The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch: Comedy Without Relief

Against the idea that comedy offers us--or at least, that it should offer us--a relief from the horrors of the real world, the German-Jewish-American filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch defended his masterpiece To Be or Not to Be, a comedy from 1942 about the concurrent Nazi occupation of Poland, with the claim that he had made up his mind ＂to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time.＂ The essays included in The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch consider Lubitsch’s work from his early Berlin years to his Hollywood fame, emphasizing the idea of ’comedy without relief’ as the fundamental ethical premise of his special cinematic ’touch.’ In this edited collection, contributors take a closer look at how Lubitsch addresses delicate and controversial topics like sexuality, love, and revolution, and set out a picture of an engaged ethics without moralism. The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch is a vital contribution to film scholarship and a tribute to an essential filmmaker.

Ivana Novak is a curator of the film programme at the Slovenian national television (RTV Slovenija). She is a film critic and theoretician, a musician and a PhD candidate at the University of Ljubljana. Her main topics of research are humour and comedy, classical American and European cinema and television series. She has co-edited several books: Lubitsch Can’t Wait (2014), Stanley Cavell: Refleksija filma (2015), and Do zadnjega smeha: Preston Sturges (2016).

Gregor Moder is a senior research associate in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of Comic Love: Shakespeare, Hegel, Lacan (2016) and Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity (2017), and he coedited The Object of Comedy: Philosophies and Performances (2020). He is currently the principal investigator in a research project on the ＂Theatricality of Power.＂