GERM / CUST 3300German Culture through

Film

GERM/CUST 3300COURSE DESCRIPTION

Students will view subtitled German films and read excerpts in translation from works of Germanic historiography, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, which highlight key issues in the cultural history of the German-speaking countries. They will then apply critical reading, viewing, and writing strategies as they examine and evaluate the central concepts and themes used to organize Germanic cultural history, as well as the ways in which textual and visual media create, enforce, and challenge these assumptions.

This is both a history and film course. If you are interested in either, but especially if you are interested in both, you will find this both an interesting and rewarding experience. Please continue through this slide show, which highlights just some of the films and themes we’ll be examining in GERM/CUST 3300.

“In the real cinema, every object and every light means something,as in a dream.” --Frederico Fellini

Critical film analysis. The murderer framed by knives.M, 1931.

Germanic cinema: a long and proud history of innovation.

Cinematic technique.The sun rises, the vampire dissolves. Nosferatu, 1922.

German cinema and the German collective psyche: From Caligari to Hitler?

Dr. Caligari and his somnambulist, Caesar, who murdersat his bequest. Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, 1919.

German cinema / Germanic history / Germanic mythology / Germanic literature: relationships?

Siegfried: man, myth, legend? Siegfried as knight and poet. Niebelungenlied, 1924.

German cinema and intertextuality.

Siegfried slays the dragon, Niebelungenlied, 1924. The medieval epic, Wagnerian opera, and the fate of Achilles?

Riefenstahl: the question of propaganda versus art.

Mass fascist salute forms geometric pattern, Triumphof the Will, 1936.

Triumph of the Will, 1936.

Star Wars, 1977.

Intertext and influence: Star Wars borrowedFrom Nazi propaganda?

Germanic cinema and race, gender, ethnicity, and class.

Nosferatu, 1922: the Jewish,homosexual, eastern threat?

Colonel Redl, 1985. the Jewish homosexual & late Austria-Hungary?

New German Cinema 1: Fassbinder chronicles the excesses of the BRD.

Post-war prosperity? The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978.

New German Cinema 2: German politics in the 70s.

Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, 1979: will the real terrorists please stand up?

New German Cinema 3: the uncompromising vision of Werner Herzog.

Adrift on the Amazon (literally), Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre searches vainly for El Dorado, and drifts towards madness: Aquirre: Wrath of God, 1972.

Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "auditory clairvoyant babies", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself". --quote from Grass novel

Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of TheTin Drum: literary Adaptation, moral panic, and “the GünterGrass affair.”

Wim Wenders: Magical Realism in 80s Berlin.

Damiel atop the Berlinskyline …

… and walking along the Berlin wall.

Before and after the angel becomes human in Wings of Desire, 1987.

Austere formalism and critical engagement: Michael Haneke.

Benny filming himself filming himself, Benny’s Video, 1992.

“My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator.”

Goodbye Lenin, 2004:the fall of the wall,‘Ostalgie’ and the arrivalof Burgerking in Berlin.

Representing Hitler 1: humanizing a monster?

Hitler with Eva Braun and Albert Speer. Downfall, 2004.

Representing Hitler 2: is it okayto laugh at the Führer?

Saluting in the bath …

… and play fighting in the Chancellery.

Helge Schneider in Mein Führer, 2007.

I will be updating this introduction over the coming weeks, so lookfor more images, notes, and a course syllabus to appear soon.

www.kwantlen.ca/modernlanguagesjason.lieblang@kwantlen.ca