(Freie Universität Berlin, DFG-Collaborative Research Centre 626 "Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits": 2011–2014)

The subproject investigated how the relationship between politics and the modalities of aesthetic experience was conceptualized in Western-European post-war cinema. During its second funding period, the subproject turned towards the effect-aesthetically oriented affect poetics of the genre cinema, which also dominated Western-European post-war cinema.

While the first funding period succeeded in analyzing and describing film-poetic concepts, which can be assigned to the paradigm of the ‘new realisms’ after the Second World War, along the model of a specific cinematographic perception potential as “politics of aesthetics” (Jacques Rancière), the aim was then to position popular genre cinema in relation to this model. Based on the film studies concept, genre cinema was examined as a specific system of entertainment culture that organizes an interplay of different poetics of affect.

From a theoretical point of view, it was important to clarify whether and in which sense these poetics can be understood as aesthetic modalities of experience and how these modalities relate to the pertinent concept of “politics of aesthetics” from the first funding period. Following the concept of “sense of community” (Hannah Arendt), the aim was to investigate  how the primarily effect-aesthetical experience modalities of genres relate to the reflexivity of processes of judgment (subproject 1). In historical terms, the subproject comprised an investigation of West German genre cinema between 1951 and 1962 (subproject 2) and a study about the so-called B-genres in British and Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s (subproject 3). This constellation of subject fields responded to a fundamental desideratum which had become clear through the research results of the first funding period. While the perception-theoretically based poetics of the immediate post-war cinema (1945 to 1952) and the later European auteur cinema (from 1962) had been the research subject there, the previously overlooked flip side of Western European cinema was now taken into consideration and investigated historically as well as poetically.

Staff:

Research Assistants:

Sarah-Mai Dang, M.A.
Dr. Bernhard Groß
Dr. Daniel Illger
Michael Lück, M.A.
Moritz Schumm, M.A.

Student Assistants:

Sinan Ertugrul
Christian Lippe
Jasper Stratil

Events:

Workshop 'Filmfarbe', 26.10.2012 – 27.10.2012

Conference 'Geschmack und Öffentlichkeit', 13.12.2013 – 14.12.2013