ERIC RENTSCHLER
film historian and cultural critic
Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic
Languages and Literatures

Chair, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

VES 270: Proseminar in Film and Visual Studies: History
VEs 301: Film Studies Workshop

(additional course listings)

Still from G.W. Pabst's Paracelsus, 1943

Rentschler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. He received his academic training in European literary, cultural, and intellectual history, studying in Stuttgart, Bonn, and Prague, before taking his doctoral degree at the University of Washington. He has been a recipient of Guggenheim, Humboldt, American Council of Learned Societies, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and Fulbright fellowships; in 2001 he won the Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for Harvard Senior Faculty and in 2003 the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship. His publications have concentrated on film history, theory, and criticism, with particular emphasis on German cinema during the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the postwar and the postwall eras. His books include West German Film in the Course of Time (Redgrave, 1984), German Film and Literature (Routledge, 1986), West German Filmmakers on Film (Holmes & Meier, 1988), Augenzeugen (Frankfurt am Main, 1988, 2nd revised edition 2001), The Films of G.W. Pabst (Rutgers University Press, 1990), and The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard University Press, 1996). He is currently finishing two books: "Courses in Time: Film in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1962-1989" and "The Continuing Allure of Nazi Attractions."