Angelos Koutsourakis | University of Leeds (original) (raw)

Books by Angelos Koutsourakis

This file contains the table of contents and introduction of my new book Kafkaesque Cinema, which... more This file contains the table of contents and introduction of my new book Kafkaesque Cinema, which has just been published by Edinburgh University Press.

About the Book:
For all its familiarity as a widely used term, “Kafkaesque cinema” remains an often-baffling concept that is poorly understood by film scholars. Taking a cue from Jorge Luis Borges’ point that Kafka has modified our conception of past and future artists, and André Bazin’s suggestion that literary concepts and styles can exceed authors and “novels from which they emanate”, this monograph proposes a comprehensive examination of Kafkaesque Cinema in order to understand it as part of a transnational cinematic tradition rooted in Kafka’s critique of modernity, which, however, extends beyond the Bohemian author’s work and his historical experiences.

More info here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-kafkaesque...

There is also a launch discount code (at checkout use NEW30) that to my knowledge even university libraries can use.

Cinema of Crisis Film and Contemporary Europe, 2020

This file contains the table of contents and the introduction to our co-edited book Cinema of Cri... more This file contains the table of contents and the introduction to our co-edited book Cinema of Crisis Film and Contemporary Europe.

Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe explores the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking across a continent in flux. This urgent and necessary collection brings together scholars from Spain to Estonia, Hungary to Britain, in order to trace European filmmakers’ diverse responses to the interlinked upheavals and emergencies of the past three decades. Covering topics such as the collapse of the eastern bloc; deindustrialisation; the 2008 crash and the eurozone debt crisis; austerity and neoliberalism, as well as ‘Fortress Europe’ and the ‘refugee crisis’, this book investigates a range of audiovisual forms, including documentaries, the work of arthouse auteurs, and videos posted on YouTube. It engages in highly topical debates in political and aesthetic spheres, and explores key interfaces between the two.

Making a compelling argument for the continuing relevance of Brechtian film theory and cinema, th... more Making a compelling argument for the continuing relevance of Brechtian film theory and cinema, this book offers new research and analysis of Brecht the film and media theorist, placing his scattered writings on the subject within the lively film theory debates that took place in Europe between the 1920s‐1960s. Furthermore, Angelos Koutsourakis identifies key points of convergence between Brecht’s ‘unfinished project’ and contemporary film and media theory. With case studies of films ranging from Robert Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà to Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing amongst others, this study challenges many existing preconceptions about Brecht’s theoretical position and invites readers to discover new ways of apprehending and making use of Brecht in film studies.

Reviews:
Brecht's experiences with film were not always happy, but the Brechtian influence on film and its theory is colossal. Koutsourakis’ book masterfully sets out the wide scope of Brecht's aesthetics, from his 1923 venture with slapstick to the Brechtian footprints in the essay film, Realist and post-Deleuzian cinema theory and contemporary media archaeology.

- Prof Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London

Edinburgh University Press offers 30% when you order direct. If you’re ordering from Europe, Asia, Africa or Oceania, please visit edinburghuniversitypress.com and enter the discount code NEW30 If you’re ordering from the Americas, visit oup.com/us and use the code ADISTA5

The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is the first critical assessment of one of the leading figures of... more The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is the first critical assessment of one of the leading figures of modernist European art cinema. Assessing his complete works, this groundbreaking collection brings together a team of internationally regarded experts and emerging scholars from multiple disciplines, to provide a definitive account of Angelopoulos’ formal reactions to the historical events that determined life during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Refusing to restrict its approach to the confines of the Greek national film industry, the book approaches his work as representative of modernism more generally, and in particular of the modernist imperative to document its allusive historical objects through artistic innovation.
Retrospective in nature, The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos argues that Angelopoulos’ films are not emblems of a bygone historical and cultural era or abstract exercises in artistic style, but are foreshadowing documents that speak to the political complexities and economic contradictions of the present.

