Brad Prager

Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames

This essay concerns the applicability of the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful to Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. It takes the public debate around Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains (1807–08) as a starting point from which to reflect upon the relationship of this categorical distinction to the apparent contentiousness of his work. Using Kant’s philosophical argument, the essay explores why Friedrich’s formal interventions were not only aesthetic ones, but quite political as well. It then follows its terms into the twentieth century, considering its argument from the perspectives of Derrida and Lyotard, who have each reflected on the interrelationship of politics and sublimity in contemporary contexts.

How Herzog remembers images past: a response to Catherine Lord

This is a reply to:Lord, Catherine. 2016. “Only connect: ecology between ‘late’ Latour and Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” Global Discourse 6 (1–2): 119–132. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1011865

The Stones Begin to Speak: The Laboring Subject in Early DEFA Documentaries

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is well known for its depiction of laborers being subdued by machines. More than once in that film, workers risk becoming part of the very machinery that has been manufactured to serve them. In one sequence a laborer—as though he were bound like Prometheus to his rock—attempts to control a machine’s moving parts. Lang’s cinematic subject seems to transfigure himself; he becomes one with an enormous mechanized apparatus. The film ultimately offers a humanitarian vision of class struggle, though one that was not incompatible with capitalism. Its famous moral tells us that between labor, or the hands that do the work, and capital, the head that administrates, there must always be a mediating heart. Despite the overall tenor of Lang’s most iconic sequences—images that portend the domination of machines over mankind—industrial labor is not presented on its own as problematic. It appears in the film as something inevitable, a necessity accompanied by the risk that laborers will find themselves inside the belly of an industrial Moloch.

German Film Ventures into the Amazon: Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo as Prelude to Michał Marczak’s Eco-documentary

Where the German director Werner Herzog films ecosystems, his works recapitulate colonialism’s contradictions. This chapter begins by examining one of Herzog’s short films, Ten Thousand Years Older (2001), in which the director and his crew encounter a South American tribe that developed entirely apart from Western society, and it explores the differences between the documentarian’s standpoint and that of his various subjects. It then compares Herzog’s film with Michal Marczak’s Polish-German eco-documentary Fuck for Forest (2012). Marczak’s camera also witnesses things that the activists who are his film’s subjects do not, capturing what eludes his protagonists’ Western gazes. Both of these films are cinematic spaces in which rainforest people can be seen and heard, irrespective of their filmmakers’ colonial fantasies.

“Documentary: Subservience to Journalism?”: A Panel Discussion with Miriam Bale, Robert Greene, and Eric Hynes

The following is a transcription of the panel “Documentary: Subservience to Journalism?” which was held at the Based on a True Story Conference at Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri on February 27, 2014.1

Offending the Public: Handke, Herzog, Hypnosis

In Les Blanks documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), director Werner Herzog eats pieces of his own sturdy looking footwear in order to settle a bet that he made with the filmmaker Errol Morris. While dining on his shoe, which he has cooked in garlic and duck fat, Herzog responds to the question, “What is the value of films for society?” Initially, he answers the question with a question: “Whose society?” (or, perhaps, “Whos society?”). It appears that he has finished responding and is returning to the business of eating, but Herzog is hardly known for keeping his answers…

The Haunted Screen (Again): The Historical Unconscious of Contemporary German Thrillers

In an essay in Die Zeit, the German filmmaker Wim Wenders reflected critically on Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film Der Untergang. Wenders compared the film unfavorably to the popular, mass-marketed film Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the sequel to the first Resident Evil film.1 Although one deals with a “downfall” and the other with an “apocalypse,” the link between the two films is not only nominal; they are also linked through the involvement of their German producer, Bernd Eichinger, who was both the executive producer of the Resident Evil films and the author and producer of Der Untergang. Eichinger also produced Wenders’s own 1975 film, Falsche Bewegung. Wenders indicates that as someone who has worked with Eichinger, he generally takes pleasure in his fellow countryman’s success; but Eichinger’s involvement with Der Untergang came as a disappointment to him. When comparing Resident Evil: Apocalypse to Downfall, Wenders finds the Resident Evil sequel superior. As he sees it, this zombie film based on a video game—referred to in one review as “survival horror”2—conveys both a greater truth about fascism than Hirschbiegel’s critically acclaimed Hitler film and a sterner warning. Wenders’s criticism concerns how Germany as a “perpetrator nation” can make films that deal with or engage effectively with the legacy of what it means to have been historical malfeasants. Reaching back to Karl Jaspers’s 1946 reflection on the question of German guilt, Germans have long been engaged in a project of coming to terms with a past of perpetration, with varying degrees of success. Hirschbiegel’s cinematic drama