German Cinema

Ce séminaire de recherche part de la volonté d’interroger le rapport au temps historique dans le cinéma contemporain et dans le cinéma de la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle. Nous nous proposons de travailler cette question à partir de corpus variés (cinématographies de diverses périodes et régions). Les années 1960 apparaissent comme une périodisation cohérente car c’est une époque de nouvelles vagues dans le monde mais également d’un véritable renouveau aussi bien esthétique, que narratif, thématique et formel. En empruntant la terminologie de François Hartog, nous nous proposons donc d’interroger les régimes d’historicité dans le cinéma et la mutation des formes et des thématiques au cours des décennies, ainsi que la circulation des images et des figures entre des périodes en apparence éloignées, voire antinomiques.
Nous nous intéressons tout particulièrement à des moments de crise de temps qui marquent et interrogent le rapport au temps et à l'Histoire dans de nombreuses filmographies durant des périodes de bouleversements sociopolitiques, ainsi qu’à l’idée de trace du passé dans ses multiples formes (thématiques, esthétiques, narratives, formelles). Une attention particulière sera portée à la question de la présence du passé historique dans les films comme la forme d'une construction ou d'une reconstruction. Enfin, nous interrogerons la manière dont ces régimes d’historicité et l’histoire des représentations qu’ils produisent, permettent de penser une histoire du cinéma travaillée autant par les continuités et les héritages que par les ruptures. Le terme même de la contemporanéité et des « cinémas contemporains » sera repensé et interrogé au prisme de leur ancrage dans la mémoire, la dyschronie et le principe de déphasage temporel comme mode opératoire.

The emphasis on the mix of facts and inventions has prevailed in the studies about Bavarian director Werner Herzog's treatment of fiction, leading to the same result again and again: for Herzog, poetic truth is more important than factual truth. But how can we go beyond this conclusion? This paper will try to open an alternative path of analysis more adequate to his philosophy of filmmaking, one that works through the detection of visual and narrative motifs in his films, thus searching the impact of Herzog's idea of fiction into his poetics.

In this chapter, I analyze two examples of contemporary German documentary film, in which the working life of office workers and freelancers in Germany after the turn of the millennium is presented. Work Hard Play Hard by Carmen Losmann (2011) and In dir muss brennen by Katharina Pethke (2009) cast their critical gaze upon the construction of middle-class work in the era of late capitalism: as we see here, this is a kind of work that always takes place under conditions of monitoring and self-monitoring. I show how these films critique the working and leisure circumstances of today's middle-class workers, as they are surrounded by the latest and most subtle techniques of surveillance, techniques that lead them to become ever more engaged in the multi-faceted improvement of their own selves. Through self-optimization, and despite the superficial freedom and 'flexibility' represented by late capitalist working conditions, the figures in these films become subjects of a futuristic working model which recruits the working subject as a resource for corporate growth. I argue that one of the most important contributions of these two films is the vision they provide of new, late capitalist codes of conduct. Like the 'distant man' in the post-World War One writing of Helmuth Plessner, who practices codes of conduct that protect him from feeling vulnerable and powerless, the individuals shown in these films made after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 learn to display a ritualized behavior that promises to bring security and even a personal sense of sovereignty through its own forms of ritual and play. But these new codes of conduct secure the ongoing complicity of middle-class workers with their position of insecurity and utter lack of sovereignty, even as their working conditions appear to become more and more flexible and even enjoyable.

R. W. Fassbinder’s cinematic output can be roughly divided into two parts informed by two different sensibilities. There is a Fassbinder, the director of Effi Briest (1974) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), as well as of many other masterpieces dealing with specifically German problems in specifically German historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. These films are social studies and political allegories. As such, they constitute a famous cinematic counterpart to Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s investigation about the Germany of the economic miracle with its inability to mourn, first published in West Germany in 1967.
But alongside Fassbinder the sociologist, there is also Fassbinder the psychologist, whose concern is the power dynamics underlying human relationships in general. This Fassbinder focuses on the irrational drives of (self-)destructiveness and the desire for domination and submission as anthropological givens, which do not coincide strictly with social roles and hierarchies but inhabit the blurry realm of sexuality with its Freudian, mythical dimension. This article explores Fassbinder's depictions of power relations which are closer in sensibility to the understanding of power dynamics in the French accounts of dominance, exemplified by Bataille, Genet and Foucault, through an examination of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Querelle (1982).

The article seeks to trace the comparatively less known aspect of Himanshu Rai's life, his German ex-wife Mary and their daughter. How Himanshu's grandchildren from that marriage came to hold the key documents of Bombay Talkies now, has been known before. However I try to situate the story in historical context and consult memoirs of Niranjan Pal and Madhu Bose for further inputs hitherto unused in this particular affair.