Search

In Christian Petzold's 2012 film Barbara, a film about a disgraced East German doctor who has been demoted to work in a provincial hospital, borders and boundaries abound. While moral, ethical, and personal boundaries are frequently crossed in the film, the German-German border remains somewhat of a mystery. It is a border that cannot be spoken of, rendering not only the characters mute, but also any visual representation impossible. Using the understated realism of the Berlin School of filmmaking, this paper argues, the film visualizes instead an ambivalent approach to the German notion of 'Heimat': rather than being the homely, safe haven it is usually depicted as, Barbara's country of birth becomes 'unheimlich' – uncanny, a place of invasion, surveillance and confinement. And yet, in the end, Barbara chooses to stay there, giving up her place in an escape plan to a pregnant teen patient instead. The film thus throws up more questions than it answers, most crucially about the human capacity to live within even the most personal constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of SYMPOSIUM CULTURE@KULTUR is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Fritz Lang’s comments about the inspiration for his film Metropolis emphasize the verticality and bright lights he encountered on his first view of Manhattan in 1924. Scholarship on the film’s cityscape has likewise focused on skyscrapers, the influence of and discourse about New York, and the debate about skyscrapers in Germany. Yet events high above ground constitute a minority of the film’s action. The present study argues that the upward focus in past scholarship has distracted from the equally dramatic ecological archive underground. After discussing ideas about archives that undergird the study, the article offers a new analysis of the film’s cityscape in relation to the rapidly expanding underground infrastructures of early twentieth-century Europe and ideas about ecology and pollution that circulated around the time of the film’s release. With these contexts in mind, Metropolis resonates as an ecological archive of Weimar Germany as much as a science fiction fantasy of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece revisits Weimar cinematic greatness in two films from the period: G. W. Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, and Fritz Lang's M, with Peter Lorre in the leading role. Also re-examined a later German picture, The Lost One, made by, and starring, a prominent Weimar actor--Peter Lorre himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The often bemoaned crisis of West German cinema in the 1980s coincided with a dramatic changing of the nation's film critical guard. The symptomatic impetus that had figured so strongly during the postwar era gaveway to the socalled new subjectivism of young critics like Michael Althen, Claudius Seidl, and Andreas Kilb. They looked askance at the formal complexity and political activism of most art house fare and above all found themselves smitten by mainstream American features. Taking their cue from Susan Sontag and her essay "Against Interpretation," these postmodern existentialists cultivated a highly personalized, indeed rarefied form of poetic empiricism. This study analyzes their sensibility and rhetoric, their emphases and oversights. It focuses on Dominik Graf's essay film, Was heißt hier Ende? (Then Is It the End?, 2015), a tribute toAlthen and the cohort of young criticswithwhom heworked and interacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Film festivals have become key agents in the movie business, with major competitive festivals enjoying outstanding importance. Based on this assumption, this paper focuses on the example of Germany and asks to what extent the Berlin International Film Festival offers a venue for domestic films, and which types of filmmakers, in particular, benefit from this springboard and gatekeeping mechanism. More precisely, given the diverging interests confronting the Berlinale as a platform for the film community, a quantitative program analysis was conducted of the festival's most significant sections (Competition, Panorama, Forum, Generation, Perspective German Cinema, Lola@Berlinale) from 1980 to 2016. The findings demonstrate that even good-faith efforts to strengthen domestic filmmaking in regard to weight and diversity have hardly changed the power structures that underlie the curatorial decision-making process. Respectively, the share of national film productions has been stagnating for many years. Moreover, female and young filmmakers are still broadly underrepresented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the state sponsorship of film production in Germany, this article examines general mechanisms in the formation of meaning in German filmmaking. With reference to Schimank's framework of agent–structure dynamics and based on a constructivist understanding of the world, the results of 97 expert interviews with screenwriters, directors, producers, distributors, cinema theatre operators, funding representatives and public television editors, as well as document analyses, show that the medium's construction of reality is anything but unconditioned. On the contrary, due to the fundamental role of film funding and public television in the agent constellations