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Long overlooked by scholars and critics, the history and aesthetics
of German television have only recently begun to attract serious,
sustained attention, and then largely within Germany. This
ambitious volume, the first in English on the subject, provides a
much-needed corrective in the form of penetrating essays on the
distinctive theories, practices, and social-historical contexts
that have defined television in Germany. Encompassing developments
from the dawn of the medium through the Cold War and
post-reunification, this is an essential introduction to a rich and
varied media tradition.
Long overlooked by scholars and critics, the history and aesthetics
of German television have only recently begun to attract serious,
sustained attention, and then largely within Germany. This
ambitious volume, the first in English on the subject, provides a
much-needed corrective in the form of penetrating essays on the
distinctive theories, practices, and social-historical contexts
that have defined television in Germany. Encompassing developments
from the dawn of the medium through the Cold War and
post-reunification, this is an essential introduction to a rich and
varied media tradition.
Approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an
interdisciplinary perspective, questioning the assumption that
classical music functioned purely as an ideological support for the
state. Classical music in the German Democratic Republic is
commonly viewed as having functioned as an ideological support or
cultural legitimization for the state, in the form of the so-called
"bourgeois humanist inheritance." The largenumbers of professional
orchestras in the GDR were touted as a proof of the country's
culture. Classical music could be seen as the polar opposite of
Americanizing pop culture and also of musical modernism, which was
decried as formalist. Nevertheless, there were still musical
modernists in the GDR, and classical music traditions were not only
a prop of the state. This collection of new essays approaches the
topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary
perspective, presenting the work of scholars in a number of
complementary disciplines, including German Studies, Musicology,
Aesthetics, and Film Studies. Contributors to this volume offer a
broad examination of classical music in the GDR, while also
uncovering nonconformist tendencies and questioning the assumption
that classical music in the GDR meant nothing but (socialist)
respectability. Contributors: Tatjana Boehme-Mehner, Martin Brady,
Lars Fischer, Kyle Frackman, Golan Gur, Peter Kupfer, Albrecht von
Massow, Carola Nielinger-Vakil, Jessica Payette, Larson Powell,
Juliane Schicker, Martha Sprigge, Matthias Tischer, Jonathan L.
Yaeger, Johanna Frances Yunker Kyle Frackman is Assistant Professor
of Germanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Larson
Powell is Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas
City.
This is the first book in English on the films of Konrad Wolf
(1925-1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a
larger European filmic and historical context. Konrad Wolf
(1925-1982) was East Germany's greatest filmmaker and also an
influential public figure in his country's political and cultural
life. As artist and representative of the GDR, he had to perform a
complex balancing act between aesthetic conscience and political
function, not unlike Brecht. His work covers almost the whole
lifespan of the GDR, in a range of filmic styles and genres, from
musicals to antifascist films to films of everyday life. This book,
the first in English on Wolf's entire oeuvre, proposes that we
understand his work as an archive both of his own personal
experience and of the ideology of socialism, embedded in
self-reflexive filmic forms and generic references that put Wolf in
the vicinity of other filmmakers like Fassbinder, Wajda, and
Tarkovsky. The book's comparativist dimension, as well as its
larger examination of the problems of a politically committed
artist in state socialism, will make it of interest to all readers
concerned with late-twentieth-century film history, art under
socialism, and the history of East Germany and Eastern Europe.
Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University
of Missouri, Kansas City. He has published The Technological
Unconscious (2008); The Differentiation of Modernism (2013), and
edited volumes on German television and on classical music in the
GDR.
The Differentiation of Modernism analyzes the phenomenon of
intermediality in German radio plays, film music, and electronic
music of the late modernist period (1945-1980). After 1945, the
purist "medium specificity" of high modernism increasingly yielded
to the mixed forms of intermediality. Theodor Adorno dubbed this
development a "Verfransung," or "fraying of boundaries," between
the arts. TheDifferentiation of Modernism analyzes this phenomenon
in German electronic media arts of the late modernist period
(1945-80): in radio plays, film music, and electronic music. The
first part of the book begins with a chapter on Adorno's theory of
radio as an instrument of democratization, going on to analyze the
relationship of the Hoerspiel or radio play to electronic music. In
the second part, on film music, a chapter on Adorno and Eisler's
Composing for the Film sets the parameters for chapters on the film
Das Madchen Rosemarie (1957) and on the music films of Jean-Marie
Straub and Daniele Huillet. The third part examines the music of
Karlheinz Stockhausen and its relationship to radio, abstract
painting, recording technology, and theatrical happenings. The
book's central notion of the "differentiation of culture" suggests
that late modernism, unlike high modernism, accepted the
contingency of modern mass-media driven society and sought to find
new forms for it. Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film
Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of
The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature
(Camden House, 2008).
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.
The first scholarly collection in English or German to fully
address the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of
DEFA across genres and in social, political, and cultural context.
The cinema of the German Democratic Republic, that is, the cinema
of its state-run studio DEFA, portrayed gender and sexuality in
complex and contradictory ways. In doing so, it reflected the
contradictions in GDR society in respect to such questions. This is
the first scholarly collection in English or German to fully
address the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of
DEFA across genres (from shorts and feature films to educational
videos, television productions, and documentaries) and in light of
social, political, and cultural contexts. It is also unique in its
investigation of previously unresearched subjects, including films
and directors that have received little scholarly attention and
nonconformist representations of gender and sexual embodiments,
identifications, and practices. The volume presents the work of
leading scholars on the GDR and allows students and scholars to
examine East German film with respect to the acceptance, rejection,
or nuanced negotiation of ideas of proper male and female behavior
espoused by the country's brand of socialism. Contributors: Muriel
Cormican, Jennifer L. Creech, Heidi Denzel de Tirado, Kyle
Frackman, Sebastian Heiduschke, Sonja E. Klocke, John Lessard,
Larson Powell, Victoria I. Rizo Lenshyn, Reinhild Steingroever,
Faye Stewart, Evan Torner, Henning Wrage. Kyle Frackman is
Assistant Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of
British Columbia. Faye Stewart is Associate Professor of German at
Georgia State University.
A bold new theoretical analysis of literary modernism and its
conception of and relation to nature. Even after the end of
modernism and postmodernism, grandiose fantasies of artifice and
self-reference still resonate in the "social constructivism" of
current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can
perform or construct "identities" or social roles without external
constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's
book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining
aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and
therefore its relation to reality. Powell's term "the Technological
Unconscious" refers both to the intersection between psychoanalysis
and theories of modernism and to the philosophical mediation
between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno.
The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in
German prose and -- especially -- poetry by Rilke, Benn, Brecht,
and Doeblin from the years 1900 to 1945. In connection with these
works, Powell analyzes the conceptions of subject and system in the
theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their
complement, nature. The Technological Unconscious is thus an
important polemical intervention both in the debates over
interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic "culturalist"
theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one
hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other. Larson
Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of
Missouri, Kansas City.
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