The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film

The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film
Author: Robin Curtis
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1571139176

The essays in this volume examine the parameters shaping the audiovisual self in the Germanophone cultural context across a variety of practices and aesthetic modes, from contemporary artists including Hito Steyerl, Ming Wong, and kate hers to Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's multimedia experiments of the 1970s, and from Helke Misselwitz's challenges to the documentary tradition in the GDR to Peter Liechti's investigations of Swiss ambivalence toward the nation's iconic landscape. The volume thus takes up a number of historically and geographically specific iterations of autobiographical discourse that in each case remain contingent on the space and time in which they are uttered.

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004308237

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume brings together contributions by distinguished experts from different disciplinary fields for a multidimensional view on immersion in the visual arts and media. In the current media debate, immersion has frequently been linked to the advent of digital technology and its capacity to provide vivid sensations of being placed in or surrounded by an artificial space. The idea of ‘liquidity’ contained in this promise to plunge into another world informs wide areas of contemporary cultural imagination, referring to a myriad of phenomena that relate to experiences of uncertainty and instability, of complexity and change. Considering the fact, however, that the idea of ‘liquid’ spaces appeared long before the digital creation of augmented or virtual environments, the contributors to this volume trace its reemerging throughout the history of the visual arts and media. By focusing on selected works of painting and architecture, photography and cinema, video installation and media art, they explore the variability of immersive experiences according to the different media environments and interfaces that constitute the actual sites of historically shifting relations between media and users. Contributors are: Matthias Bauer, Jörg von Brincken, Robin Curtis, Burcu Dogramaci, Thomas Elsaesser, Ole W. Fischer, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Ursula Frohne, Henry Keazor, Matthias Krüger, Katja Kwastek, Fabienne Liptay, Karl Prümm, Martin Warnke.

On Women's Films

On Women's Films
Author: Ivone Margulies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2019-07-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 150133249X

On Women's Films looks at contemporary and classic films from emerging and established makers such as Maria Augusta Ramos, Xiaolu Guo, Valérie Massadian, Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Chantal Akerman, or Claire Denis. The collection is also tuned to the continued provocation of feminist cinema landmarks such as Chick Strand's Soft Fiction; Barbara Loden's Wanda; Valie Export's Invisible Adversaries, Cecilia Mangini's Essere donne. Attentive to minor moments, to the pauses and the charge and forms bodies adopt through cinema, the contributors suggest the capacity of women's films to embrace, shape and question the world.

Celluloid Revolt

Celluloid Revolt
Author: Christina Gerhardt
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 1571139958

Provides new insights into German-language cinema around 1968 and its relationship to the period's epoch-making cultural and political happenings. The epoch-making revolutionary period universally known in Germany as '68 can be argued to have predated that year and to have extended well into the 1970s. It continues to affect German and Austrian society and culture to this day. Yet while scholars have written extensively about 1968 and the cinema of other countries, relatively little sustained scholarly attention has thus far been paid to 1968 and West German, East German, and Austrian cinemas. Now, five decades later, Celluloid Revolt sets out to redress that situation, generating new insights into what constituted German-language cinema around 1968 and beyond. Contributors engage a range of cinemas, spanning experimental and avant-garde cinema, installations and exhibits; short films, animated films, and crime films; collectively produced cinemas, feminist films, and Arbeiterfilme (workers' films); as well as their relationship to cinemas of other countries, such as French cinéma vérité and US direct cinema. Contributors: Marco Abel, Tilman Baumgärtel, Madeleine Bernstorff, Timothy Scott Brown, Michael Dobstadt, Sean Eedy, Thomas Elsaesser, IanFleishman, Christina Gerhardt, Lisa Haegele, Randall Halle, Priscilla Layne, Ervin Malakaj, Kalani Michell, Evelyn Preuss, Patricia Anne Simpson, Fabian Tietke, Andrew Stefan Weiner. Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Area Studies at the Crossroads

Area Studies at the Crossroads
Author: Katja Mielke
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2017-02-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137598344

In this pioneering volume, leading scholars from a diversity of backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and different area studies argue for a more differentiated and self-reflected role of area-based science in global knowledge production. Considering that the mobility of people, goods, and ideas make the world more complex and geographically fixed categories increasingly obsolete, the authors call for a reflection of this new dynamism in research, teaching, and theorizing. The book thus moves beyond the constructed divide between area studies and systematic disciplines and instead proposes methodological and conceptual ways for encouraging the integration of marginalized and often overseen epistemologies. Essays on the ontological, theoretical, and pedagogical dimension of area studies highlight how people’s everyday practices of mobility challenge scholars, students, and practitioners of inter- and transdisciplinary area studies to transcend the cognitive boundaries that scholarly minds currently operate in.

