An Aesthetics of Prolepsis

In Germany, Kluge is regarded both as a major filmmaker and as a major social theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. His films center upon the question of memory and history. For Kluge, the memory of any given situation is multiform, and the situation in space and time of its many forms is the result of perspectives in the present. To put this in another way, memory has a history, or, more precisely, histories.This does not mean that the relationship between history and memory is, or should be, balanced or stable. In Kluge’s work, the tension or outright conflict between history and memory is both necessary and productive.Thus my emphasis with regard to Kluge’s films is to locate "a break in the ancient bond of identity," a break in the equilibrium of memory and history.The basis of Kluge’s critical formulation of what is lacking in German history is the intertwining of memory with history, archive, documentary, and fiction and its subsequent regression to the problem of identity.This “lack” must be thought of in terms of what it is to have a positive identity of the German people. Published in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media Inc., 2002), pp. 383-401.

eSharp

This paper explores the current popularity of memory studies in academia, by looking specifically at the basis of the methodology by illustrating key theorists such as Maurice Halbwachs and his theory of collective memory and Pierre Nora’s Sites of Memory. These theories are then applied specifically to the portrayal of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in art, film and literature. The left-wing terrorism of the RAF developed out of the West German student protest movement of 1968 and holds a controversial place in the cultural and political memory of Germany today. In a 1971 survey by the Allensbach Institute, 5 per cent of the West German population said that they would harbour a member of the RAF overnight, which goes some way in illustrating the popularity of the movement. After the trial and (contested) suicide of the core members of the gang, this period holds a particular significance in the memory of the Left in Germany. At the time, as well as in recent decades, many films and novels have been created in order to contextualise the events and to ratify the conflict between supporting the ideology of the group, whilst condoning their terrorist methods. Gerhard Richter painted and exhibited October 18, 1977 in 1988-89, which questioned the portrayal of the RAF in the media as well as the issues of nostalgia, memory and cultural manipulation of historical events. This paper discusses the theories of memory and their manifestation in works of art as well as evaluating the use of a methodology of memory for critical analyse of particular events in history.

Studies in European Cinema, 2018

2015

Author(s): Allred, Mason Kamana | Advisor(s): Kaes, Anton | Abstract: This study shows how historical film confronted popular memory and the dominant sense of history, to deconstruct and supplant these modes, resulting in a media revolution for historical transmission and experience. With its inherent potential and oft-lamented drawbacks, I argue that film came to shape a primary regime of historicity, one that made history internationally shared, primarily imagistic rather than narrative, explicitly constructed and a sensory experience specifically for embodied viewers. In order to closely analyze this emergence of cinematic historicity I turn to symptomatic contemporary developments that expose the power of cinema on historical thought and writing. The project begins by tracing historical film's pedagogical inflection, first in its international context as a connective force for peace and understanding and then by focusing in on the potential of historical film in Weimar class...

In a historical situation characterised by crisis, wars and widespread protests the question of the relationship between past Left-revolutionary endeavours and present political challenges is of utmost importance for the possibility of mounting an anti-systemic challenge to capitalism. T. J. Clark's essay 'For a Left with No Future' argues that the future-oriented stance of the 19th and 20th Century Left turned the Left into a disastrous dobbel-gänger of capitalist modernity causing havoc and death instead of being a genuine opposition to capitalism. The great refusals have to be replaced with a 'modest' and more 'realistic' approach, Clark argues, enabling the Left to understand the human propensity to violence and therefore engaging in a kind of anti-war activism. This article rejects Clark's analysis and tries to save the revolutionary perspective Clark is trying to get rid of arguing that it is indeed the Left that we have to bury. Juxtaposing Clark's argument with a reading of Michèle Bernstein's 'Victories of the Proletariat' made as part of the 1963 Situationist exhibition 'Destruction of RSG-6' the article attempts to contribute to the re-formulation of a contemporary revolutionary position on the basis of the breakdown of the programmatic Left. keywords Defeat, The Left, Revolution, Avant-garde, T. J. Clark, Situation-ist International

Studies in 20th & 21st century literature, 2007

How might we view the films by the Jewish Austrian filmmaker, Ruth Beckermann through the lens of the prose by the late German writer W.G. Sebald? The archival and, at the same time, haunting prose of Sebald's works such as The Emigrants or Austerlitz bears a close resemblance to the work of memory that Beckermann's films begs us to do. By focusing on particular spaces of remembrance in Beckermann's films in comparison to Sebald's similar practice of intermeshing historical and individual memories, this essay explores how the gendered construction of cultural memory takes place through transcultural encounters with those deemed as Other. Even as locations in Beckermann's films-a living room, the interior of a train passing through Vienna, a cold and sterile exhibit space, or a dream-like landscape-exist in reality, Beckermann's situating of memory in them, creates other, more compelling encounters between the living and the dead. The gendering of memory sites in Beckermann's films creates an alternative to the more elegiac images that are conjured in Sebald's textual and visual spaces of remembrance.

This article surveys an emerging tendency that I call the New Historicist Film, describing certain affinities between recent films and videos that refract themes common to avant-garde cinema, such as personal subjectivity, myth, and the nature of the cinematic experience itself, through the prism of historical narrative. New Historicist Films draw from diverse subjects and seemingly unrelated disciplines in an effort to understand the present through an inquisitive, often oblique examination of the past. Taken together, these films represent a turn from the diaristic, first-person impulse of the avant-garde to the world "out there," as it has been represented in primary documents, literary texts, and historical scholarship. In particular, this essay compares and contrasts the works of four filmmakers — David Gatten, Rebecca Meyers, Deborah Stratman, and Erin Espelie. My intention is to outline some of their shared thematic preoccupations, aesthetic predilections, and formal strategies, as well as provide context for their work in relation to both methodological shifts in historical writing and the history of avant-garde cinema.

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory, it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory. 1

In 1966, aged 21, Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote a play entitled Nur eine Scheibe Brot (Just a Slice of Bread). The play consists of ten scenes and tells the story of a young man, Fricke, who wants to make a film about Auschwitz that does not comply with the official post-war Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) narrative on the events. The main character is afraid of spectacularising and trivialising such a sensitive issue without offering any insights into the causes that made the Holocaust happen. He is more inclined to make a film which acknowledges the limits of representation. Eventually, he succumbs to the temptation to produce an object which is based upon all the conventional, emotional clichés that one can identify in contemporary films on the subject; not surprisingly he receives public praise and a number of Federal prizes. Fassbinder's play proleptically addresses some of the key points raised later by Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel, who reacted against the "trivialisation of memory" in mainstream cinema's portrayals of the concentration camps. 2 David Barnett has brilliantly captured the complexity of the play: