Cinepoetics Essay
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Edited by:
Hermann Kappelhoff
The series Cinepoetics Essay investigates the multifaceted poetologies of audiovisual images, with each volume focusing on a specific theme or subject. The respective objects of study are approached from a personal point of view, or examined from a specific aesthetic, cultural-historical, or theoretical perspective. Thus, the series provides ways of thinking about figurations of media experience and aims at introducing a broad readership to an understanding of cinematic thinking in all its diversity.
Please note also the English-language (https://www.degruyter.com/serial/CINE%20E-B/html) and the German-language (https://www.degruyter.com/serial/CINE-B/html) Cinepoetics book series.
Author / Editor information
In academic and public discourse, 'mapping' has become a ubiquitous term for epistemic practices ranging from surveys of scholarly fields to processes of data collection, ordering and visualization. Mapping captures patterns of distribution, segregation and hierarchy across socio-cultural spaces and geographical territories. Often lost in such accounts, however, is the experiential dimension of mapping as an aesthetic practice with determinate social, cultural and political effects. This volume draws on approaches from film philosophy, media archaeology, decolonial scholarship and independent film practice to explore mapping as a mediated experience in which film becomes entangled in larger processes of historical subject-formation, as well as in dissident reconfigurations of cultural memory. Proposing an approach to mapping through decolonial aesthetics and poetic thinking, the three essays in this volume help define a film studies perspective on mapping as a practice that structures political and aesthetic regimes, organizes and communicates shared realities, but also enables dissenting reconfigurations of concretely experienced worlds.
Between 1977 and 1987, a cycle of innovative films founded the genre of fantasy. Embedded within the US (film) culture of the decade, the filmmakers created audiovisual stagings that continue to shape how society remembers the 1980s. This essay looks at these films in film-analytical case studies to draw out a (historical) poetics of the genre.
Like every history, the history of film can be grasped not just as a temporal phenomenon, but also within the specificity with which it has inscribed itself into concrete places. The question of how this has occurred at different points in German film history forms the starting point of this book. Using five examples, it explores the social and political horizons of heterotopic concepts of space in German film from the 1930s to the 1990s: Hamburg in Werner Hochbaum’s A Girl Goes Ashore [Ein Mädchen geht an Land], East Berlin in Günter Reisch’s Ein Lord am Alexanderplatz, Munich in the early works of Wim Wenders, the passage from New York to Athens and Santorini via Berlin in Rudolf Thome’s Die Sonnegöttin, and the reunified Berlin in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run [Lola rennt]. The main points of interest are the poetological devices the films use to portray their settings. By uniting topology and film aesthetics, this book opens up spaces of historic experience that provide film historiography with new insights.
