GERM 467 - Body Cinema & Cinematic Bodies

The seminar presents a history of German and German speaking film with special focus to the depiction of the human body. Spanning a period of almost a century (1929 – 2019), the material assembles cinematic traditions across epochs: from Weimar cinema’s last years of silent film, via post war Austrian filmic activism, various cinematic traditions from East and West Germany, all the way up to the present, the Berlin School and transnational European Cinema. Assembling a number of filmmakers with an emphasis on German/European traditions, the course revisits the filmic canon and introduces filmmakers from outside film studies’ canonical scope. Established auteurs such as Werner Herzog or VALIE EXPORT are juxtaposed and paired with lesser-known artists such as Heiner Carow or Mara Mattuschka, and newcomers such as Jan Soldat or Pia Hellenthal, to convey the diversity within film’s and filmmakers’ exploration of the human body. As the thematic vector brings together auteurs of entirely different traditions, it also draws attention to filmic genres often neglected by academics, such as anime, music videos, pornography or short films. “Kinokörper” or “cinematic bodies”, become significant by means of their actions, they take shape in the disciplining of their representation, and fulfil different functions for the genres they traverse. The unsettling effect cinematic bodies have on filmic genre distinctions – such as those between fiction and report, between pornography and its documentation, between scripted narrative and spontaneous improvisation – will be of particular interest. The seminar is conducted in German.

Credits: 1.00
Corequisite: None
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
Liberal Arts CORE: None

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