Freie Universität Berlin, Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion”: 2011–2016

The project investigated the aesthetic strategies of emotionalization from a historical perspective through the example of the Hollywood war film and its interrelationship with war news reports and propaganda in other audiovisual media.
The central question was: which role do the genre cinema’s staging strategies and aesthetic modes of representation play for the information media or, respectively, which function does the interrelationship of war films and war reporting in audiovisual media serve?
The hypothesis was that the war film genre’s aesthetic modes of representation are effective in all areas of audiovisual war representation with regard to the organization of a sense of community. The project’s aim was to examine through film-analytically based comparative studies whether the dynamics of a documentary and a fictional representation of war constitute a coherent image circulation in audiovisual media. It was also to be investigated, as to how this staging process can be qualified as an economy of affect constitutively shaped by media-based forms of presentation. That means as a mediality of communal experience, and and to what extent this can be described in media-historical and media-theoretical terms as the organization of communal bonds.

Staff:

David Gaertner, M.A.
Tobias Haupts, M.A.
Cilli Pogodda, M.A.
Eileen Rositzka, M.A.

Student Assistants:

 Hanno Berger
Sinan Ertugrul
Dorothea Linneweber

Project Publications:

Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner, Cilli Pogodda (eds.): Mobilisierung der Sinne. Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie. Verlag Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2013.