Malte Hagener

Cinephilia: movies, love and memory

The anthology Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory explores new periods, practices and definitions of what it means to love the cinema. The essays demonstrate that beyond individualist immersion in film, typical of the cinephilia as it was popular from the 1950s to the 1970s, a new type of cinephilia has emerged since the 1980s, practices by a new generation of equally devoted, but quite differently networked cinephiles. The film over of today embraces and uses new technology while also nostalgically remembering and caring for outdated media formats. He is a hunter-collector as much as a merchant-trader, a duped consumer as much as a media-savvy producer.

Migration and refugees in German cinema: transnational entanglements

ABSTRACT Contrary to popular sentiment which sees the current, so-called ‘refugee crisis’ as unprecedented, (forced) migration and the displacement of larger groups of population have a long history in most countries of the world. Consequently, the cinema, ever since it existed, has addressed many aspects surrounding the realities and imaginations of the issue. Indeed, the cinema could be seen as a laboratory in which different scenarios are played through, different situations are experienced and different (subject) positions are occupied. Taking the German cinema as a case study, I intend to take a long view at these phenomena by concentrating on three different historical periods: the displacement of German Jews, political opponents of Nazism and others from Germany after 1933; the forced migration of German-speaking populations around and after the end of the Second World War from eastern Europe (Silesia, Eastern Prussia, Bohemia, etc.), and the influx of migrants and refugees into Germany from the 1960s onwards and well into the twenty-first century.

Die Verortung des Zuschauers

Lange Zeit schien es, als waren Special Effects tatsachlich etwas, das – gemas der Bezeichnung – auf besondere Orte und Verwendungszusammenhange beschrankt bliebe, auf Szenen und Sequenzen, die durch ihre radikale Andersheit aus dem Fluss der ansonsten wahrnehmungsahnlichen Bilder herausragen. Angesichts der Ubiquitat medialer Bilder und ihrer Transformierbarkeit, angesichts ihrer rasanten Zirkulation und ihrer ebenso raschen Proliferation haben sich in jungster Zeit einige Medienwissenschaftler die Frage gestellt, ob der Spezialeffekt wirklich so „speziell“ ist wie angenommen: Sean Cubitt etwa hat eine Theorie vom „Kinoeffekt“ entworfen, der zufolge der Film selbst immer schon als Spezialeffekt zu verstehen sei, eine These, die er nicht zuletzt mit dem Erstaunen des fruhen Kinopublikums im Angesicht der ersten Bewegtbilder am Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts begrundet (Cubitt 2004). Lev Manovich (1995) ist davon ausgegangen, dass die Animation, die stets als Sonderfall des Films behandelt wurde, aufgrund der Allgegenwart von CGI-Bildern zu ihrer Regel erklart werden muss.1 Und Norman Klein hat – ausgehend vom Kino, aber uber dieses hinausweisend – eine Art Weltgeschichte der Special Effects entworfen, in der die „engines of erasure“ (wie er diese Anordnungen nennt) vom Vatikan bis Las Vegas die Herrschaft der Machtigen sichern, indem sie deren Macht unsichtbar machen (Klein 2004). So unterschiedlich diese drei Beispiele auch in Ansatz, Geltungsanspruch und theoretischer Flughohe sein mogen, es verbindet sie doch grundlegend die Idee, dass Spezialeffekte als zentrale Instanz der Kulturtechnik Film anzusehen sind.

Cinephilia and Film Culture in the Age of Digital Networks

This chapter examines the transformations that film culture and cinephilia have undergone in the age of the digital. In focusing on the role of online portals and websites, as well as on the dialectics of materiality and immateriality, it becomes clear that the recent developments do not radically break with the past, but continue and twist dynamics that are known from the twentieth century.

Introduction: Like Water: On the Re-Configurations of the Cinema in the Age of Digital Networks

In Taxi (2015), the third film Iranian director Jafar Panahi made in defiance of the 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed on him by the Tehran regime, the filmmaker drives a taxi through Tehran, picking up random passengers along the way. The film is shot with a small camera installed on the dashboard. The first passenger mistakes the camera for a car alarm; in the end, two thugs, probably secret police or maybe just ordinary criminals, break into the car and steal it. In the film, the cinema is ubiquitous. One of the passengers is Panahi’s niece. She reads to him the instructions that she was handed by her teacher for a school assignment to make a short film: “Realism, but no sordid realism”. Later, a wedding party uses the taxi to rehearse routines for a wedding video, such as getting in and out of the car. For their wedding video shoot, the couple uses their own digital camera. We know this because the dashboard camera is pointed at the viewfinder of Panahi’s niece’s camera, which records the camera outside of the car, which in turn records the wedding video routines. This mise-en-abyme of observation points simultaneously to a society in which (self-)surveillance and the spectacle of public staging of the self are omnipresent, and to a situation of ubiquitous media saturation.

