Call for abstracts for the proposed panel ...

Reading Berlin School Films

SCMS 2015 – Montreal – March 25-29

This panel builds on recent scholarship assessing that growing body of contemporary German films often identified under the moniker “Berlin School” because of their emergence parallel to installation of the Berlin Republic These films seem to resist assignation to either the categories of national cinema, blockbuster co-productions, or inherited conventions of art cinema, instead pursuing an uncompromising realism that dwells in exacting and uncanny detail upon the forms of subjectivity, both ordinary and extraordinary, produced within a society struggling with the erosion of the social welfare state under the pressures of globalization.

Marco Abel (2013) aligns these heterogeneous films with the counter cinemas of the 1960s and 1970s. This panel continues the conversation, both testing the pliancy of the concept of counter cinema, and exploring various conceptual approaches to unpacking aesthetics, film style, politics, and spectatorship. How can theories of affect, the sensorial, and the everyday, for example, be brought into conversation with questions of political economy and social thought to unpack the ‘politics of the aesthetic’ (Rancière) Abel attributes to these films? Directors associated with this movement include but not are limited to Maren Adé, Thomas Arslan, Valeska Grisebach, Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, and Maria Speth as well as a new generation, e.g. Hannes Lang, Timo Müller, and others.

Please email a 250-300 word abstract, bibliography with five sources, and a brief biographical statement (max 100 word) to: [log in to unmask]

Paper abstracts due August 10.  Notification of results by August 16, and ensuing submission of pre-constituted panel by August 30th, 2015.  Authors will need to apply for or renew their SCMS membership by August 28th, 2015.








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