This is the first study that employs a materialist framework to discuss the political implication... more This is the first study that employs a materialist framework to discuss the political implications of form in the films of Lars von Trier. Focusing mainly on early films, Politics as Form in Lars von Trier identifies recurring formal elements in von Trier’s oeuvre and discusses the formal complexity of his films under the rubric of the post-Brechtian. Through an in depth formal analysis, the book shows that Brecht is more important to von Trier’s work than what most critics seem to acknowledge and deems von Trier as a dialectical filmmaker. This study draws on many untranslated resources and features an interview with Lars von Trier, and another one with his mentor – the great Danish director Jørgen Leth

Articles and Chapters by Angelos Koutsourakis

Screen 64:3 (2023), pp.325-333, 2023

The loss of Laura Marcus in September 2021 has affected people across multiple academic communiti... more The loss of Laura Marcus in September 2021 has affected people across
multiple academic communities and diverse fields of study. Many have
mourned her passing as an intellectual force – as ‘Marcus’ the
authoritative scholar of 19th- and 20th-century literature, biographical
writing, feminism and psychoanalysis, whose insights unpacked the
rhythm of modernism in the English language. Yet something else is
evident from the various articles, events and obituaries that
commemorate her, and from the very moving and personal memorial at
New College, where she was a Fellow and Oxford’s Goldsmiths
Professor of English Literature. It is the fact that Laura Marcus inspired
not only great international respect, but also a rare degree of affection.
To the many colleagues to whom she was a friend or a mentor, she
inescapably remains ‘Laura’ as well as ‘Marcus’.
Here, as scholars of cinema, we focus on her work on film, a medium
that she connected with literature but recognized as a cultural life-force
with its own specific energy. Marcus’s work enables us to see not only
the cinematic in modernist literature, but also cinema’s literary
connections and the ‘aesthetic convergence’ – to invoke Andre´ Bazin’s
famous essay ‘In defense of mixed cinema’ – brought about by the
inception of the film medium.1 Bazin argued fervently that cinema’s
emergence led to a dialectical interaction between old and new media.

A commonplace argument among film critics and scholars alike is that Spike Lee’s films do not con... more A commonplace argument among film critics and scholars alike is that
Spike Lee’s films do not conform to the principles of classical Hollywood
narrative. Critics complain that at times his films are characterised by
structural disjointedness and dramatic incoherence. Even commentators
positively predisposed towards his overall oeuvre, such as Roger Ebert
and Adrian Martin, criticise this aspect of his films. In his positive review
of School Daze (1988), Ebert admits that the film ‘has big structural problems
and leaves a lot of loose ends’ (1988). Similarly, Adrian Martin’s
review of Jungle Fever (1991) suggests that Lee’s ‘films are not dramatically
well-constructed in the conventional sense, and nor have they ever
wished to be. They come out of another cultural tradition – one that is
loud, boastful, erratic, performative, obsessed with surface glitz on the one
hand, and the Big Statement on the other’ (Martin 1991). Along similar
lines, Jason P. Vest states that ‘Lee’s juxtaposed style, as such, will appear
jumbled, incoherent, and inartistic to audiences schooled in classical
Hollywood filmmaking’ (Vest 2014, xxx). All the same, Todd McGowan
acknowledges that incoherence is a central feature of Lee’s movies. As he
says, many positive and negative reviews of Jungle Fever drew the same
conclusion – that is, the film looks like ‘a series of disparate narratives
edited together’ (McGowan 2014, 56). Lee himself has not denied the
fact that loose storylines and interpretive ambiguity are part and parcel
of his aesthetic. As he says, ‘I don’t believe in Hollywood script structure’
(cited in Aftab 2005, 298). Yet, at the same time, the discontinuity of the narrative aside, his films successfully merge entertainment with political
critique. Narrative is not negated in Lee’s cinema but rendered loose, and
this can be understood as a re-appropriation of forms of popular theatricality
that were influential, not only in modernist theatre, but also in
the early days of the medium. In what follows, I will discuss the popular
theatricality of Lee’s cinema in reference to four films: School Daze, Do the
Right Thing (1989), Bamboozled (2000) and Chi-Raq (2015). I suggest
that a discussion of tropes of theatricality in his films can offer a better
understanding of the interconnection between aesthetics and politics in
his work.

Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism: Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics (New York: Camden House, 2024) edited by Claudia Breger, Olivia Landry, 2024

This essay is a reworked version of my discussion of Transit in the last section of an article en... more This essay is a reworked version of my discussion of Transit in the last section of an article entitled, “Kafkaesque Cinema in the Context of Post-fascism,” Modernism/Modernity 30:3 (2023), pp. 449-472.

