History of German Film and Photography

Catalog description

This course will examine the history, theory, and practice of German photographic and moving picture technology from its origins to the digital age. The course will be structured around important innovations in visual technology, including: 1) the pre-history and invention of photography, 2) pre-cinematic moving pictures (Anschütz), 3) the invention of cinema (Skladanowsky Bros.), 4) sound and color innovations, 5) video, digital, and installation work. The aim of the course is to provide an historical overview of visual culture in which the radical shifts inaugurated by new technologies are examined in terms of their aesthetic, philosophical, and political impact. In the German context these shifts have been examined by important theoreticians of visual culture (most notably Arnheim, Balácz, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Flusser) whose work has changed the way we think about our relation to images. Practitioners in the German sphere have been no less influential: from Ottomar Anschütz's pre-cinematic experiments with moving pictures to the very first public demonstration of cinematic technology (the Skladanowskys' bioscope, one month before the Lumières' first show) to the avant-garde animation of the Weimar period; from the narrative and design innovations of the Expressionist filmmakers to the rich and varied independent films of the New German Cinema to the radical documentarians of the past decade. By providing students with an understanding of German innovations in and responses to new technologies this course will ground readings of particular works historically. In broad terms, class discussion will consider questions such as: What is the aesthetic status of the photographic image in relation to painting? What is the ontological status of the photograph as a chemical imprint of light? How do these new technologies lend themselves to political action? How is the spectator differently constructed by these technologies? In what way is the still image integral to the moving image-and what implications do these have for our perception of time? What is the new role of the image in mass, consumer culture (subversive or complicit)? How do the formal and technical affordances of the film-based image contribute to the construction of national, race, and gender identities, to spectator desires, and to new aesthetic categories? Readings will be available in German and in English. Class discussion will be in English.