Introduction

The task of this special issue is to unearth the often denied logic of neoliberal rationality in Germany over the last few decades by exploring how various literary texts, films, and artistic projects, at the level of both content and formal experimentation, have sought to visualize the ramifications of deregulation and ceaseless self-management. The volume features scholarly work on various literary texts, performances, films, time-based art works, and theoretical interventions that explore the nexus between neoliberalism, new media culture, and the landscapes of temporal experience

Raus aus der Haut : Division and Identity in Current German Cinema

A Report from the 48. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, February 11-22, 1998 Notes 1. Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 1992). For a critical discussion of Schulze\u27s terms, see Axel Honneth, Desintegration: Bruchstücke einer soziologischen Zeitdiagnose (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1995).2. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 70.3. Leslie A. Adelson, Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993) 36

Landscapes of Ice, Snow and Wind: Alexander Kluge’s Aesthetics of Coldness

Discusses the German author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge's exploration of the theme of coldness in film and other works. The authors report on the theorist Theodor Adorno's discussion of the subject in an essay written in 1967, note that Kluge focused on coldness in works in different media created after 2010, and study his approach to the theme in the film 'Landschaften mit eis und schnee' (2010; illus.) noting his treatment of ice in the work. They assess the relationship of Kluge's film to the work of various theorists including Peter Wollen, comment on Kluge's focus on the wind in his films 'The patriot' (1979; illus.), 'Gelegenheitsarbeit einer sklavin' (1973; illus.) and other works, and report on Kluge's use of photographs of snow taken by Gerhard Richter in the book 'December' (2010; illus.) also examining the work's relationship to the films 'Landschaften mit eis und schnee' and 'Zitraffer mit schneetreiben vor meinem balkon, Elizabethstrasse 38(2010; illus.). They refer to Kluge's incorporation of footage from his films into talks given in 2010, and contrast his approach to the theme of coldness with that of Adorno

Creativity and commerce: Michael Klinger and new film history

The crisis in film studies and history concerning their legitimacy and objectives has provoked a reinvigoration of scholarly energy in historical enquiry. 'New film history' attempts to address the concerns of historians and film scholars by working self-reflexively with an expanded range of sources and a wider conception of 'film' as a dynamic set of processes rather than a series of texts. The practice of new film history is here exemplified through a detailed case study of the independent British producer Michael Klinger (active 1961-87) with a specific focus on his unsuccessful attempt to produce a war film, Green Beach, based on a memoir of the Dieppe raid (August 1942). This case study demonstrates the importance of analysing the producer's role in understanding the complexities of film-making, the continual struggle to balance the competing demands of creativity and commerce. In addition, its subject matter - an undercover raid and a Jewish hero - disturbed the dominant myths concerning the Second World War, creating what turned out to be intractable ideological as well as financial problems. The paper concludes that the concerns of film historians need to engage with broader cultural and social histories. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Figures of resonance: Reading at the edges of attention

The introduction of new media has recurrently produced fierce arguments and fears about the future of attention, our ability to attend to meanings, objects, and ideas with care and persistence. In his essay, Koepnick revisits past and present debates about the relation of audiobooks and paper-based texts in order to argue for the need to move beyond worn concepts of aesthetic attentiveness. In Koepnick’s perspective, the mobile listening of audiobooks as much as the roaming passage through contemporary sound installations offer compelling test cases to rethink the very logic that makes us discuss (and often misunderstand) new technologies with old arguments. As it (re)introduces the category of resonance to cognitively centered understandings of reading, Koepnick’s essay explores the pleasures of half-attentive receptivity as a springboard to develop expanded attitudes about attention and aesthetic experience that meet the realities of a world saturated with information technology

The dark mirror: German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood

Lutz Koepnick analyzes the complicated relationship between two cinemas - Hollywood's and Nazi Germany's - in this theoretically and politically incisive study. The Dark Mirror examines the split course of German popular film from the early 1930s until the mid 1950s, showing how Nazi filmmakers appropriated Hollywood conventions and how German film exiles reworked German cultural material in their efforts to find a working base in the Hollywood studio system. Through detailed readings of specific films, Koepnick provides a vivid sense of the give and take between German and American cinema

The Aesthetics and Politics of Slowness:A Conversation

In order to approach the concept of slowness in its relationality, we invited KEVIN HAMILTON and LUTZ KOEPNICK to engage with us in an open conversation to explore where scholarship on the topic is—or should be—headed. While this conversation is the first in which all four of us engage in the topic together, it is also a continuation of a long-term academic exchange that started in 2007 when both KATJA and KEVIN were invited for the final critiques of the MFA student projects of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Digital + Media Department, and—ending up in the same hotel in Providence—took a long walk along the coastline together. When KATJA was asked to participate in a summer school on the topic of "The Arts and the Future" at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich in 2012, she invited KEVIN over to co-teach a class on slowness. KEVIN and KATJA presented and published their thoughts on what they called slow media art at the Media Art Histories conference in Riga in 2013 and at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in 2015.1 As they had been using LUTZ'S book during their conversation, they took the 2017 ASAP/9 conference in Berkeley/Oakland as a chance to organize a panel on slowness.2 In parallel, KATJA approached ERIN with the suggestion to organize an ASAP symposium on the topic of slowness at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2018