Dear All,
this will bi of interest to colleagues interested in filmstudies 
a.r.
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> From: Duncan Large <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: CFP: Anthology on German Popular Film
> Date: 07 April 1999 20:25
> 
> ------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
> 
> CALL FOR PAPERS: ANTHOLOGY ON GERMAN POPULAR FILM
> Eds.  Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy
> 
> Seeking to redress the gap between cultural studies' legitimation of
> popular culture and its frequent absence as object of analysis among
> Germanists, this volume will examine the roots, historical forms and
> current ascension of German popular cinema.  However inadvertently,
> German film studies have reflected a very traditional impulse to
> divy up German films, like Germans themselves, into the Good and the
> Bad.  The "golden era" of Weimar film and New German Cinema thus
> stand apart from embarrassing fascist propaganda, Heimat kitsch,
> alpine porn, and the present boom of German comedies. By looking at
> German popular film and the larger cultural, historical and
> political meanings it generates, this volume will attempt to
> reanimate the field of German film studies by examining and/or
> challenging the following discrepancies, dichotomies and
> constellations:
> 
> 
> Metaphors of Death and Rebirth
> 
> - the American "killing off" of German film, economically and
> ideologically, following WWII, despite evidence that domestic films
> outscored American products at the box office
> 
> - "rebirth" located at Oberhausen and in New German Cinema, as opposed 
> to a flourishing porn industry and Germans' preference for commercial 
> films during the same era
> 
> - film critic Laurens Straub's proclamation in 1990 about the death of
> German cinema, followed by record numbers of German filmgoers in the 
> 1990s who have resuscitated the economic viability and viewing pleasures 
> of German film
> 
> Who or what determines the "pulse" of German film?  To what extent has 
> an Anglo-American perspective constructed a landscape of artistic bounty 
> and commercial wastelands?  Have efforts to examine German identity 
> across the familiar historical spectrum - Weimar turbulence, the Third 
> Reich and "Zero Hour," Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung and a contemporary 
> multicultural Germany - overlooked alternative forms of identification 
> and cinematic pleasures among Germans, particularly in an increasingly 
> multinational, identity-dissolving, "Euro-Pudding" mode?  How has the 
> continued influence of the Frankfurt School endorsed cinematic 
> separations between the high and low? What role has the Goethe Institute 
> played in promoting German "art house" fare in America?
> 
> Hollywood and Origin and "Other"
> 
> - Hollywood's "legitimate" influence on German film when filtered 
> through the lens of a Fassbinder or Wenders vs. Steven Spielberg as 
> inspiration to German filmmakers of the 1990s, current attempts to 
> borrow from and improve upon the Hollywood model and reject New German 
> Cinema; Weimar's self-conscious scopic and narrative "Sonderweg" in the 
> face of Hollywood cinema; the influence of Hollywood on popular film 
> under National Socialism
> 
> - Franco-American auteur criticism which defines European and American
> films relationally in terms of art vs. popular appeal, politics vs.
> pleasure; inadvertent support of Hollywood hegemony by defining German
> cinema as copy, deviation, subversion of Hollywood film; cultural
> essentialisms in defining a national cinema vs. hetereogenity, or the
> manner in which gender, sexual and racial identities complicate
> identifications along national lines
> 
> - Clueless Germans/ Anglo-American know-it-alls: the need for American
> academics to "enlighten" Germans first about the merits of New German
> Cinema and now about the legitimacy of popular culture
> 
> Does popular cinema deflect political considerations, historical trauma, 
> and distort or misrepresent German identity, as some critics contend?  
> To what extent do filmmakers like Fassbinder, Ottinger, Treut and von 
> Praunheim combine politics with pleasurable viewing?  What is gained or 
> lost in recent "queer" films such as Der bewegte Mann and Echte Kerle?  
> Do German popular films open up contradictory definitions of the popular 
> as sell-out, product of power relations, corrupting threat to society, 
> site of opposition, play, an authentic register of desires, etc.?
> 
> Women and the Popular
> 
> - the absence, devaluation, or demonization of women in film histories
> which write out the popular: Thea von Harbou as fascist tool vs. Fritz 
> Lang as one of Weimar's greatest directors; Leni Riefenstahl: beauty 
> freak or still fascist after all these years?; Hildegard Knef as both 
> cinematic sinner, real-life pariah and ever-popular talk show guest; 
> Katja Rieman as role model; Superweib films in relation to a purportedly 
> compromised German feminism of the 1990s; the role of women like Dorris 
> Doerrie and Katja von Garnier in the rise of German comedies
> 
> We invite analysis of any of the above considerations, particularly via 
> close readings of  popular, entertaining and successful German films 
> across the historical spectrum: mountain films, Heimat films, Blood and 
> Soil films, porno, musicals, comedies, animated films, children's films
> 
> Deadline for abstracts: June 1st
> 
> Deadline for finished papers: December 1st
> 
> Send to:
> Randall Halle
> Department of Modern Languages and Cultures
> University of Rochester
> Rochester, NY  14627
> USA
> [log in to unmask]
> 
> Margaret McCarthy
> Department of German and Russian
> Davidson College
> Davidson, NC  28036
> USA
> [log in to unmask]
> 


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