Freie Universität Berlin, DFG-Collaborative Research Centre 626 "Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits": 2007–2010

At the beginning of Western European cinema (1945–1990), there was the expectation that an aesthetic mode of experience was tangible in the cinematic medium, that would make a new political culture possible under the condition of social disintegration; at the end, in the reunified Europe, films are characterized by the “politics of aesthetics”, in which just this expectation towards the cinema articulates itself once again. The project explored the question, which understanding of the aesthetic experience of film had emerged from the discourse of Western European cinema, and in which sense this experience had been understood as political.
The subproject investigated the historical expressions of various concepts of an aesthetic experience mode of the cinema. The question of the “politics of aesthetics” functioned as a heuristic perspective on the research object. It presupposed that the poetics of individual films and genres can be conceptualized as historically specific reflections of the experience form of cinematographic images and can be distinguished by their relation to the political. From this perspective, “Western European post-war cinema” presented itself as an exemplary historical field of research. This field could be characterized on the one hand by the break with the avant-garde concepts of aesthetic experience of the European pre-war cinema, and on the other, by the engagement with new media-based practices of societal integration, in which the relations between the aesthetic and political (worlds of) experience moved to the center: the engagement with US-American entertainment culture.

Staff:

Research Assistants:

Ilka Brombach, M.A. / Dr. Bernhard Groß / Matthias Grotkopp, M.A. / Dr. Daniel Illger / Dr. Anja Streiter

Student Assistants:

Christian Lippe

Project Publications:

Brombach, Ilka; Setton, Dirk; Temesvári, Cornelia: „Ästhetisierung“. Der Streit um das Ästhetische in Politik, Religion und Erkenntnis. Einleitung. Zürich/Berlin 2010, pp.1–10.
Kappelhoff, Hermann; Groß, Bernhard; Illger, Daniel: Demokratisierung der Wahrnehmung? Das westeuropäische Nachkriegskino, Berlin 2010.
Illger, Daniel: Heim-Suchungen. Stadt und Geschichtlichkeit im italienischen Nachkriegskino, Berlin 2009.
Kappelhoff, Hermann: Realismus. Das Kino und die Politik des Ästhetischen, Berlin 2008.
Kappelhoff, Hermann; Illger, Daniel: Film-Konzepte, Heft 9: Almodóvar, München 2008.
Groß, Bernhard: Selbstmord im Film: Variationen eines Topos im westlichen Kino nach 1945. In: Suizidalität im Film, edited by Arno Herberth u.a., Wien 2008, pp.121–131.
Groß, Bernhard: Figur und Wahrnehmung, Zur Genealogie des Bildraums bei Pier Paolo Pasolini. In: Das goldene Zeitalter des italienischen Films. Die 1960er Jahre, edited by Thomas Koebner und Irmbert Schenk, München 2008, pp. 227–240.

Events:

Workshop 'Die Politik des Ästhetischen: Die Filme Almodóvars', 09.03.2007 – 11.03.2007
Workshop 'Das westeuropäische Nachkriegskino', 04.07.2008 – 05.07.2008
Workshop 'Der Hollywood Kriegsfilm', 08.12.2007 – 09.12.2007