Cinepoetics

Watching a film is an extremely subjective experience. Attempts to work with audiovisual images in scholarship face the challenge of describing this experience objectively without resorting to the mere description of abstract structures or narrative content. It is against this backdrop that this book attempts to take a systematic approach to experience-based film analysis at the cutting edge of current film theory.

What happens to a democracy in times of war? How can US war objectives be aligned with the interests of individuals and the community? This was the challenge facing the US during World War II. The relationship between democracy, propaganda, and the public sphere had to be renegotiated. Cinema had the ability to dissolve the resulting contradictions.

Was meint das Spielen digitaler Spiele? Welche Handlungen vollziehen sich im spielerischen Umgang mit diesen algorithmischen Medien, die Bedingungen algorithmischer Kontrolle ästhetisch erfahrbar machen? Anhand poetologischer Einzelstudien sowie Diskursen zu algorithmischer Prozessualität, verkörperter medialer Erfahrung und handlungsphilosophischen Konzepten entwickelt das Buch eine medienästhetische Theorie des Handelns in digitalen Spielen.

Portrayals of love are everywhere in films and series. However, this apparent ubiquity is accompanied by a lack of understanding for the interconnection between love, its portrayal, and the medium of the moving picture. In contrast, this book presents a poetological theory and analysis of the time-forming connections between production processes – in order to ultimately provide an insight into the contemporary intimacies of the moving picture.

How do films and videos position themselves in the age of the "Alt-Right," #BlackLivesMatter, and financial and climate crises? In their interventions, they shape the perception of contemporary political crises. They raise or provoke objections. This book questions this behavior in audiovisual communication, thereby shifting the perspective in the analysis and critique of audiovisual rhetoric.

Despite its specific visuality, the spectacle has not played any major role in film studies. By deconstructing the cultural history of the term, this study sounds out its analytical potential. Three analyses spanning the history of film show how the spectacle appears as a dynamic network of gazes in the staging of surfaces – and thus how visibility itself is negotiated aesthetically.

Hans Bausch Mediapreis 2024

"Don't drink and drive!", "Respect Covid regulations!", or "Don't get the vaccine!": In the public spheres of democratic societies, there are many insistent audiovisual messages that appeal to the public in the name of the "common good". This monograph examines such social advertisements against a multi-disciplinary field of theoretical reference in order to develop a discourse-analytical approach. By analyzing films serving "mundane" purposes as cinematic forms of meaning-making, it opens up audiovisual discourse formations to aesthetic and political critique. This film studies perspective sheds new light on media practices where propaganda, advertising, and public relations intersect. What emerges through this analysis is a poetics of persuasion: a political instrumentalization of fictional worlds, with their inherent possible actions, responsibilities, and views of humanity, staged in the language of cinema. Drawing on a number of case studies, this book teases out three main elements of social advertising: the genre-specific pedagogy of negative audience feelings, cinematic metaphors that shape public media discourses, and the temporal structure of prevention. It shows that audiovisual persuasion is not a unidirectional rhetorical maneuver, but rather a process of negotiation, of shaping ideas and stances through the medium of cinematic fiction. Through this reflection of media-specific societal practices, the study contributes to the interdisciplinary research on contemporary public media spheres.

What is special about the way that school is portrayed in the German feature film? Why do even films that were made in the distant past invoke similar images? This book examines filmic memories, appropriations, and productions from over 100 years of joint and divided German film history. In doing so, it takes a broad scholarly approach toward investigating questions of film history, cultural studies, and political science.

How do we encounter characters in films and comics? While audiences might　relate to characters intuitively,　film and comics scholars　cannot analyze them in the same intuitive way.　Theories and analytical methods influenced by narratology and cognitive theory often conceptualize characters as finished subjects presented in a medial disguise. This study　argues instead that　film-watching and comic-reading　are　dynamic situations permeated by subjectivity. Conceptualized as　film-　or　comic-behavior, these subjectivized dynamics form the basis for the emergence of characters for viewers and readers. The study develops a phenomenological theory and method that allows　us　to analyze encounters with characters through descriptions of　film-　and　comic-behaviors. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of perception, it discusses current　phenomenological positions　in film studies　and articulates an extensive phenomenological　framework　for comic research.　The works of Chris Ware, Riad Sattouf, and Marc Forster, which　it discusses,　are not only the subject of analytical case studies but also an integral part of this study's theoretical framework.

How does the way we look at a film change when it is classified as "German-Turkish cinema"? And how do we view it when we conceive of its images as products of film watching instead? In interviews with filmmakers, supplemented with analyses and theoretical reflections, this book investigates the question of the creative spaces that emerge for filmmaking between the poles of politics and art.

The fact that media technologies influence our feelings seems obvious. But how do digital cameras or MP3 players change how we perceive, feel, and emotionally assess the world? This book examines the connection between media technology and affect on the level of the poetic patterns of audiovisual images, combining rigorous methods of film analysis with praxeological and genre-theoretical approaches.

