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CInema of Crisis
240-002 | CCN: 25133
4 Units
M 1:00-4:00pm; M 4:00-6:00pm, Dwinelle 226
The seminar looks at German cinema between 1929 and 1934 through the lens of philosophical writings about crisis — economic, political, and cultural. We will analyze selected films from the pivotal years before and after the ascent of Hitler and ask how culture registered the gradual transition from a democratic to an autocratic system of government. Our interrogation will also address larger conceptual questions, such as the entanglement of aesthetics and politics, modernity and myth, proletariat and populism, as well as the very definition of crisis and state of exception. In addition, we will examine the media-technological shift from silent to sound cinema and radio. We will screen films by Bert Brecht, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Max Ophüls, Leni Riefenstahl, and lesser-known documentary and avant-garde works. Most importantly, we will discuss critical interventions by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt, as well as retrospective readings of the period by Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, and Jürgen Habermas.