The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism

Hermann Kappelhoff

Hermann Kappelhoff

The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism

In: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

Translated by: Daniel Hendrickson

Columbia University Press | 2015

https://doi.org/10.7312/kapp17072

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About this book

Casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment.

Author information

Hermann Kappelhoff is a professor in the Department for Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit, a major study on the cinematic melodrama as a paradigm of artificial emotions.

Reviews

D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago, author of Philosophy's Artful Conversation:
Kappelhoff offers an engaging and thoughtful account of cinematic experience framed by deeply original readings of Richard Rorty's pragmatist account of solidarity and community, Jacques Rancière's writings on politics and aesthetic experience, and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of film. Here Kappelhoff rethinks the concept of realism as a lived practice within which life and art, politics and poetics, indeed reality and image, are experienced as inseparable activities that dynamically shape our sense of the worlds and the communities we live in. In so doing, he also produces new and convincing accounts of the theories of Sergei Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer, as well as the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodòvar, and others.

Thomas Elsaesser, Columbia University:
Kappelhoff, one of Germany's most accomplished film scholars, endowed with a uniquely philosophical grasp of history in the tradition of Kracauer, offers in The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism a precise reassessment of realism across a historical spectrum, while also enlisting Fassbinder and Almodovar as realists of the body and of communities to come.

Gerd Gemünden, author of Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951:
Since the 1920s, the cinema has been closely associated with the development of aesthetic utopias. Drawing on the writings of Rancière, Brecht and Kracauer, Hermann Kappelhoff traces the legacy of these utopias in the films of the late Visconti, the early Fassbinder, the New Hollywood of A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist, and the flamboyant oeuvre of Pedro Almodóvar. What emerges is a fascinating study of cinema as a cultural institution that unlike any other helps us experience the complexities of social reality and envision a new symbiosis between poetics and politics.

Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan:
Kappelhoff distinguishes himself as an astute analytical thinker and as a film theorist who plies the history of the medium and its shifting interpretations for the underlying implications about the 'big' questions that animate the humanities.

Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (2010) and The Hollywood Historical Film (2008).:
A major work of critical writing on film, and one that moves the intellectual discourse about film, politics, and the aesthetic movements and projects of the twentieth century forward by several steps.

Frontmatter Free access PDF PDF	i
CONTENTS Free access PDF PDF	vii
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	ix
1 POETICS AND POLITICS Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	1
2 BEFORE THE WAR Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	26
3 AFTER THE WAR Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	58
4 AFTER ’68 Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	101
5 BEYOND CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	147
6 A NEW SENSITIVITY Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	187
NOTES Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	225
BIBLIOGRAPHY Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	237
INDEX Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	245
Backmatter Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	259

The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism

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