Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny

In this essay I draw on close textual analysis to consider the interface between film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel / Divided Heaven (1964) and Solo Sunny (1979). Both films focus on women who have to confront painful processes of self realisa-tion in specifically East German contexts. They also show Wolf and his collaborators working in two very different modes, from a nouvelle vague-inspired mix of location shooting and self-conscious formal artifice to a more laconic style and mobile camera that borrow from documentary aesthetics. Viewed from the perspective of today, the films resist the reductive stereotyping of what Christa Wolf in 1991 called the 'phantom' East Germany, and offer a more productive haunting. As living ghosts in the post-reunification era, they are a reminder of the necessity of remembering, and so confound both a negative 'master narrative' of the GDR and a collective amnesia with no interest in this history

Re-framing “Ecstatic Truth” : experiments in the new visual language of Werner Herzog

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2016.This dissertation critically examines the cinema of Werner Herzog – a prolific director who has produced and directed more than sixty films over the course of fifty years. Though the films of Herzog have often been described by scholars as whimsical or idiosyncratic, my work shows that the variations of form, content, and style that emerge throughout his expansive oeuvre actually reflect a strategic and ever-evolving experiment in the art and limitations of cinematic representation. I therefore approach Herzog’s collective works as a series of formal and rhetorical experiments in a new visual language of cinema that challenges the conventions of normative filmmaking. More specifically, Herzog reimagines the poetic or creative potential of cinema, contesting the textual-taxonomical registers of fiction and documentary film. Herzog also situates his films within a broader commentary on the crisis of language and the inadequacy of what he refers to as a “worn out” grammar of images. As such, he advocates for a deeper truth encounter in cinema – an “ecstatic truth” that relies on “fabrication and stylization and imagination.” In order to move beyond the rhetoric of “ecstatic truth,” I advance an emulative/liminal model that provides a discursive lens through which to contest the apparent unevenness and discontinuity of Herzog’s films. Furthermore, by casting a critical lens upon the rhetoric of Herzog’s own publications and public addresses, I advance a theoretical approach that maintains a degree of analytic distance, while also acknowledging the narrative role of Herzog’s performative directorial persona. Through a survey of contemporary literature and an examination of applied filmic case studies, I establish the call for a scholarly treatment of Herzog that more comprehensively accounts for the discrete iterations of form and style that emerge recurrently in his films, as well as the notable departures of style and form that problematize a more straightforward reading of Herzog as an auteur. Whereas extant literature focuses predominantly on specific aspects of style and form that arise within particular filmic texts, my work establishes a representative subset of the abstract themes, narrative tropes, and stylistic devices that more holistically comprise a distinctive Herzogian mode