This Chapter discusses Christian Petzold’s homonymous adaptation of Anna Seghers’ Transit in the context of post-fascism. The source-text of the Jewish, Communist, anti-fascist author engages with questions of forced migration of European refugees in Marseille trying to flee fascism and hoping to find a sanctuary in North and South America. Petzold’s adaptation makes use of anachronism putting the 1944 characters in a setting of contemporary Marseille. He has justified this choice explaining that the film seeks to identify the parallels between the past, the present rising neo-fascism, and the refugee crisis in Europe. Indeed, scholars have recognized the film’s references to the refugee crisis, but nobody has paid attention to the issue of the rising fascism mentioned by the filmmaker. In this paper, I read the film under the rubric of post-fascism so as to rethink its political implications as well as the relevance of the source text in the present. Important interlocutors are the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás and the Italian historian Enzo Traverso, who understand post-fascism as a historical condition that permeates even mainstream politics and perpetuates fascism’s hostility to the Enlightenment.

Modernism/Modernity 30:3, 2023

This article discusses Kafkaesque cinema as a response to historical conditions of post-fascism t... more This article discusses Kafkaesque cinema as a response to historical conditions of post-fascism through the close-reading of three films: Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), Béla Tarr's Werckmeister harmóniák (Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000), and Christian Petzold's Transit (2018). Important interlocutors are the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás and the Italian historian Enzo Traverso; both understand post-fascism as a historical condition that perpetuates fascism's hostility to the Enlightenment, but which, however, permeates even mainstream politics. Drawing on their work, the article shows how the films' Kafkaesque aesthetic and themes invite us to consider the link between post-fascism and the defeat of the radicalized Enlightenment thought.

Screening the Past , 2022

In this paper, I intend to join the scholarly conversation on documentary reenactment going beyon... more In this paper, I intend to join the scholarly conversation on documentary reenactment going beyond the memory studies debates that have become prevalent in the academy in the past three decades. Examining two recent films, Anja Kofmel’s Chris the Swiss (2018) and Radu Jude’s “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018), I am interested in thinking about reenactment as a mode of inquiry and practice that is not just in service of commemorating victims from the past. Instead, I want to look at how reenactment can enable us to recover untold stories from the past with the view to troubling linear approaches to history rooted in the Enlightenment paradigm.

‘Kafkaesque Themes in The Lobster’, in Eddie Falvey (ed), The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos: A Cinema of Apathy (New York Bloomsbury, 2022), 2022

In a 2018 interview with Jonathan Romney, Yorgos Lanthimos acknowledged that he used to be a dedi... more In a 2018 interview with Jonathan Romney, Yorgos Lanthimos acknowledged that he used to be a dedicated reader of the work of Franz Kafka.1 Indeed, Lanthimos’s work is indebted to the Bohemian author both formally and thematically. Key Kafkaesque traits in his oeuvre include deadpan humor, a tragic–comic aesthetic, the critique of liberalism and humans’ compliance with absurd and repressive authority. But it is in his first English-language film, The Lobster, where the Kafkaesque motifs become even more demonstrable. In this chapter, I focus on the Kafkaesque themes in The Lobster; I draw analogies between Kafka’s interest in animality as a route of escape from human alienation and the motif of metamorphosis in the film. My key argument is that the film follows Kafka’s critique of conformity in its caustic satire of the disciplinary forces behind the individual’s desire for amorous relationships. I suggest that whereas in the Bohemian author’s work animality is seen as a liberating path away from human alienation, the characters in The Lobster resist it because they remain vulnerable to the neoliberal narrative of success that values homogeneity and compliance to authority. The fear of animality can therefore be seen as a fear of change, which is indicative of the erasure of political alternatives in the neoliberal present.

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

This essay discusses how two contemporary films, Paranoia 1.0 (Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson... more This essay discusses how two contemporary films, Paranoia 1.0 (Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson: 2004) and The Circle (James Ponsoldt: 2017), portray the normalisation of surveillance capitalism. Coined by Shoshana Zuboff, the term surveillance capitalism describes practices of data extraction and digital behaviourism on the part of corporations aiming to predict but also to shape future consumer and social behaviour. Zuboff and other scholars in surveillance studies have raised the alarm of how these developments undermine individual autonomy, weaken democracy, and run the risk of diminishing people’s capacity to construct and imagine alternative futures. The two films discussed here address these anxieties and concerns highlighting how surveillance and dataveillance lead to the accumulation of personal information on the part of firms, which are keen on accruing people’s private data but keep their own profit-making operations in stealth. My analysis of the films emphasises two fundamental political implications of surveillance capitalism: consumer behaviourism and a novel form of labour alienation related to work monitoring, which can make leisure time indistinguishable from work time.

