Cinepoetics Essay – serie

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.

In academic and public discourse, 'mapping' has become a ubiquitous term for epistemic practices ranging from surveys of scholarly fields to processes of data collection, ordering and visualization. Mapping captures patterns of distribution, segregation and hierarchy across socio-cultural spaces and geographical territories. Often lost in such accounts, however, is the experiential dimension of mapping as an aesthetic practice with determinate social, cultural and political effects. This volume draws on approaches from film philosophy, media archaeology, decolonial scholarship and independent film practice to explore mapping as a mediated experience in which film becomes entangled in larger processes of historical subject-formation, as well as in dissident reconfigurations of cultural memory. Proposing an approach to mapping through decolonial aesthetics and poetic thinking, the three essays in this volume help define a film studies perspective on mapping as a practice that structures political and aesthetic regimes, organizes and communicates shared realities, but also enables dissenting reconfigurations of concretely experienced worlds.