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Filmmaking in Germany and Austria has changed dramatically in the
last decades with digitalization and the use of video and the
Internet. Yet despite predictions of a negative effect on
experimental film, the German and Austrian filmscape is filled with
dynamic new experiments, as new technological possibilities push a
break with the past, encouraging artists to find new forms. This
volume of theoretically engaged essays explores this new landscape,
introducing the work of established and emerging filmmakers,
offering assessments of the intent and effect of their productions,
and describing overall trends. It also explores the relationship of
today's artists to the historical avant-garde, revealing a vibrant
form of artistic engagement that has a history but has certainly
not ended. The essays address such questions as the effects of
transformations of cinematic space; the political effects of the
breakdown of barriers between experimental film and advertising,
and of the rise of music videos and reality TV; the effects of the
collapse of the Soviet bloc, the rise of capitalism, and the
European movement on experimental film work; and whether these
experiments are aligned with mass political movements -- for
instance that of anti-globalization -- or whether they strive for
autonomy from quotidian politics. Randall Halle is Klaus W. Jonas
Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of
Pittsburgh. Reinhild Steingrover is Associate Professor of German
in the Department of Humanities at the Eastman School of Music.
How the act of looking at our own and others' bodies is informed by
the techniques, expectations, and strategies of body modification.
If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how
we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic
gaze-in Bernadette Wegenstein's groundbreaking formulation-is one
through which the act of looking at our bodies and those of others
is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies
(often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, Wegenstein says,
also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both
physical and spiritual improvement. In The Cosmetic Gaze,
Wegenstein charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation.
Wegenstein shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the "rebirth"
celebrated in today's makeover culture and how it builds upon a
body concept that has collapsed into its mediality. In today's
beauty discourse-on reality TV and Web sites that collect "bad
plastic surgery"-we yearn to experience a bettered self that has
been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally
remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal.
Wegenstein traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas
about physiognomy through television makeover shows and
facial-recognition software to cinema-which, like our other
screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be,
drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.
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