intertwined with social structures that shape the film production process in Germany, the medium's key communicators are confronted with expectations that go far beyond economic parameters. More precisely, the article reveals that German filmmaking reflects a political dimension, and expresses hierarchies and constraints that prompt struggles for legitimate meaning and challenge any autonomous practice in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds light on Dominik Graf’s long-standing and often-overlooked engagement with the essay film since the mid-1990s. The article contends that his urban essays, his cinema and television essays, and his commemorative essays are driven by a reconstructive impetus that takes stock of the state of German cities, German media, and German society from the viewpoint of their “end.” In reading these three variations of his essay films as “architectures of images,” the article presents Graf and his collaborators as “collectors” and “combiners,” who not only (re)construct highly layered works out of archival materials that activate multiple public and personal histories at once but also elicit a larger reflection on the potential of moving images to capture these layered histories in their constant transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The film essays Verfluchte Liebe deutscher Film (2016) and Offene Wunde deutscher Film (2017), coscripted and codirected by Dominik Graf and Johannes F. Sievert, survey the postwar history of genre cinema in the Federal Republic of Germany and take stock of the present situation. Their diagnosis is grim, for in their assessment the state of the nation’s film culture is altogether dire and depleted. Why, they wonder, are German films so unpopular? Why does Germany produce so few compelling genre films, and why do German films in general seem so averse to representing German bodies? In fact, and here is where their key emphasis lies, there have been some (albeit only a few) noteworthy counterexamples of German genre films that are vibrant and full of life, that plumb depths and probe outer limits, that relish excess and abound with sensuality. Graf and Sievert’s two films provide an impassioned intervention in the formof an archaeological excavation. This article considers its argument and examines its rhetoric, especially theway in which it eschews an artistic cinema of authors (Autorenkino) and espouses a more kinetic body cinema of action, affect, and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on Foucault's discourse theory, this article deals with the construction of social reality through contemporary German cinema. More precisely, the case study explores the discursive formations of Combat Girls (2012), a film about the teenager milieu in the rural area of East Germany where two girls are moving into and out of a neo-Nazi group. This movie stands for the film production culture in Germany, which largely depends on sponsorships by state promotion bodies and public television, and consequently must be interpreted as the result of power relations and as the outcome of a struggle for legitimate meaning. Combining the Foucauldian discourse analysis with film content analysis tools, the study shows that the text-image relationships of Combat Girls contain three dominant discourses, which push forward the perspectives of 'self-fulfillment', 're-integration in society', and 'identification with the democratic system'. These findings indicate that the filmic construction of social reality in Germany has a clear political purpose. Simultaneously, they give insight into the knowledge regime of contemporary German film and what is possible to be said and shown on national screens – especially when it comes to a socially and politically sensitive topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Publizistik: Vierteljahreshefte für Kommunikationsforschung is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The German mountain film (Bergfilm) has received extensive critical attention for its political, social, and aesthetic implications, but has received remarkably little attention for its role in the environmental history of the Alps. This article considers the Bergfilm within the long history of depictions of the Alps and the growth of Alpine tourism in order to ask how the role of media in environmental change shifts with the advent of film. The argument builds on Verena Winiwarter and Martin Knoll’s model of social-ecological interaction, Adrian Ivakhiv’s theoretical framework for the environmental implications of film, and Laura Frahm’s theories of filmic space. Through an analysis of Arnold Fanck’s films Der heilige Berg [The Holy Mountain, Fanck 1926] and Der große Sprung [The Great Leap, Fanck 1927], which are compared with Gustav Renker’s novel Heilige Berge [Holy Mountains, Renker 1921] and set into the context of the environmental history of the Alpine regions where the films were shot, the author argues that film aesthetics serve as a creative catalyst for environmental change and infrastructure development. While some ecocinema scholars have argued that environmental films teach viewers new ideas or change modes of behavior, this analysis suggests that film aesthetics are most effective at accelerating processes of environmental change that are already underway.

