Michael Wedel - Böcker

German film in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods is regarded as marked by a strong sense of cultural conservatism and the aspiration to be recognized as an art form. This book takes an alternative approach to the history of German cinema from the emergence of the early feature film to the transition to sound by focusing on the poetics of popular genres such as the disaster film, melodrama, the musical and the war film, exploring their cultural reverberations and modes of audience address. Based on the assumption that popular cinema contributed immensely to the breakthrough of a modern audiovisual "culture of the senses" in Germany between 1910 and 1930, Pictorial Affects, Senses of Rupture offers close readings of a number of rarely analyzed films, including one of the first cinematic adaptations of the Titanic disaster from 1912 and the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front from 1930. Restoring the films' horizons of historicity by locating them at crucial points of intersection between social, cultural, technological and aesthetic discourses, this book argues for the prominent role popular German cinema’s own forms of discursivity have played within the historical formation of modernity.

Like every history, the history of film can be grasped not just as a temporal phenomenon, but also within the specificity with which it has inscribed itself into concrete places. The question of how this has occurred at different points in German film history forms the starting point of this book. Using five examples, it explores the social and political horizons of heterotopic concepts of space in German film from the 1930s to the 1990s: Hamburg in Werner Hochbaum’s A Girl Goes Ashore [Ein Mädchen geht an Land], East Berlin in Günter Reisch’s Ein Lord am Alexanderplatz, Munich in the early works of Wim Wenders, the passage from New York to Athens and Santorini via Berlin in Rudolf Thome’s Die Sonnegöttin, and the reunified Berlin in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run [Lola rennt]. The main points of interest are the poetological devices the films use to portray their settings. By uniting topology and film aesthetics, this book opens up spaces of historic experience that provide film historiography with new insights.

German film in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods is regarded as marked by a strong sense of cultural conservatism and the aspiration to be recognized as an art form. This book takes an alternative approach to the history of German cinema from the emergence of the early feature film to the transition to sound by focusing on the poetics of popular genres such as the disaster film, melodrama, the musical and the war film, exploring their cultural reverberations and modes of audience address. Based on the assumption that popular cinema contributed immensely to the breakthrough of a modern audiovisual "culture of the senses" in Germany between 1910 and 1930, Pictorial Affects, Senses of Rupture offers close readings of a number of rarely analyzed films, including one of the first cinematic adaptations of the Titanic disaster from 1912 and the German version of All Quiet on the Western Front from 1930. Restoring the films' horizons of historicity by locating them at crucial points of intersection between social, cultural, technological and aesthetic discourses, this book argues for the prominent role popular German cinema’s own forms of discursivity have played within the historical formation of modernity.

Die film- und medienwissenschaftliche Diskussion zum Thema Special Effects wird bisher von Fragen nach der Produktionsweise und technischen Realisierbarkeit dominiert. Im Rahmen einer derart technik- und produktionszentrierten Herangehensweise an das Phänomen bleibt das Verständnis der kulturellen Bedeutung von Special Effects in Film, Fernsehen und digitalen Unterhaltungsmedien auf die Ebene der industriellen Möglichkeitsbedingungen ästhetischer Erfahrung reduziert. Selten wird in diesem Zusammenhang danach gefragt, welche „Effekte“ die Verwendung von Special Effects im individuellen Wahrnehmungsakt herstellen und was sie in den Augen des Publikums tatsächlich so „speziell“ erscheinen lässt. Der Sammelband korrigiert die Vernachlässigung dieser Fragen, indem er theoretische Grundlagentexte zu einer Wirkungsästhetik der Special Effects versammelt und mit konkreten Fallstudien zur kulturellen Wahrnehmung und empirischen Publikumsrezeption in verschiedenen Mediengattungen vom Kinofilm bis hin zu Internet-Videos und Computerspielen verbindet.

Das Buch untersucht die internationalen Filmbeziehungen der DEFA von ihrer Gründung 1946 bis zu ihrer Auflösung nach dem Ende der DDR. Im Rahmen einer komparatistischen Mediengeschichtsschreibung werden stilistische Einflüsse in verschiedenen Filmgattungen ebenso untersucht wie Wechselwirkungen in der Rezeption und öffentlichen Diskussion.