Volume 16 (2019): Edizione 1 (August 2019)

German Expressionism, although often viewed as a uniquely German phenomenon, was part of a broader crisis affecting the European avant-garde at the time of the First World War. The experience of modernity, so proudly displayed at events like the Universal Exposition of 1900, inspired both hopes and fears which were reflected in the works of artists, writers and musicians throughout Europe. The outbreak of the war was welcomed by many exponents of the avant-garde as the cathartic crisis they had anticipated. The letters and diaries of artists who hastened to enlist, however, reflected their rapid disillusionment. The war had the effect of severing cultural ties that had been forged prior to 1914. This did not prevent a parallel process of cultural evolution on both sides of the conflict. Those who survived the war, of diverse nationalities and artistic affiliations, produced works reflecting a common perception that modern civilization had resulted in humanity becoming a slave to its own machines.

Prerogative of what Jung calls visionary art, the aesthetics of German Expressionist cinema is “primarily expressive of the collective unconscious,” and – unlike the psychological art, whose goal is “to express the collective consciousness of a society” – they have succeeded not only to “compensate their culture for its biases” by bringing “to the consciousness what is ignored or repressed,” but also to “predict something of the future direction of a culture” (Rowland 2008, italics in the original, 189–90). After a theoretical introduction, the article develops this idea through the example of three visionary works: Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (Schatten, 1923), Fritz Lang’s The Weary Death aka Destiny (Der müde Tod, 1921), and Paul Leni’s Waxworks (Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924).

The films of Guy Maddin, from his debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) to his most recent one, The Forbidden Room (2015), draw extensively on the visual vocabulary and narrative conventions of 1920s and 1930s German cinema. These cinematic revisitations, however, are no mere exercise in sentimental cinephilia or empty pastiche. What distinguishes Maddin’s compulsive returns to the era of German Expressionism is the desire to both archive and awaken the past. Careful (1992), Maddin’s mountain film, reanimates an anachronistic genre in order to craft an elegant allegory about the apprehensions and anxieties of everyday social and political life. My Winnipeg (2006) rescores the city symphony to reveal how personal history and cultural memory combine to structure the experience of the modern metropolis, whether it is Weimar Berlin or wintry Winnipeg. In this paper, I explore the influence of German Expressionism on Maddin’s work as well as argue that Maddin’s films preserve and perpetuate the energies and idiosyncrasies of Weimar cinema.

This article examines the modernist medievalism of Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight (Von morgens bis mitternachts), discussing the influence of the morality play genre on its form. The characterization and action in Kaiser’s play mirrors and evokes that of morality plays influenced by and including the late-medieval Dutch play Elckerlijc and its English translation as Everyman, in particular Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann, first produced in Berlin in 1911. The medievalism of Kaiser’s play is particularly evident when it is compared to Karl Heinz Martin’s film version of the text, produced in 1920. The play’s allegory and message, though contemporary, are less specifically historically contextual than the film’s, while its central protagonist is more representative of generic capitalist subjectivity. The detective film shapes Martin’s adaptation, obscuring the morality play conventions and therefore medievalism of Kaiser’s earlier text.

The article looks at German Expressionist cinema through the eyes of contemporary, non-commercial filmmakers, to attempt to discover what aspects of this 1920s approach may guide filmmakers today. By drawing parallels between the outsider nature of Weimar artist-driven approaches to collaborative filmmaking and twenty-first-century non-mainstream independent filmmaking outside of major motion picture producing centres, the writers have attempted to find ways to strengthen their own filmmaking practices as well as to investigate methods of re-invigorating other independent or national cinemas. Putting their academic observations of the thematic, technical, and aesthetic aspects of Expressionist cinema into practice, Ells and Saul illustrate and discuss the uses, strengths, and pitfalls, within the realm of low-budget art cinema today.

This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and the numerous contrasting interpretations that this film has generated. Rather than offering an(other) interpretation of the film, we aim to investigate some of the reasons why Lynch’s highly complex narrative has gained a cult – if not classic – status in recent film history. To explain the striking variety of (often conflicting) interpretations and responses that the film has evoked, we analyse its complex narrative in terms of its cognitive effects. Our hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive’s attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an art-cinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film- and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.

The article investigates two seemingly conflicting critical approaches of haptic and transgressive cinema, which emerged along with the corporeal turn in film studies, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While haptics operates with undistinguishable figures and demands extreme closeness and an active caressing gaze, transgression is usually seen from a distance and subverts the social, political and ethical order. The paper attempts an examination of the Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Kurt Kren’s Actionist films and enlightens how these two opposing strategies can be present together. Giving a detailed analysis of the films, the article describes an expanded definition of Linda Williams’s body genres, in order to create a new category of horror: the horror of materiality.

Robert Bresson did not only distribute musical excerpts and sounds in his films, but also often conceived the whole film running in a general rhythm, including the repetition and variation of shots in their contents and length. David Bordwell (1985) considered Bresson’s films as examples of the style centred “parametric mode of narration.” More than that, after Jean-Louis Provoyeur (2003), we consider that many shots in Bresson’s films have a characteristic of “denarrativization,” a conception based on musicality, devoid of representational constraints. One example is the tournament sequence in Lancelot of the Lake (Bresson, 1974), in which visual and sound elements are repeated as a “cell” with variations in length, angle of shot and with addition or suppression of elements. The author also analyses some aspects of The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), in which the rhythmic sensation is created by the procedure of repetitive alternation of image, speech and space.¹

An (un)conventional encounter between humans and alien beings has long been one of the main thematic preoccupations of the genre of science fiction. Such stories would thus include typical invasion narratives, as in the case of the three science fiction films I will discuss in the present paper: the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978; Abel Ferrara, 1993), The Host (Andrew Niccol, 2013), and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). I will examine the films in relation to postcolonial theories, while attempting to look at the ways of revisiting one’s history and culture (both alien and human) in the films’ worlds that takes place in order to uncover and heal the violent effects of colonization. In my reading of the films I will shed light on the specific processes of identity formation (of an individual or a group), and the possibilities of individual and communal recuperation through memories, rites of passages, as well as hybridization. I will argue that the colonized human or alien body can serve either as a mediator between the two cultures, or as an agent which fundamentally distances two separate civilizations, thus irrevocably bringing about the loss of identity, as well as the lack of comprehension of cultural differences.

The article is based on 20 in-depth interviews with women professionals conducted for a more comprehensive study focusing on gender roles within the film and television industry in Turkey. This study examines the career possibilities for women, the experience of being a woman working in television and cinema, and the working environment, including work-life balance issues, experiences of discrimination and experiences of sexism. The hypothesis of this study is that film industry is male-dominated, and women have to struggle to be able to prove themselves in this industry in the 21st century in Turkey, where the position of women is made even more difficult by the gender role codes and the structure of Turkish society.