Syllabus
The course aims at familiarising students with film as medium of history on one side and as object and source genre of historiography on the other side. It explores the way communist governments of central and southeastern Europe understood to employ the medium “film” in representing political power and order with the aim of fostering state legitimacy.
At the same time the course illuminates the overt critical character of other films of banned and exiled or only censored film makers. Not least, it questions the rather ambiguous status of a third category of film makers who proved politically loyal on one side, but nevertheless included subversive elements in their films, on the other side.
The tensions inflicted by the three types of films, be it for cinema or for television, and by the ambiguity of the latter category to the discursive relationship between film and political power should open the floor for discussion. At stake is the understanding of the aesthetics of state order, e.g., the police aesthetics, of film and its influence in close relationship with the degree of reception of those films by the respective populations, be it the East-German, the Polish, the Czechoslovak or the Romanian and beyond.
Students are free to explore the interconnectedness of the film genre with archival sources, with other sources such as the written press and the radio, the literature and the autobiography, the memoirs and the petitions or letters to various administrative bodies. On this journey through the narrative and the aesthetics of film in a “middle phase” and in late communism, students will explore various sub-genres of film such as feature film, crime fiction, essay, educational, documentary and personal documentary from both socialist and critical realism perspective.
Deciphering among various layers of fictionality, grasping congruent or contradictory storytellings will contribute in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural mode to understanding the collapse of late communism, the self-reproductive mode of social obedience and the mechanisms of political power beyond legitimacy.
Annotation
The block seminar is split in 4 appointments à 8 hours each. These take place on Friday and
Saturday, the first two in December and the latter two in January. My suggestion is: 15th-16th December & 12th-13th January
Each appointment consists in a short introduction (5-10 minutes), at least one film (1-1,5 h), to be introduced to or by the students, and a discussion (1 h), including both comments and theory regarding the respective film. A 20 minutes break is planned after each film. For each discussion session texts from the bibliography will be made available.