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , 2021

Studies in epic cinema have flourished in the past decade, but one senses that scholars take the ... more Studies in epic cinema have flourished in the past decade, but one senses that
scholars take the term to be self-explanatory,
without considering its literary
origins and the variety of films that can be placed under the rubric of the
epic. Furthermore, the question of epic style has received less scholarly attention.
In this article, I propose that in order to define epic cinema we need to
look at literary, philosophical, and film theoretical discussions of the epic. In
doing so, we will be able to appreciate that epic cinema is an exceptionally
expansive umbrella term that covers many and diverse film practices, including
films (1) with epic subject matter but not epic style, (2) with epic subject
matter and epic style, (3) with epic style but not epic subject matter, and (4)
films which can be placed under the rubric of the modernist epic.

"Marx and Cinema." in Mark Steven (ed), Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 134-145. , 2021

Classical Marxism embodied a political vision that could complete the un nished Enlightenment pro... more Classical Marxism embodied a political vision that could complete the un nished Enlightenment project and overcome the contradictions of modernity, the tensions between town and country, the proliferation of poverty through the accumulation of wealth, and the simultaneous production of development and underdevelopment. Aesthetic modernism reacted against tradition as well as the division of labor between artists and consumers of art that characterized bourgeois society. In prioritizing the labor of style, modernism necessitates the labor of the reader and audience, challenging the neat separations between art and social life putting forward the idea of "art as material intervention. " 1 e ultimate dream of modernism is its desire to come to terms with the real by refusing its unre ective reproduction. e emergence of cinema as an art form for the masses reliant on collective labor comes at a pertinent time in history when modernism seeks to reclaim art as part and parcel of social life. No other art form at the time was more suited to accomplish such a project, given that cinema was a new art that did not require literacy skills and could thus easily address a mass audience. As Adolf Behne wrote in 1926: "Film is something essentially new. It is the literature of our times. " 2 An art form that becomes synonymous with the new and which can address millions of people irrespective of their educational background would be at the forefront of the Marxist and the modernist projects.

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2020

Kristin Thompson’s influential article “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” (1977) has made a case f... more Kristin Thompson’s influential article “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” (1977) has made a case for thinking about those details in a film that cannot be integrated within the narrative but instead fascinate us through their capacity to estrange us. Yet Thompson understands cinematic excess as something that applies mainly to films outside the classical Hollywood narrative. This has led to a proliferation of essays discussing cinematic excess in films from the world and art cinema canon. While a few scholars have considered the concept with reference to specific Hollywood films, they tend to approach these objects as unique exceptions to the Hollywood canon. Moreover, it is unusual to find excess defined in anything but broad terms and it is rarely discussed in detail with meticulous reference to Roland Barthes’ comments on the Third/obtuse meaning, which was the key starting point in that formative essay. The aim of this essay is to revisit the concept of cinematic excess through a closer engagement with Barthes. In doing so, I intend to offer a range of insights that can enable us to understand that excess is not something solely applicable to art cinema but also pertinent to the study of films from the classical Hollywood tradition.

Film-Philosophy 24(3), pp. 259–283, 2020

Kafka's work has exercised immense influence on cinema and his reflections on diminished human ag... more Kafka's work has exercised immense influence on cinema and his reflections on diminished human agency in modernity and the dominance of oppressive institutions that perpetuate individual or social alienation and political repression have been the subject of debates by philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Alexander Kluge. Informed by a world-systems approach and taking a cue from Jorge Luis Borges' point that Kafka has modified our conception of the future, and André Bazin's suggestion that literary concepts, characters and styles can exceed "novels from which they emanate", I understand the Kafkaesque as an elastic term that can refer to diverse films that might share thematic preoccupations, but also aesthetic and formal differences. In this article, I explore the politics of humour in Kafkaesque cinema with reference to the following films: The Overcoat (Шинель, 1926, Gregor Koznitzev and Leo Trauberg), The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965, Ján Kadár), and Death of a Bureaucrat (La muerte de un burócrata, 1966, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea). I draw attention to the dialectics of humour and the connection between the Kafkaesque and slapstick so as to show how humour is deployed as a means of political critique.

