Expansion, Circulation, Resonance

This book offers the first systematic and in-depth study of illustrated popular film magazines, a highly influential yet long-neglected form of media that shaped how cinema was seen, understood, and experienced throughout the twentieth century. Focusing on the German-speaking media landscape, it reframes these widely circulated publications not as marginal film paratexts, but as powerful agents of visual culture that actively configured cinematic knowledge, taste, and affect.

Spanning from early illustrated film reporting in general-interest magazines around 1900, through the emergence of illustrated popular film magazines proper in the 1910s, to postwar transformations and the rise of brand-based media clusters in the late twentieth century, the book combines historical breadth with theoretical innovation. It develops a multi-layered analytical model grounded in the concepts of expansion, circulation, and film-cultural resonance to explain how magazines operated as aesthetic infrastructures linking films, stars, production practices, and everyday life. Through serial rhythms, striking layouts, participatory formats, and networks of media ‘satellites’ such as posters and postcards, these magazines generated flows of images and meanings that extended cinema far beyond the screen.

Based on extensive archival research, visual analysis, quantitative measurements, and interviews, the book offers a praxeological and historically grounded account of illustrated film magazines in their material, visual, and media-ecological configurations. Richly illustrated case studies provide detailed insights into the material and visual logics of popular film culture. Ambitious in scope and method, the book positions film magazines as an epistemic medium central to film and visual culture, and as key sites in the formation of popular culture. It not only fills a major gap in cinema and media studies, but also offers a conceptual framework that connects historical print media infrastructures with contemporary debates in visual and digital media research.