Austria Made in Hollywood

Austria Made in Hollywood
Author: Jacqueline Vansant
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 1571139451

Considers over sixty Hollywood films set in Austria, examining the film industry, the influence of domestic factors on images of a foreign country, and the persistence of clichés. Maria von Trapp, watching the final scene of The Sound of Music for the first time as "her" family escaped into Switzerland, exclaimed, "Don't they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!" Hadshe thought about the beginning of the film, which transports viewers to "Salzburg, Austria in the last Golden Days of the Thirties," when the country was in fact suffering from extreme political and social unrest, she might haveasked, "Don't they know history either?" In The Sound of Music as well as in Hollywood's many other "Austria" films, the projections on the screen resemble reflections in a funhouse mirror. Elements of a "real" place with a"real" history inhabited by "real" people can be found in the fractured distortions, which have both drawn from and contributed to the general public's perceptions of the country and its citizens. Austria Made in Hollywood focuses on films set in an identifiable Austria, examining them through the lenses of the historical contexts on both sides of the Atlantic and the prism of the ever-changing domestic film industry. The study chronicles theprotean screen images of Austria and Austrians that set them apart both from European projections of Austria and from Hollywood incarnations of other European nations and nationals. It explores explicit and implicit cultural commentaries on domestic and foreign issues inserted in the Austrian stories while considering the many, sometimes conflicting forces that shaped the films.

Ecologies of Gender

Ecologies of Gender
Author: Susanne Lettow
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2022-03-30
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1000544443

Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn examines the role of gender in recent debates about the nonhuman turn in the humanities, and critically explores the implications for a contemporary theory of gender and nature relations. The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume each provides theoretical reflections based on an analysis of specific naturecultural processes. They reveal how "ecologies of gender" are constructed through aesthetic, epistemological, political, technological and economic practices that shape multispecies and material interrelations as well as spatial and temporal orderings. The volume includes contributions from cultural anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, media studies, philosophy and theatre studies. The essays are organized around four key dimensions of an "ecological" understanding of gender: "creatures", "materials", "spaces" and "temporalities". The overall aim of the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn is to explore the potentialities and limitations of the nonhuman turn for a critical analysis and theory of ecologies of gender, and thereby make an original contribution to both the environmental humanities and gender studies. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students from the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more broadly, as well as from gender studies and cultural theory.

Listening to Others

Listening to Others
Author: Natalia Brizuela
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 551
Release: 2024-05-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1438497903

Listening to Others is the first English-language volume dedicated solely to the vast corpus of the preeminent Brazilian director, Eduardo Coutinho (1933–2014). From his early work in the 1960s to his last, posthumous film in 2015, Coutinho transformed documentary filmmaking in Brazil and beyond. Described as an informal linguist and savage anthropologist, Coutinho filmed encounters with people different from himself that foregrounded their voices and his role as an attentive listener, creating a "cinema of listening." This collection brings together leading scholars of film, literature, visual culture, Brazilian studies, and Latin American studies, from the United States and Latin America, to examine both Coutinho's masterpieces and less studied films. Using a range of approaches, the contributors invite new ways of understanding the documentarian's trajectory and importance as his work transformed in response to dictatorship, democratization, and other political, social, and technological changes over the course of five decades. The volume also features original translations of a selection of Coutinho's writings and key texts by Brazilian critics to offer a historical perspective on his filmmaking and its reception.

Asians on Demand

Asians on Demand
Author: Feng-Mei Heberer
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2023-08-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 145296954X

Does media representation advance racial justice? While the past decade has witnessed a push for increased diversity in visual media, Asians on Demand grapples with the pressing question of whether representation is enough to advance racial justice. Surveying a contemporary, cutting-edge archive of video works from the Asian diaspora in North America, Europe, and East Asia, this book uncovers the ways that diasporic artists challenge the narrow—and damaging—conceptions of Asian identity pervading mainstream media. Through an engagement with grassroots activist documentaries, experimental video diaries by undocumented and migrant workers, and works by high-profile media artists such as Hito Steyerl and Ming Wong, Feng-Mei Heberer showcases contemporary video productions that trouble the mainstream culture industry’s insistence on portraying ethnic Asians as congenial to dominant neoliberal values. Undermining the demands placed on Asian subjects to exemplify institutional diversity and individual exceptionalism, this book provides a critical and nuanced set of alternatives to the easily digestible forms generated by online streaming culture and multicultural lip service more broadly. Employing feminist, racial, and queer critiques of the contemporary media landscape, Asians on Demand highlights how the dynamics of Asian representation play out differently in Germany, the United States, Taiwan, and Spain. Rather than accepting the notion that inclusion requires an uncomplicated set of appearances, the works explored in this volume spotlight a staunch resistance to formulating racial identity as an instantly accessible consumer product.

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art
Author: Peter Chametzky
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262365278

The first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects--those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel--and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany's multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German. With a title that echoes Peter Gay's 1978 collection of essays, Freud, Jews and Other Germans, this book, like Gay's, rejects the idea of "us" and "them" in German culture. Discussing artworks in a variety of media that both critique and expand notions of identity and community, Chametzky offers a counternarrative to the fiction of an exclusively white, Christian German culture, arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. He considers works that deploy critical, confrontational, and playful uses of language, especially German and Turkish; that assert the presence of "foreign bodies" among the German body politic; that grapple with food as a cultural marker; that engage with mass media; and that depict and inhabit spaces imbued with the element of time. American discussions of German contemporary art have largely ignored the emergence of non-ethnic Germans as some of Germany's most important visual artists. Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art fills this gap.