Am Kreuzweg von Magie und Positivismus: Die Hermeneutik des Verdachts und die „paranoiden“ Analysen der 1970er Jahre

Der Beitrag spurt der Frage nach, wie Bedeutung im System von Classical Hollywood entsteht, ob diese fest fixiert oder frei flottierend zu betrachten ist. Seine historische Analyse von Zuschreibungen an das klassische Hollywood fokussiert dabei jene „paranoiden“ Analysen der 1970er Jahre, die, ausgehend von einer enttauschten Cinephilie, hinter der putativen Selbstevidenz von Classical Hollywood nach semantischen Exzessen wie Bedeutungsuberschussen suchen und in ihren gleichsam ambitionierten wie ausufernden Analysen die Grenzen der Interpretation ausloten. Dabei konzediert der Autor den „paranoiden“ Analysen der 1970er somit nicht nur eine historische Bedeutung, vielmehr zeigt er ihre Signifikanz fur eine Medienkultur des Postkinematographischen auf.

Komplexität, Präsenz und Flexibilität in den Zeiten der Netz werkmedien

Die US-amerikanische Fernsehserie 24 (Fox, 2001-2010) ist zunachst deshalb in den Fokus der off entlichen Wahrnehmung geruckt, weil sie als erstes Mainstream-Medienprodukt konsequent die Terrorangst der USBevolkerung nach dem 11. September 2001 thematisiert und verhandelt hat.1 Meist hat sich die Debatt e dabei um die Darstellung von Folter als Ultima Ratio gedreht, die in der Serie stets positiv codiert und narrativ gerechtfertigt wird, weil die Folterhandlungen ausnahmslos ,Schuldige’ treff en und zudem solche Informationen zutage fordern, die der direkten Vereitelung von Straftaten und dem Schutz unbeteiligter Burger dienen (vgl. etwa Žižek 2006a, 2006b; Hantz schel 2007; Miniter 2008).

The Classical Hollywood Reader

imperial/ colonial histories and geographies. The third section, ‘Postcolonial Cinemas: Postcolonial Aesthetics’, ‘investigates the aesthetic frameworks and rhetorical strategies that the postcolonial cinematic optic has had to create and through which it becomes accessible’ (11). It shows how visual and narrative strategies are used to contest canonical paradigms. The last section, ‘Postcolonial Cinemas and Globalization’, ‘explores the intersection of postcoloniality with globalization, emphasizing the porosity of the rubric “postcolonial cinema studies” to other frameworks and its enduring relevance to the seismic shifts of post-Cold War restructuring’ (11). Contributors come first and foremost from cinema and media-studies, followed by literature, area studies and only then cultural studies. The major part of the contributors is from the USA, and all are – with the exception of the Netherlands – from the Anglo-American world. The films discussed are mostly European (83) and North-American (41). Films from the Tricontinental (postcolonial) world are represented to a lesser degree: Asian (33), African (18) and Latin-American (eight). When counting the (former) colonial powers together with their (former) colonies, France is predominantly represented with 32 French films and 27 from its colonies, followed by the UK (19+18). The book passes a wide-ranging and well-documented collection of applications of the postcolonial gaze on postcolonial and ‘empire’ cinema. The edited volume is effective in its balance of disciplines, sources and trends. Moreover, it addresses implicitly some of the limits of postcolonialism. By focusing on political cinema in some of its chapters, the book takes seriously the challenge of re-politicizing the field. In this way, the book is an answer to the ‘productive crisis’ of postcolonial theory and expresses strong beliefs, notably the one that current experiences of migration, economic exploitation, militarization, racial and religious conflicts, and tensions between citizens and non-citizens are haunted by colonial and neo-colonial histories globally, as said by Katarzyna Marciniak (p. i). It has the merit to show us the contribution that cinema can offer to postcolonial studies, and the need for cinema studies for a postcolonial gaze. The book embodies the cross-fertilization between both. Contributors include: Jude G. Akudinobi, Kanika Batra, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Shohini Chaudhuri, Julie F. Codell, Sabine Doran, Hamish Ford, Claudia Hoffmann, Anikó Imre, Priya Jaikumar, Mariam B. Lam, Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Richard Rice, Mireille Rosello and Marguerite Waller.