Forum: German Film Studies

The forum section in this issue focuses on German film and is presented here as a snapshot of the state of German film studies in the Anglo-American context. It follows papers from a 2012 GSA panel about the Dreileben project put together by Christina Gerhardt and includes a version of the talk on "Art Cinema Now" given by Lutz Koepnick at the 2013 MLA and 2103 SCMS conferences; both are supplemented by my own, more general remarks on the field.

• Contemporary German Film Studies in Ten Points
• Sabine Hake

German film studies has seen a remarkable growth over the past three decades, a growth that can be measured by the number of scholarly publications and presentations at conferences, and that is most obvious in the full integration of film in the teaching and research agenda of German departments in North America and Great Britain. Moreover, German film studies continues to expand and redefine its field and mode of inquiry. In the last years, scholars have turned attention to film sound and space and explored the intersections with music, architecture, and television. Some have remapped German film as a hyphenated or transnational cinema, and some have introduced philosophical and aesthetic questions. Others have shifted attention to documentary and experimental formats, and yet others returned attention to questions of authorship, genre, and film form.

However, the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts. In spite of the impressive quantity and indisputable quality of current scholarship, the field remains beholden to its disciplinary origins in Germanistik and exhibits signs of what I would describe as growing narrowness, conformity, and insularity. These problems are not unique to German film studies and can also be found in its French and Italian equivalents. But because of a stronger commitment to the project of cultural studies, German film studies is also uniquely positioned to respond to the challenges of studying a national cinema in the shifting terrain marked by contemporary media and/or screen studies and to develop a program of (inter)disciplinary inquiry that is at once rigorous and speculative, expansive and thorough, and equally committed to film history and theory.

My comments may be read as a follow-up to Anton Kaes's "German Cultural History and the Study of Film: Ten Theses and a Postscript," published in New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): 47-58. This piece was published after the demise of New German cinema as the prototypical art cinema that, together with Weimar cinema, established German film studies as an academic discipline during the 1970s. These genealogies, in turn, are inseparable from the debate about film and literature in the emerging field of German studies more generally, the great significance of Siegfried Kracauer in providing a model of film history as cultural history, and the hopes attached to other theoretical paradigms (at the time: Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Stephen Greenblatt) in sustaining this critical momentum through inspiration from other disciplines. Just as New German cinema served as a reference point for many of the questions outlined by Kaes, the intense interest in the Berlin School today speaks to productive continuities in the attention to German film as art film, though not necessarily in the sense meant by Koepnick.

In this larger context, rereading Kaes's piece means recognizing the yet unfulfilled promise of active engagement with—that is, not merely selective appropriation of—new research areas and methodologies in film and media studies and beyond. As the following ten points suggest, these promises can only be realized through the kind of theoretically and historically informed work on film/cinema that is cognizant of its dual status as art and commodity, text and event, aware of the constitutive tensions between image and sound, narrative and spectacle, informed by the dynamics of the national, international, and transnational as mutually constitutive categories, and attentive to the profound effects of media convergence, whether in the context of inter- and multimediality or as part of new screen media and digital technologies.

1. Despite legitimate concerns about the shortcomings of national cinema as a critical category, German film studies continues to be defined by the...