The term Berliner Sonderschule appears both in a humorous scene in Jan Ole Gerster's 2012 film Oh Boy (English: A Coffee in Berlin) and in a media interview in which Gerster uses it to refer to his own cinematic aesthetic. He thereby consciously sets his work apart from recent films belonging to the Berlin School. Exploring various cinematic and narrative techniques in Oh Boy--including how the director spotlights the city;s palimpsestuous architectural objects and displays the influence of German history on present-day Berliners--we reveal what Gerster might mean with his use of the tongue-in-cheek designation Berliner Sonderschule. We assess this appellation also as a way for the director to reinforce his distance from the Berlin School and to refer to his kaleidoscopic aesthetic with self-deprecating humour. In Oh Boy, Gerster confronts the interconnectedness of past and present, critiques the state of cinema in post-Wall Germany, and is not afraid to laugh at himself in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the first comprehensive history of German film, Oskar Kalbus's two-volume Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst(On the Rise of German Film Art, 1935) in terms of its contemporary reception in Nazi Germany and in light of a newly surfaced third volume. This is the first article dedicated to a work that scholars have long cited, though rarely without suspicion. The newly surfaced typescript for Der Film im Dritten Reich(Film in the Third Reich, 1937) confirms the author's National Socialist sympathies, but at the same time it highlights by contrast the virtues of the two published volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the 2012 feature Lore, which was made in Germany by Australian director Cate Shortland and is based on the story of the same name by Rachel Seiffert. Focusing on a group of siblings and their odyssey across Germany at the end of World War II, the film explores questions of identity constitution and subversion in the transitional ground between childhood and adulthood, in particular as this is registered in bodily experience. The three main sections of this article focus on the family archive (not least through the medium of photography), structures of double identity (in particular around the figure of the German Jew), and aesthetic strategies of representation (especially framing and mirroring). Through these steps, the article probes the ethical, aesthetic, and political stakes involved in representing the passing of children through the violence of history in what the director calls "grey zones." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the first and only Film Week of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was held in New York City in 1975, East Germany saw it as another major success on the road to normalization and international recognition. However, trouble was already brewing under the surface of the GDR film sector, and this was indicative of larger political and cultural trends. Western film imports were becoming ever more important to the yearly cinema programme in the GDR, especially in order to attract the predominantly young film audiences. As the 1970s progressed and East Germany's economic situation worsened, Western film imports, and especially Hollywood blockbuster movies, became increasingly indispensable to the economic survival of the GDR film sector as a whole. By the early 1980s, the SED officials in charge of cultural affairs and movie selection eventually lost control over GDR film policy. Because of complex and multiplying cultural, political and economic pressures, ideological priorities were relegated to the back seat while economic profit and the financial survival of the East German film sector took centre stage. By the mid to late 1980s, the West and East German film markets, and their lists of top-rated films, increasingly converged as the two countries were dominated by an international and US-dominated film culture. In little more than ten years, East Germany was forced to surrender control of this vital cultural sector and core building block of its socialist identity, and this not only substantially weakened its cultural autonomy but also endangered its political stability and survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While public discussions about media and violence tend to be defined by the negative psychological effects attributed to exposure to mediated depictions of violence, this article argues that the mediated violence in Valeska Grisebach's 2006 film, Longing, (Sehnsucht) instead seeks to heighten viewers' sensitivity towards violent acts in moving images. Grisebach rejects the so-called MTV aesthetic and instead employs formal and narrative devices that may be read in political terms. To illuminate the connection between film aesthetics, violence, and mass (dis)engagement with politics, this article draws upon the argument rehearsed in Walter Benjamin's oft-cited essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility' (1936). Given that we are witnessing changes in the ways that we experience and re-present our reality now that are arguably as significant as the birth of the moving image itself, it is pertinent to look to early twentieth-century cultural theory in order to gain a better understanding of the significance of these transformations in a historical context. By reading the violent incidents in Longing through a Benjaminian lens, this article suggests that the film is a political act by Grisebach, as well as a key political work in the field of contemporary German-language cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Film scholars interested in the responses to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and subsequent unification have tended to focus on the comic and6 or tragic narratives which reflect