Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.
The series Cinepoetics Essay investigates the multifaceted poetologies of audiovisual images, with each volume focusing on a specific theme or subject. The respective objects of study are approached from a personal point of view, or examined from a specific aesthetic, cultural-historical, or theoretical perspective. Thus, the series provides ways of thinking about figurations of media experience and aims at introducing a broad readership to an understanding of cinematic thinking in all its diversity.
Hermann Kappelhoff, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany; Michael Wedel, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Potsdam, Germany.
Like every history, the history of film can be grasped not just as a temporal phenomenon, but also within the specificity with which it has inscribed itself into concrete places. The question of how this has occurred at different points in German film history forms the starting point of this book. Using five examples, it explores the social and political horizons of heterotopic concepts of space in German film from the 1930s to the 1990s: Hamburg in Werner Hochbaum’s A Girl Goes Ashore [Ein Mädchen geht an Land], East Berlin in Günter Reisch’s Ein Lord am Alexanderplatz, Munich in the early works of Wim Wenders, the passage from New York to Athens and Santorini via Berlin in Rudolf Thome’s Die Sonnegöttin, and the reunified Berlin in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run [Lola rennt]. The main points of interest are the poetological devices the films use to portray their settings. By uniting topology and film aesthetics, this book opens up spaces of historic experience that provide film historiography with new insights.
Ende der 1970er-Jahre formierte sich im US-amerikanischen Kino ein neuer Genrezyklus. Ausgehend von der Space Opera im Kino, für die George Lucas’ Star Wars paradigmatisch ist, begründete sich Fantasy erstmals als eigenständiges filmisches Genre in Abgrenzung vom Märchen und der Fantastik. Der Enthusiasmus für Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspiele und die anhaltende J. R. R. Tolkien-Begeisterung kulminierte in den folgenden Jahren in einer Reihe von Filmen, die die Vielfalt moderner Filmtechnik und -produktion aufnahm, forcierte und weiterentwickelte: Vom Live-Action-Film (Conan the Barbarian) über Puppenanimation (The Dark Crystal) bis hin zum Animationsfilm (The Last Unicorn) reichte das Spektrum der Filme, an denen George Lucas ebenso wie Jim Henson und die damals hinter ihnen stehenden Produktionsfirmen führend beteiligt waren. Die zeitgenössische Kritik hatte diese Filme als konservative, zuweilen gar reaktionäre Genrespielarten abgeschrieben. Dagegen entfaltet der vorliegende Essay eine (historische) Poetik des US-amerikanischen Fantasyfilms. Mit seinen filmanalytischen Fallstudien zeigt der Band auf, wie die Filme der Jahre 1977 bis 1987 in eine spezifische Filmkultur eingebettet sind und wie der Genrezyklus als Teil des Hollywood-Systems den Siegeszug des Blockbusterkinos in den 1990er-Jahre vorbereitet und maßgeblich beeinflusst hat.
In academic and public discourse, 'mapping' has become a ubiquitous term for epistemic practices ranging from surveys of scholarly fields to processes of data collection, ordering and visualization. Mapping captures patterns of distribution, segregation and hierarchy across socio-cultural spaces and geographical territories. Often lost in such accounts, however, is the experiential dimension of mapping as an aesthetic practice with determinate social, cultural and political effects. This volume draws on approaches from film philosophy, media archaeology, decolonial scholarship and independent film practice to explore mapping as a mediated experience in which film becomes entangled in larger processes of historical subject-formation, as well as in dissident reconfigurations of cultural memory. Proposing an approach to mapping through decolonial aesthetics and poetic thinking, the three essays in this volume help define a film studies perspective on mapping as a practice that structures political and aesthetic regimes, organizes and communicates shared realities, but also enables dissenting reconfigurations of concretely experienced worlds.