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The volume examines from a comparative perspective the phenomenon of aesthetic disruption within the various arts in contemporary culture. It assumes that the political potential of contemporary art is not solely derived from presenting its audiences with openly political content, but rather from creating a space of perception and interaction using formal means: a space that makes hegemonic structures of action and communication observable, thus problematizing their self-evidence. The contributions conceptualize historical and contemporary politics of form in the media, which aim to be more than mere shock strategies, which are concerned not just with the ‘narcissistic’ exhibition of art...
Tracing the rise and development of the Ghanaian video film industry between 1985 and 2010, Sensational Movies examines video movies as seismographic devices recording a culture and society in turmoil. This book captures the dynamic process of popular filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination and tracks the interlacing of the mediumÕs technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Christianity on the other. Birgit Meyer analyzes Ghanaian video as a powerful, sensational form. Colliding with the state film industryÕs representations of culture, these movies are indebted to religious notions of divination and revelation. Exploring the format of Òfilm as revelation,Ó Meyer unpacks the affinity between cinematic and popular Christian modes of looking and showcases the transgressive potential haunting figurations of the occult. In this brilliant study, Meyer offers a deep, conceptually innovative analysis of the role of visual culture within the politics and aesthetics of religious world making.
This book offers a post-representational approach to a range of fiction and non-fiction films that deal with labour migration from Turkey to Germany. Engaging with materialist philosophies of process, it offers analyses of films by Thomas Arslan, Christian Petzold, Aysun Bademsoy, Seyhan Derin, Harun Farocki, Yüksel Yavuz and Feo Aladag. Shifting the focus from the longstanding concerns of integration, identity and cultural conflict, Gozde Naiboglu shows that these films offer new expressions of lived experience under late capitalism through themes of work, social reproduction, unemployment and insecure work, exhaustion and precarity, thereby calling for a rethinking of the established ideas of class, community and identity.
This book explores female-themed art films from China and Germany and seeks to illustrate how the cultural difference between the ways of representing women and narrating women's themes is shown in both countries' films, by means of analyzing two film elements: mise-en-scène and cinematography. This book analyzes female-themed art films in five topics: Marriage and Love, Birth and Motherhood, Professional Women and Housewives, Death and Despair, and Dreams and Destiny.
In the context of globalization, this book explores female-themed art films from China and Germany, in order to seek and illustrate how the cultural difference between the ways of representing women and narrating women's themes is shown in the films of both countries.
The 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...
Eric Rentschler's new book, The Use and Abuse of Cinema, takes readers on a series of enthralling excursions through the fraught history of German cinema, from the Weimar and Nazi eras to the postwar and postwall epochs and into the new millennium. These journeys afford rich panoramas and nuanced close-ups from a nation's production of fantasies and spectacles, traversing the different ways in which the film medium has figured in Germany, both as a site of creative and critical enterprise and as a locus of destructive and regressive endeavor. Each of the chapters provides a stirring minidrama; the cast includes prominent critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim; postwar directors like Wolfgang Staudte, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Alexander Kluge; representatives of the so-called Berlin School; and exponents of mountain epics, early sound musicals, rubble films, and recent heritage features. A film history that is both original and unconventional, Rentschler's colorful tapestry weaves together figures, motifs, and stories in exciting, unexpected, and even novelistic ways.
Introduction: Postcolonial literary studies now / Jenni Ramone -- NEW CONTEXTS. The global and the neoliberal: Indra Sinha's Animal's people, from human community to zones of indistinction / Philip Leonard -- Disaster, governance and (post-)colonial literatures / Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee -- The postcolonial book market: reading and the local literary marketplace / Jenni Ramone -- Postcolonial economics: literary critiques of inequality / Melissa Kennedy -- Postcolonial studies in the digital age: an introduction / Roopika Risam -- "Another world is possible": radicalizing world literature via the postcolonial / Wendy Knepper -- NEW NARRATIVES. Postcolonial poetry / Emma Bird -- Postcolonial ...
Heroisches Blutvergießen, mit diesem Begriff, der schon fast zu einer Genrebezeichnung gereift ist, werden John Woos Werke der 1980er und 1990er Jahre gern erfasst. Doch Woo Yu-sen, besser bekannt unter dem Namen John Woo, ist weit mehr als nur der Schöpfer eines brachialen Actionkinos. Als eindeutiges Kind des Hongkong-Kinos, dessen Produktionsweisen und filmsprachlichen Traditionen John Woo aufgriff, um sie auf eigenwillige und stilsichere Weise neu zu interpretieren, sind seine Werke ebenso geprägt von flamboyanten, ästhetisierten, durch ständige Rhythmuswechsel strukturierte Kampfchoreografien wie von einem komplexen Wertekanon, der aus seiner christlichen Erziehung, aus Ideen der Ritterlichkeit und der chinesischen Geisteswelt gleichermaßen schöpft. Seine Helden mögen entschlossen und heroisch sein, doch sie sind ebenso zerrissen, zweifelnd und melancholisch. Nach dem Karrierebeginn in Hongkong, arbeitete Woo ein Jahrzehnt in Hollywood und heute in der Volksrepublik China. Seinen Stil adaptierte er den jeweiligen Produktionsumständen, doch er blieb ihm stets treu.