Enchanted by Cinema: William Thiele Between Vienna, Berlin and Hollywood

William Thiele is remembered today as the father of the sound film operetta with seminal classics such as Drei von der Tankstelle (1930). While often considered among the most accomplished directors of Late Weimar cinema, as an Austrian Jew he was vilified during the onset of the Nazi regime in 1933 and fled to the United States where he continued making films until the end of his career in 1960. Enchanted by Cinema closely examines the European musical film pioneer’s work and his cross-cultural perspective across forty years of filmography in Berlin and Hollywood to account for his popularity while discussing issues of ethnicity, exile, comedy, music, gender, and race.

Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert is PhD candidate at the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities with a gender studies concentration. His publications include a chapter in Goethe als Literatur-Figur (Wallstein Verlag, 2016) and a contribution to Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2020). In his dissertation, he focuses on lost films of the late Weimar Republic.