As the building blocks of moving pictures, photographs have played an integral role in cinema since the dawn of the medium—a relationship that has grown more complexly connected even as the underlying technologies continue to evolve. explores the use of photographs in German films from Expressionism to the Berlin School, addressing the formal and narrative roles that photographs play as well as the cultural and historical contexts out of which these films emerged. Looking beyond and within the canon, the editors gather stimulating new insights into the politics of surveillance, resistance, representation, and collective memory functioning through photographic rupture and affect in German cinema.