Think Images!
Film Analysis as a Cultural Theoretical Concept
Whether in history or literary studies, the social sciences or cultural studies: the exploration of audiovisual realms has for some time now moved to the center of attention in all realms of the study of human life. Whether occupied with questions of politics or social life, art or entertainment, any understanding of our way of life seems to require an understanding of modes of staging audiovisual images.
This is what characterizes the realm in which media studies finds itself today when dealing with methods of analyzing audiovisual images. As much as these methods are fed by exploring expressive forms typical of audiovisual art and entertainment, they mark a fundamental instrument of theoretical thought in a world shaped by the audiovisual image. From this perspective, an engagement with newer and older forms of both art film and the mainstream cinema represents the nucleus of an increasingly complex understanding for thinking in images.
Hermann Kappelhoff is professor for film and media history and the theory of media at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2008, he began directing the project “The Mobilization of Emotions and the Staging of War by the Media” (Cluster of Excellence, “Languages of Emotion”), and since 2007 he has been directing the project “Die Politik des Ästhetischen im westeuropäischen Kino” as part of the SFB “Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste.”
Select publications include: Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit (Berlin 2004); Blick Macht Gesicht (ed. with Bernhard Groß, Helga Gläser, Berlin 2001); Realismus: Die Politik des Ästhetischen und das Kino (Berlin 2008).
Sunday | Jan. 18 | 11:15 am
