Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema

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by Olivia Landry

Type: Studies
Subject: Countries > Germany
Keywords: Germany, Berlin School, movement
Publishing date: 2019
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Collection: New Directions in National Cinemas
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 226 pages
5 ¾ x 9 inches (14.5 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-253-03802-9

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Book Presentation:
Through a study of the contemporary German film movement the Berlin School, Olivia Landry examines how narrative film has responded to our highly digitalized and mediatized age, not with a focus on stasis and realism, but by turning back to movement, spectacle, and performance. She argues that a preoccupation with presence, liveness, and affect—all of which are viewed as critical components of live performance—can be found in many of the films of the Berlin School. Challenging the perception that the Berlin School is a sheer adherent of "slow cinema," Landry closely analyzes the use of movement, dynamism, presence, and speed in a broad selection of films to show how filmmakers such as Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Thomas Arslan, and Christoph Hochhäusler invoke the pulse of the kinesthetic and the tangibly affective. Her analysis draws on an array of film theories from early materialism to body theories, phenomenology, and contemporary affect theories. Arguing that these theories readily and energetically forge a path from film to performance, Landry traces a trajectory between the two through which live experience, presence, spectacle, intersubjectivity, and the body in motion emerge and powerfully intersect. Ultimately, Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema expands the methodological and disciplinary boundaries of film studies by offering new ways of articulating and understanding movement in cinema.

About the Author:
Olivia Landry is Assistant Professor of German at Lehigh University.

Press Reviews:
"A new take on the cinema of the Berlin School that argues successfully against the rubric of 'slow cinema' as applicable to this school.
"
-Brigitte Peucker, author of The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film

"
[This work] opens up new perspectives on how contemporary cinema employs movement and sensation to produce a new mode of embodied spectatorship.
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-Roger F. Cook, editor (with Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad Prager) of Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema

"
If you think you know what Berlin School cinema is, Olivia Landry's scholarship brings an important critical turn to the canon of films. Beyond her theoretically informed and clearly written discussions of the Berlin School, Landry deftly weaves film, performance, and affect studies, making whole cloth for future scholarship.
"
-Randall Halle, author of The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities

"Landry's book should be of great interest to both scholars of German film history and those who are invested in thinking of moving images from a theoretically rigorous perspective as primarily material forces (rather than signs to be interpreted) that can effect change in viewers' apperceptions and thus intervene in the world."
-GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

"The book is a rich and welcome addition to the surge of scholarly interest in the Berlin School (and spends refreshingly little time on questions of its label). Landry not only challenges dominant approaches to Berlin School aesthetics, but also moves beyond frames of national cinema and/or neoliberalism to focus on productive collisions of theory and film. . . . Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema is an essential reading for understanding the aesthetics and spectatorship of this contemporary film movement and its resonances across global art cinema. Theoretically capacious and incisive, Landry's book is a vital contribution to thinking the (mobile) body onscreen and its turn to performance studies illuminates compelling new directions for film theory."
-Hannah Pavek, Studies in European Cinema

"Landry's often breathless and exhilarating prose gives form to the motion and vitality she finds in these contemporary films. The book's style makes it a pleasure to read." -Hester Baer, Monatshefte