the challenges facing the population of the New Federal States, whether as citizens struggling to adjust to the new post-unification order or as citizens of an economically deprived region and all the attendant social and psychological problems. But a number of important films produced during the Wende have largely been neglected. Formally experimental, occasionally cryptic, and sometimes disturbing, these films demand reviewing not only because of their unconventional aesthetic, which distinguishes them from the other better-known films of the time and since, but because with hindsight, as this article makes clear, we recognise that they offer a critical index of the doubts and frustrations resulting from the East German state's collapse and its subsequent union with the Federal Republic. This article focuses on three films in particular (Letztes aus der DaDaeR/ Latest from the DaDaeR, Das Deutsche Kettensägenmassaker/ The German Chainsaw Massacre and Deutschfieber/ German Fever) and considers filmmakers' recourse to aesthetic forms, namely the carnivalesque and the grotesque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the portrayal of German-Polish relations in Robert Thalheim's 2007 film Am Ende kommen Touristen. Situated within present day Oświęcim, Poland-more commonly known as Auschwitz, the historical site of Nazi perpetration-Touristen shifts viewer attention toward contemporary concerns surrounding historical memories of Auschwitz and the present day transnational encounters at the memorial site. This article discusses memory constellations as well as the intercultural and intergenerational issues depicted in the film. By showing how the past still continues to affect contemporary relationships between Germans and Poles, the film calls for continued engagement and dialogue to work through the shared past in the European present. This article furthermore discusses the status of Touristen as a 'third wave' Holocaust film that distances itself from cinematic, historical reconstruction on a visual and narrative level by rather focusing attention on the pieces of the past that continue to affect contemporary German-Polish relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hubertus Siegert’s impressionistic documentary, Berlin Babylon, illuminates the demolition and urban renewal of Berlin during the mid-late 1990s. This was a critical phase in the city’s history, as it prepared, amidst a flurry of excitement and anticipation, to become the united Germany's seat of power. Siegert's film seeks to give pause for thought, but deliberately eschews a “voice of god” voiceover, opting instead for a poetic audiovisual montage. This includes shots of the cityscape (and its lacunae), archival footage documenting the wartime devastation and subsequent dynamiting of buildings, observational cinema of the city’s busy building sites, and of verbal snippets from various architects, developers and politicians––following the film title’s cue, the agents in a rerun of the construction of the Tower of Babel––as well as epigraphs from the Bible and Walter Benjamin, and a prominent soundscape and musical score. As this article will demonstrate, the film’s (mostly) sombre soundtrack plays a critical role here, commenting on the footage, and beyond that on the whole project of the new ‘Berlin Republic’ and its attitude to architectural heritage and twentieth century history. Re-figuring the theme of this volume, Berlin Babylon’s music is a form of writing about (collapsing, old) architecture and history. And yet, the soundtrack is not as unambiguous as a voiceover might have been, and thereby allows creative space for the audience’s interpretation, a matter that was very important to the film’s director. This article will focus, in particular, on three elements: the use (and treatment) of historical recordings in the film; the use of silence; and finally the way in which tracks from the Berlin band Einstürzende Neubauten use music, noise and text to comment on the project of the new Berlin.

Hubertus Siegert’s impressionistic documentary, Berlin Babylon, illuminates the demolition and urban renewal of Berlin during the mid-late 1990s. This was a critical phase in the city’s history, as it prepared, amidst a flurry of excitement and anticipation, to become the united Germany's seat of power. Siegert's film seeks to give pause for thought, but deliberately eschews a “voice of god” voiceover, opting instead for a poetic audiovisual montage. This includes shots of the cityscape (and its lacunae), archival footage documenting the wartime devastation and subsequent dynamiting of buildings, observational cinema of the city’s busy building sites, and of verbal snippets from various architects, developers and politicians––following the film title’s cue, the agents in a rerun of the construction of the Tower of Babel––as well as epigraphs from the Bible and Walter Benjamin, and a prominent soundscape and musical score. As this article will demonstrate, the film’s (mostly) sombre soundtrack plays a critical role here, commenting on the footage, and beyond that on the whole project of the new ‘Berlin Republic’ and its attitude to architectural heritage and twentieth century history. Re-figuring the theme of this volume, Berlin Babylon’s music is a form of writing about (collapsing, old) architecture and history. And yet, the soundtrack is not as unambiguous as a voiceover might have been, and thereby allows creative space for the audience’s interpretation, a matter that was very important to the film’s director. This article will focus, in particular, on three elements: the use (and treatment) of historical recordings in the film; the use of silence; and finally the way in which tracks from the Berlin band Einstürzende Neubauten use music, noise and text to comment on the project of the new Berlin.

