Skandalöse
Erscheinungen:
Teufel, Monster, Unholde
Unser Seminar befasst sich mit
Figuren, die schon durch ihre Anwesenheit, und nicht erst durch ihr
Verhalten, Skandale bewirken und unsere gewohnte Lebenswelt in Frage
stellen. Oft zeichnet bereits ihr äusseres Erscheinungsbild
sie als hybride Geschöpfe aus, deren Wesen sich jedem Versuch
einer dauerhaften Klassifizierung widersetzt. Trotz ihrer
offensichtlichen Andersartigkeit, drängen sich diese Figuren
förmlich in unsere Alltagswelt, wo ihre Anwesenheit oft
tragische Folgen hat. Problematisch erscheint insbesondere jedes
eindeutige moralische Werturteil: einerseits bestärkt die
Anwesenheit von Teufeln, Monstern und Unholden unsere Sehnsucht nach
einer klaren Trennung von Gut und Böse, andererseits
lässt sie uns aber erkennen, dass das Böse und
Hässliche nicht als selbständige Kategorie verstanden
werden kann. Skandale, welche auf diese Weise entstehen, sind deshalb
oft in besonderem Masse öffentlich. Im Verhalten des Anderen
lassen sich die Ängste und Ziele einer ganzen Gesellschaft
erkennen.
Texte
:
Out
of the Shadows: cinema and "the other"
This seminar will link
comparative cinema history and cultural analysis with contemporary
philosophical reflection on the paradoxical status of
‘shadows’ (as in Roy Sorenson’s new
book). During the 1920s, cinema’s technical capacity to
create chiaroscuro images increased, giving rise to a new visual
expressivity, often drawing on the traditional symbolism of shadows and
darkness. We begin by recalling the climax of Weimar cinema’s
preoccupation with shadows, and how this entered Hollywood’s
lexicon in specific genres. Next, we consider the role of shadow-play
in early avant-garde film, which leads on to the New American cinema of
the 50s and 60s, typified by Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959), with
its
exploration of racial exclusion and marginality. The new
Queer cinema that emerged in the 1980s was also concerned with bringing
queer identities and histories ‘out of the
shadows’, often with its own visual vernacular to match in
films by Fassbinder, Almodovar and Kalin.
Readings
- Lotte
H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expresionism in the German Cinema,
Thames and Hudson, 1969
- S. S. Prawer,
Caligari’s Children. The Film as Tale of Terror, Oxford
University Press, 1980
- B. Ruby Rich, New
Queer Cinema, 1991
- P. Adams Sitney,
Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, OUP, 2002
- Paul Julian Smith,
Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar, Verso, 1994
- Roy Sorenson, Seeing
Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows, OUP, 2008
Seminar in English
Held by
Ian Christie
Birkbeck College
and Giulio
Iacoli
University of
Parma
Ian
Christie is Professor of
Film and Media History at Birkbeck College,
University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has
published widely on avant-garde film, on Russian, British, French and
American cinema, and on the history of film theory (see website
www.ianchristie.org ). He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge
University in 2006, with a series of lectures entitled ‘The
cinema has now yet been invented’. His current interests
include production design, early optical entertainments and
neuroscience.
Giulio
Iacoli (Modena, 1974) holds
a Laurea in Classical Literature at the University of Bologna, and
received a doctorate in Comparative
Literature from the University of
Cagliari. A former Visiting Researcher at Stanford University and
Research Fellow at the University of L’Aquila, since 2006 he
is Assistant Professor at the University of Parma, Dipartimento di
Italianistica, where he presently teaches courses in Comparative
Literature and Theory and History of Literary Genres. He is co-director
of Studi culturali, and co-editor of Scritture migranti.
His main interests are cultural geography, literary theory, queer
studies, contemporary novel writing, comparisons between literature,
cinema and other arts. He has widely written on contemporary fiction
(Buzzati, Calvino, D’Arzo, Perec, Queneau, DeLillo, Ginzburg,
Guibert) as well as on cultural and queer issues (cultural geography
and maps, queer spaces, the JFK assassination, Bergman, Susan Sontag,
Almodóvar, Siti, the images of the italian city and of the
migrants in contemporary cinema).
The author of two monographs, Atlante delle derive. Geografie da
un’Emilia postmoderna: Gianni Celati, Pier Vittorio Tondelli
(Diabasis, 2002), and La percezione narrativa dello spazio. Teorie e
rappresentazioni contemporanee (Carocci, 2008), he has also edited in
2005 a special issue of the review “Poetiche”,
devoted to Pier Vittorio Tondelli, and in 2009 a little book on
literary theory (La pratica e la grammatica. Letteratura e teorie
culturali, Unicopli). He is currently co-editing a
book manuscript
addressing the relationships between literature, eroticism, and
pornography.
Tutor
Antonio Bibbò
University
of L'Aquila
Antonio Bibbò was born in Naples on the 12th December 1979 but has lived for the past 4 years in Rome, where he works with professor Enrico Terrinoni at the Università di Roma Tre. He also works as a journalist (especially in the area of cinema and literature) for a national magazine and does freelance technical and literary translations from English and French into Italian. He likes, roughly in this order, English, French and Italian literature, and has a particular interest in realist, Victorian and modernist writers. But at present he is reading as many alive (or at least recently departed) authors as possible. He loves cinema and owns a video-projector, which he cherishes as if it were part of his own body. He chiefly screens films by Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, Ernst Lubitsch, teen-movies and loads of tv-series, past and present.