Marco Abel - Böcker

Violence: most of us would be happy if we never had to experience it, and many are driven by the belief that nonviolent spaces exist. In Violent Affect, however, Marco Abel starts from a different, potentially controversial assumption: namely that violence is all-pervasive by ontological necessity. In order to work through the implications of this provocation, Abel turns to literary and cinematic works such as those by Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Harron, Patricia Highsmith, the Coen Brothers, and Robert DeNiro, contending that we do not even know what violent images are, let alone how they work and what they do.  Countering previous studies of violent images based on representational and, consequently, moralistic assumptions, which, Abel argues, inevitably reinforce the very violence they critique, Violent Affect instead turns to the concept of "affect" as a means to explain how violent images work upon the world. Arguing for what he calls a "masocritical" approach to violence, Abel's analysis attends to the affects inherent to violent images with the goal of momentarily suspending judgment of them, thus allowing for new, unanswered critical questions about the issue of violence to emerge. Abel suggests that shifting from representational understandings of violence toward an account of its affective forces is a necessary step in developing more ethical tools to intervene in the world—for acting upon it for the betterment of the future.

The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art-Cinema came about in light of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)’s 2013 major exhibition of works by contemporary German directors associated with the so-called Berlin School, perhaps Germany’s most important contemporary filmmaking movement. Christoph Hochhäusler, the movement’s keenest spokesperson, stated that ""the Berlin School, despite what the label suggests, is not a specifically German phenomenon. All over the world there are filmmakers exploring related terrain."" In response to this ""transnational turn,"" editors Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher have assembled a group of scholars who examine global trends and works associated with the Berlin School.The goal of the collection is to understand the Berlin School as a fundamental part of the series of new wave films around the globe, especially those from the traditional margins of world cinema. For example, Michael Sicinski and Lutz Koepnick explore the relation of the Berlin School to cinema of Southeast Asia, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang; Ira Jaffe and Roger Cook take a look at Middle Eastern film, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Abbas Kiarostami, respectively. The volume also includes essays engaging with North American filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt and Derek Cianfrance as well as European auteurs like Antonioni, Tarr, Porumboiu, McQueen, and the Dardennes. Bringing German cinema into dialogue with this series of global cinemas emphasizes how the Berlin School manifests—whether aesthetically or thematically, politically or historically—a balancing of national particularity with global flows of various sorts. Abel and Fisher posit that since the vast majority of the films are available with English subtitles (and at times also in other languages) and recent publications on the subject have established critical momentum, this exciting filmmaking movement will continue to branch out into new directions and include new voices.The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts folds German-language cinema back into conversations with international as well as transnational cinema. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of German and global cinema.

The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art-Cinema came about in light of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)’s 2013 major exhibition of works by contemporary German directors associated with the so-called Berlin School, perhaps Germany’s most important contemporary filmmaking movement. Christoph Hochhäusler, the movement’s keenest spokesperson, stated that ""the Berlin School, despite what the label suggests, is not a specifically German phenomenon. All over the world there are filmmakers exploring related terrain."" In response to this ""transnational turn,"" editors Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher have assembled a group of scholars who examine global trends and works associated with the Berlin School.The goal of the collection is to understand the Berlin School as a fundamental part of the series of new wave films around the globe, especially those from the traditional margins of world cinema. For example, Michael Sicinski and Lutz Koepnick explore the relation of the Berlin School to cinema of Southeast Asia, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang; Ira Jaffe and Roger Cook take a look at Middle Eastern film, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Abbas Kiarostami, respectively. The volume also includes essays engaging with North American filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt and Derek Cianfrance as well as European auteurs like Antonioni, Tarr, Porumboiu, McQueen, and the Dardennes. Bringing German cinema into dialogue with this series of global cinemas emphasizes how the Berlin School manifests—whether aesthetically or thematically, politically or historically—a balancing of national particularity with global flows of various sorts. Abel and Fisher posit that since the vast majority of the films are available with English subtitles (and at times also in other languages) and recent publications on the subject have established critical momentum, this exciting filmmaking movement will continue to branch out into new directions and include new voices.The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts folds German-language cinema back into conversations with international as well as transnational cinema. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of German and global cinema.