A critical assessment is given of the current preoccupation in German film studies with the concept of the transnational. Greater attention to film history, the article argues, offers a productive alternative to the problematic binaries that posit the transnational against the national and provides the tools for a more nuanced understanding of their shared economic, political, and cultural rationales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Helke Misselwitz's Fremde Oder/Foreign Oder (2001) and Volker Koepp's Söhne/Sons (2007), two German documentary films featuring journeys to regions of Poland that were once a part of Germany. Both films grapple with the troubled history of the region, and explore the continuing influence of the past on the lives of those now living in the region, and those who left it unwillingly before, during or after the Second World War. Koepp does so through the microcosm of a single, albeit large, German-Polish family, while Misselwitz's interview subjects are many and diverse. The article begins by considering the filmmakers' approaches. It then turns to analyzing the nostalgia both films are permeated by, before exploring the German-Polish interactions that are central to the films. The article then canvasses Heimat and belonging in the films, before ending with a discussion of memory and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Max Färberböck's first feature film, Aimée & Jaguar: Eine Liebe grer größer der Tod/Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Larger than Death (1999), to consider various ways the female protagonists subvert and/or encourage a range of melancholic readings (Freud, the Mitscherlichs, Butler). The filmic retelling of the true love story set in 1940s Berlin between an Aryan wife and mother of four and an underground Jewish lesbian, who eventually perishes under the National Socialist regime, displays a melancholic mise-en-scène, editing style and plot via its flashback to the story of one true/lost love. This article examines the traditional understanding of melancholia alongside various ideas relating to screened lesbianism, including femmeinisation, lesbian narcissism and Judith Butler's theory of gender melancholia, to offer a more upbeat, albeit controversial, re-reading of the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the "Bundesrepublik Deutschland Trilogy" (IBD Trilogy) of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a motion picture that reflects a postwar Germany and is composed of three films including "Lola," (1981) "The Marriage of Maria Braun," (1979), and "Veronika Voss," (1982). It mentions that the films that composed the trilogy are capable of standing alone because of their cinematic achievement. It also presents an analysis of the character of Maria Braun.

This article addresses how recent German films depict unification, placing special emphasis on the question of cinematic time. In contrast with Germany's most internationally successful films about the East German past—including Das Versprechen (1994), which emerged in the un-reflected moments not long after the fall of the Wall, Das Leben der Anderen (2006), which portrayed daily life under the shadow of the Stasi, and even Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), which depicted the period immediately following the fall of the Wall—and with the intention of identifying an alternative mode of depicting the GDR past, this paper explores a post Wende cinema of disillusionment. It examines: the revaluation of the time of unification itself in Oskar Roehler's Die Unberührbare (1999); the time of demission subsequent to unification as portrayed in Robert Thalheim's Netto (2004); and, the forsaken time of the postunification present as depicted in Christian Petzold's Yella (2007). The article provides an overview of this cinematic tendency, and comments specifically on how these three films represent the difference between the passage of historical time and its subjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with institutional changes and differences between the two German film cultures before and after 1989 during the unification process. But the main focus is on different genres and strategies in films dealing with the East German past and the unified post-1989 Germany, and with directors with an East German background and directors with a West German background. The article looks into three specific generic strategies: the historical transition drama; the realist strategy and the comedy strategy and the very different ways they treat the past; the transition and the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]