R.W. Fassbinder: Film Stills, 1966-1982

Beneath the Tuxedo Elegance: Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, by Mark Glancy

Anarchist Cinema: A Dream of Resistance: The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki by Stephen Prince

Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson

Identity in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass

Stairways to Paradise: Youssef Chahine and Alexandria…Why?

At Home Among Strangers (Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1974)

German Yearnings, East and West: The Sons of Great Bear (Josef Mach, 1966)

Waiting for Rain: Oppression and Resistance in Youssef Chahine’s The Land (1970)

Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964)

A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines (Chelovek s bulvara Kaputsinov, Alla Surikova, 1987)

Fernández, Emilio “Indio”

Scott, Tony

Menzel, Jiří

Wise, Robert

Fei Mu

Huston, John

Stone, Oliver

Ghosts and their Prices: Surveillance and Image Economies in Christian Petzold’s Cinema