Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism

Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society.

About the author

Hermann Kappelhoff is a professor in the Department for Film Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Matrix der Gefühle: Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit, a major study on the cinematic melodrama as a paradigm of artificial emotions.

Summary

Casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment.

Report

"Kappelhoff distinguishes himself as an astute analytical thinker, and as a film theorist who plies the history of the medium and of its shifting interpretations for the underlying implications about the big" questions that animate the humanities." Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan

Product details

• Authors: , Hermann Kappelhoff, Hermann (Freie Universitat Berlin) Kappelhoff, Kappelhoff Hermann
• Assisted by: Daniel Hendrickson (Translation), Hendrickson Daniel (Translation)
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.08.2015
• EAN: 9780231170734
• ISBN: 978-0-231-17073-4
• No. of pages: 280
• Series: Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts; Columbia Themes in Philosophy; Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; Non-fiction book > Music, film, theatre; PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Film Theory & Criticism, Film history, theory or criticism