Cultural Politics, 2020

Abstract The publication of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garb... more Abstract The publication of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City, and Death; 1976) constitutes one of the major scandals in German cultural history. The play was accused of being anti-Semitic, because one of its key characters, a real estate speculator, was merely called the Rich Jew. Furthermore, some (negative) dramatis personae in the play openly express anti-Semitic views. When asked to respond, Fassbinder retorted that philo-Semites (in the West Germany of the time) are in fact anti-Semites, because they refuse to see how the victims of oppression can at times assume the roles and positions assigned to them by pernicious social structures. Fassbinder’s vilification on the part of the right-wing press prevented the play’s staging; subsequently, in 1984 and 1985 – 86 two Frankfurt productions were banned due to the reaction on the part of the local Jewish community. A similar controversy sparked off by the film adaptation of the play Shadow of Angels by Daniel Schmid. During the film’s screening at the Cannes Film Festival the Israeli delegation walked out, while there was also rumor of censorship in France. Gilles Deleuze wrote an article for Le Monde titled “The Rich Jew” defending the film and the director. Deleuze’s article triggered a furious reaction from Shoah (1985) director, Claude Lanzmann, who responded in Le Monde and attacked the cultural snobbery and “endemic terrorism” of the left-wing cinephile community. Lanzmann saw the film as wholly anti-Semitic and suggested that it identifies the Jew — all Jews — with money. While the author acknowledges the complexity of the subject, he revisits the debate and the film to unpack its ethical/aesthetic intricacy and propose a pathway that can potentially enable us to think of ways that political incorrectness can function as a means of exposing the persistence of historical and ethical questions that are ostentatiously resolved. He does this by drawing on Alain Badiou’s idea of militant ethics and Jacques Rancière’s
redefinition of critical art as one that produces
dissensus.

Cinema of Crisis Film and Contemporary Europe Edited by Thomas Austin, Angelos Koutsourakis, 2020

The key thesis of this chapter is that there has been a resurgence of modernism in the European c... more The key thesis of this chapter is that there has been a resurgence of modernism in the European cinema of crisis. This revival of a movement that had been declared passé by the majority of contemporary film scholars has to be understood against the backdrop of social crises whose symptoms resemble the crises experienced by modern societies in the first half of the twentieth century. These crises need to be seen in the context of modern societies’ separation between the private and public sphere, as well as their inability to generate conditions of economic/social stability and prosperity on account of their vulnerability to economic shocks and pressures. Henri Lefebvre’s argument formulated in the 1960s that modernity generates more crises in its ‘fruitless attempt to achieve structure and coherence’ (1995: 187) is equally applicable to the contemporary experience of late modernity and neoliberal capitalism. As such, to understand the current crisis in Europe, we need to expand its historical parameters and see it not as the exception, but as a systemic reality that has characterised modern societies since the entrenchment of neoliberalism in the post-1989 world.

In this article, I engage with scholarly debates on cinematic slowness, and argue that slow cinem... more In this article, I engage with scholarly debates on cinematic slowness, and argue that slow cinema’s apparent recuperation of modernism has not been subject to the level of scholarly scrutiny that could reveal the politics of this anachronism. I then clarify the historical significance of slow cinema’s belated style using contemporary films from the World Cinema canon as a lens with which to view the political implications of their modernist belatedness and their recovery of the modernist critique of liberalism. In the second part of the essay I focus on two films – Pedro Costa’s Ossos (1997) and Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (2004) – whose study can expand our understanding of the slow cinema movement as a reactivation of the modernist impulse to encounter the real and to make material realities visible.

Introduction: European Cinema and Post-democracy , 2020

This is the introduction to a special issue of Studies in European Cinema on European cinema and ... more This is the introduction to a special issue of Studies in European Cinema on European cinema and post-democracy, guest edited by me.