This study attempts to develop a new perspective on the genre of high fantasy, while at the same time exploring the extent to which there might be a specific affinity between high fantasy and the medium of the video game. By confronting common attributions made to the genre – such as the claim that it is politically reactionary and aesthetically dull – it develops a transmedial poetics of high fantasy that simultaneously allows for a political reassessment of the genre. High fantasy, Illger argues, aims to shape the feeling of a "longing for the very other," which always already encompasses a challenge to the historicity of a given community. The medium of the video game, in turn, makes it possible to experience this aesthetic feeling in a unique way, since it literally puts the unfolding of its fantastical worlds into the hands of the players. This is made tangible in poetological analyses of artistically outstanding games such as Dark Souls, Skyrim, or Hellblade. In this way, the study opens up new possibilities for the academic examination of video games, proposing a genuinely aesthetic way of thinking with the audiovisual images of individual games that has, until now, been lacking in game studies.

Film theory has always regarded metaphor as relevant for both constituting and understanding cinematic meaning. With its theses on embodied thought, the cognitive-linguistic theory of conceptual metaphors has initiated an upswing in research on metaphor and audiovisuality across disciplines.

By engaging with these premises, this book develops a transdisciplinary perspective on audiovisual images, metaphor, and cinematic meaning that is at the interface between linguistic metaphor research oriented towards language use and the theory of audiovisual media as movement-images developed in film studies. It positions itself critically towards works that take up a semiotic-linguistic approach or are influenced by cognitive film theory, and that are caught up in the code-model of the sender-receiver paradigm of communication. A universal in-depth semantics that disregards cinematic dynamics is hereby countered by the idea of metaphorizing as a spectatorial activity: a dynamic process of perceiving, feeling, and understanding modelled by the movement figurations of audiovisual images.

Through detailed analyses of diverse cinematic formats – from Hollywood films to political reports – this monograph shows that, and how, metaphorizing is a mode of cinematic thinking structured by the performativity of audiovisual images.

Did 1968 fail? The question is misstated. For the significance and consequences of ’68 cannot be captured in a coherent narrative. That year appears as the point of culmination of a set of highly heterogeneous cultural, social, and political phenomena. Cinema, with its classics and gems to be (re-)discovered, proves to be a kaleidoscope that lets us perceive the fractures and contradictions of ’68.

The discourse of sound motion pictures has evolved to become a cultural practice through which people attempt to grasp their subjective cognitive reality as part of a shared world. By developing a poetological theory of filmic thinking and the “cinematic metaphor,” this study shows how filmic images generate an understanding and thinking that introduces new differences and modalities into this shared reality.

How is the temporal composition of audiovisual images linked to different modes of affectivity? This volume examines this question with reference to screwball comedy. Films belonging to this classical Hollywood genre from the 1930s and 40s present fast-paced conversations full of repartee, wordplay, and linguistic acrobatics. Comedy and exhilaration are primarily shaped by how gestures, facial expressions, voices, and speech acts are embedded temporally in the cinematic image. In screwball comedies, the act of sensing is often fashioned in a contrastive-comical manner: interactions rife with strife and anger are made perceptible as the elegant dance of a couple’s movement. From such a perspective, Greifenstein inquires into the pivotal connection between movement and affectivity and fundamentally interrogates the relationship between speech acts, acting, and the film image. The book shows that the spectators’ feeling of elation and enjoyment in experiencing screwball comedies is tied less to narrative action than to the films’ aesthetic-expressive orchestration, timing, and embodied meanings.

How do cinematic images generate and transform a community’s affectively grounded sense of values? Using the feeling of guilt as an example, this study shows how modulation of moral sentiments can be described as the calculus of audiovisual staging techniques. This calculus is analyzed as a cultural practice that helps establish the conditions for political community and shapes its historicity.

The book explores the relationship of movement and music in film to study the aesthetic principles of audience affect. It begins by a reconstructive analysis and theoretical reflection on the rhythmicity of films – and goes on to show the extent to which the rhythmic dimension of audiovisual images offers access to intersubjective strategies to induce affect in the movie theater.

How do spectators become emotionally involved in cinema? Starting from this question, the book suggests an original view about a critical period in United States film history. In a detailed analysis of individual films, an image emerges of a complex interplay between three affective modes – suspense, paranoia, and melancholy – which draw the spectators to reflect in unique ways about contradictions in their own feelings.

Based on the premise that a society’s sense of commonality depends upon media practices of political communitarization, this study examines how Hollywood was deployed during the Second World War. It shows that Hollywood responded to the crisis of democracy in the war by creating a new genre. Using an affective theory of genre cinema, it offers a new characterization of the relationship between politics and poetics in forming commonality.