The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism

ISBN-13: 9780231170734 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 280 str.

Hermann Kappelhoff

Opis

Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodovar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society.

Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of "thinking in images" to his analysis of films and incorporates the approaches of Jacques Ranciere and Richard Rorty, who see politics in the permanent reconfiguration of poetic forms. This enables him to conceptualize film as a medium that continually renews the audiovisual spaces and temporalities through which audiences confront reality. Revitalizing the reading of films by Visconti, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Friedkin, and others, Kappelhoff affirms cinema's historical significance while discovering its engagement with politics as a realm of experience.

Recenzje

"Kappelhoff distinguishes himself as an astute analytical thinker, and as a film theorist who plies the history of the medium and of its shifting interpretations for the underlying implications about the big" questions that animate the humanities." Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan

O autorze

Hermann Kappelhoff is a professor in the Department for Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit, a major study on the cinematic melodrama as a paradigm of artificial emotions.