You can access it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rseu20/16/3?nav=tocList

Table of Contents:

Angelos Koutsourakis, Introduction: European Cinema and Post-Democracy

Carmina Gustrãn Loscos, Framing the invisible hands. Work, cinema and crisis in La mano invisible (Macián 2016).

Martin O‘Shaughnessy, Beyond language and the subject: machinic enslavement in contemporary European cinema.

Richard Rushton, Chevalier (2015) and the rules of the European game.

James Harvey, Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film.

Thomas Austin, Benefaction, processing, exclusion: documentary representations of refugees and migrants in Fortress Europe.

Dorota Ostrowska, “The migrant gaze” and “the migrant festive chronotope”- programming the refugee crisis at the European human rights and documentary film festivals. The case of the One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (2016).

More info here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-kafkaesque...

There is also a launch discount code (at checkout use NEW30) that to my knowledge even university libraries can use.

Cinema of Crisis Film and Contemporary Europe, 2020

- Prof Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London

Screen 64:3 (2023), pp.325-333, 2023

Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism: Radical Aesthetics, Radical Politics (New York: Camden House, 2024) edited by Claudia Breger, Olivia Landry, 2024

Modernism/Modernity 30:3, 2023

Screening the Past , 2022

‘Kafkaesque Themes in The Lobster’, in Eddie Falvey (ed), The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos: A Cinema of Apathy (New York Bloomsbury, 2022), 2022

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , 2021

"Marx and Cinema." in Mark Steven (ed), Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 134-145. , 2021

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2020

Film-Philosophy 24(3), pp. 259–283, 2020

Cultural Politics, 2020

Cinema of Crisis Film and Contemporary Europe Edited by Thomas Austin, Angelos Koutsourakis, 2020

Introduction: European Cinema and Post-democracy , 2020

You can access it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rseu20/16/3?nav=tocList

Table of Contents:

Angelos Koutsourakis, Introduction: European Cinema and Post-Democracy

Carmina Gustrãn Loscos, Framing the invisible hands. Work, cinema and crisis in La mano invisible (Macián 2016).

Martin O‘Shaughnessy, Beyond language and the subject: machinic enslavement in contemporary European cinema.

Richard Rushton, Chevalier (2015) and the rules of the European game.

James Harvey, Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film.

Thomas Austin, Benefaction, processing, exclusion: documentary representations of refugees and migrants in Fortress Europe.

This chapter discusses four important books published in the field of film theory in 2017. It is ... more This chapter discusses four important books published in the field of film theory in 2017. It is divided into four sections: 1. Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics; 2. Timothy C. Campbell, The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life; 3. Eyal Peretz, The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame; 4. Lucy Fischer, Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History.

This essay is published in a booklet accompanying the DEFA film Library's release of Konrad Wolf'... more This essay is published in a booklet accompanying the DEFA film Library's release of Konrad Wolf's The Naked Man on the
Sports Field.

The ambition of this article is to propose a way of visualizing the Anthropocene dialectically. A... more The ambition of this article is to propose a way of visualizing the Anthropocene dialectically. As suggested by the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the professor of biology Eugene F. Stoermer, the term Anthropocene refers to a historical period in which humankind has turned into a geological force that transforms the natural environment in such a way that it is hard to distinguish between the human and the natural world. Crutzen and Stoermer explain that the Anthropocene has begun after the Holocene, the geological epoch that followed the last ice age and lasted until the industrial revolution. Drawing on a number of figures such as the " tenfold " increase in urbanisation, the extreme transformation of land surface by human action, the use of more than 50 % of all accessible fresh water by humans, and the massive increase in greenhouse emissions, Crutzen and Stoermer conclude that the term Anthropocene describes aptly mankind's influence on ecological and geological cycles (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000, p.17). The wager of this article is that we need to identify ways to visualize the Anthropocene dialectically and I proceed to do so using as a case study Jessica Woodworth's and Peter Brosen's trilogy on the conflict between humans and nature, which consists of Khadak (2006), Altiplano (2009), and The Fifth Season (La Cinquième Saison, 2012).

This chapter discusses work published in the field of film theory in 2016 and is divided into six... more This chapter discusses work published in the field of film theory in 2016
and is divided into six sections: 1. The Promise of Cinema: German Film
Theory, 1907–1933; 2. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema; 3. Roland Barthes’ Cinema; 4. Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film; 5. Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary; 6. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film.