Eds. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy
Seeking to redress the gap between cultural studies' legitimation of popular culture and its frequent absence as object of analysis among Germanists, this volume will examine the roots, historical forms and current ascension of German popular cinema. However inadvertently, German film studies have reflected a very traditional impulse to divy up German films, like Germans themselves, into the Good and the Bad. The "golden era" of Weimar film and New German Cinema thus stand apart from embarrassing fascist propaganda, Heimat kitsch, alpine porn, and the present boom of German comedies. By looking at German popular filmand the larger cultural, historical and political meanings it generates, this volume will attempt to reanimate the field of German film studies by examining and/or challenging the following discrepancies, dichotomies and constellations:
Metaphors of Death and Rebirth
- the American "killing off" of German film, economically and ideologically, following WWII, despite evidence that domestic films outscored American products at the box office
- "rebirth" located at Oberhausen and in New German Cinema, as opposed to a flourishing porn industry and Germans' preference for commercial films during the same era
- film critic Laurens Straub's proclamation in 1990 about the death of German cinema, followed by record numbers of German filmgoers in the 1990s who have resuscitated the economic viability and viewing pleasures of German film
Who or what determines the "pulse" of German film? To what extent has an Anglo-American perspective constructed a landscape of artistic bounty and commercial wastelands? Have efforts to examine German identity across the familiar historical spectrum - Weimar turbulence, the Third Reich and "Zero Hour," Vergangenheitsbewältigung and a contemporary multicultural Germany - overlooked alternative forms of identification and cinematic pleasures among Germans, particularly in an increasingly multinational, identity-dissolving, "Euro-Pudding" mode? How has the continued influence of the Frankfurt School endorsed cinematic separations between the high and low? What role has the Goethe Institute played in promoting German "art house" fare in America?
Hollywood and Origin and "Other"
- Hollywood's "legitimate" influence on German film when filtered through the lens of a Fassbinder or Wenders vs. Steven Spielberg as inspiration to German filmmakers of the 1990s, current attempts to borrow from and improve upon the Hollywood model and reject New German Cinema; Weimar's self-conscious scopic and narrative "Sonderweg" in the face of Hollywood cinema; the influence of Hollywood on popular film under National Socialism
- Franco-American auteur criticism which defines European and American films relationally in terms of art vs. popular appeal, politics vs. pleasure; inadvertent support of Hollywood hegenomy by defining German cinema as copy, deviation, subversion of Hollywood film; cultural essentialisms in defining a national cinema vs. hetereogenity, or the manner in which gender, sexual and racial identities complicate identifications along national lines
- Clueless Germans/ Anglo-American know-it-alls: the need for American academics to "enlighten" Germans first about the merits of New German Cinema and now about the legitimacy of popular culture
Does popular cinema deflect political considerations, historical trauma, and distort or misrepresent German identity, as some critics contend? To what extent do filmmakers like Fassbinder, Ottinger, Treut and von Praunheim combine politics with pleasurable viewing? What is gained or lost in recent "queer" films such as Der bewegte Mann and Echte Kerle? Do German popular films open up contradictory definitions of the popular as sell-out, product of power relations, corrupting threat to society, site of opposition, play, an authentic register of desires, etc.?
Women and the Popular
- the absence, devaluation, or demonization of women in film histories which write out the popular: Thea von Harbou as fascist tool vs. Fritz Lang as one of Weimar's greatest directors; Leni Riefenstahl: beauty freak or still fascist after all these years?; Hildegard Knef as both cinematic sinner, real-life pariah and ever-popular talk show guest; Katja Rieman as role model; Superweib films in relation to a purportedly compromised German feminism of the 1990s; the role of women like Dorris Dörre and Katja von Garnier in the rise of German comedies
We invite analysis of any of the above considerations, particularly via close readings of popular, entertaining and successful German films across the historical spectrum: mountain films, Heimat films, Blood and Soil films, porno, musicals, comedies, animated films, children's films
Deadline for abstracts: June 1st
Deadline for finished papers: December 1st
Send to:
Randall Halle
Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
Rhalle@uhura.cc.rochester.edu
Margaret McCarthy
Department of German and Russian
Davidson College
Davidson, NC 28036
Mamccarthy@davidson.edu
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