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...

'The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid'

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

Uncomfortably at Home: German Films at the 64th Berlinale

The 34th Cinema Ritrovato Has Full Resuscitation under COVID

Women at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival

Lest We Forget: the 31st FID Marseille

A Vitalising Cinema in an Agitated Age: The 58th New York Film Festival

Locarno 2020: The Open Doors Experience

Your Daughters Come Back to You: The 28th Pan African Film and Arts Festival

The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology by J.P. Telotte

War, Community, and the Cinema: Front Lines of Community: Hollywood Between War and Democracy by Hermann Kappelhof and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris

The Perfect Conditional: Philippe Garrel by Michael Leonard

Creating the Appearance of Being: The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, by Dan Callahan

The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller

Engaged Vision: Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave, by Steven Ungar

Reagan at the Movies: Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, by J. Hoberman

Contraband

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)

Quay, Stephen and Timothy

Scott, Tony

Menzel, Jiří

Wise, Robert

Fernández, Emilio “Indio”

Fei Mu

Huston, John

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