The last of the so-called new waves in film, New German Cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s represents much more than a national phenomenon; it impacted and was influenced by films from around the world. Filmmakers such as the famous troika of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, as well as directors, such as Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Helke Sander, and Volker Schlöndorff received much critical acclaim both in Germany and abroad. These directors, their films, and their often-infamous reputations constitute one of the most intriguing and consequential legacies of European cinema and world culture. In this groundbreaking view of New German Cinema through a global lens, editors Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher approach these celebrated years of German art film from diverse and innovative perspectives. Contributors explore these films' transnational circuits of production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as how the films were made and received, thereby inviting us to reexamine the roots of what New German Cinema was and imagine what it might yet become.

Nebraska Book Award, Special Poetry recognition More in Time is a celebration and tribute to Ted Kooser, two-time U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Presidential Professor of the University of Nebraska. Through personal reflections, essays, and creative works both inspired by and dedicated to Kooser, this collection shines a light on the many ways the midwestern poet has affected others as a teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend, as well as a fellow writer and observer-of-the-world. The creative responses included in this volume are reflective of the impact Kooser has had in his connections to other writers, while also revealing glimpses of his distinct way of seeing.

Christian Petzold (b. 1960) is the best-known filmmaker associated with the "Berlin School" of postunification German cinema. Identifying as an intellectual, Petzold self-consciously approaches his work for both the big and the small screen by weaving critical reflection on the very conditions of contemporary filmmaking into his approach. Archeologically reconstructing genre filmmaking in a national film production context that makes the production of genre cinema virtually impossible, he repeatedly draws on plots from classic films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s, in order to provide his viewers with the distinct pleasures only cinema can instill without, however, allowing his audience the comforts the "cinema of identification" affords them.Including thirty-five interviews, Christian Petzold: Interviews is the first book in any language to document how one of Germany’s best-known directors thinking about his work has evolved over the course of a quarter of a century, spanning his days as a flailing student filmmaker in the early 1990s in postunified Germany to 2020, when his reputation as one of world cinema’s most respected auteurs has been firmly enshrined. The interviews collected here—thirty of which are published in English for the first time—highlight Petzold’s career-long commitment to foregrounding how economic operations affect individual lives. The volume makes for a rich resource for readers interested in Petzold’s work or contemporary German cinema but also those looking for theoretically challenging and sophisticated commentary offered by one of global art cinema’s leading figures.

Christian Petzold (b. 1960) is the best-known filmmaker associated with the "Berlin School" of postunification German cinema. Identifying as an intellectual, Petzold self-consciously approaches his work for both the big and the small screen by weaving critical reflection on the very conditions of contemporary filmmaking into his approach. Archeologically reconstructing genre filmmaking in a national film production context that makes the production of genre cinema virtually impossible, he repeatedly draws on plots from classic films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s, in order to provide his viewers with the distinct pleasures only cinema can instill without, however, allowing his audience the comforts the "cinema of identification" affords them.Including thirty-five interviews, Christian Petzold: Interviews is the first book in any language to document how one of Germany’s best-known directors thinking about his work has evolved over the course of a quarter of a century, spanning his days as a flailing student filmmaker in the early 1990s in postunified Germany to 2020, when his reputation as one of world cinema’s most respected auteurs has been firmly enshrined. The interviews collected here—thirty of which are published in English for the first time—highlight Petzold’s career-long commitment to foregrounding how economic operations affect individual lives. The volume makes for a rich resource for readers interested in Petzold’s work or contemporary German cinema but also those looking for theoretically challenging and sophisticated commentary offered by one of global art cinema’s leading figures.

The first book-length study in any language of the "Berlin School," the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the 1970s.WINNER: 2014 German Studies Association AwardThe contemporary German directors collectively known as the "Berlin School" constitute the most significant filmmaking movement to come out of Germany since the New German Cinema of the 1970s, not least because their films mark the emergence of a new film language. The Berlin School filmmakers, including Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Ulrich Köhler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maren Ade, and Valeska Grisebach, are reminiscent of the directors of the New German Autorenkino and of French cinéma des auteurs of the 1960s.This is the first book-length study of the Berlin School in any language. Its central thesis - that the movement should be regarded as a "counter-cinema" - is built around the unusual style of realism employed in its films, a realism that presents images of a Germany that does not yet exist. Abel concludes that it is precisely how these films' images and sounds work that renders them political: they are political not because they are message-driven films but because they are made politically, thus performing a "redistribution of the sensible" - a direct artistic intervention in the way politics partitions ways of doing and making, saying and seeing.Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.