Using a montage of footage from the highest quality restorations, the film illustrates Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 thesis that the rise of Nazism is anticipated in many themes found throughout Weimar cinema, while situating Kracauer in the philosophy and histories of the time.

What does the cinema know that we don’t? Rüdiger Suchsland’s sweeping doc on the cinema of Weimar Germany visualizes Siegfried Kracauer’s potent thesis from the influential 1947 book. Using beautiful restorations of films by Lang, Murnau and others, it contextualizes the period and its masterpieces.