National Cinema in the Netflix Era

Panel: National Cinema in the Netflix Era

This special program took place on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020 at 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

Recap by Kumars Salehi of the Multicultural Germany Project

Join Us:
On Facebook Live
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This special panel marks the release of The German Cinema Book (2nd Edition), published by the British Film Institute in April 2020. The panel will feature brief statements by three of the book’s editors, highlighting transnational connections and acts of diversity, counter-cinema and feminist interventions, and the rediscovery of East German cinema as the other German cinema. Along with the respondent, the speakers will make the case that cinema history matters, focusing on production, public reception, and cultural politics. The global pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital education and entertainment, but far from everything is streaming online. What does national cinema mean when on-demand television circulates locations to global audiences in serialized and subtitled fashion? Uneven exhibition, limitations of digital availability, and over-saturation of viewers in navigating a plethora of ever new platforms are topics that demand attention. From archives to rediscoveries, the public viewing experiences at festivals continue to be crucial for the appreciation, contextualization, and remediation of audiovisual culture flickering across our screens.

Main Photograph: Sibel Kekilli in Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand / Head-On (2004), winner of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival.

In Memoriam Birol Ünel (18 August 1961 – 3 September 2020)

Moderator: 
Jaimey Fisher (University of California, Davis)

Editors of German Cinema Book: 
Erica Carter (King’s College London)
Deniz Göktürk (University of California, Berkeley)
Claudia Sandberg (University of Melbourne)

Respondent:
J. Hoberman (Film Critic)

Panelists

Erica Carter

Erica Carter is Professor of German and Film Studies at King’s College, London, Associate Member of the Cinepoetics Center for Advanced Film Studies, Berlin, and founding Chair of the UK German Screen Studies Network. As co-editor of the BFI German Cinema Book (2nd edition 2019), she contributed chapters on transnational stars and (with Claudia Sandberg) on women’s cinema. Other publications include the co-edited German Division as Shared Experience (2019); Béla Balázs. Early Film Theory (2010); Dietrich’s Ghosts; The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (2004). She is currently researching colonial cinema and the racial ‘distribution of the sensible’ for a forthcoming Cinepoetics volume, Mapping the Sensible: Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking.

Jaimey Fisher

Jaimey Fisher teaches at University of California, Davis, where he is professor of German and Cinema & Digital Media as well as the director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute. He is the author of Treme, Christian Petzold, and Disciplining German: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War. He has also been editor or co-editor of seven volumes, including The Berlin School and its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema; Generic Histories of German Cinema: Genre and its Deviations; and Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects. His current book-project analyzes war films in Germany from 1914-1961.

Deniz Göktürk

Deniz Göktürk is a professor of German studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research in cinema, media and culture focuses on moving images, multilingual literature, and theories of migration in a global horizon. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (2002, 2020); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005 (2007); Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (2011); Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (2010); Komik der Integration: Grenzpraktiken und Identifikationen des Sozialen (2019). Her book Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders is forthcoming. She is co-founder of the Multicultural Germany Project and concept coordinator of the electronic journal TRANSIT.

J. Hoberman

J. Hoberman is a culture critic and film historian based in New York. He teaches at Columbia University and recently completed a trilogy of books on Hollywood and the Cold War. Other books include The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism, On Flaming Creatures and Other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc, and Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? For 33 years, he was a film critic at The Village Voice.

Claudia Sandberg

Claudia Sandberg is a film historian and filmmaker. She is employed at the University of Melbourne as Senior Research and Teaching Fellow. Her research interests include migration and mobility in European and Latin American film, Cold War memory and archives. She made the documentary Hidden Films. A Journey between Exile and Memory (2016) together with Alejandro Areal Vélez. Sandberg co-edited the volume Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Resisting Neoliberalism? (2018), and The German Cinema Book (2nd edition, 2020). Her journal articles appeared in Screenworks, Filmblatt, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. The monograph Peter Lilienthal. A Cinema of Exile and Resistance will appear with Berghahn Books in 2021.

Image copyright of Sibel Kekilli from “Head-On”: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo

Outreach Partners:

• German Screen Studies Network
• University of California, Berkeley – Department of German
• Cinepoetics at Freie Universität Berlin