ReFocus: The Historical Films of Ernst Lubitsch

This volume reconsiders Ernst Lubitsch’s historical films as philosophically charged, aesthetically experimental, and politically attuned engagements with the past. Moving beyond the reductive notion of “the Lubitsch Touch” as a mere marker of style, the essays collected here explore how Lubitsch’s oeuvre navigates the historical through satire, theatricality, hapticity, and the sensuous logic of fabric and ornament. The collection is structured around three phases of Lubitsch’s career—his Weimar-era costume dramas, his Pre-Code Hollywood musicals, and his émigré comedies—each examined through a diverse array of critical methodologies, including Deleuzian film-philosophy, exile studies, Jewish cultural analysis, genre theory, and archival historiography. From Weimar Egyptomania to post-Tiananmen Hong Kong, these essays trace the transnational afterlives of Lubitsch’s cinema, revealing its enduring influence on global film cultures and its complex entanglement with questions of memory, displacement, and desire. By foregrounding Lubitsch’s historical films as sites of both ludic pleasure and political subtext, this volume offers a vital intervention in scholarship on cinematic historicity, exile cinema, and the affective textures of twentieth-century screen culture.