Fall 2024 German GU4350 section 001

GERMAN FILM AFTER 1945

Call Number 12858
Day & Time
Location
T 2:10pm-4:00pm
318 Hamilton Hall
Points 3
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Claudia Breger
Type LECTURE
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description

This introduction to German film since 1945 (in its European contexts) deploys a focus on feelings as a lens for multifaceted, intersectional investigations of cinematic history. We will explore how feelings have been gendered and racialized; how they overlap with matters of sex (as closely associated with political revolt in Western Europe, while considered too private for public articulation in the socialist East, especially when queer); and how they foreground matters of nation and trauma (for example via the notions of German ‘coldness’ and inability to mourn the Holocaust). Simultaneously, the focus on feelings highlights questions of mediality (cinema as a prototypically affective medium?), genre and avant-garde aesthetics: in many films, ‘high-affect’ Hollywood cinema intriguingly meets ‘cold’ cinematic modernism. In pursuing these investigative vectors through theoretical readings and close film analysis, the course connects affect, gender, queer, and cultural studies approaches with cinema studies methodologies. The films to be discussed span postwar and New German Cinema, East German DEFA productions, the ‘Berlin School’ of the 2000s, and contemporary transnational cinema.

Web Site Vergil
Department Germanic Languages
Enrollment 15 students (25 max) as of 12:06PM Friday, December 6, 2024
Subject German
Number GU4350
Section 001
Division Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Note This course is taught in ENGLISH language.
Section key 20243GERM4350G001