In addition, the filmmakers refuse to provide any consistent narrative or spatial frameworks that could sustain an illusion of reality. All the films in question undercut the paradigm of realism by self-reflexively staging their own production as cultural products. On the basis of his theoretical explorations Wenzel emphasizes the specific achievements of the experimental films of the New German Cinema. In addition to the reality effect common to all 'realistic' films, the very historicity of the subject matter conveys the impression that the past universe depicted on the screen is unalterable because it is both real and passé (pp. In the case of conventional historical documentaries and historical feature films, the viewers are even further removed from any critical engagement with the form and content of that coverage. The intuitively compelling and one-dimensional narrative universes that unfold on the movie and television screens provide pleasurable illusions of coherence and systematically prevent the audience from calling into question the powerful cultural codes that sustain them (119 and passim). Based on rigid subject-object relations, narrative consistency, and continuity editing most products of the culture industry present a seemingly transparent and authentic reflection of the world, which is inherently conservative in nature. In the process of forging his analytical tools, Wenzel provides a lucid critique of literary and filmic realism, exposing the limits of the paradigm and highlighting the price we have to pay for our uncritical identification with the conventions of the ideology of the real. Thus, the author engages with the works of Käte Hamburger and Michail Bachtin Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christain Metz, and Hartmut Winckler Hayden White, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann, to mention just his most important theoretical reference points. Wenzel's methodological arsenal integrates literary theory with structuralist and poststructuralist film theory, historiography, and collective memory studies. The second book contained in "Gedächtnisraum Film," which could easily stand on its own, offers an ambitious, wide-ranging, yet consistent theory of cultural production that introduces the theoretical tools to appreciate the experimental space defined by above films (chapters II, III, and V). The productions in question are, in this sequence, Jean-Marie Straub's and Danielle Huillet's "Machorka Muff," Straub's and Huillet's "Nicht versöhnt oder es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht," Alexander Kluge's "Abschied von gestern (Anita G.)," Straub's and Huillet's "Geschichtsunterricht," Harun Farocki's "Zwischen zwei Kriegen," the compilation film "Deutschland im Herbst," Kluge's "Die Patriotin," Hartmut Bitomsky's and Heiner Mühlenbrock's "Deutschlandbilder," and Jean-Luc Godard's "Allemagne 90 Neuf Zero." The list of films, which were originally released between 19, shows that Wenzel has taken on some of the most complex and difficult films to emerge from the New German Cinema and very appropriately related them to Godard's similarly overdetermined, post-unification ruminations about Germany's past and present. The first provides a close reading of nine avant-garde films, which avoid the conventions of cinematic realism and open new perspectives of historical reflection in film (chapters I, IV, and VI). In fact, "Gedächtnisraum Film" contains two books under one cover. Eike Wenzel's project is more ambitious and more specific. "Gedächtnisraum Film" does not provide a general survey of the representation of German history in feature films since the 1960s, as the reader might assume from the title. Gedchtnisraum Film: Die Arbeit an der deutschen Geschichte in Filmen seit den sechziger Jahren. The Avant-Garde in the Trenches of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: German History in the Experimental Films of the New German CinemaĮike Wenzel.
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