Politics and the moving image :

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Politics and the moving image : "
Mukhida, Leila

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Record Number	:	1100586
Doc. No	:	TLets636846
Main Entry	:	Mukhida, Leila
Title & Author	:	Politics and the moving image :\ Mukhida, Leila
College	:	University of Birmingham
Date	:	2015
student score	:	2015
Degree	:	Ph.D.
Abstract	:	This thesis charts the trajectory of a strand of film-theoretical optimism in texts by Walter Benjamin (1882-1940), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and Alexander Kluge (1932–) from different moments in the twentieth century; the empirical corpus looks to post-reunification German and Austrian cinema to find evidence of this theoretical optimism in contemporary filmmaking practices. The thinkers advocate the leftist-political potential of film to stimulate a critical mode of spectatorship, and are to varying degrees influenced by Brecht and the neo- Marxist politics of the \({Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung}\). The objective of this thesis is thus twofold. First, it illustrates the continuing relevance of the following principal strands in the film-theoretical texts of Benjamin, Kracauer and Kluge: the representation of the figure of the worker in the \(Arbeiterfilm\) genre; the possibilities and limits of capturing reality using different modes of realism; the imperative of challenging viewers in order to transform them from ‘consumers’ into collaborators; and, following on from this, notions of shock and distraction, focusing on Benjamin’s concept of the ‘Schockwirkung’. Second, it shows how this diachronic, neo-Marxist approach can continue to illuminate facets of the political in contemporary cinema by German-speaking directors in an age of advanced capitalism and digital reproducibility.
Subject	:	JA Political science (General)
	:	PN1993 Motion Pictures
Added Entry	:	University of Birmingham